Read Ebook: The quenchless light by Laut Agnes C

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Ebook has 845 lines and 73729 words, and 17 pages

Mientras el acompa?amiento desfilaba, con lentitud de duelo, por las calles mal empedradas de Le?n, el tren corr?a, corr?a, dejando atr?s las interminables alamedas de chopos que parecen un pentagrama donde fuesen las notas verde claro, sobre el crudo tono rojizo de las llanadas. Hecha Luc?a un ovillo en la esquina del departamento, sollozaba sin amargura, con alg?n hipo, con vehemente llanto de ni?a inconsolable. Bien comprend?a el novio que le tocaba decir algo, mostrarse afectuoso, compartir aquel primer dolor, ponerle t?rmino; mas hay en la vida situaciones especiales, casos en que no tropieza ni se embaraza la gente sencilla, y en que acaso el hombre de mundo y experiencia se convierte en doctrino. Preferible es en ocasiones un adarme de coraz?n a una arroba de habilidad; donde fracasan las huecas f?rmulas, vence el sentimiento, con su espont?nea elocuencia. A fuerza de quebrarse los cascos ideando manera de anudar el di?logo con su esposa, ocurriole al novio aprovechar una circunstancia insignificante.

--Luc?a--le dijo en voz algo turbada--m?date de ventanilla, hija m?a, c?rrete ac?; ah? te da el sol de lleno, y es tan malsano....

Levantose Luc?a con autom?tica rigidez, pas? al lado opuesto del departamento, y dej?ndose caer de golpe, torn? a cubrir el semblante con el fino pa?uelo, y se oyeron otra vez sus sollozos y el anhelar de su seno juvenil.

-II-

Es de rigor saber de qu? boca parti? el soplo que encendi? la antorcha de aquellas nupcias.

"I was coming out to seek the young scribe Timothy--I saw him once and helped him carry the Prophet in, when he was mobbed and stoned and left for dead in Lystra--I thought he'd help me back to my people!"

The Idumean rose impatiently.

The heart of the frightened boy almost stopped. He seemed to have jumped from danger close to death or torture. What had he told, or not told, that made him, a friendless Grecian boy in Imperial Rome, of great money value to the Idumean guard the minute Bernice's name was mentioned? Why had the rough soldier called the young princess a "night monster," "a spider maid," "a vixen with snaky blood," "a nymph" aiming a net at Titus, the son of the Roman General in Asia? Why should a girl princess not flee one old husband, married to silence evil tongues, and seek a younger mate in the General's son? Wise, wise as seer or prophet is the intuition of youth; but stronger than the breastplate of Imperial Rome the innocence of youth; for the boy had not told all the truth. Something he held back for the love of the royal mistress, who had befriended him. He had not told the Idumean captain that when he had been handed over to the merchant of Coloss? he had been sold by King Agrippa because his young master was jealous of his sister's affections for a page; and when he had taken ship at Crete, dressed as a page, he was a runaway slave, with Princess Bernice's gold in a goatskin wallet round his girdle, obeying her orders "to have no fear to go to Rome; she would meet him there: to wait."

To his youthful heart it seemed no evil thing that she should come to Rome and marry Titus, Vespasian's son, where he again could be her page. He could not know that all Rome was now counting on General Vespasian to save the Empire and become Emperor. He would not have had long to wait, as destiny soon rolled the years to Vespasian's triumphial entry into Rome--if the harpy women of the wine shops on the water front had not taken note of his beauty and set the bargemen on to kidnap him as bait for higher game in Nero's Palace, where ruled an evil woman, guided only by her own wicked desires.

The boy heard the door clank as the Praetorian guard drew the chain across outside and snapped the great twin locks with a key as long as a man's forearm. He heard the ring of the swift soldier tread as the Idumean strode over the stones for the Three Taverns.

Then he turned. The room was dark but for a flickering peat fire on the hearth and a little guttering olive oil wick in a stone or breccia lamp on a rough board table. The floor was softened with sand and earth. The window was high and latticed, but let a soft breeze in from the sea. A little, stooped old man with a white beard and snow white hair and skullcap such as doctors of the law wore, sat on a backless stool at the table, writing on a scroll which he unwound from a roller as he wrote, with his eyes so close to the papyrus that he did not see the boy's form against the dark of the door.

Except for the table and the backless stool there was no furniture in the prison hut but two couches, close together near the door; and the boy noticed that while the prisoner's right hand wrote and wrote on unheeding, his left arm, resting on the table, had a huge handcuff attached to an iron chain which also lay on the table; and this was the Prophet, whom he had helped the scribe Timothy carry in stoned for dead at Lystra. This was the man, when the wreck broke up at Malta, who stood in the pelting rain and the dark and bade the Lord Julius "be of good cheer" and thanked his strange God "that now at last he could publish the Glad News at Rome."

The boy had not noticed the strange leader of the strange new sect in the Judgment Hall at Caesarea, because he had been too young, the toy and plaything of the youthful King Agrippa and his younger sister, Bernice, and he had noticed him still less at Lystra, some years before, because he had been still younger and much too excited over the mob. There is a discrepancy here in the boy's story as picked out of the old records; and yet the discrepancy proves its truth, for he could not have been more than four or five. Yet he distinctly remembered coming in on one of his father's caravans for Damascus from the South, and seeing the maddened mob, and running with all the camel drivers toward the gates of the city, where he had picked up the insensible Prophet's cap and helped the young scribe Timothy to shuffle the almost lifeless form through the doors into the house of Lois and Eunice, Timothy's people, who were Greek merchants.

On the ship wrecked between Crete and Malta, he recalled the prisoner of two years ago well enough; but he had kept himself out of sight from both prisoners and sailors all he could on that voyage, staying below deck on plea of seasickness by day and coming up only in the wild nights, when the high-rolling cape of his black cloak had hidden his face; and he could dream his dreams of awakening youth, and the message of hope his Princess's black glance had thrown him when she slipped him the wallet of gold pieces from her litter chair and bade him "haste to Rome and wait there."

Yet it had been no easy business for him "to haste to Rome," for the merchant of Coloss? to whom Agrippa in a moment of jealous suspicion had sold him had been an exacting master, and had set the new young slave to keeping accounts in the great warerooms. It had only been his knowledge of the Phrygian patois dialect, half Assyrian, half Greek, that had induced the merchant to send him to the seacoast and the Isles of the Sea to collect exchange on accounts. He had collected the accounts. Then he had taken ship at Crete and run away without a qualm. Why should he have qualms? Had he not been kidnapped by the robbers of Galilee and held for ransom, and, when the robbers were routed out by Felix, given as a slave--he, who came from the mountaineers who never had been slaves--to young King Agrippa and the sister, Bernice?

After that, life had become a golden dream of awakening youth. Though Bernice had been a wife to one Herod, and now was sent north to be wife to another old man, after the custom of the Herods to strengthen their thrones by marrying their daughters to powerful rulers, Bernice had been almost as young as he--she was barely twenty. He had been set at first to seeing that the Nubian slaves kept the royal baths at Caesarea clean. Then in a fit of suspicion over having any but black eunuchs, who were mutes, attend the royal baths, Agrippa had sent him to keep the tracks of the chariot races powdered with soft sand to fill the wheel ruts and save the horses' knees if a racer slipped on the swift course.

There he had gained the first glimpse of the Princess's favor toward himself. She had been driving with her royal young brother in one of the trials for the chariot races. The snowy steeds of the young King's chariot were given precedence of all others, the Festus's wild Arab horses were champing the bits to pass, and the Roman had great ado to hold them behind Agrippa. A dozen other prancing teams were surging behind. She had worn a silver bangle round her brow to hold back her hair. On her brow hung a jade-stone ornament from Arabia with the swastika cross of luck beaded in gold. In the wild charge of the racers the jade pendant had bounced from its setting in the sand. Leaping in front of the other racers, the boy had rescued the emblem of good luck from trampling; and all the people in the seats of the great hippodrome had cheered his pluck. Fortune had come to him in the little jewel with the odd cross.

When the charioteers came round the course again, King Agrippa himself had stooped to receive the restored jewel; and the people had cheered again; and when Agrippa and Bernice had gone up to Daphne's Gardens at Antioch, for the wild, lawless pleasures there, then had followed another golden dream of awakening youth. The boy did not know, when he had been with the royal lovers in Daphne's Gardens, that only a few miles away was the Prophet, with the Christians of Antioch; and here they were, both thrown together in the evil snares of Rome. Amid the roses and the palms and the love temples and the fountains of the gardens were artificial lakes, where plied boats with silken awnings rowed by Naiads in silver-and-golden nets to the music of zither and harp under the Moon Goddess.

This is the only point in the boy's story where there is any discrepancy between his experiences as told by himself and the sacred and profane writers of the period. It does not appear among the sacred writers whether the corn ships carrying the Prophet at the various ports of call delayed long enough for the prisoners to have gone in to Antioch, as they did at all the other ports where Christians dwelt; but in the profane writers of Rome and Greece at the period '61 A.D. to '68 A.D., are abundant proofs of all the youth's adventures in Daphne's Gardens; and Bernice's record became an infamy in Rome.

Here Agrippa and Bernice took their pleasure, and he, now the trusted page, accompanied them, as steersman for the nymphs. He was clad in silvered silks, the girl rowers in spangled nets, with naked limbs the color of pink shells. He knew that five hundred bastinadoes on the soles of his feet would be the punishment if ever he breathed a word of what he saw on these nights; and he saw nothing; but dipped his steersman paddle to the rhythm of the temple music, and watched the limpid water ripple in drops of moonlit gold, and dreamed his dreams of awakening youth, which are wiser than seers in their intuitions and stronger than breastplates of bronze in their innocence. He knew nothing going on around him because he saw nothing but Bernice's eyes; and she was so far beyond his reach, he saw no spider net in those black, fathomless eyes.

And then one day crashed down his house of dreams in catastrophe about his youth. It had been a wild day of painted barges, of soothsayers, of magicians, of story-tellers, of dwarfs, of buffoons, of libations to Bacchus, and temple nymphs clad in golden gauze. The flesh of grown man did not live that could pass that day unscathed; and the page, who had been a mountain boy, knew naught of a goddess who could turn men to swine. There had been an older man with King Agrippa and his sister that day. The boy remembered afterward the older man had the face of one of the satyrs, half man, half goat, of whom his mountain tribes told.

There had been frenzied dancing in the love temples and more libations to Bacchus; but the mountaineers do not drink; and at the end of that day, to quiet evil tongues, Princess Bernice had been affianced to the King with the satyr face; and the star of the boy's lamp had gone out in utter blackness, with his heart cold lead, till, passing from the love temple in her curtained, latticed litter, she had thrust out her hand to him in the dark and given him the purse of gold and bade him haste to Rome and meet her there, while she went to Jerusalem to pay a vow! He did not know the nature of that vow, though all the fashion of Rome was laughing over it, and poets made mock of it and actors in the theaters extemporized lines on "Bernice's locks" and do to this day.

He knew with the knowledge of youth she had shaved her head and taken her vow to escape her elderly spouse; and now the rough Idumean guard had said all Rome was laughing at the way the sly maid had gone to Jerusalem but to throw her nymph net over Titus, son of Vespasian, who might become Emperor after Nero.

And now he stood in the prison hut of Rome, with the wolf harpies of the water-front wine shops outside, locked in by the Roman soldier, who knew there was fortune to be grasped by restoring a slave, with the threat ringing in his ears--"There is no escape from Roman power in all the known world; keep your tongue from blabbing--or I'll cut it out with my dagger," and the Lebanon boy had seen captives whose tongues had been cut by daggers. He knew this was no idle threat; but he did not know it was his boyish beauty that had cast the fatal net of danger round himself.

The boy stood with his head hanging, behind the locked door of the prison hut, like a fly caught in an evil spider web. He did not ascribe the net flung round him by dark eyes seen through the lattice of a palanquin to any spider maid; for he was still thinking with the knowledge of youth rather than age. He only knew the spider net had become strong chains binding him to the evil forces of the great Imperial City of the world, and that he had been flung into that net by a destiny uncontrolled by him except for the one act--when he had run away from his merchant master at Coloss?.

He was too deeply sunk in sudden despond and fear to notice the flickering of the shadows from the lifted breccia-stone lamp held in the Prophet's hand, while the other hand shaded the old man's defective vision peering at the ragged figure against the back of the locked door. All hope had flickered out for him with the turning of the double lock by that great key the Idumean carried.

A voice spoke out of the dark, quiet, clear, and limpid as his own mountain streams in Lebanon: "Child, come here! Why are you troubled?"

The boy raised his long-lashed blue eyes and looked across to see, not the little withered wisp of a man he had remembered as the Prophet, but a snow-white face illumined in an ethereal light and framed in an aureole of snow white hair.

"The Lord Julius bade me prepare your supper."

The Prophet did not press his question. "There are the corn bread and the leben in the alcove," he said, pointing to a dark corner of the stone wall, "and in one jar you will find the drinking water and in the other the fresh pulse."

The boy laid the meal on the rough table without a word and took his stand behind the Prophet's stool. He was still dust spattered and torn from his fall.

"Bring the couch to the table," requested the Prophet.

Thinking the Master wished to eat reclining, after the manner of the Judeans, the boy lifted the couch and placed it at the table.

"Join me," gently urged the Prophet. "I remember when I was a lad in Tarsus before I went down to study law in Jerusalem, we used to say of the mountain men, when they had broken bread and salt with us, they would be our friends forever, and never utter word, or think thought against host or guest. A good rule, child."

Tears sprang to the lad's eyes; for what the Prophet had said was true, and recalled all the stern tradition of the mountain tribes, who dwelt in tents and roved the desert on camels.

"Let us bless God and give thanks," said the Master, bowing his head; and the boy understood neither the strange Deity to whom thanks were given nor what there was for thanks in a prison hut.

It must have been the white hair or the white beard; for though the wick was guttering lower in the breccia lamp, that luminous look seemed to shine brighter and brighter round the figure of the Prophet. The boy could see his hands like hands of snow in the gathering dusk of the hut; and his brow shone with the radiance of the sun's white flame at dawn.

"Why did you wish to see Timothy?" he asked, as though reading the lad's thought.

Thereat, the youth's pent emotions of terror and despondency and fearful unknown danger broke in floods of speech.

"And, oh, Master," cried the boy, finishing the narrative that the Idumean had forbidden him to tell, and holding back nothing but his love for the Princess, "my Lord Julius says there is no escape from the power of Rome from Gaul to the Ganges for a slave. Let me be your slave, oh, Master! Master, buy me and save me! I'll serve you as never Emperor was served in thought and speech and act! I'll serve you forever with no brand on my palms or shoulders." And the little mountaineer, who never yet had bowed his head to earth as slave, fell at the old man's knees sobbing, and would have placed the Prophet's foot on his neck.

"What was your merchant master's name in Coloss??"

"The Lord Philemon; and oh, my Master, I'll pay him back my price and all the money I stole to run away to Rome. I'll work my hands to the bone! I'll earn wages for my price by acting as runner between the poles for the great Romans in the villas here. I'll pay him back fourfold as the law demands. Only let me stay--keep me from the wolves of Rome--keep the Lord Julius from selling me to Nero's Palace, or tearing out my tongue for telling you, or flogging me five hundred bastinadoes on my feet for running away, or betraying me for telling of Bernice's kindness. I know now what I should or should not tell, nor why--"

"Ah, those crafty foxes of the Herod brood! 'Twas what Christ called them when they slew John for Salome's dance. She was of the same brood of vipers long ago; and the blood of a Herod runs true to color."

The Prophet's hands were over his eyes and he seemed to be thinking back long, long years. The hearth fire guttered lower. The lamp wick had burned almost to the edge of the oil, and still the Prophet's face shone with luminous radiance as of an inner white flame; and his hands looked like ethereal hands through which flamed an inner fire of the spirit in kindly deeds.

"Dear Master, let me be your slave--"

"Child, there are nor bond nor free in the Great Kingdom which I serve; for neither life nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor heights, nor depths, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God."

"Nor bond nor free?" cried the little mountaineer. "Is there a kingdom in all the world where there are neither bond nor free?"

"The Kingdom is here and now," said the Prophet; and his brow shone with the radiance of moonlight on the snowy peaks of Lebanon.

"But, sir," cried the boy, "they held me slave, and they hold you in bonds; for the King Agrippa told the Lord Julius--"

"Two bodies there are," answered the Prophet gently, "one terrestrial and one celestial--one that waxes old as a garment which we cast aside, and one that grows younger with fuller life as the years nearer draw to God; and neither life nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor any other creature than ourselves can place bonds upon that body. Like the air, which we do not see, but in which we live and move and have our being, that celestial body lives and moves and has its being in the love of God. Child, rejoice, rejoice, again I say rejoice, that the Glad News has come and the Kingdom is here--and now."

When the Idumean returned, his mood seemed again gentler. He bade the boy fasten the wrist gyves of the chain on the prisoner's left arm to his own right wrist, and to sleep on the floor, so that he as older man would not be troubled in his sleep by the clank of the chain when he tossed restlessly at night, as age is wont to do.

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