boat, landed, and Olinthus, preceding the priest, threaded the labyrinth
of lanes, and arrived at last at the closed door of a habitation
somewhat larger than its neighbors. He knocked thrice--the door was
opened and closed again, as Apaecides followed his guide across the
threshold.
They passed a deserted atrium, and gained an inner chamber of moderate
size, which, when the door was closed, received its only light from a
small window cut over the door itself. But, halting at the threshold of
this chamber, and knocking at the door, Olinthus said, 'Peace be with
you!' A voice from within returned, 'Peace with whom?' 'The Faithful!'
answered Olinthus, and the door opened; twelve or fourteen persons were
sitting in a semicircle, silent, and seemingly absorbed in thought, and
opposite to a crucifix rudely carved in wood.
They lifted up their eyes when Olinthus entered, without speaking; the
Nazarene himself, before he accosted them, knelt suddenly down, and by
his moving lips, and his eyes fixed steadfastly on the crucifix,
Apaecides saw that he prayed inly. This rite performed, Olinthus turned
to the congregation--'Men and brethren,' said he, 'start not to behold
amongst you a priest of Isis; he hath sojourned with the blind, but the
Spirit hath fallen on him--he desires to see, to hear, and to
understand.'
'Let him,' said one of the assembly; and Apaecides beheld in the speaker
a man still younger than himself, of a countenance equally worn and
pallid, of an eye which equally spoke of the restless and fiery
operations of a working mind.
'Let him,' repeated a second voice, and he who thus spoke was in the
prime of manhood; his bronzed skin and Asiatic features bespoke him a
son of Syria--he had been a robber in his youth.
'Let him,' said a third voice; and the priest, again turning to regard
the speaker, saw an old man with a long grey beard, whom he recognized
as a slave to the wealthy Diomed.
'Let him,' repeated simultaneously the rest--men who, with two
exceptions, were evidently of the inferior ranks. In these exceptions,
Apaecides noted an officer of the guard, and an Alexandrian merchant.
'We do not,' recommenced Olinthus--'we do not bind you to secrecy; we
impose on you no oaths (as some of our weaker brethren would do) not to
betray us. It is true, indeed, that there is no absolute law against us;
but the multitude, more savage than their rulers, thirst for our lives.
So, my friends, when Pilate would have hesitated, it was the people who
shouted "Christ to the cross!" But we bind you not to our safety--no!
Betray us to the crowd--impeach, calumniate, malign us if you will--we
are above death, we should walk cheerfully to the den of the lion, or
the rack of the torturer--we can trample down the darkness of the grave,
and what is death to a criminal is eternity to the Christian.'
A low and applauding murmur ran through the assembly.
'Thou comest amongst us as an examiner, mayest thou remain a convert!
Our religion? you behold it! Yon cross our sole image, yon scroll the
mysteries of our Caere and Eleusis! Our morality? it is in our
lives!--sinners we all have been; who now can accuse us of a crime? we
have baptized ourselves from the past. Think not that this is of us, it
is of God. Approach, Medon,' beckoning to the old slave who had spoken
third for the admission of Apaecides, 'thou art the sole man amongst us
who is not free. But in heaven, the last shall be first: so with us.
Unfold your scroll, read and explain.'
Useless would it be for us to accompany the lecture of Medon, or the
comments of the congregation. Familiar now are those doctrines, then
strange and new. Eighteen centuries have left us little to expound upon
the lore of Scripture or the life of Christ. To us, too, there would
seem little congenial in the doubts that occurred to a heathen priest,
and little learned in the answers they receive from men uneducated,
rude, and simple, possessing only the knowledge that they were greater
than they seemed.
There was one thing that greatly touched the Neapolitan: when the
lecture was concluded, they heard a very gentle knock at the door; the
password was given, and replied to; the door opened, and two young
children, the eldest of whom might have told its seventh year, entered
timidly; they were the children of the master of the house, that dark
and hardy Syrian, whose youth had been spent in pillage and bloodshed.
The eldest of the congregation (it was that old slave) opened to them
his arms; they fled to the shelter--they crept to his breast--and his
hard features smiled as he caressed them. And then these bold and
fervent men, nursed in vicissitude, beaten by the rough winds of
life--men of mailed and impervious fortitude, ready to affront a world,
prepared for torment and armed for death--men, who presented all
imaginable contrast to the weak nerves, the light hearts, the tender
fragility of childhood, crowded round the infants, smoothing their
rugged brows and composing their bearded lips to kindly and fostering
smiles: and then the old man opened the scroll and he taught the infants
to repeat after him that beautiful prayer which we still dedicate to the
Lord, and still teach to our children; and then he told them, in simple
phrase, of God's love to the young, and how not a sparrow falls but His
eye sees it. This lovely custom of infant initiation was long cherished
by the early Church, in memory of the words which said, 'Suffer little
children to come unto me, and forbid them not'; and was perhaps the
origin of the superstitious calumny which ascribed to the Nazarenes the
crime which the Nazarenes, when victorious, attributed to the Jew, viz.
the decoying children to hideous rites, at which they were secretly
immolated.
And the stern paternal penitent seemed to feel in the innocence of his
children a return into early life--life ere yet it sinned: he followed
the motion of their young lips with an earnest gaze; he smiled as they
repeated, with hushed and reverent looks, the holy words: and when the
lesson was done, and they ran, released, and gladly to his knee, he
clasped them to his breast, kissed them again and again, and tears
flowed fast down his cheek--tears, of which it would have been
impossible to trace the source, so mingled they were with joy and
sorrow, penitence and hope--remorse for himself and love for them!
Something, I say, there was in this scene which peculiarly affected
Apaecides; and, in truth, it is difficult to conceive a ceremony more
appropriate to the religion of benevolence, more appealing to the
household and everyday affections, striking a more sensitive chord in
the human breast.
It was at this time that an inner door opened gently, and a very old man
entered the chamber, leaning on a staff. At his presence, the whole
congregation rose; there was an expression of deep, affectionate respect
upon every countenance; and Apaecides, gazing on his countenance, felt
attracted towards him by an irresistible sympathy. No man ever looked
upon that face without love; for there had dwelt the smile of the Deity,
the incarnation of divinest love--and the glory of the smile had never
passed away.
'My children, God be with you!' said the old man, stretching his arms;
and as he spoke the infants ran to his knee. He sat down, and they
nestled fondly to his bosom. It was beautiful to see that mingling of
the extremes of life--the rivers gushing from their early source--the
majestic stream gliding to the ocean of eternity! As the light of
declining day seems to mingle earth and heaven, making the outline of
each scarce visible, and blending the harsh mountain-tops with the sky,
even so did the smile of that benign old age appear to hallow the aspect
of those around, to blend together the strong distinctions of varying
years, and to diffuse over infancy and manhood the light of that heaven
into which it must so soon vanish and be lost.
'Father,' said Olinthus, 'thou on whose form the miracle of the Redeemer
worked; thou who wert snatched from the grave to become the living
witness of His mercy and His power; behold! a stranger in our meeting--a
new lamb gathered to the fold!'
'Let me bless him,' said the old man: the throng gave way. Apaecides
approached him as by an instinct: he fell on his knees before him--the
old man laid his hand on the priest's head, and blessed him, but not
aloud. As his lips moved, his eyes were upturned, and tears--those
tears that good men only shed in the hope of happiness to
another--flowed fast down his cheeks.
The children were on either side of the convert; his heart was
theirs--he had become as one of them--to enter into the kingdom of
Heaven.
Chapter IV
THE STREAM OF LOVE RUNS ON. WHITHER?
DAYS are like years in the love of the young, when no bar, no obstacle,
is between their hearts--when the sun shines, and the course runs
smooth--when their love is prosperous and confessed. Ione no longer
concealed from Glaucus the attachment she felt for him, and their talk
now was only of their love. Over the rapture of the present the hopes
of the future glowed like the heaven above the gardens of spring. They
went in their trustful thoughts far down the stream of time: they laid
out the chart of their destiny to come; they suffered the light of
to-day to suffuse the morrow. In the youth of their hearts it seemed as
if care, and change, and death, were as things unknown. Perhaps they
loved each other the more because the condition of the world left to
Glaucus no aim and no wish but love; because the distractions common in
free states to men's affections existed not for the Athenian; because
his country wooed him not to the bustle of civil life; because ambition
furnished no counterpoise to love: and, therefore, over their schemes
and projects, love only reigned. In the iron age they imagined
themselves of the golden, doomed only to live and to love.
To the superficial observer, who interests himself only in characters
strongly marked and broadly colored, both the lovers may seem of too
slight and commonplace a mould: in the delineation of characters
purposely subdued, the reader sometimes imagines that there is a want of
character; perhaps, indeed, I wrong the real nature of these two lovers
by not painting more impressively their stronger individualities. But
in dwelling so much on their bright and birdlike existence, I am
influenced almost insensibly by the forethought of the changes that
await them, and for which they were so ill prepared. It was this very
softness and gaiety of life that contrasted most strongly the
vicissitudes of their coming fate. For the oak without fruit or
blossom, whose hard and rugged heart is fitted for the storm, there is
less fear than for the delicate branches of the myrtle, and the laughing
clusters of the vine.
They had now advanced far into August--the next month their marriage was
fixed, and the threshold of Glaucus was already wreathed with garlands;
and nightly, by the door of Ione, he poured forth the rich libations.
He existed no longer for his gay companions; he was ever with Ione. In
the mornings they beguiled the sun with music: in the evenings they
forsook the crowded haunts of the gay for excursions on the water, or
along the fertile and vine-clad plains that lay beneath the fatal mount
of Vesuvius. The earth shook no more; the lively Pompeians forgot even
that there had gone forth so terrible a warning of their approaching
doom. Glaucus imagined that convulsion, in the vanity of his heathen
religion, an especial interposition of the gods, less in behalf of his
own safety than that of Ione. He offered up the sacrifices of gratitude
at the temples of his faith; and even the altar of Isis was covered with
his votive garlands--as to the prodigy of the animated marble, he
blushed at the effect it had produced on him. He believed it, indeed,
to have been wrought by the magic of man; but the result convinced him
that it betokened not the anger of a goddess.
Of Arbaces, they heard only that he still lived; stretched on the bed of
suffering, he recovered slowly from the effect of the shock he had
sustained--he left the lovers unmolested--but it was only to brood over
the hour and the method of revenge.
Alike in their mornings at the house of Ione, and in their evening
excursions, Nydia was usually their constant, and often their sole
companion. They did not guess the secret fires which consumed her--the
abrupt freedom with which she mingled in their conversation--her
capricious and often her peevish moods found ready indulgence in the
recollection of the service they owed her, and their compassion for her
affliction. They felt an interest in her, perhaps the greater and more
affectionate from the very strangeness and waywardness of her nature,
her singular alternations of passion and softness--the mixture of
ignorance and genius--of delicacy and rudeness--of the quick humors of
the child, and the proud calmness of the woman. Although she refused to
accept of freedom, she was constantly suffered to be free; she went
where she listed; no curb was put either on her words or actions; they
felt for one so darkly fated, and so susceptible of every wound, the
same pitying and compliant indulgence the mother feels for a spoiled and
sickly child--dreading to impose authority, even where they imagined it
for her benefit. She availed herself of this license by refusing the
companionship of the slave whom they wished to attend her. With the
slender staff by which she guided her steps, she went now, as in her
former unprotected state, along the populous streets: it was almost
miraculous to perceive how quickly and how dexterously she threaded
every crowd, avoiding every danger, and could find her benighted way
through the most intricate windings of the city. But her chief delight
was still in visiting the few feet of ground which made the garden of
