Marsyas knew that superior advantages were always for the rich man, and he, who had to be in the forefront of Flora"s van, had to gather unto himself the most propitious opportunities. So while the riot of plebeians into which he had been absorbed streamed contentedly on to its own lowly place, Marsyas worked his way out of the crowd and approached the City of Love.
The glow of its lights, breaking through low-hanging branches and pillared avenues of tree-trunks, reached Marsyas with its music, its shouts and its tumult, but its inhabitants were shut away behind foliage, that their doings might be screened from the unqualified.
The young man looked here and there for a way to enter, but the cunningly extended grove reached from street to street and blocked his pa.s.sage. Drawing closer he saw that a cordon of soldiers from the city garrison had been thrown around the grove for protection during revels.
At that moment, some one whispered in his ear.
"Thou art in time, white brother. Continue and fail not!"
He looked to catch a glimpse of Vasti, the bayadere, at his side. She was wrapped from head to heel in a murky red silk, like a fire-illumined tissue of smoke. He exclaimed to himself that this was no old woman, nor yet one young. There was too much lissome grace in the sinuous figure, and too much unearthly wisdom in the dark mysterious face.
An instant and she had disappeared like a spirit.
A little dazed he turned to follow his approved course, but stopped, seeing that many humbler folk who had preceded him were halted and driven away. The benefits of the grove were distinctly for those who came with a following and in chariots. The cars of the rich were constantly pa.s.sing through the line of guards; the numbers were greatly increasing, and presently became congested. The shouts of the impatient waiting ones, the pawing of the horses and the calls of the slaves running hither and thither, added uproar to the lines which closed in around him, until finally he could go neither forward nor backward.
While he turned this way and that for an avenue of escape, he found that he stood beside a sh.e.l.l of a chariot, with Junia and Justin Cla.s.sicus seated within. Cla.s.sicus was not given readily to seeing people afoot, and Marsyas stepped hastily out of view. But the Roman woman had already discovered him. He saw her speak to Cla.s.sicus, and, while he waited in resentment to be pointed out, Cla.s.sicus leaped lightly out of the car, and, forcing his way through a crush of slaves, got up beside another, whom Marsyas saw to be Agrippa.
Then Junia leaned down to him.
"Come up; thou art safe," she said. "I will not betray thee. What was it, reason or repentance that freed thee?" Her eyes sparkled and her breath came and went quickly between her parted lips.
"An errand," he answered, "and the soldiers will not let me pa.s.s."
"An errand? Flora"s errand? Nay, but thou art an Essene. Come up, I say. The soldiers must pa.s.s thee if I bid them."
With thanks on his lips he stepped in beside her and was presently driven without further interruption through the line of sentries, to the circle of abandoned chariots within. There, alighting, the young man found himself deftly thrust into the crowd by Junia to avoid meeting the proconsul or Justin Cla.s.sicus. She lost herself with him, and entirely obscured from any he had ever seen before, they proceeded.
"I have delivered thee an evil charge," she said, and there was a note of regret in her voice. "Yesterday and the day before they would have been less objectionable, and seeing them hour by hour thou shouldst have become gradually accustomed to their aberration. But suddenly exposed to this night"s work, thy soul will be covered with confusion."
Marsyas smiled awkwardly. The woman could not understand that nothing short of the motive that had actuated him could have moved him to follow Flora; neither did he wish her to rest under the self-blame that she had urged him.
"I do not go of mine own will, nor even thine," he answered. "I was summoned."
"What! has Flora summoned thee?" she cried, gazing at him in unfeigned astonishment. "Fie on her boldness! Only the Floras of Rome do such a thing!"
"A new evil in Rome?" he responded, smiling. "O lady, I can not go thither unless thou promise me protection!"
She laughed and waved him a warning hand.
"Behold how thou acceptest my counsel here in Alexandria! What obedience need I expect in Rome?"
Without waiting for his answer, she turned him out of the open into the grove.
No extensive vista greeted him. No lamps, only their lights were visible. No green-and-gold walled aisle led far in a straight line.
The woodland screening of leaf and branch prevailed everywhere. The music, the shouts, the tumult seemed to be in another direction than the one toward which they were tending. Marsyas went uncertainly; he had been bidden to be in the forefront of Flora"s van, and ahead of him was falling silence. The splendid creature at his side held her peace, and moved rapidly. Gradually, the people thinned out, and when Junia turned him into another aisle they were alone. She seemed to be conducting him away from the music and noise.
Only for a moment, he hesitated at a loss, and then with an apologetic smile, he said to her:
"We will go this way,"--and, turning at right angles, led back toward the tumult.
"Marsyas," she said, with more impatience than reproach, "and thou art an Essene! How I reproach myself!"
But he smiled uncomfortably, and kept on.
The wail of instruments, wild and discordant, the blowing of horns, the pulsation of drums, seemed suddenly to unite as they approached. Above the clamor and squeal of cymbals and pipes, voices were lifted, loud and strained as if striving to be heard above the uproar. Some of them merely shouted, most of them were singing, not one but many songs; shrieks and laughter shrilled through it all, and once in a while the musical tone of a rich throat triumphant above the noise bespoke the presence of gift with frenzy.
The tumult was not now distant, and Marsyas did not wish Junia"s further aid. His search after Flora was not a thing to be published abroad. He glanced at the lights, looked about for a less circuitous route, and, with a word to her, plunged through the brake toward the revel.
Before she had thought to protest, the forefront of a procession penetrated from the side of the aisle and, streaming across, broke through the green on the other side.
The first were flamens, Greek, Roman and Egyptian, robed in the pallium and carrying the lituus--first, if the order of procession had been observed, but before them, and about them bounded a harlequinade of baboons, centaurs, goats, swine--loose, ill-fashioned disguises that only robbed their wearers of human form and did not achieve the animal semblance. Among them were slighter figures of lizards, snails on active pretty limbs, toads, beetles--glittering, sinuous things that surpa.s.sed the heavier figures in agility and boldness. After them came a great cornucopia of gold, banded with spiral garlands of roses, studded with jewels and drawn on low ivory wheels by snow-white mule-colts. Out of the sh.e.l.l-tinted mouth of the great horn, and luxuriously bedded on a gauze of gold cast over the flowers and fruits, was the rosy figure of a little boy, with pearly wings bound to his shoulders.
Thus Eros proceeded to Flora.
Only thus far was any semblance of order distinguishable in the procession. The wave of uproar suddenly a.s.sumed overwhelming proportions; the aisle was inundated with frenzy.
Marsyas moved forward, Junia moving with him, and the tumult drawing its bulky length across the aisle swept in now by mult.i.tudes. He was caught; Junia clung to him determinedly for a moment, but was torn away; he permitted himself to be swallowed up and pitched along by the flood.
He attracted no consecutive attention. Maenads flung themselves upon him because his cheeks were crimson and his figure notable, but other youths with glowing cheeks drew the maenads away, now and again.
Satyrs, fauns and bacchantes saluted him, tumbled him, buffeted him: one s.n.a.t.c.hed off his scarlet fillet and crowned him with a wreath of grape-leaves, while a second thrust a thyrsus into his hand. Some clung about his shoulders and bawled into his ear; others reached him flagons of wine and did not notice that others s.n.a.t.c.hed the drink away.
These things were single events that stood up out of the daze of astonishment and shock that confounded him.
The noise roared louder at every step: the thousands about him augmented. The grove opened more; the lights became more scattering and presently he found that he had been swept through another circle of chariots and outpost of soldiery into the city again. Hurriedly glancing at the buildings on each side of the street into which the procession poured, he saw a sufficient number of familiar marks to inform him that he had been borne out on the Rhacotis side of the city.
Then the blood within him chilled. This half-maddened, half-murderous mult.i.tude was upon the trail of Flora, and was driving toward the settlement of the Nazarenes!
An unshakable conviction possessed him, that Lydia stood between!
Meanwhile the army of rabble joined the procession of aristocrats.
From every avenue fresh mult.i.tudes poured in and added to the thousands. Except for the bounding mimes about them the flamens kept the front of the horde, following with downcast eyes the trail of yellow roses which, Marsyas now knew, led the procession.
In the midst of the gigantic hurly-burly he saw with strained eyes and a laboring heart that the light-footed G.o.ddess had made a long, deviating flight: that over and over again she doubled on her tracks, but that the detours led with deadly sureness toward the Nazarenes.
Impelled now by desperation, he began to work his way toward the front.
But he had not reckoned on the immense length of the procession, nor how far he had been absorbed into the heart of it. Only when he was rushed over a slight rise in the street did he know that ahead of him for a great distance was a sea of tossing heads and moving shoulders, and on either side a compact wave wholly filled the two hundred feet of street and washed up against the walls of the houses.
The street opened up into an immense square, the last stadium which marked the limit of the Roman influence in the Egyptian settlement.
Beyond that, on the water-front, were the streets of the Nazarenes!
Praying and struggling, Marsyas hardly noticed the increase of noise beginning at the front and extending back to him and pa.s.sing until the wild clamor resolved itself into a stunning shout that shook Alexandria and rippled the face of the bay.
"Flora! _Dea maxima_! _Solis filia_! Give us joy; give us joy!"
The trail of roses had been broken off. Flora had been found.
But another roar went up, here and there from the great body there were cries of protest and disappointment: the voice of looters and brawlers that had been deprived of sacrificial blood. There were hisses, shouts of derision and cries to the populace to press on.
But the flamens stopped; the great concourse halted by rank and rank until the slackening and final cessation of movement imprisoned the dissenters that were resolved to go on. The main body continued its greetings to the G.o.ddess, above the cry of the dissatisfied.
At the far side of the open was a tiny squat temple, hardly more than a shrine, to Rannu, the Egyptian G.o.ddess of the harvests. On the top of the cornice with the blush lights of the City of Love upon her, stood a girl. Thus lifted into the night sky, her features could not be distinguished, and Marsyas believed that she was mummied, face and figure, in wrappings.