Saul Of Tarsus Part 5

He was built on long, narrow lines, spare as a spear stuck in the sand before a dowar, but Judean flesh rounded his angles and reduced the Arabian brownness of complexion. He was strikingly handsome and tall; not imposing but elegant, modeled for symmetry of his type, not for ideality, for refinement, not for strength. His hands were delicate almost to frailty, his feet slender and daintily shod. Never a Roman walked so lightly, never a Jew so jauntily.

His presence was captivating. Navete or impudence, carelessness or recklessness, gravity or mockery were ever uncertain in their delineation on his face, and one gazed trying to decide and gazing was undone. Never did he reveal the perspective of a single avenue in his intricate and indirect disposition. He forwent the human respect that is given to the straight-forward man, for the excited interest which the populace pays to the elusive nature.

It was hard to name his years. He was too well-knit to be young, too supple to be old. The only undisputed evidence that he was past middle-age was not in his person but behind the affected mood in his soft black eyes. There was another nature, literally in ambush!

He had reached the gentler slopes of the Mount, when a young man dressed wholly in white approached from the north. The wayfarer walked hesitatingly, his eyes roving over the towered walls of the City of David. There were other wayfarers on Olivet besides the man in white and the man in scarlet. There were rustics and traveling Sadducees, in chairs borne by liveried servants, Pharisees with staff and scrip, marketers, shepherds, soldiers on leave and slaves on errands, men, women and children of every cla.s.s or calling which might have affairs without the walls of Jerusalem. But each turned his steps in one direction, for the night was not distant and Jerusalem would shelter them all.

The hill was busy, but many took time to observe the one in white. The men he met glanced critically at his fine figure and pa.s.sed; the women looked up at him from under their wimples, and down again, quickly; some of the children lagged and gazed wistfully at his face as if they wanted his notice. Even the man in scarlet, attracted by the wholesome presence of the comely young man, studied him carelessly. He was a little surprised when the youth stopped before him.

"Wilt thou tell me, brother, how I may reach the Gate of Ha.n.a.leel from this spot?" he asked. His manner was anxious and hurried, his eyes troubled.

"Thou, a son of Israel, and a stranger in the city of thy fathers?" the other commented mildly.

"The Essenes are rare visitors to Jerusalem," was the reply.

"Ah!" the other said to himself, "the bleached craven of En-Gadi. Dost thou come from the community on the Dead Sea?" he asked aloud.

"I journey thither," the Essene answered patiently. "I come from Galilee."

The man in scarlet looked a little startled and put his slender hand up to his cheek so that a finger lay along the lips. "Now, may thy haste deaden thy powers of recognition, O white brother," he hoped in his heart, "else thou seest a familiar face in me."

He lifted the other arm and pointed toward the wall of the city.

"Any of these gates will lead thee within," he said.

"Doubtless, but once within any but the one I seek, I am more lost than I am here. Wilt thou direct me?"

The man in scarlet motioned toward a splendid ma.s.s of masonry rising many cubits above the wall toward the north. "There," he said. "Go hence over the Bridge of the Red Heifer and follow along the roadway on the other side of Kedron."

As the man in white bowed his thanks, his elbow struck against an obstruction which yielded hastily. The two looked, to see the Greek who had been defeated at dice make off up the hill. The Essene caught at his pilgrim wallet which hung at his side and found it open.

"Ha! a thief!" the man in scarlet cried. "Did he rob thee?"

His quick eyes dropped to the wallet. There were many small round cylinders wrapped in linen within, evidently stacks of coin of various sizes from the little denarius to the large drachma; a handful of loose gold and several rolls of parchment which might have been bills of exchange. The Essene frowned and closed the mouth of the purse.

"A trifle is gone," he said. "He was discovered in time."

"If thou carryest this to the Temple, friend," the older man urged, "get it there to-night, else thou walkest in danger continually."

"I give thee thanks; I shall be watchful; peace to thee,"--and the young man walked swiftly away.

"Wary as the eyes of Juno!" the man in scarlet said to himself.

"Essenes never make offering at the Temple; that treasure goes into the common fund of the order. Now, what a shame that the unsated maw of the Essenic treasury should swallow that and hold it uselessly when I need gold so much! Would that I had been born a good thief!"

He sauntered after the young Essene and idly kept him in sight.

"He walks like a legionary and talks like a patrician, but doubtless he hath the spirit of an a.s.s, or he would not have let that knave of a Greek make off with so much as a lepton. I wonder if I should not seek out the thief and win his pilferings from him."

The Essene in the distance, just before he reached the Bridge of the Red Heifer, unslung his wallet and resettled the strap over his shoulder, but the purse did not reappear at his side. He had concealed it within his gown.

"I wish he were not in such uncommon haste; I might persuade him to loan it me. Money-lending is second nature to a Jew. There must be several thousand drachmae in that wallet--enough to take me to Alexandria. I wonder if he sped so all the way from--_Hercle!_ What an aristocrat!"--noting the Essene draw aside his robes from contact with the unclean mob at the opposite end of the causeway.

"What! do they resent it?" he exclaimed, lifting himself on tiptoe to watch the young man, who seemed suddenly pressed upon and swallowed up by rapidly a.s.sembling numbers.

Distant shouts arose, the Sheep Gate choked suddenly with a ma.s.s, Kedron's banks, the tombs of Tophet and the rubbish heaps there yielded up clambering, running people. The hurry was directed along the brook outside the wall; stragglers closed up and the whole, numbering hundreds, flung itself toward the north.

The man in scarlet, moved by amazement and a half-confessed interest in the man he had seen disappear, ran down the Mount and after the crowd.

But a glance ahead now showed him that the Essene had not called forth this demonstration. The gate next beyond the heavy shape of Ha.n.a.leel was discharging a struggling ma.s.s that instantly expanded in the open into a great party-colored ring, dozens deep. The flying body the man in scarlet believed to encompa.s.s the young Essene swept up to the circle and melted into it.

Meanwhile, around him came running eagerly the travelers, the marketers, shepherds, soldiers and slaves, and behind, the loiterers, who had watched him defeat the Greek. Focalizing at the Bridge of the Red Heifer which spanned Kedron at a leap, the mob caught and precipitated him into its heart. Rushed toward the road on the opposite side, he seized a corner of the parapet, and, holding fast, let the ma.s.s stream by him.

When the rush trailed out, thinned and ceased altogether, he leisurely drew near the huge compact circle and stood on its outskirts. But he could hear and see nothing but the crowd about him.

"What is it?" he asked, touching a man in front of him. The man shook his head and stood fruitlessly on tiptoe.

Presently unseen authority in the hollow ring pressed the crowd back.

In the ferment and resistance, he caught, through a zigzag path of daylight between many kerchiefed heads, a glimpse of a segment of the center. A young man stood there. About his forehead was bound the phylactery of a Pharisee. At his feet was a tumbled heap of white outer garments. Then the breach closed up.

"A sacrifice?" the man in scarlet asked himself. But such a deduction would not answer for the behavior of the crowd. Its temper was ferocious. They howled, they spat, they shook arms and clenched hands above their heads and forward over their neighbors' shoulders; they cursed in Greek and Aramic; they twisted their faces into furious grimaces; they pressed forward and were driven back and the foremost rank which knew wherefore it raged was not more violent than the rearmost which was perfectly in the dark.

It was typically the voice of the Beast in man. Some circ.u.mstance, unknown to the greater body, had waived restraint. Therefore the wolves of Perea could have come down from the bone-whited wadies of the wilderness and said to them with truth: "We be of one blood, ye and we!"

Each felt the support of numbers, the momentum of unanimity, the incentive of relaxed order, and the original cause, however heinous, was forgotten in the joy of the reversion to primordial savagery.

Their quiet fellow stood on the outskirts and listened to the yelp of the jackal in man. Before him was a wall of variously clad backs and upstretched heads, beside him rows of raving men in profile, with strained eyes, open mouths and working beards; and one of them was the man who had shown, when asked, that he did not understand this demonstration.

The man in scarlet finally shrugged his shoulders. He had suddenly evolved an explanation--the blood of a fellow man. He turned away, not because he had revolted--he had seen too many spectacles in the Circus in Rome--but because he was disinclined to stand till he had learned the particulars of the uproar. A gnarly hummock, white, harsh and dry, as if it were a heap of disintegrated ashes, rose several rods away on the brink of Kedron. He mounted it and sat. Yes; he would wait, also, till he saw the Essene again, who, he was sure, had been buried in the ring. It would be unkind to himself to permit a chance for a loan to pa.s.s untried.

The tumult continued many minutes before he noticed abatement in the forward ranks. Movement which had been general throughout the interval increased at times, but the mob showed no signs of dispersing.

The western slope of Olivet was now in its own shadow, its ravines already purpling with night. Only the glory on the summit of Moriah blazed with undiminished fire, as the gold of the gates gave back the gold of the sunset.

Presently a number of men, dressed alike in priestly robes, hurried back through Ha.n.a.leel into the city. Hardly had they disappeared before the gate gave up a number of radiant shapes in a column, which broke suddenly and flung itself upon the great raving circle. The flash of armor and the glitter of swords were suddenly interjected into a demoralized eddy of stampeded hundreds. Another sort of clamor arose, no less voluminous, no less fervid, but it was a howl of panic and protest against the methods of Vitellius' legionaries sent to disperse a crowd.

A solid core of fugitives drove through the gate beside Ha.n.a.leel and the Sheep Gate; fragments, detachments and individuals rolled down the banks into Kedron; screaming, tumbling, falling bodies fled north and south by the roadway and wherever there was a gate or a niche or a crevice it received fugitives who appeared no more. Dust arose and obscured everything but the flash of arms and armor which rived through it like lightning in a cloud. The uproar began to subside, and presently the laughter and jests of the soldiers mounted above the protest. Fainter and fainter the cries grew, fewer the sounds of flying feet, and at last, strong, harsh and biting as the clang of a sledge upon metal, the command of the centurion to fall in settled even the shouts of the soldiers.

There was the even, musical ring of whetting armor as the column filed back through Ha.n.a.leel, and silence. The man in scarlet, who had sat on his ash-heap and smiled throughout the dispersing of the mob, a royal creature enthroned and entertained by the discomfiture of the ma.s.s, suddenly realized that the obscurity, which he had expected to lift, was the shadow of night. He arose and, dusting off his scarlet skirt, moved out into the road.

At that moment, a figure moving nearer the wall pa.s.sed him, walking swiftly. It was the Essene.

"Ho! a discreet youth! a cautious youth!" the man in scarlet said to himself; "profiting by experience, he waited in safety somewhere until this light-fingered rabble was dispersed. That must be a fat purse, a fat purse! And I am looking for such!"

He quickened his pace to overtake the young man and in his interest forgot the late riot. Suddenly the young Essene stopped as if he had been commanded. The man in scarlet brought up and looked.

Before them was an immense trampled dusty ring. In the falling twilight, he saw several huddled shapes, in att.i.tudes of suffering and sorrow, kneeling together in its center over something which was stretched on the sand.

A strangling gasp attracted the older man's attention once more to the Essene. His figure seemed to shrink, his cheeks fell in. Swiftly about his lips crawled the gray pallor of one physically sick from shock to the senses. His eyes flared wide and the next instant he flew at the mourning cl.u.s.ter about the prostrate shape in the ring. One or two fell back under his hand, and he leaned over and looked.