Saul of Tarsus: A Tale of the Early Christians
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CHAPTER XI
THE HOUSE OF DEFENSE
Meanwhile Marsyas lay on his straw pallet at the house of Peter, theusurer, in Ptolemais, night after night and made calculation.
By fair winds, Agrippa should reach Alexandria in so many days.Allowing time to begin and complete the negotiations for a loan, somany more days should elapse. Then the same number with a few allowedfor foul weather would be required to return to Ptolemais. About sucha day, so many weeks hence, he told himself he should be ransomed.
Six weeks is a long time for a free man to be enslaved. He sighed andturned again on his pallet and trusted in the God who does not forgetprayers.
It was a strange, sordid biding of time for Marsyas. The man he servedwas the first of the kind he had ever known. The ascetic refinement ofthe white old Essene, the simple purity of Stephen, the polished rigorof the Pharisee Saul, the naive sophistication of the Romanized Herodhad constituted his social horizon, and he had come to believe that theworld's manner was either cultured or simple.
But he went into the usurer's counting-room to meet the borrowingworld, to be amazed and shocked and finally to fortify himself tocontrol it.
It was not to change his nature; it was to develop latent powers in himthat were the fruit of long generations of Judaism. At night hisfingers were soiled by contact with the coins, the counting-room hadbecome noisome with the day's heat and the unhappy humanity that hadcome and gone through the busy hours. But he summed up, not what hehad sacrificed in soul-sweetness and optimism, for that was a loss hedid not realize, but his triumphs in achieving whatever he had beenbidden to do, in his mastery of men and things and in the thoroughnessof his workmanship. However loudly his mind declared that he was outof place, he felt no great repugnance to his duty.
After the newness of his experience wore off, as it did in a very shorttime, the days began to go with wearing deliberation, as all days gothat are counted impatiently. His sorrow and his wrongs were his onlycompanions; as his anxiety for his liberty and Agrippa's successincreased, his healthy indifference to his unwholesome atmosphere beganto decline rapidly, his resentment against his oppression to grow. Thesix weeks ebbed out and passed. His anxiety flowed into his bitternessand his bitterness into his anxiety until they were one. Troubledabout his liberty, he clenched his teeth and thought on Saul; thinkingof his impotent position against the powerful Pharisee, he watched theharbor from the counting-room and trembled whenever a sail crossed it.
Inactivity became eventually unbearable, for an unemployed moment was amiserable moment. He could not devise a way to liberty, nor furtheraid his one ally into power, so he turned to his own resources againstSaul.
Continuing cautiously to visit the proseuchae by night, he learnedsomething, which he heard casually at the time, but which eventuallydeveloped into a matter of importance. He heard that the Nazareneswere flying from Jerusalem in great numbers, scattering in bodies fromDamascus to Alexandria, and from Jerusalem to Rome. The rabbis ofPtolemais were concerned to discover that there was a community hidingin the city, because they feared the evils of a persecution,established in Ptolemais, as much as the influence of the apostasy uponthe faithful.
When Marsyas admitted casually to himself, after he had heard thetidings, that the apostasy must have numbers of followers, he wascarried in his thinking to the realization that numbers meant strengthand strength meant resistance. Why, then, should not these people turnon the Pharisee? Here, in a twinkling, he believed that he haddiscovered abettors, allies whom he could instantly enlist in his owncause.
But before he could deduce resolution from this electrifying admission,events began to mark his days.
Late one afternoon, after the time for his ransoming was out, a manapproached the opening in the grating. The shadows in thebadly-lighted chamber made client and steward and all the appointmentsin the dingy counting-room imperfect shapes to the eye. The new-comerleaned down to the opening and peered at Marsyas as he pushed a fibulaof gold through the opening.
"I am in need," the man said. "Canst thou not give me the value ofthis in money?"
The voice was resonant and strangely familiar to Marsyas. In the gloomthe great lifted shoulders of the man, bending from his height, broughtback on a sudden the chamber in the college at Jerusalem. The youngEssene came closer to the grating and looked at the applicant.
There was a mutual start of recognition; in Marsyas perhaps the chillthat a fugitive feels who finds himself detected. The man was theRabbi Eleazar.
"Thou! Here, with them?" the rabbi exclaimed in a suppressed whisper.
"I am here, Rabbi," Marsyas replied, "but alone."
Eleazar looked at him, but the examination under the difficulty of thegloom was not satisfactory; besides, there was the stir of others whohad come in behind him and were able to listen. Marsyas swept thefibula into one of the coin-baskets and passed a handful of silver tothe rabbi.
"Meet me without at the end of the first watch to-night," the rabbiadded, as he thanked Marsyas. "Do not fear me, for I am also a victimof thine enemy."
Marsyas saluted him, and the rabbi disappeared. A figure in armorstepped up to the place where Eleazar had stood. He was helmeted andgreaved and had a line of purple about the hem of his short tunic. Heapplied for a loan and yielded as indorsement the favor of Caesar andthe family name of Aulus. Marsyas withdrew hastily into theoverhanging shadow of the grating, received the officer's note, countedout the gold and drew in a free breath when another stepped into hisplace. It was Vitellius' legionary.
"Am I run to earth?" Marsyas asked himself.
At the end of the first watch that night he prepared to followEleazar's suggestion, if only to discover what to expect. That he wasnot filled with confidence nor resigned to suffer what might befall himwas evident by his slipping a knife into his belt when he made himselfready.
He went out into the unlighted street and looked about him for Eleazar.The tall figure of the rabbi emerged from the darkness a moment afterMarsyas appeared and approached the young man.
"Have no fear," the rabbi said. "We are common victims of the sameunjust suspicion; let us not be suspicious of each other."
"Thy words are fair, Rabbi, but I do not know thee. Whom I mosttrusted hath failed me of late; it must follow then that I am not sureof strangers. Tell me first thy business with me."
"I am Eleazar, the rabbi, who sat with Saul in the college that daywhen Joel, the Levite, came with news of Stephen of Galilee."
"I know that; also that thou knowest that Saul oppresses me. Thou arta rabbi and zealous for the Law. Art thou sent for me on Saul'smission?"
"No, brother."
"Or the proconsul's?"
"I know nothing of the proconsul; I am here, driven from Jerusalem bySaul who charged me with apostasy because I would not aid him in hisoppression."
For a moment Marsyas was dumb with amazement.
"He is mad!" he cried when speech came to him.
"Is it madness when he persecutes others, but villainy when heoppresses thee?" Eleazar demanded.
"I pray thy pardon," Marsyas said quickly, "if I seem to miscall hiswork. It might follow in reason that he should accuse me, butthou--thou a rabbi, accepted before the Law and clean-skirted beforeall Judea--that he should accuse thee of apostasy seems to be the workof no sane man."
"But it is! He layeth plans keen as Joshua's who warred under God'sbanner, and he striketh with the strength of an army. Unless he isstayed he will devastate to the end!"
Marsyas came close and laid a hand on the rabbi's shoulder.
"What of Stephen?" he asked with stiffened lips. "How did it come topass?"
For a moment there was silence, and then the rabbi drew up and shookhimself.
"It will not help thee, young brother," he said, with an impatiencewhich was only fortification against feeling. "It is ill enough totake a blasphemer and deliver him up to punishment; ask no more, for itwrenches me to think of it."
Eleazar, seeking to turn the current of the young man's thoughts, whichhe believed, being unable to see his face, must be sorrowfullyretrospective, asked presently:
"Art thou here with--them?"
"With whom?"
"The Nazarenes."
Marsyas seized the rabbi's shoulder with a fresh grasp.
"Where are they?" he demanded.
"Dost thou--in truth, dost thou not know?" he demanded.
"Accused though I am, I am a good Jew, Rabbi. Never until now have Iwished to know where they house themselves. But even were it thepowers of darkness which alone could help me, now, I should nothesitate! Where are these apostates?"
"Here, in Ptolemais. What wilt thou have of them, Marsyas?"
"Were not heathen and idolaters instruments for the Lord's work? Havenot even the beasts of the fields served His ends?"
"What dost thou meditate?"
"Saul's undoing!" Eleazar heard him thoughtfully and answered after asilence.
"So be it, then; if thou choosest that spirit, it must serve. Thouhast a dead friend to avenge and I, the guiltless oppressed to justify.So the one end, the prevention of Saul's work, be attained, what matterif the spirit be mine or thine!"
"Well enough; the means, then! Where are these Nazarenes?"
"They--they meet on the water-front, nightly, since the oppression hathbeen instituted against them," Eleazar answered reluctantly, as if hedoubted the propriety of betraying a knowledge of the apostates' habits.
"Nightly!" Marsyas repeated. "So then to-night! Where is the place?We will go there!"
Eleazar stood undecided and debated with himself. But the pressure ofthe young man's impelling firmness assumed material force against himand he yielded doubtfully.
"Come, then," he said, and his hesitation melted in the face of theother's decision.
Marsyas put himself at the rabbi's side and together they trampedthrough the dark streets toward the poorer districts of Ptolemais,along the harbor. It was poor indeed; the houses were the smallest inthe city, low, square boxes of sun-dried earth little higher than aman's head and mere stalls for space and comfort. Each, however, had anumerous tenantry, and wherever doors were opened the two men sawwithin, now Jews, now Greeks or Romans. Although uproar and disordercommon in the lower walks of the city went on in the environments, theparticular passage Marsyas and the rabbi walked was quiet though notdeserted. But it was a veritable black well, that maintained a swiftslope for many rods and indicated the proximity to the water.
"How found you them, in this hole?" Marsyas asked, astonished, in spiteof his intent thoughts, at the black labyrinth.
"I, too, was in hiding for my life's sake," Eleazar answered.
The brooding cornices of the houses, visible against the strip ofstarry sky, rounded suddenly and closed in upon the passage. Marsyassaw that they were nearing a blind end, when a door opened in thecul-de-sac, disclosing several other men preceding Marsyas and therabbi.
"Haste!" Eleazar whispered, and, seizing Marsyas' hand, ran so thatthey reached the lighted doorway before it closed again.
They entered with the others, and the bolts were shot behind them.