SANCTUARY
The cluster of vagabonds hanging before the alabarch's mansion stayed
no longer after the breezes brought the first sound of tumult which
announced a rarer sport elsewhere. In a twinkling the Regio Judaeorum
was silent and deserted.
Except for the gusts of far-off turmoil, the cooing of pigeons in
towers, the clashing of palm-leaves, the creak of crazy gates in the
wind, the casual calling of Numidian cranes or the crowing of poultry
were the only sounds in the quarter--lonesome, nature sounds, signals
of a householder's absence.
But it seemed as if the Regio Judaeorum listened and waited.
After Agrippa's departure, the alabarch came into his presiding-room,
without purpose and visibly uneasy. Lydia followed him, and, at a look
from her father, came close to his chair and mingled her yellow-brown
curls with his white locks.
The silence over the quarter had become oppressive and the slightest
break would have been no less grateful than distinct, when it seemed
that cautious footsteps pattered by without.
The two stirred and listened.
After a moment, they heard others, very swift and soft, as if many were
running by a-tiptoe. There were whispers and rustlings, excited words
cried under the breath.
The two in the presiding-room looked at each other. Had the vagabonds
returned to their place for mischief, outside the alabarch's mansion?
Lysimachus stepped to the windows and listened. But Lydia stood still,
dreading without understanding that which he might hear.
East and west, far and near, sounds were drifting in and passing toward
the New Port, sounds as if a multitude 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 passeth?" 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 passing as silently as forty thousand may
pass, 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 reasserted 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 passed 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 cumbered 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 encompassed 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, muffled, 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 assault.
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 passed 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 multitude 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.
"Yield us the woman!" the mob roared in the interval. "Give us the
woman and save yourselves!"
Those about the alabarch, hearing the demand of the mob, turned great
terror-strained eyes upon Lydia, and she hid her face in her father's
shoulder.
The smell of burning pitch penetrated the interior; pungent smoke
assailed the nostrils of the keeper, who smiled grimly, assuming that
the mob hoped to burn the Synagogue.
But there followed an explosion of steam, split by a sharp report, and
followed by a howl of exultation. The keeper with wild eyes sprang at
the valve. Immediately the hammering of the ram reverberated through
the gloom.
The alabarch understood. They were cracking the stone with fire and
water and beating in the fractures with a ram.
Then the forty thousand within realized their extremity. The murmur
increased to an even groan of terror, and here and there, as some more
acutely realized the desperate straits, frantic screams would rive
through the drone of misery.
Above it all the ram beat its sentence of doom upon the gate.
Splintering rock began to fall on the inner side of the assaulted
portal. The keeper put his hands over his ears and turned away from
the sight. Let but a breach be made wide enough to admit a hand to
undo the bolts and hideous death would pour in upon the shuddering
captives within.
Without, above the noise of the ram, the roar of the multitude
continued:
"Give up the woman ere it is too late!"
Under the light of fires falling from above, hundreds of white faces in
the mad mass turned toward Lydia.
A lozenge of stone large enough to admit a man's body shaped itself in
the gate under the ram, and the next instant shot out and fell near the
keeper. With it came a hoarse roar of triumph, drowning a scream of
despair.
A dozen arms came through the opening and fumbled for the bolts.
The keeper seized the fragment of stone and hurled it at the intruding
arms. It struck fair and with vicious force. Howls of pain went up.
The limp arms were dragged out and as others came in the keeper bounded
to the gate and catching up his missile beat madly upon flesh and bone
until the besiegers abandoned their search for the bolts.
The thunder of assault began again, for the gate could not hold long.
The trapped victims shrieked and out of the mass fingers pointed at
Lydia.
Suddenly, she stood away from her father's arm. Walking to one of the
keepers of the unassaulted gates, she said to him:
"I am she whom they want without! Let me forth!"
A tall spare old man, one of the strangers who had entered last,
approached her. But the girl motioned him aside and he made the sign
of the cross over her.
Her father, watching her, did not realize until the keeper undid the
bolts which held the wicket, or subsidiary gate in the large one, that
Lydia meant to pass out into the night.
With a cry, he sprang after her.
A hush fell in the Synagogue.