THE FINING FIRE
As Marsyas leaped into the Temple of Rannu, a figure started up beside
him. He sprang away from it in alarm, but a word in Hindu reassured
him.
"It is I, Vasti."
With the bayadere following he raced through the cloyed musk of the
temple toward the square of lesser darkness at the rear, which showed
the exit into the court. He flung himself across the pavement of the
inner inclosure and down its aisle of sphinxes, through the gate in the
rear wall and out into a black passage.
Behind, the roar of the contending host of Flora followed him. Though,
for a second time this day he had run with peril on his track, the
threatened identification of the precious burden he bore was more
terrifying than death had been at sunset.
It was a long alley, the single outlet for a jam of humble houses
surrounding the temple, and it opened into a street deep in the
Egyptian quarter. Though Marsyas ran splendidly, he carried no little
burden, and the way was black, unpaved and treacherous. He had begun
to fear that he could not reach the end before pursuers, so minded,
could hem him in, when almost as if the thought had invited the
actuality, he saw a figure appear at the mouth of the alley. With a
furious but repressed exclamation, the unknown plunged at the Essene.
Determined to defend Lydia's identity as long as he might, Marsyas
swung her behind him, and with a whisper to Vasti to hide Lydia, made
ready to fight fast.
With the dim illumination of the city behind him, Marsyas was better
able to see his antagonist. As the solid body projected itself at him,
like a springing beast, he met it with a raised left arm and a ready
right hand. Instantly the two closed and for a brief, fierce moment,
fought savagely. But Marsyas discovered that he was far more agile,
taller and apparently younger than his assailant, and for a space he
had only to fight away the knife that glinted and darted hungrily at
his throat. Then, seizing upon his antagonist's first imperfect guard,
he delivered a stunning blow over the heart. The heavy body staggered,
quivered and collapsed.
Expecting to find the passage before him filling with ruffians, Marsyas
was astonished to see the way clear and vacant. Without waiting to
catch breath Marsyas sprang back in the alley, and, whispering the
bayadere's name, found Lydia and the serving-woman only a pace from the
spot.
Catching Lydia up again, in spite of her protests, he was about to
spring over the prostrate body that all but blocked the passage, when
his eye fell upon the upturned face. The dim light of the city fell on
it.
It was Flaccus!
For a single moment of surprise and bewilderment, Marsyas stood still.
Then very surely it penetrated through his brain that the proconsul had
recognized him at the moment of Flora's drop into his arms, and had
come to capture him--or to identify the Dancing Flora!
He knew that he had not struck a fatal blow and the proconsul's knife
lay near. He picked it up.
It was bloody.
Startled and aghast, he flung the weapon away, and, leaping over the
unconscious Roman, fled out of the alley. A torch of pitch, burnt down
to a charred knot, with a feeble flame playing over it, was set upon a
staff hardly ten paces from the mouth of the passage. It was a dark
street, and deserted. The roar of the populace still centered about
the square of the Temple of Rannu. Marsyas turned toward the torch,
and, as he ran, he saw under its sickly light the figure of a man
stretched on the earth. At another step, he tripped over a second
fallen body. It moved and groaned.
Marsyas put Lydia down. Carrying her through a street cumbered with
prostrate men might mean bodily injury for both of them. With a
reassuring word, he led her between the head of the obscured man and
the feet of the one under the torch, and stumbled at his second step on
a contorted shape.
Marsyas stopped, to ask himself if the deadly hand that had brought
these men low might not await him and his dear charge farther on.
Vasti leaned over the one under the torch. Then she sprang up.
"Come! Look!" she whispered in excitement.
Marsyas hurried to the man, and met at that instant the last conscious
light in the eyes of Agrippa.
The young Essene dropped to his knees without a word, thrust his hand
into the embroidered tunic and felt for the prince's heart. It beat
but slowly. Vasti, meanwhile, snatched the torch from the staff and
beat the charred pitch knot on the ground till the still inflammable
heart broke open and ignited afresh.
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 Classicus; 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 passage 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 passages, my lord and I,
outstripping Classicus, 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
circumstances.
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.
She had been waiting to have a stolen look upon him as he went!
He caught her in his arms and drew her out into the light. Under its
revealing ray, he saw her lovely face smitten down with shame, but he
lifted it, to kiss her eyes, her temples and her lips.
"Lydia! Lydia! I fear to leave thee!" he whispered.
She let her eyes light upon him, to catch his meaning, and when she saw
terror for her apostasy and amazement for the thing she had done for
the Nazarenes, a sudden misery leaped into her face. She tried to put
him back.
"Lydia, Lydia!" he begged, feeling the repulse, "dost thou not love me,
then?" His tone urged, his eyes pleaded.
For a moment, she was silent; then she said, with infinite pain:
"Marsyas, I broke off the trail of roses through Rhacotis, and held
back the multitude from the Nazarenes. But thou art an Essene, and a
Jew; wherefore, in thy sight I can not be justified. Forget not these
things for my sake! Go, ere thy teaching hath cause to reproach thee."
"No, no!" he agonized. "Do not say that to me! Say rather that thou
wilt turn away from this heresy and be led no more by it into
transgression! Better thy sweet life and thy sweet fame than all the
truth in the world!"
The word he used caught her. She waited and seemed not to breathe. He
swept on.
"Art thou, beyond saving, a Nazarene?"
Her face fell, and her soft red lips were parted with a heavy sigh.
"From this night henceforward, Marsyas! I have purchased the blessing
dearly."
She took the hands about her and undid them.
"Go!" she whispered. "Farewell, and the one God, that loves us all,
shield thee from harm all the days of thy life!"
A moment and she was gone.
After a while he turned and walked with stumbling feet into the new
dawn on Alexandria.