HE SHALL NOT LOSE HIS REWARD.
There was no room for doubt or for delay. “What is to become of you,
Callista?” he said; “they will tear you to pieces.”
“Fear nothing for me, father,” she answered; “I am one of them. They know
me. Alas, _I_ am no Christian! _I_ have not abjured their rites! but you,
lose not a moment.”
“They are still at some distance,” he said, “though the wind gives us
merciful warning of their coming.” He looked about the room, and took up
the books of Holy Scripture which were on the shelf. “There is nothing
else,” he said, “of special value here. Agellius could not take them.
Here, my child, I am going to show you a great confidence. To few persons
not Christians would I show it. Take this blessed parchment; it contains
the earthly history of our Divine Master. Here you will see whom we
Christians love. Read it; keep it safely; surrender it, when you have the
opportunity, into Christian keeping. My mind tells me I am not wrong in
lending it to you.” He handed to her the Gospel of St. Luke, while he put
the two other volumes into the folds of his own tunic.
“One word more,” she said; “your name, should I want you.”
He took up a piece of chalk from the shelf, and wrote upon the wall in
distinct characters,
“Thascius Cæcilius Cyprianus, Bishop of Carthage.”
Hardly had she read the inscription when the voices of several men were
heard in the very neighbourhood of the cottage; and hoping to effect a
diversion in favour of Cæcilius, and being at once unsuspicious of danger
to herself, and careless of her life, she ran quickly forward to meet
them. Cæcilius ought to have taken to flight without a moment’s delay, but
a last sacred duty detained him. He knelt down and took the pyx from his
bosom. He had eaten nothing that day; but even if otherwise, it was a
crisis which allowed him to consume the sacred species without fasting. He
hastily opened the golden case, adored the blessed sacrament, and consumed
it, purifying its receptacle, and restoring it to its hiding-place. Then
he rose at once and left the cottage.
He looked about; Callista was nowhere to be seen. She was gone; so much
was certain, no enemy was in sight; it only remained for him to make off
too. In the confusion he turned in the wrong direction; instead of making
off at the back of the cottage from which the voices had scared him, he
ran across the garden into the hollow way. It was all over with him in an
instant; he fell at once into the hands of the vanguard of the mob.
Many mouths were opened upon him all at once. “The sorcerer!” cried one;
“tear him to shreds; _we’ll_ teach him to brew his spells against the
city.” “Give us back our grapes and corn,” said a second. “Have a guard,”
said a third; “he can turn you into swine or asses while there is breath
in him,” “Then be the quicker with him,” said a fourth, who was lifting up
a crowbar to discharge upon his head. “Hold!” said a tall swarthy youth,
who had already warded off several blows from him, “hold, will you? don’t
you see, if you kill him he can’t undo the spell. Make him first reverse
it all; make him take the curse off us. Bring him along; take him to
Astarte, Hercules, or old Saturn. We’ll broil him on a gridiron till he
turns all these canes into vines, and makes olive berries of the pebbles,
and turns the dust of the earth into fine flour for our eating. When he
has done all this he shall dance a jig with a wild cow, and sit down to
supper with an hyena.”
A loud scream of exultation broke forth from the drunken and frantic
multitude. “Along with him!” continued the same speaker in a jeering tone.
“Here, put him on the ass and tie his hands behind his back. He shall go
back in triumph to the city which he loves. Mind, and don’t touch him
before the time. If you kill him, you’ll never get the curse off. Come
here, you priests of Cybele,” he added, “and be his body-guard.” And he
continued to keep a vigilant eye and hand over the old man, in spite of
them.
The ass, though naturally a good-tempered beast, had been most sadly tried
through the day. He had been fed, indeed, out of mockery, as being the
Christians’ god; but he did not understand the shouts and caprices of the
crowd, and he only waited for an opportunity to show that he by no means
acquiesced in the proceedings of the day. And now the difficulty was to
move at all. The people kept crowding up the hollow road, and blocked the
passage, and though the greater part of the rioters had either been left
behind exhausted in Sicca itself, or had poured over the fields on each
side of Agellius’s cottage, or gone right over the hill down into the
valley beyond, yet still it was some time before the ass could move a
step, and a time of nervous suspense it was both to Cæcilius and the youth
who befriended him. At length what remained of the procession was
persuaded to turn about and make for Sicca, but in a reversed order. It
could not be brought round in so confined a space, so its rear went first
and the ass and its burden came last. As they descended the hill back
again, Cæcilius, who was mounted upon the linen and silk which had adorned
the Dea Syra before the Tertullianist had destroyed the idol, saw before
him the whole line of march. In front were flaunted the dreadful emblems
of idolatry, so far as their bearers were able still to raise them.
Drunken women, ragged boys mounted on men’s shoulders, ruffians and
bullies, savage-looking Getulians, half-human monsters from the Atlas,
monkeys and curs jabbering and howling, mummers, bacchanals, satyrs, and
gesticulators, formed the staple of the procession. Midway between the
hill which he was descending and the city lay the ravine, of which we have
several times spoken, widening out into the plain or Campus Martius, which
reached round to the steep cliffs on the north. The bridle-path, along
which he was moving, crossed it just where it was opening and became
level, so as to present no abrupt descent and ascent at the place where
the path was lowest. On the left every vestige of the ravine soon ceased,
and a free passage extended to the plain.
The youth who had placed Cæcilius on the ass still kept close to him and
sung at the pitch of his voice, in imitation of the rest—
“Sporting and snorting in shades of the night,
His ears pricking up, and his hoofs striking light,
And his tail whisking round, in the speed of his flight.”
“Old man,” he continued to Cæcilius in a low voice, and in Latin, “your
curse has not worked on me yet.”
“My son,” answered the priest, “you are granted one day more for
repentance.”
“Lucky for you as well as for me,” was the reply: and he continued his
song:—
“Gurta, the witch, was out with the rest;
Though as lame as a gull, by his highness possessed,
She shouldered her crutch, and danced with the best.
“She stamped and she twirled in the shade of the yew,
Till her gossips and chums of the city danced too;
They never are slack when there’s mischief to do.
“She danced and she coaxed, but he was no fool;
He’d be his own master, he’d not be her tool:
Not the little black moor should send him to school.”
He then turned to Cæcilius and whispered, “You see, old father, that
others, besides Christians, can forgive and forget. Henceforth call me
generous Juba.” And he tossed his head.
By this time they had got to the bottom of the hill, and the deep shadows
which filled the hollow showed that the sun was rapidly sinking in the
west. Suddenly, as they were crossing the bottom as it opened into the
plain, Juba seized and broke the thong which bound Cæcilius’s arms, and
bestowing a tremendous cut with it upon the side of the ass, sent him
forward upon the plain at his greatest speed. The youth’s manœuvre was
successful to the full. The asses of Africa can do more on an occasion of
this kind than our own. Cæcilius for the moment lost his seat; but,
instantly recovering it, took care to keep the animal from flagging; and
the cries of the mob, and the howlings of the priests of Cybele cooperated
in the task. At length the gloom, increasing every minute, hid him from
their view; and even in daylight his recapture would have been a difficult
matter for a wearied-out, famished, and intoxicated rabble. Before
Cæcilius well had time to return thanks for this unexpected turn of
events, he was out of pursuit, and was ambling at a pace more suitable to
the habits of the beast of burden that carried him, over an expanse of
plain which would have been a formidable night-march to a fasting man.
We must not conclude the day without relating what was its issue to the
persecutors, as well as to their intended victim. It is almost a proverb
that punishment is slow in overtaking crime; but the present instance was
an exception to the rule. While the exiled Bishop of Carthage escaped, the
crowd, on the other hand, were caught in the trap which had been laid for
them. We have already said it was a _ruse_ on the part of the governing
authorities of the place to get the rioters out of the city, that they
might at once be relieved of them, and then deal with them just as they
might think fit. When the mob was once outside the walls, they might be
refused re-admittance, and put down with a strong hand. The Roman
garrison, who, powerless to quell the tumult in the narrow and winding
streets and multiplied alleys of the city, had been the authors of the
manœuvre, now took on themselves the stern completion of it, and
determined to do so in the sternest way. Not a single head of all those
who poured out in the afternoon should return at night. It was not to be
supposed that the soldiers had any tenderness for the Christians, but they
abominated and despised the rabble of the town. They were indignant at
their rising, thought it a personal insult to themselves, and resolved
they should never do so again. The gates were commonly in the custody of
the city guard, but the Porta Septimiana, by which the mob passed out, was
on this occasion claimed by the Romans. It was most suitably circumstanced
for the use they intended to make of it. Immediately outside of it was a
large court of the same level as the ground inside, bordered on the right
and left by substantial walls, which after a time were drawn to meet each
other, and contracted the space to the usual breadth of a road. The walls
continued to run along this road for some distance, till they joined the
way which led to the Campus Martius, and from this point the ground was
open till it reached the head of the ravine. The soldiers drew up at the
gate, and as the worn-out and disappointed, brutalized and half-idiotic
multitudes returned towards it from the country, those who were behind
pushed on between the border walls those who were in front, and, while
they jammed together their ranks, also made escape impossible. It was now
that the Roman soldiers began their barbarous, not to say cowardly,
assault upon them. With heavy maces, with the pike, with iron gauntlets,
with stones and bricks, with clubs, with scourge, with the sword, with the
helmet, with whatever came to hand, they commenced the massacre of that
large concourse of human beings, who did not offer one blow in return.
They slaughtered them like sheep; they trampled them down; they threw the
bodies of the wounded over the walls. Attempting to run back, numbers of
the poor wretches came into conflict with the ranks behind them, and an
additional scene of confusion and overthrow took place; many of them
straggled over to the open country or woods, and perished, either from the
weather, or from hunger, or even from the wild beasts. Others, weakened by
excess and famine, fell a prey to the pestilence that was raging. After
some days a remnant of them was allowed silently and timidly to steal back
into the city as best they could. It was a long day before the Plebs
Siccensis ventured to have any opinion of its own upon the subject of
Christianity, or any other political, social, or ecclesiastical topic
whatever.