Saul of Tarsus: A Tale of the Early Christians. Elizabeth Miller
himself on tiptoe to watch the young man, who seemed suddenly pressed upon and swallowed up by rapidly assembling numbers.
Distant shouts arose, the Sheep Gate choked suddenly with a mass, Kedron's banks, the tombs of Tophet and the rubbish heaps there yielded up clambering, running people. The hurry was directed along the brook outside the wall; stragglers closed up and the whole, numbering hundreds, flung itself toward the north.
The man in scarlet, moved by amazement and a half-confessed interest in the man he had seen disappear, ran down the Mount and after the crowd.
But a glance ahead now showed him that the Essene had not called forth this demonstration. The gate next beyond the heavy shape of Hanaleel was discharging a struggling mass that instantly expanded in the open into a great party-colored ring, dozens deep. The flying body the man in scarlet believed to encompass the young Essene swept up to the circle and melted into it.
Meanwhile, around him came running eagerly the travelers, the marketers, shepherds, soldiers and slaves, and behind, the loiterers, who had watched him defeat the Greek. Focalizing at the Bridge of the Red Heifer which spanned Kedron at a leap, the mob caught and precipitated him into its heart. Rushed toward the road on the opposite side, he seized a corner of the parapet, and, holding fast, let the mass stream by him.
When the rush trailed out, thinned and ceased altogether, he leisurely drew near the huge compact circle and stood on its outskirts. But he could hear and see nothing but the crowd about him.
"What is it?" he asked, touching a man in front of him. The man shook his head and stood fruitlessly on tiptoe.
Presently unseen authority in the hollow ring pressed the crowd back. In the ferment and resistance, he caught, through a zigzag path of daylight between many kerchiefed heads, a glimpse of a segment of the center. A young man stood there. About his forehead was bound the phylactery of a Pharisee. At his feet was a tumbled heap of white outer garments. Then the breach closed up.
"A sacrifice?" the man in scarlet asked himself. But such a deduction would not answer for the behavior of the crowd. Its temper was ferocious. They howled, they spat, they shook arms and clenched hands above their heads and forward over their neighbors' shoulders; they cursed in Greek and Aramic; they twisted their faces into furious grimaces; they pressed forward and were driven back and the foremost rank which knew wherefore it raged was not more violent than the rearmost which was perfectly in the dark.
It was typically the voice of the Beast in man. Some circumstance, unknown to the greater body, had waived restraint. Therefore the wolves of Perea could have come down from the bone-whited wadies of the wilderness and said to them with truth: "We be of one blood, ye and we!"
Each felt the support of numbers, the momentum of unanimity, the incentive of relaxed order, and the original cause, however heinous, was forgotten in the joy of the reversion to primordial savagery. Their quiet fellow stood on the outskirts and listened to the yelp of the jackal in man. Before him was a wall of variously clad backs and upstretched heads, beside him rows of raving men in profile, with strained eyes, open mouths and working beards; and one of them was the man who had shown, when asked, that he did not understand this demonstration.
The man in scarlet finally shrugged his shoulders. He had suddenly evolved an explanation—the blood of a fellow man. He turned away, not because he had revolted—he had seen too many spectacles in the Circus in Rome—but because he was disinclined to stand till he had learned the particulars of the uproar. A gnarly hummock, white, harsh and dry, as if it were a heap of disintegrated ashes, rose several rods away on the brink of Kedron. He mounted it and sat. Yes; he would wait, also, till he saw the Essene again, who, he was sure, had been buried in the ring. It would be unkind to himself to permit a chance for a loan to pass untried.
The tumult continued many minutes before he noticed abatement in the forward ranks. Movement which had been general throughout the interval increased at times, but the mob showed no signs of dispersing.
The western slope of Olivet was now in its own shadow, its ravines already purpling with night. Only the glory on the summit of Moriah blazed with undiminished fire, as the gold of the gates gave back the gold of the sunset.
Presently a number of men, dressed alike in priestly robes, hurried back through Hanaleel into the city. Hardly had they disappeared before the gate gave up a number of radiant shapes in a column, which broke suddenly and flung itself upon the great raving circle. The flash of armor and the glitter of swords were suddenly interjected into a demoralized eddy of stampeded hundreds. Another sort of clamor arose, no less voluminous, no less fervid, but it was a howl of panic and protest against the methods of Vitellius' legionaries sent to disperse a crowd.
A solid core of fugitives drove through the gate beside Hanaleel and the Sheep Gate; fragments, detachments and individuals rolled down the banks into Kedron; screaming, tumbling, falling bodies fled north and south by the roadway and wherever there was a gate or a niche or a crevice it received fugitives who appeared no more. Dust arose and obscured everything but the flash of arms and armor which rived through it like lightning in a cloud. The uproar began to subside, and presently the laughter and jests of the soldiers mounted above the protest. Fainter and fainter the cries grew, fewer the sounds of flying feet, and at last, strong, harsh and biting as the clang of a sledge upon metal, the command of the centurion to fall in settled even the shouts of the soldiers.
There was the even, musical ring of whetting armor as the column filed back through Hanaleel, and silence. The man in scarlet, who had sat on his ash-heap and smiled throughout the dispersing of the mob, a royal creature enthroned and entertained by the discomfiture of the mass, suddenly realized that the obscurity, which he had expected to lift, was the shadow of night. He arose and, dusting off his scarlet skirt, moved out into the road.
At that moment, a figure moving nearer the wall passed him, walking swiftly. It was the Essene.
"Ho! a discreet youth! a cautious youth!" the man in scarlet said to himself; "profiting by experience, he waited in safety somewhere until this light-fingered rabble was dispersed. That must be a fat purse, a fat purse! And I am looking for such!"
He quickened his pace to overtake the young man and in his interest forgot the late riot. Suddenly the young Essene stopped as if he had been commanded. The man in scarlet brought up and looked.
Before them was an immense trampled dusty ring. In the falling twilight, he saw several huddled shapes, in attitudes of suffering and sorrow, kneeling together in its center over something which was stretched on the sand.
A strangling gasp attracted the older man's attention once more to the Essene. His figure seemed to shrink, his cheeks fell in. Swiftly about his lips crawled the gray pallor of one physically sick from shock to the senses. His eyes flared wide and the next instant he flew at the mourning cluster about the prostrate shape in the ring. One or two fell back under his hand, and he leaned over and looked.
A cry, heartrending in its agony, broke from his lips. He dropped to his knees and fell forward with his face in the dust. A murmur of compassion arose from the little group around him, and the man in scarlet lifted his shoulders and turned his back on the blighting spectacle of the young man's anguish.
He walked hurriedly out of the falling night on the Mount, through Hanaleel, into the lights and noise of the City of David. Soldiers on the point of closing the great gate paused to let him through.
"Comrade," he said to one, "what did they out yonder?"
"They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen," was the reply.
"They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen"
CHAPTER IV