They pa.s.sed out of the simpler portions of the royal house into the state wing and emerged in the great audience-chamber.
It would have been impossible for a scion of that b.l.o.o.d.y house to pa.s.s for the first time in years through that royal chamber without comment upon it. Agrippa after crossing the threshold slackened his step and his eyes took on the l.u.s.ter of retrospection.
"I remember it," he said in a preoccupied way, "but only as a dream. I went this way when my father and mother fared hence to Rome!"
Capito lagged also, and Marsyas and the men following slackened their steps, until by the time the center of the vast hall was reached they paused as if by one accord.
The hall was an octagonal, faced half its height, or to the floor of its galleries, in banded agate from the Indies; from that point upward the lining was marble panels and frescoes, alternating. The galleries were supported by a series of interlaced oriental arches, rich with tracery and filigree. With these main features as groundwork, the barbaric fancy of Herod the Great threw off all restraint and reveled in magnitude, richness and display. He did not permit Greece, the _arbiter elegantarium_, to govern his building or his garnishment. He harkened to the Arab in him and made a baccha.n.a.l of color; he remembered his one-time poverty and debased the hauteur of gold to the humility of wood and clay and stone. He imaged Life in all its forms and crowded it into mosaics on his pavement, subjected it in the decoration of his scented wood couches, tables, taborets, weighted it with the cornices of his ceilings, the rails of his bal.u.s.trades, the basins of his fountains--until he seemed to shake his scepter as despot over all the beast kind. He was a hunter, a warrior and a statesman; the instincts of all three had their representation in this, his high place. He was a voluptuary, a tyrant, and a shedder of blood; his audience-chamber told it of him. Thus, though he had crumbled to ashes forty years before, and the efforts of the world to forget him had almost succeeded, he left a portrait behind him that would endure as long as his palace stood.
The light of the Judean sun came in a harlequinade of twenty colors, but, where it fell and was reproduced, Nature had mastered the kaleidoscope and made it a glory. The immense s.p.a.ce, peopled with graven images, yet animated with ghostly swaying of hangings, had its own shifting currents of air, drafts that were streaming winds, cool and scented with the aromatic woods of the furniture. The portals were closed, and there was no sound. Sun, wind and silence enn.o.bled Herod"s mistakes.
The four stood longer than they knew. Then Agrippa made a little sound, a sudden in-taking of the breath.
"See!" he whispered, laying a hand on Capito"s shoulder and pointing with the other. "That statue!"
Following his indication, their eyes rested on the sculptured figure of a woman, cut from Parian marble. It was a drowsy image, the head fallen upon a hand, the lids drooping, the relaxation of all the muscles giving softness and pliability to the pose. So perfect was the work that the marble promised to be yielding to the touch. Some imitator of Phidias had achieved his masterpiece in this. Indeed, at first glance there was startlement for the four. A warm human flush had mantled the stone, and Marsyas" brows drew together, but he could not obey the old Essenic teaching and drop his eyes.
"A statue?" Capito asked, uncertainly taking his withered chin between thumb and forefinger.
"A statue," Agrippa a.s.sured him. "The illumination is from the batement light above. Come nearer!"
He led them to the angle in which the image stood, not more than three paces from the wall.
"It is my grandsire"s queen, Mariamne," he continued softly, for ordinary tones awakened ghostly echoes in the haunted hall.
"Murdered Mariamne!" the old man whispered with sudden intensity.
"He loved her, and killed her in the fury of his love. They said that the king was wont to come in the morning when the sun stood there, drive out the attendants so that none might hear, and cling about this fair marble"s knees in such agony of pa.s.sion and remorse and grief that life would desert him. They would come in time to find him there, stretched on the pavement, cold and inert, to all purposes dead! And it was said that these groins here above held echoes of his awful grief after he had been borne away."
Capito shivered.
"What punishment!" he exclaimed.
"Punishment! They who curse Herod"s memory could not, if they had their will, visit such torture upon him as he invented for himself!"
But Capito was lost now in contemplation of the statue.
"She was beautiful," he said after a silence.
"Didst ever see her?" Agrippa asked eagerly. The collector"s back was turned to the prince, that he might have the advantageous view, and he answered with rapt eyes.
"Once; through an open gate which led into her own garden. So I saw her in the lightest of vestments, for the day was warm and half of her beauty usually hidden was unveiled."
"Well for thee my grandsire never knew," Agrippa put in, leaning against one of the cestophori which guarded a blank panel in the wall.
"He never knew; but I would have died before I would give over the memory of it. She was slight, willowy, with the eyes of an Attic antelope, yet braver and more commanding than any woman-eye that ever bewitched me. Her mouth--Praxiteles would have turned from Lais" lips to hers."
Agrippa"s hand slid down the side of the cestophorus and fumbled a little within the edge of the molding.
"Her hair was loose," the old man went on, "the sole drapery of her bosom--a very cloud of night loomed into filaments--"
An inert, moldy breath reached Marsyas. He turned his head. The panel between the cestophori was gone and a square of darkness yawned its miasma into the hall.
The prince made a lightning movement; noiselessly the two servants dived into the blackness; Marsyas followed; after him, the prince.
An eclipsing wall began to slide between them and the hail they had left.
"Her arms were languidly lifted--arms that for whiteness shamed this marble--" the old man was saying as the panel glided back into place and shut them in darkness.
"Ow!" Agrippa whispered in delight, "he tells that story better every year!"
CHAPTER VI
MARSYAS a.s.sUMES A CHARGE
Agrippa crowded past the three that had preceded him into the black pa.s.sage and, whispering a command to follow, led on. They kept track of him by the sound of his shoes on the stone, but the absolute darkness and the unfamiliar path made their steps uncertain and slow.
Frequently the sure footfall before them receded and in fear of losing their guide they stumbled forward in nervous haste.
Presently the darkness about them lifted; the sensation was not that light had entered in, but that the darkness had simply failed in strength. There was a perceptible increase in temperature and the atmosphere, changing from a chill, became muggy and oppressive.
Marsyas, drawing in a full breath in search of freshness, told himself that this was the original air of chaos, penned in at the hour of creation.
The floor under his feet became irregular, the instinctive realization that a roof was imminent overhead, pa.s.sed, and, when the darkness became sufficiently feeble, they discovered that they were following through an immense chamber. Light came in through air-holes in the rock above.
Agrippa spoke aloud.
"This is a quarry-chamber. It was also my grandsire"s secret stronghold, trial-chamber and tomb where many of his private grudges were satisfied. But there are no evidences, now. The place was open to the hill-jackals, by another pa.s.sage which, if my memory has not failed me, shall lead us out."
One of the servitors, whose teeth had been chattering, made a shuddering sound. Agrippa laughed.
"Thou, Eutychus?" he said. "Comfort thee; the jackals have ceased to haunt the place since their hunger was last satisfied, thirty years ago."
An irregular spot of blackness in one of the walls swallowed up the prince as he spoke. Eutychus halted at the edge and drew back with a whimper. But the second servitor, who had not spoken since Marsyas had first seen him, muttered contemptuously some inarticulate word and pushed Eutychus into the blackness. Marsyas followed.
Thereafter it was only time which ensued. Sound, sight and, except for the stone under their feet, feeling were defeated. They moved interminably. Once or twice Eutychus became hysterical from the depression, but the stolid servitor smote him and bundled him on.
Ahead a light laugh floated back to them in appreciation of the humor in Eutychus" predicament.
In time a yellow star with ragged points appeared ahead of them, high above the level upon which they had been walking. Eutychus trembled before it, but Agrippa quickened his steps.
"What a memory I have," he observed cheerfully. "Any other than myself would have been hopelessly entangled in these galleries and perished miserably some days hence."
The star enlarged, lost substantiality and presently Eutychus with a gasp of joy faltered that it was daylight. Several minutes later they emerged through an open tomb into high noon over Judea.
Before their blinded vision, the green hills swimming in sunlight upheaved between them and all points of the horizon. The City of David was nowhere to be seen; the sun stood directly in the zenith. Marsyas was lost; but the prince smiled in immense satisfaction and, seeking a gra.s.sy spot, sat down and breathed deeply. Presently he motioned to the others to sit. Marsyas came close to him; the others remained at a respectful distance.
For a long time no one spoke.