Saul Of Tarsus Part 64

"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 a.s.sailed the nostrils of the keeper, who smiled grimly, a.s.suming 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 a.s.saulted 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 mult.i.tude 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 ma.s.s 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sault began again, for the gate could not hold long.

The trapped victims shrieked and out of the ma.s.s fingers pointed at Lydia.

Suddenly, she stood away from her father's arm. Walking to one of the keepers of the una.s.saulted 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 pa.s.s out into the night.

With a cry, he sprang after her.

A hush fell in the Synagogue.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

THE DREGS OF THE CUP OF FURY

The great stars were further withdrawn into the immeasurable arch of blue night; the winds had fled away into the ocean; the bay was angry with fire for leagues. The s.p.a.ce before Lydia was open as far as the reader's stone of the proseucha, for the attacking party had demanded room for their proceedings. Beyond that was the front of the besiegers, a sea of bodies lighted by torches, tunics b.l.o.o.d.y with murder which had been done, mouths open, teeth s.h.i.+ning, and eyes filled with the fury of bloodthirst.

As yet she was unnoticed, because the attention of the mult.i.tude was engaged with the a.s.sault upon the easternmost gate.

Lydia's mind did not direct her. It had sunk long ago under the stress of womanly terror. Only an involuntary obedience to an impulse conceived during the last conscious suggestions of her Nazarene faith, moved her toward the reader's stone, straight in the face of the mult.i.tude. She went as all young and tender martyrs have gone, with the spirit already lifted out of the body.

She mounted the rock; the alabarch, unable to reach her in time, unable to make her hear him, gave up with a groan of despair, and followed her.

Then the mult.i.tude saw and understood.

A yell of fury went up; a ma.s.s of innumerable heads and shoulders lurched toward her. Even the a.s.sailants at the gate dropped their ram to come.

Then up and out of it Marsyas leaped!

Lydia saw him, and a great light swept over her face. He had come to die with her, to sweeten the bitter martyrdom with the faithfulness of his love.

After Marsyas, the bayadere bounded, as if pitched from the front of the wave. Between the murdering front and the three on the stone she interposed herself, a creature of primal fury, terrible and ferocious.

A torch was in her hand, the badge of eligibility, which had let her to the forefront of this mob, that received none but destroyers. But the sibilant utterance of the crimson flame, raking the air, and taller by half than the screaming fury that whipped it before her, was turned upon them that had kindled it.

She carried by its bail a great copper kettle filled with bitumen, but, as she planted feet upon the stone, she dropped her torch and, whirling upon the wave of fury, swept the full contents of the giant pot over every face and garment for yards about her. She caught up her torch; the looping flame uncoiled itself like a springing snake and shot down into the pack. Instantly there was a running flash, the rip of explosive ignition, and the breast of the riot turned, each a great towering flame, and drove itself into the heart of the oncoming thousands behind!

The rabble in cotton tunics had absolutely no defense against one another. The riot of bloodthirst turned instantly into panic and a revel of terrible death. The sound, the scene were indescribably awful.

In the hideous uproar that ensued, events followed swiftly. Vasti and her tall torch, in fearful fellows.h.i.+p, shrilled and spun on the rock in a frenzy of heathen triumph. Marsyas, for the instant stunned and scorched, flung his arm over his face, to shut out the horror. But the Jews, the instant the ram was dropped, realizing that their citadel was hopeless with breaches in its gate, and seeing a respite in the riot's attention upon Lydia, broke from the sanctuary and poured like a sea in flight into the open. The miraculous intervention of the bayadere gave them the opportunity to save themselves. But when Marsyas came to himself and sprang to take up Lydia, the inundation of fleeing Jews had swept over the reader's stone behind him, and Lydia was gone!

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

CAPTIVES OF THE MIGHTY

The second night after the riot about the Synagogue, one of Flaccus'

sentries, posted about the small cramped portion of the Regio Judaeorum, into which the forty thousand Jews had been driven, brought his spear at guard and called "Halt!"

But the object approaching spun on toward him noiselessly, pa.s.sed the lines, and disappeared up the dark, sandy roadway, into the night on the beleaguered quarter.

"Ha, ha! Ho, ho!" roared the next post, who had heard his challenge, "challenging sand-columns, Sergius? Flaccus should know of thy thoroughness!"

The discomfited sentry muttered and shouldered his weapon.

But the column of sand disintegrated before a hovel, and became a snaky woman-shape that disappeared into the dark door of the house.

Within, she stumbled over prostrate bodies, sleeping on the earthen floor, and, muttering in Hindu against the darkness, stopped finally.

"Master!" she called softly, in her native tongue.