Hypatia or New Foes with an Old Face Part 10

'Who is Hypatia, rustic? The queen of Alexandria! In wit, Athene; Hera in majesty; in beauty, Aphrodite!'

'And who are they?' asked Philammon.

The porter stopped, surveyed him slowly from foot to head with an expression of boundless pity and contempt, and was in the act of walking off in the ecstasy of his disdain, when he was brought to suddenly by Philammon's strong arm.

'Ah!-I recollect. There is a compact.... Who is Athene? The G.o.ddess, giver of wisdom. Hera, spouse of Zeus, queen of the Celestials. Aphrodite, mother of love.... You are not expected to understand.'

Philammon did understand, however, so much as this, that Hypatia was a very unique and wonderful person in the mind of his little guide; and therefore asked the only further question by which he could as yet test any Alexandrian phenomenon-

'And is she a friend of the patriarch?'

The porter opened his eyes very wide, put his middle finger in a careful and complicated fashion between his fore and third fingers, and extending it playfully towards Philammon, performed therewith certain mysterious signals, the effect whereof being totally lost on him, the little man stopped, took another look at Philammon's stately figure, and answered-

'Of the human race in general, my young friend. The philosopher must rise above the individual, to the contemplation of the universal.... Aha!-Here is something worth seeing, and the gates are open.' And he stopped at the portal of a vast building.

'Is this the patriarch's house?'

'The patriarch's tastes are more plebeian. He lives, they say, in two dirty little rooms-knowing what is fit for him. The patriarch's house? Its antipodes, my young friend-that is, if such beings have a cosmic existence, on which point Hypatia has her doubts. This is the temple of art and beauty; the Delphic tripod of poetic inspiration; the solace of the earthworn drudge; in a word, the theatre; which your patriarch, if he could, would convert to-morrow into a-but the philosopher must not revile. Ah! I see the prefect's apparitors at the gate. He is making the polity, as we call it here; the dispositions; settling, in short, the bill of fare for the day, in compliance with the public palate. A facetious pantomime dances here on this day every week-admired by some, the Jews especially. To the more cla.s.sic taste, many of his movements-his recoil, especially-are wanting in the true antique severity-might be called, perhaps, on the whole, indecent. Still the weary pilgrim must be amused. Let us step in and hear.'

But before Philammon could refuse, an uproar arose within, a rush outward of the mob, and inward of the prefect's apparitors.

'It is false!' shouted many voices. 'A Jewish calumny! The man is innocent!'

'There is no more sedition in him than there is in me,' roared a fat butcher, who looked as ready to fell a man as an ox. 'He was always the first and the last to clap the holy patriarch at sermon.'

'Dear tender soul,' whimpered a woman; 'and I said to him only this morning, why don't you flog my boys, Master Hierax? how can you expect them to learn if they are not flogged? And he said, he never could abide the sight of a rod, it made his back tingle so.'

'Which was plainly a prophecy!'

'And proves him innocent; for how could he prophesy if he was not one of the holy ones?'

'Monks, to the rescue! Hierax, a Christian, is taken and tortured in the theatre!' thundered a wild hermit, his beard and hair streaming about his chest and shoulders.

'Nitria! Nitria! For G.o.d and the mother of G.o.d, monks of Nitria! Down with the Jewish slanderers! Down with heathen tyrants!'-And the mob, reinforced as if by magic by hundreds from without, swept down the huge vaulted pa.s.sage, carrying Philammon and the porter with them.

'My friends,' quoth the little man, trying to look philosophically calm, though he was fairly off his legs, and hanging between heaven and earth on the elbows of the bystanders, 'whence this tumult?'

'The Jews got up a cry that Hierax wanted to raise a riot. Curse them and their sabbath, they are always rioting on Sat.u.r.days about this dancer of theirs, instead of working like honest Christians!'

'And rioting on Sunday instead. Ahem! sectarian differences, which the philosopher-

The rest of the sentence disappeared with the speaker, as a sudden opening of the mob let him drop, and buried him under innumerable legs.

Philammon, furious at the notion of persecution, maddened by the cries around him, found himself bursting fiercely through the crowd, till he reached the front ranks, where tall gates of open ironwork barred all farther progress, but left a full view of the tragedy which was enacting within, where the poor innocent wretch, suspended from a gibbet, writhed and shrieked at every stroke of the hide whips of his tormentors.

In vain Philammon and the monks around him knocked and beat at the gates; they were only answered by laughter and taunts from the apparitors within, curses on the turbulent mob of Alexandria, with its patriarch, clergy, saints, and churches, and promises to each and all outside, that their turn would come next; while the piteous screams grew fainter and more faint, and at last, with a convulsive shudder, motion and suffering ceased for ever in the poor mangled body.

'They have killed him! Martyred him! Back to the archbishop! To the patriarch's house: he will avenge us!' And as the horrible news, and the watchword which followed it, pa.s.sed outwards through the crowd, they wheeled round as one man, and poured through street after street towards Cyril's house; while Philammon, beside himself with horror, rage, and pity, hurried onward with them.

A tumultuous hour, or more, was pa.s.sed in the street before he could gain entrance; and then he was swept, along with the mob in which he had been fast wedged, through a dark low pa.s.sage, and landed breathless in a quadrangle of mean and new buildings, overhung by the four hundred stately columns of the ruined Serapeium. The gra.s.s was already growing on the ruined capitals and architraves.... Little did even its destroyers dream then, that the day would come when one only of that four hundred would be left, as 'Pompey's Pillar,' to show what the men of old could think and do.

Philammon at last escaped from the crowd, and putting the letter which he had carried in his bosom into the hands of one of the priests who was mixing with the mob, was beckoned by him into a corridor, and up a flight of stairs, and into a large, low, mean room, and there, by virtue of the world-wide freemasonry which Christianity had, for the first time on earth, established, found himself in five minutes awaiting the summons of the most powerful man south of the Mediterranean.

A curtain hung across the door of the inner chamber, through which Philammon could hear plainly the steps of some one walking up and down hurriedly and fiercely.

'They will drive me to it!' at last burst out a deep sonorous voice. 'They will drive me to it.... Their blood be on their own head! It is not enough for them to blaspheme G.o.d and His church, to have the monopoly of all the cheating, fortune-telling, usury, sorcery, and coining of the city, but they must deliver my clergy into the hands of the tyrant?'

'It was so even in the apostles' time,' suggested a softer but far more unpleasant voice.

'Then it shall be so no longer! G.o.d has given me the power to stop them; and G.o.d do so to me, and more also, if I do not use that power. To-morrow I sweep out this Augean stable of villainy, and leave not a Jew to blaspheme and cheat in Alexandria.'

'I am afraid such a judgment, however righteous, might offend his excellency.'

'His excellency! His tyranny! Why does Orestes truckle to these circ.u.mcised, but because they lend money to him and to his creatures? He would keep up a den of fiends in Alexandria if they would do as much for him! And then to play them off against me and mine, to bring religion into contempt by setting the mob together by the ears, and to end with outrages like this! Seditious! Have they not cause enough? The sooner I remove one of their temptations the better: let the other tempter beware, lest his judgment be at hand!'

'The prefect, your holiness?' asked the other voice slily.

'Who spoke of the prefect? Whosoever is a tyrant, and a murderer, and an oppressor of the poor, and a favourer of the philosophy which despises and enslaves the poor, should not he perish, though he be seven times a prefect?'

At this juncture Philammon, thinking perhaps that he had already heard too much, notified his presence by some slight noise, at which the secretary, as he seemed to be, hastily lifted the curtain, and somewhat sharply demanded his business. The names of Pambo and a.r.s.enius, however, seemed to pacify him at once; and the trembling youth was ushered into the presence of him who in reality, though not in name, sat on the throne of the Pharaohs.

Not, indeed, in their outward pomp; the furniture of the chamber was but a grade above that of the artisan's; the dress of the great man was coa.r.s.e and simple; if personal vanity peeped out anywhere, it was in the careful arrangement of the bushy beard, and of the few curling locks which the tonsure had spared. But the height and majesty of his figure, the stern and ma.s.sive beauty of his features, the flashing eye, curling lip, and projecting brow-all marked him as one born to command. As the youth entered, Cyril stopped short in his walk, and looking him through and through, with a glance which burnt upon his cheeks like fire, and made him all but wish the kindly earth would open and hide him, took the letters, read them, and then began-

'Philammon. A Greek. You are said to have learned to obey. If so you have also learned to rule. Your father-abbot has transferred you to my tutelage. You are now to obey me.'

'And I will.'

'Well said. Go to that window, then, and leap into the court.'

Philammon walked to it, and opened it. The pavement was fully twenty feet below; but his business was to obey, and not take measurements. There was a flower in the vase upon the sill. He quietly removed it, and in an instant more would have leapt for life or death, when Cyril's voice thundered 'Stop!'

'The lad will pa.s.s, my Peter. I shall not be afraid now for the secrets which he may have overheard.'

Peter smiled a.s.sent, looking all the while as if he thought it a great pity that the young man had not been allowed to put talebearing out of his own power by breaking his neck.

'You wish to see the world. Perhaps you have seen something of it to-day.'

'I saw the murder-'

'Then you saw what you came hither to see; what the world is, and what justice and mercy it can deal out. You would not dislike to see G.o.d's reprisals to man's tyranny?.... Or to be a fellow-worker with G.o.d therein, if I judge rightly by your looks?'

'I would avenge that man.'

'Ah! my poor simple schoolmaster! And his fate is the portent of portents to you now! Stay awhile, till you have gone with Ezekiel into the inner chambers of the devil's temple, and you will see worse things than these-women weeping for Thammuz; bemoaning the decay of an idolatry which they themselves disbelieve-That, too, is on the list of Hercules' labour, Peter mine.'

At this moment a deacon entered.... 'Your holiness, the rabbis of the accursed nation are below, at your summons. We brought them in through the back gate, for fear of-'

'Right, right. An accident to them might have ruined us. I shall not forget you. Bring them up. Peter, take this youth, introduce him to the parabolani.... Who will be the best man for him to work under?'