Saul Of Tarsus Part 63

East and west, far and near, sounds were drifting in and pa.s.sing toward the New Port, sounds as if a mult.i.tude hastened in one direction.

Above these stealthy, fugitive, whispered noises, there came freshened uproar from pagan Alexandria, swift, high, relentless and carrying like fire on a wind.

As they stood thus, perplexed and alarmed, Vasti appeared like a shadow out of the dusk and caught the alabarch's arm.

"It is come!" she hissed with compelling vehemence. "To the Synagogue!

Fly! For the hosts of Siva are upon you even now!"

Lysimachus grasped the grill of the window, and turned slowly toward his daughter.

"Lydia?" he asked helplessly.

The girl came to him, and Vasti began to motion her toward the street.

"What is it? What pa.s.seth?" the alabarch insisted, unable to act without perfect conception of the conditions he had to fight.

Lydia's eyes, fixed on her father's face, deepened with misery and widened with suffering. The hour had fallen! She was to be the outcast and the abomination at last.

"They accuse me," she said, "of being a Nazarene; that I committed sacrilege, to hold off the mob from Rhacotis--that I was the Dancing Flora!"

The alabarch put his thin hands to his forehead, as if to ward off the conviction, which all the fragmentary intimation against Lydia, and her own words conjoined, threatened to establish in him.

"Is it so, my daughter?" he asked in a benumbed voice.

Cause was submerged in effect; she felt less fear of the confession than of her father's suffering. In the appreciable interval his figure shriveled; age and the encroachment of death showed upon him. The atmosphere of the magistrate, the courtier and the aristocrat dissolved under the anguish of a father and the horror of a Jew. He had surrendered his two sons, Tiberius and Marcus, to paganism; in Lydia, he had reposed the unwatchful faith, that had permitted his other children to apostasize under his roof. He had believed the more in her, and the shock was the greater, therefore.

"Let it be the measure of my conviction, my father," she said sadly, "that I did this thing in the knowledge that I might forfeit thy love!"

He made no movement; his face did not relax from its stunned agony.

Lydia awaited its change with flagging heart-beat.

But the thunder of menace from the Gymnasium square rolled in again through the streets of the Regio Judaeorum. The alabarch heard it. Up through the mask there struggled not rebuke and condemnation, but the terror of love fearing for its own. He caught Lydia in his arms and turned his straining eyes toward the windows. But the bayadere waited no longer for the arousing of his faculties. She seized his arm and thrust him toward the vestibule.

"Awake! Get you up and be gone! Will you wait to see her perish?"

She did not stop until she had pushed them through the porch into the streets.

"To the Synagogue!" she commanded last, and disappeared as she had come.

All the Regio Judaeorum, as far as the Brucheum on the south and the tumble and wash of the Mediterranean on the north, was pouring through the streets toward the New Port.

The alabarch's own servants went hither and thither, knocking at doors, from which other servants presently issued to speed with the alarm over the yet unwarned sections nearer the Synagogue.

After a moment's waiting until the light airs cleared the daze that enmeshed his brain, the alabarch took Lydia under his cloak and fled with his people toward their refuge.

As he went, doorways about them were giving up households, bazaars and booths were emptying of their patrons and proprietors; workshops, their artisans and apprentices; schools, their readers and pupils; the counting-room, the rich men and the borrowers; the squalid angles, the outcast and the beggar. The oppression of terror and the instinct for silence weighted the darkening air; the twilight covered them, and hostile attention was yet far behind them.

So they came: the slaves with marks of perpetual servitude in their ears, and ladies of the Sadducees that had rarely set foot upon the harsh earth; figures in Indian silks and figures in sackcloth; fugitives to whom fear lent wings and fugitives to whom flight was bitterer than death; families and guilds by the hundreds, hurrying together; companies of diverse people separated from their own; sons carrying parents and neighbors bearing the sick; friends forgetting attachments and foes forgetting feuds--until the streets became veritable rivers of running people. And so they went, crowding, pressing, contending, but pa.s.sing as silently as forty thousand may pa.s.s, toward the Synagogue, which was sanctuary and stronghold for them all.

The keepers of the great gates were there, and the huge valves stood wide. The alabarch's old composure rea.s.serted itself, as, amid the panic of his people, he realized their want of leadership. He stepped to one side of the nearest gate, and stood while he watched each and every Jew rush into the darkness and disappear under the great pylons of the Synagogue. Lydia, whom he would have sent in at once, clung to him, and together they stood without.

Meanwhile, out of the distant Brucheum, there came a snarl of monstrous and terrifying proportions. The mob was gaining strength.

The last of the Jews fled praying through the giant gates and pressed themselves into the shelter of the Synagogue. The keeper looked at the alabarch. He lifted his arm, and Lydia and the keeper and he, shutting away, as best they might, the noise of the threatening city, listened, if any belated fugitive came through the dark.

The sound of footsteps approached; a body of people, strangers to the alabarch, appeared; Lydia made a little sound, and moved toward them.

"We also are beset," the foremost said, "can we enter into the protection of the Synagogue?"

"Haste ye, and enter!" the alabarch answered.

And after the hindmost, he and Lydia pa.s.sed into the sanctuary.

The keepers swung the great valves shut, and the last sound they admitted was a ravening howl, as Alexandria hurled itself into the empty streets of the Regio Judaeorum.

Until this time, Lydia had been a part of the unit of terror and self-preservation, but the hurry of the flight had ceased and the wait for events had begun. Then ensued moments for individual ideas. Thus far she had heard no murmur against her. Fear of the Alexandrians had outmeasured the Jews' indignation, or else they had believed the informer to be the father of lies.

There was the never-failing lamp on the lectern, but its light penetrated no farther than the immediate precincts of darkness. The interior was so vast that its great angles melted into shadow. The immense area of marble pavement was c.u.mbered with an army of huddled shapes, and when portentous red light began to sift down through the open roof it fell upon uplifted faces, ghastly with fear, upon bare arms, white and soft or lean and brown, upstretched in supplication.

But neither moan nor murmur arose among them who waited upon siege.

Meanwhile the roar of violence encompa.s.sed and penetrated all portions of the quarter. Great lights began to mount and redden the sky as torches were applied to houses looted of their riches. The invasion had met no obstacle and the whole region was a-swarm.

Presently, close at hand, the full bellow of freshly-discovered incentive arose, mounting above all other noises until even the Jews, imprisoned within walls of granite, heard it.

"The Jews! the Jews! The Synagogue!"

Involuntarily there arose from the lips of the forty thousand a great moan, m.u.f.fled, unechoing and filled with terror.

The alabarch stood by Lydia, with his thoughts upon the strength of the Synagogue and the hardihood of the prisoners. But the weight of culpability was heavy upon Lydia; in her great need and longing for the comfort of his confidence, she crept closer to her father and clung to his arm.

"Naught but a ram or ballista can force these gates!" he said. "And we are forty thousand. Alas, that the spirit of Joshua the warrior was not mixed with the spirit of Moses, who gave us the Law!"

The mob came on, now in distinct hearing of the imprisoned Jews.

Tremendous trampling without on the stone flagging and dull, fruitless hammering on the valves announced the a.s.sault.

The Jews nearer the gates pressed away.

Without, indecision and tumult wrangled among innumerable voices.

Great bodies began to shout as one, with mighty lungs:

"Bring out the woman! Give up the Dancing Flora!"

Lydia felt the alabarch tremble and presently the arm to which she clung withdrew from her clasp and pa.s.sed around her, drawing her close.

"_Impius_! _Insidiis_! _Succuba_! _O dea certe_!" roared the mob.

But work was doing at the gates. There arose blunt pounding, slowly and heavily delivered as if a mult.i.tude wielded a ram. But the reports were too solid to indicate any weakness in the gates, and the keeper of the one attacked watched the sacred stone with a glitter of pride in his eyes.

Presently the hammering ceased.