Saul Of Tarsus Part 43

By its light Marsyas examined Agrippa. Between the prince's shoulders, his hand touched chilling blood.

"Ambushed!" he said grimly. "Stabbed in the back!"

Marsyas looked at the prince's right hand. It was still clenched, and the flesh on the knuckles was abraded, the second joints swelling fast.

Vasti, with suspicion in her olive eyes, carried the torch over to the contorted shape. Then she made a sign to Marsyas. He looked. It was an Egyptian wearing the livery of Flaccus. The prince's Arabic dagger was neatly buried to the hilt in the servitor's breast. Vasti examined the second prostrate form. By her torch Marsyas saw that it was Eutychus, conscious but benumbed. His left ear, cheek and eye were swollen and black.

"It seems," said Marsyas, stanching Agrippa's wound, "that the prince disabled his own support!"

But Vasti, by deft twitches of ear and hair and threats in Hindu, significant in tone if not in speech to the charioteer, finally got Eutychus upon his feet.

"Take up the prince," she said to Marsyas. "The slave may follow or lie as he chooses. I shall attend my mistress."

Marsyas lifted the Herod and, following Vasti, hurried on again into the darkness. The bayadere made toward the sea-front, not many yards distant, sped across the wharf and over the edge apparently into the water. Marsyas, by this time ready to follow the brown woman into any extreme, plunged after her. He landed abruptly in the bottom of a punt. Lydia followed, and Eutychus, with an alacrity not expected of one who groaned so helplessly.

Vasti severed the rope that tied up the boat, and, with a strong thrust of her hands against the piling, pushed the boat away from the wharf.

But she did not take up the oars. She left them to Marsyas, trained on the blue waters of Galilee.

In a moment he had pulled out into the black expanse of the bay, and, with the prince's ship in mind, rowed among the sleeping shipping.

"How came the prince in this plight?" Marsyas demanded of Eutychus.

The charioteer, with his head in his hands, groaned and murmured unintelligibly. Lydia dipped an end of the wonderful silk that enveloped her into the water and pressed the wet corner to the charioteer's temples.

Marsyas frowned blackly.

"Nay, but thou canst answer, Eutychus," he said shortly.

After further murmurings, the charioteer brought out between groans an avowal that he was completely mystified.

"How came Agrippa in the street?" Marsyas insisted.

"He was with Justin Cla.s.sicus; I attended him. When Flora danced and chose her lover, and the two fled into the Temple of Rannu, the Alexandrian cried to my lord that there was another pa.s.sage into the Temple, by which they could go in, or the Flora and her lover come out.

And he proposed for a prank that he and the prince go thither and discover Flora and her lover. We were on the roof of a bath and could get down at once, so we ran through private pa.s.sages, my lord and I, outstripping Cla.s.sicus, whom the crowd swallowed. And when we got into this dark street, two fell upon us without warning and killed us both!"

"But it was Agrippa who struck that blow," Marsyas declared.

The man murmured again.

"Some one struck me," he said finally; "mayhap the prince, not knowing friend from foe in the street."

"Of a surety, this stiff old Roman took chances," Marsyas averred after thought, "with but one apparitor to aid him against Agrippa, palestrae-trained and this young charioteer! Art sure thou didst not play the craven, Eutychus?" he demanded.

"Or should I be blamed," Eutychus groaned, "when it was three against me, with the prince striking at his single defender?"

Marsyas fell silent. It was not like Agrippa to be confused under any circ.u.mstances.

He pulled up beside Agrippa's vessel, roused the watchman and had the prince and Eutychus taken aboard; but Vasti and Lydia he left in the borrowed punt, out of sight of the crew that had returned.

He followed the injured men on deck and hurriedly dressed Agrippa's wound, restored him to consciousness and left him in the charge of the captain of the vessel. He ordered one of the skilled seamen to attend Eutychus and hurried back to the women in the boat under the black shadow of the ship.

He pulled straight for the sea, rounded Eunostos point and skirting the tiny archipelagoes in the broad light of the Pharos, brought up at a small indented coast between two sandy peninsulas. Here the residence portion of Alexandria came down to the ocean. The locality was dark and wrapped in sleep.

As he lifted Lydia from the boat, Marsyas turned to Vasti.

"Why didst thou not prevent her in this thing?" he asked in Hindu.

"The white brother forgets that I am a handmaiden," she replied.

"But what if I had not come?" he persisted, growing more troubled by his perplexities.

"I had prepared a path for escape; I was armed, and watching!"

"Did--did she expect me?" he asked after silence.

"No."

Then she had done this thing for him. Oh, for the safe refuge of the alabarch's musky halls that he might harken to the sweet distress in his soul and tell her of it!

Without further event, they reached the alabarch's house and the bayadere, producing keys, let her charges into the servant's entry beneath the porch. Lydia instantly disappeared, but Vasti in obedience to a word from Marsyas conducted him through the well-beloved chambers to the corridor lined by the sleeping-rooms of the servants.

Before one, she stopped.

"Herein is the prince's other servant," she said, and quickly disappeared.

Marsyas opened the door and entering aroused Silas. With a bare explanation that the prince would sail the instant the courier got aboard, he urged the grumbling old man into activity, and went back to the alabarch's presiding-room.

He had a moment of waiting--at last a moment to think!

He realized that an extreme of some nature had been reached; all his purposes had been brought up to a climax. There was no lingering in Alexandria possible for Agrippa, wounded or well, for Marsyas knew that Flaccus had the Herod's undoing in mind. If Lydia were a Nazarene, Marsyas had now, of a surety, though all Heaven and earth intervened, to bring Saul of Tarsus to death before the Pharisee's dread hand fell upon Lydia for apostasy! For that purpose, he must go to Rome--and leave Alexandria--to return? For his love's sake? He, an Essene?

Silas came, bowed, and was dismissed to wait in the street for the moment. And still Marsyas stood. The house was silent and dark. The slumber that overtakes those relieved from a three days' strain enwrapped all under the alabarch's roof. Presently he thought of Cypros, in his search for an excuse for lingering. A lamp on the alabarch's table was ready to be lighted, and, finding the materials for fire-making in the drawer, he lighted it.

"Sweet lady," he wrote on a parchment at hand, "the winds favorable to thy lord's departure blow, and he will not awaken thee to the pain of a farewell. Be comforted, be brave, be hopeful; for when he returneth, he bringeth thee a crown. I remember my pledge to thee.

"Be thou blessed.

"MARSYAS."

It was the first letter he had ever written to a woman; he did not dream that he had written so tenderly.

He rolled the parchment and addressed it to the princess.

There was nothing more to be done.

Was he not to see Lydia again?

Filled with rebellion and fear, he hurried toward the hall; in the semi-dark, cast by the lamp within the larger room, he saw a small figure slip quickly behind a hanging.