Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face, Charles Kingsley [thriller novels to read TXT] 📗

which your fellows wish to destroy, learn that you are an ass, and a tortoise, and a nonentity, and so beholding yourself to be nothing, may be moved to become something.’

And he moved off.

Philammon seized him by the collar of his ragged tunic, and held him in a gripe from which the little man, though he twisted like an eel could not escape.

‘Peaceably, if you will; if not, by main force. You shall go back with me, and show me every step of the way. It is a just penalty.’

‘The philosopher conquers circumstances by submitting to them. I go peaceably. Indeed, the base necessities of the hog-bucket side of existence compel me of themselves back to the Moon-gate, for another early fruit job.’

So they went back together.

Now why Philammon’s thoughts should have been running on the next new specimen of womankind to whom he had been introduced, though only in name, let psychologists tell, but certainly, after he had walked some half-mile in silence, he suddenly woke up, as out of many meditations, and asked—

‘But who is this Hypatia, of whom you talk so much?’

‘Who is Hypatia, rustic? The queen of Alexandria! In wit, Athene; Hera in majesty; in beauty, Aphrodite!’

‘And who are they?’ asked Philammon.

The porter stopped, surveyed him slowly from foot to head with an expression of boundless pity and contempt, and was in the act of walking off in the ecstasy of his disdain, when he was brought to suddenly by Philammon’s strong arm.

‘Ah!—I recollect. There is a compact.... Who is Athene? The goddess, giver of wisdom. Hera, spouse of Zeus, queen of the Celestials. Aphrodite, mother of love.... You are not expected to understand.’

Philammon did understand, however, so much as this, that Hypatia was a very unique and wonderful person in the mind of his little guide; and therefore asked the only further question by which he could as yet test any Alexandrian phenomenon—

‘And is she a friend of the patriarch?’

The porter opened his eyes very wide, put his middle finger in a careful and complicated fashion between his fore and third fingers, and extending it playfully towards Philammon, performed therewith certain mysterious signals, the effect whereof being totally lost on him, the little man stopped, took another look at Philammon’s stately figure, and answered—

‘Of the human race in general, my young friend. The philosopher must rise above the individual, to the contemplation of the universal.... Aha!-Here is something worth seeing, and the gates are open.’ And he stopped at the portal of a vast building.

‘Is this the patriarch’s house?’

‘The patriarch’s tastes are more plebeian. He lives, they say, in two dirty little rooms—knowing what is fit for him. The patriarch’s house? Its antipodes, my young friend—that is, if such beings have a cosmic existence, on which point Hypatia has her doubts. This is the temple of art and beauty; the Delphic tripod of poetic inspiration; the solace of the earthworn drudge; in a word, the theatre; which your patriarch, if he could, would convert to-morrow into a—but the philosopher must not revile. Ah! I see the prefect’s apparitors at the gate. He is making the polity, as we call it here; the dispositions; settling, in short, the bill of fare for the day, in compliance with the public palate. A facetious pantomime dances here on this day every week—admired by some, the Jews especially. To the more classic taste, many of his movements—his recoil, especially—are wanting in the true antique severity—might be called, perhaps, on the whole, indecent. Still the weary pilgrim must be amused. Let us step in and hear.’

But before Philammon could refuse, an uproar arose within, a rush outward of the mob, and inward of the prefect’s apparitors.

‘It is false!’ shouted many voices. ‘A Jewish calumny! The man is innocent!’

‘There is no more sedition in him than there is in me,’ roared a fat butcher, who looked as ready to fell a man as an ox. ‘He was always the first and the last to clap the holy patriarch at sermon.’

‘Dear tender soul,’ whimpered a woman; ‘and I said to him only this morning, why don’t you flog my boys, Master Hierax? how can you expect them to learn if they are not flogged? And he said, he never could abide the sight of a rod, it made his back tingle so.’

‘Which was plainly a prophecy!’

‘And proves him innocent; for how could he prophesy if he was not one of the holy ones?’

‘Monks, to the rescue! Hierax, a Christian, is taken and tortured in the theatre!’ thundered a wild hermit, his beard and hair streaming about his chest and shoulders.

‘Nitria! Nitria! For God and the mother of God, monks of Nitria! Down with the Jewish slanderers! Down with heathen tyrants!’—And the mob, reinforced as if by magic by hundreds from without, swept down the huge vaulted passage, carrying Philammon and the porter with them.

‘My friends,’ quoth the little man, trying to look philosophically calm, though he was fairly off his legs, and hanging between heaven and earth on the elbows of the bystanders, ‘whence this tumult?’

‘The Jews got up a cry that Hierax wanted to raise a riot. Curse them and their sabbath, they are always rioting on Saturdays about this dancer of theirs, instead of working like honest Christians!’

‘And rioting on Sunday instead. Ahem! sectarian differences, which the philosopher—

The rest of the sentence disappeared with the speaker, as a sudden opening of the mob let him drop, and buried him under innumerable legs.

Philammon, furious at the notion of persecution, maddened by the cries around him, found himself bursting fiercely through the crowd, till he reached the front ranks, where tall gates of open ironwork barred all farther progress, but left a full view of the tragedy which was enacting within, where the poor innocent wretch, suspended from a gibbet, writhed and shrieked at every stroke of the hide whips of his tormentors.

In vain Philammon and the monks around him knocked and beat at the gates; they were only answered by laughter and taunts from the apparitors within, curses on the turbulent mob of Alexandria, with its patriarch, clergy, saints, and churches, and promises to each and all outside, that their turn would come next; while the piteous screams grew fainter and more faint, and at last, with a convulsive shudder, motion and suffering ceased for ever in the poor mangled body.

‘They have killed him! Martyred him! Back to the archbishop! To the patriarch’s house: he will avenge us!’ And as the horrible news, and the watchword which followed it, passed outwards through the crowd, they wheeled round as one man, and poured through street after street towards Cyril’s house; while Philammon, beside himself with horror, rage, and pity, hurried onward with them.

A tumultuous hour, or more, was passed in the street before he could gain entrance; and then