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

he was swept, along with the mob in which he had been fast wedged, through a dark low passage, and landed breathless in a quadrangle of mean and new buildings, overhung by the four hundred stately columns of the ruined Serapeium. The grass was already growing on the ruined capitals and architraves.... Little did even its destroyers dream then, that the day would come when one only of that four hundred would be left, as ‘Pompey’s Pillar,’ to show what the men of old could think and do.

Philammon at last escaped from the crowd, and putting the letter which he had carried in his bosom into the hands of one of the priests who was mixing with the mob, was beckoned by him into a corridor, and up a flight of stairs, and into a large, low, mean room, and there, by virtue of the world-wide freemasonry which Christianity had, for the first time on earth, established, found himself in five minutes awaiting the summons of the most powerful man south of the Mediterranean.

A curtain hung across the door of the inner chamber, through which Philammon could hear plainly the steps of some one walking up and down hurriedly and fiercely.

‘They will drive me to it!’ at last burst out a deep sonorous voice. ‘They will drive me to it.... Their blood be on their own head! It is not enough for them to blaspheme God and His church, to have the monopoly of all the cheating, fortune-telling, usury, sorcery, and coining of the city, but they must deliver my clergy into the hands of the tyrant?’

‘It was so even in the apostles’ time,’ suggested a softer but far more unpleasant voice.

‘Then it shall be so no longer! God has given me the power to stop them; and God do so to me, and more also, if I do not use that power. To-morrow I sweep out this Augean stable of villainy, and leave not a Jew to blaspheme and cheat in Alexandria.’

‘I am afraid such a judgment, however righteous, might offend his excellency.’

‘His excellency! His tyranny! Why does Orestes truckle to these circumcised, but because they lend money to him and to his creatures? He would keep up a den of fiends in Alexandria if they would do as much for him! And then to play them off against me and mine, to bring religion into contempt by setting the mob together by the ears, and to end with outrages like this! Seditious! Have they not cause enough? The sooner I remove one of their temptations the better: let the other tempter beware, lest his judgment be at hand!’

‘The prefect, your holiness?’ asked the other voice slily.

‘Who spoke of the prefect? Whosoever is a tyrant, and a murderer, and an oppressor of the poor, and a favourer of the philosophy which despises and enslaves the poor, should not he perish, though he be seven times a prefect?’

At this juncture Philammon, thinking perhaps that he had already heard too much, notified his presence by some slight noise, at which the secretary, as he seemed to be, hastily lifted the curtain, and somewhat sharply demanded his business. The names of Pambo and Arsenius, however, seemed to pacify him at once; and the trembling youth was ushered into the presence of him who in reality, though not in name, sat on the throne of the Pharaohs.

Not, indeed, in their outward pomp; the furniture of the chamber was but a grade above that of the artisan’s; the dress of the great man was coarse and simple; if personal vanity peeped out anywhere, it was in the careful arrangement of the bushy beard, and of the few curling locks which the tonsure had spared. But the height and majesty of his figure, the stern and massive beauty of his features, the flashing eye, curling lip, and projecting brow—all marked him as one born to command. As the youth entered, Cyril stopped short in his walk, and looking him through and through, with a glance which burnt upon his cheeks like fire, and made him all but wish the kindly earth would open and hide him, took the letters, read them, and then began—

‘Philammon. A Greek. You are said to have learned to obey. If so you have also learned to rule. Your father-abbot has transferred you to my tutelage. You are now to obey me.’

‘And I will.’

‘Well said. Go to that window, then, and leap into the court.’

Philammon walked to it, and opened it. The pavement was fully twenty feet below; but his business was to obey, and not take measurements. There was a flower in the vase upon the sill. He quietly removed it, and in an instant more would have leapt for life or death, when Cyril’s voice thundered ‘Stop!’

‘The lad will pass, my Peter. I shall not be afraid now for the secrets which he may have overheard.’

Peter smiled assent, looking all the while as if he thought it a great pity that the young man had not been allowed to put talebearing out of his own power by breaking his neck.

‘You wish to see the world. Perhaps you have seen something of it to-day.’

‘I saw the murder—’

‘Then you saw what you came hither to see; what the world is, and what justice and mercy it can deal out. You would not dislike to see God’s reprisals to man’s tyranny?.... Or to be a fellow-worker with God therein, if I judge rightly by your looks?’

‘I would avenge that man.’

‘Ah! my poor simple schoolmaster! And his fate is the portent of portents to you now! Stay awhile, till you have gone with Ezekiel into the inner chambers of the devil’s temple, and you will see worse things than these—women weeping for Thammuz; bemoaning the decay of an idolatry which they themselves disbelieve—That, too, is on the list of Hercules’ labour, Peter mine.’

At this moment a deacon entered.... ‘Your holiness, the rabbis of the accursed nation are below, at your summons. We brought them in through the back gate, for fear of—’

‘Right, right. An accident to them might have ruined us. I shall not forget you. Bring them up. Peter, take this youth, introduce him to the parabolani.... Who will be the best man for him to work under?’

‘The brother Theopompus is especially sober and gentle.’

Cyril shook his head laughingly.... ‘Go into the next room, my son .... No, Peter, put him under some fiery saint, some true Boanerges, who will talk him down, and work him to death, and show him the best and worst of everything. Cleitophon will be the man. Now then, let me see my engagements; five minutes for these Jews—Orestes did not choose to frighten them: let us see whether Cyril cannot; then an hour to look over the hospital accounts; an hour for the schools; a half-hour for the reserved cases of distress; and another half-hour for myself; and then divine service. See that the boy is there. Do bring in every one in their turn, Peter mine. So much time goes in hunting for this man and that man.... and life is too short for all that. Where are these Jews?’ and Cyril plunged into the latter half of his day’s work with that