Saul of Tarsus: A Tale of the Early Christians

by Elizabeth Miller

  CHAPTER XXXII

  SANCTUARY

  The cluster of vagabonds hanging before the alabarch's mansion stayedno longer after the breezes brought the first sound of tumult whichannounced a rarer sport elsewhere. In a twinkling the Regio Judaeorumwas silent and deserted.

  Except for the gusts of far-off turmoil, the cooing of pigeons intowers, the clashing of palm-leaves, the creak of crazy gates in thewind, the casual calling of Numidian cranes or the crowing of poultrywere the only sounds in the quarter--lonesome, nature sounds, signalsof 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 lookfrom her father, came close to his chair and mingled her yellow-browncurls with his white locks.

  The silence over the quarter had become oppressive and the slightestbreak would have been no less grateful than distinct, when it seemedthat cautious footsteps pattered by without.

  The two stirred and listened.

  After a moment, they heard others, very swift and soft, as if many wererunning by a-tiptoe. There were whispers and rustlings, excited wordscried under the breath.

  The two in the presiding-room looked at each other. Had the vagabondsreturned 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 towardthe New Port, sounds as if a multitude hastened in one direction.Above these stealthy, fugitive, whispered noises, there came fresheneduproar from pagan Alexandria, swift, high, relentless and carrying likefire on a wind.

  As they stood thus, perplexed and alarmed, Vasti appeared like a shadowout 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 towardhis 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 actwithout perfect conception of the conditions he had to fight.

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

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

  The alabarch put his thin hands to his forehead, as if to ward off theconviction, which all the fragmentary intimation against Lydia, and herown 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 confessionthan of her father's suffering. In the appreciable interval his figureshriveled; age and the encroachment of death showed upon him. Theatmosphere of the magistrate, the courtier and the aristocrat dissolvedunder the anguish of a father and the horror of a Jew. He hadsurrendered his two sons, Tiberius and Marcus, to paganism; in Lydia,he had reposed the unwatchful faith, that had permitted his otherchildren to apostasize under his roof. He had believed the more inher, 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 againthrough the streets of the Regio Judaeorum. The alabarch heard it. Upthrough the mask there struggled not rebuke and condemnation, but theterror of love fearing for its own. He caught Lydia in his arms andturned his straining eyes toward the windows. But the bayadere waitedno longer for the arousing of his faculties. She seized his arm andthrust 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 thestreets.

  "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 thetumble and wash of the Mediterranean on the north, was pouring throughthe 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 overthe yet unwarned sections nearer the Synagogue.

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

  As he went, doorways about them were giving up households, bazaars andbooths were emptying of their patrons and proprietors; workshops, theirartisans and apprentices; schools, their readers and pupils; thecounting-room, the rich men and the borrowers; the squalid angles, theoutcast and the beggar. The oppression of terror and the instinct forsilence weighted the darkening air; the twilight covered them, andhostile attention was yet far behind them.

  So they came: the slaves with marks of perpetual servitude in theirears, and ladies of the Sadducees that had rarely set foot upon theharsh earth; figures in Indian silks and figures in sackcloth;fugitives to whom fear lent wings and fugitives to whom flight wasbitterer than death; families and guilds by the hundreds, hurryingtogether; companies of diverse people separated from their own; sonscarrying parents and neighbors bearing the sick; friends forgettingattachments and foes forgetting feuds--until the streets becameveritable rivers of running people. And so they went, crowding,pressing, contending, but passing as silently as forty thousand maypass, toward the Synagogue, which was sanctuary and stronghold for themall.

  The keepers of the great gates were there, and the huge valves stoodwide. The alabarch's old composure reasserted itself, as, amid thepanic of his people, he realized their want of leadership. He steppedto one side of the nearest gate, and stood while he watched each andevery Jew rush into the darkness and disappear under the great pylonsof the Synagogue. Lydia, whom he would have sent in at once, clung tohim, and together they stood without.

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

  The last of the Jews fled praying through the giant gates and pressedthemselves into the shelter of the Synagogue. The keeper looked at thealabarch. He lifted his arm, and Lydia and the keeper and he, shuttingaway, 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 thealabarch, appeared; Lydia made a little sound, and moved toward them.

  "We also are beset," the foremost said, "can we enter into theprotection 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 theyadmitted was a ravening howl, as Alexandria hurled itself into theempty streets of the Regio Judaeorum.

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

  There was the never-failing lamp on the lectern, but its lightpenetrated no farther than the immediate precincts of darkness. Theinterior was so vast that its great angles melted into shadow. Theimmense area of marble pavement was cumbered with
an army of huddledshapes, and when portentous red light began to sift down through theopen roof it fell upon uplifted faces, ghastly with fear, upon barearms, 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 portionsof the quarter. Great lights began to mount and redden the sky astorches were applied to houses looted of their riches. The invasionhad met no obstacle and the whole region was a-swarm.

  Presently, close at hand, the full bellow of freshly-discoveredincentive 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 greatmoan, muffled, unechoing and filled with terror.

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

  "Naught but a ram or ballista can force these gates!" he said. "And weare forty thousand. Alas, that the spirit of Joshua the warrior wasnot 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, fruitlesshammering 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 sheclung 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, slowlyand heavily delivered as if a multitude wielded a ram. But the reportswere too solid to indicate any weakness in the gates, and the keeper ofthe one attacked watched the sacred stone with a glitter of pride inhis eyes.

  Presently the hammering ceased.

  "Yield us the woman!" the mob roared in the interval. "Give us thewoman and save yourselves!"

  Those about the alabarch, hearing the demand of the mob, turned greatterror-strained eyes upon Lydia, and she hid her face in her father'sshoulder.

  The smell of burning pitch penetrated the interior; pungent smokeassailed the nostrils of the keeper, who smiled grimly, assuming thatthe mob hoped to burn the Synagogue.

  But there followed an explosion of steam, split by a sharp report, andfollowed by a howl of exultation. The keeper with wild eyes sprang atthe valve. Immediately the hammering of the ram reverberated throughthe gloom.

  The alabarch understood. They were cracking the stone with fire andwater and beating in the fractures with a ram.

  Then the forty thousand within realized their extremity. The murmurincreased to an even groan of terror, and here and there, as some moreacutely realized the desperate straits, frantic screams would rivethrough 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 assaultedportal. The keeper put his hands over his ears and turned away fromthe sight. Let but a breach be made wide enough to admit a hand toundo the bolts and hideous death would pour in upon the shudderingcaptives within.

  Without, above the noise of the ram, the roar of the multitudecontinued:

  "Give up the woman ere it is too late!"

  Under the light of fires falling from above, hundreds of white faces inthe mad mass turned toward Lydia.

  A lozenge of stone large enough to admit a man's body shaped itself inthe gate under the ram, and the next instant shot out and fell near thekeeper. With it came a hoarse roar of triumph, drowning a scream ofdespair.

  A dozen arms came through the opening and fumbled for the bolts.

  The keeper seized the fragment of stone and hurled it at the intrudingarms. 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 boundedto the gate and catching up his missile beat madly upon flesh and boneuntil 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 atLydia.

  Suddenly, she stood away from her father's arm. Walking to one of thekeepers 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 signof the cross over her.

  Her father, watching her, did not realize until the keeper undid thebolts which held the wicket, or subsidiary gate in the large one, thatLydia meant to pass out into the night.

  With a cry, he sprang after her.

  A hush fell in the Synagogue.