Chapter II

The official and private dwelling of Philoremus Fabius was a handsome building of Roman architecture, situated in the fashionable Street of the Winds, south of the quadruple marble gateway that marked the junction of the city's four great thoroughfares; running east from the Canopic Gate, west from the Gate of the Necropolis; and respectively north and south from the Gates of the Sun, and of the Moon.

Before the gnomon of the sun-dial on the column of the Forum indicated the hour previous to noon-day, a traveller mounted on a large white mule, and followed by an attendant riding a dun-coloured animal, and leading another laden with baggage, reined out of the double stream of horse-drawn, carved, painted and gilded chariots conveying fashionables of both sexes; litters and chairs borne by slaves; burdened camels guided by negroes or Saracens; curled and scarlet-robed dandies walking with boon companions, fiery barbs bestridden by Roman officers; and little asses carrying Copts or Jews,--that ceaselessly traversed the Street of the Winds.

As the small hoofs of the mules slipped on the uneven flagstones before the mansion of the Prætor of Taxes, the man on the white mule uttered an involuntary cry. His eyes had fallen on a square plaque of bronze fixed on the wall beside the courtyard entrance, displaying the device of the Roman Imperial Eagle with the thunderbolt, above the name and official titles of the master of the house. A narrow strip of parchment some twelve inches long, secured by an official seal at either extremity, was pasted across the name of Philoremus Fabius and inscribed with the words;

"_SUSPENDED FROM OFFICE UNDER
SUSPICION OF CHRISTIANITY._"

The seal was that of Lollius Maxius, governor of Alexandria, a personal friend of the official thus disgraced.

For a moment the rider of the white mule remained with open mouth and staring eyeballs, livid as a mask of yellow wax under the hood of his black riding-cloak of felted camel's hair. His strongly marked visage with its arched black eyebrows, large mobile black eyes and boldly curving profile, showed, like the face of his attendant, the characteristics of the Jewish race. Large rings set with beryls were in his ears, and massive bracelets of gold clasped his swarthy arms above the elbow; while his carefully curled hair was protected from the dust of travel by a square-shaped bag of fine black leather, embroidered with seed-pearls. He endeavoured to control his voice, but it shook as he said to his companion, in Hebrew:

"Now in the name of the God of our forefathers! ... Tell me, O Ezra, son of Ephraim! do I see the thing that is, or that which is not? It may be that the fever I suffered at Joppa still troubles my brain and heats my blood!"

His eyes had entreaty in them as he appealed to the other, and his pallor grew more livid as he heard the reply:

"Health is yours, O Hazaël, son of Hazaël, but misfortune has befallen our master. He is suspected of Christianity, and suspended from office under the Governor's seal."

"Some enemy hath done this thing!" said Hazaël fiercely. "Be the Mighty One blessed that I have speedily returned home! Hold the mule's rein while I knock upon these doors that were never shut till now in the face of Hazaël."

And hastily dismounting while Ezra held the stirrup, Hazaël plucked a metal-shod staff from a bucket-holster slung behind his saddle, and beat loudly upon the bronze doors fixed in a frame of square beams of yellow Numidian marble, until a metal bolt groaned in its grooves of stone, a leaf of the door moved inwards, and the black face of an Ethiopian slave peered out between the valves. White eyeballs and dazzling teeth flashed in the ebony visage:

"By Isis the Dog Star!" he jabbered in his bastard Græco Egyptian, "The Jew Hazaël has come back to us again!"

"Son of abomination, make way!" said Hazaël, violently thrusting back the door upon the astonished Ethiopian, and striding into the vestibule, over a square of mosaic let into the marble pavement, representing a black dog spotted with white, secured by a chain attached to a red leather collar, and displaying a formidable mouthful of teeth as in the act to bite. A second Ethiopian, liveried like the first in a green tunic with a broad girdle covered with plates of silver, stooped low in humble salutation, touching with his yellowish fingertips the booted feet of the Jew.

The walls of the vestibule, from either side of which opened a waiting-room for clients, were painted light red, divided into panels by a vertical ornament, a black caduceus wreathed with a vine. Along the base of either wall ran a broad bench of black walnut, on which sprawled or sat four unhelmed and ungirt Legionaries, of whom two slept on the shady side--for broad sunshine poured through the overhead opening--two were playing dice, with a flagon of Mareotic wine standing between them, from which one or the other drank a draught at every lucky throw--while two more stood on guard, rigid and immovable as statues of men in glittering cuirasses, on either side of the curtained portal leading to the _atrium_, a hall of some forty feet in length, paved with _tesseræ_ of black and yellow marble, and centred with a square pool, in the midst of which a little fountain played. Yet two other Roman soldiers, with shield on arm and grounded javelins, kept ward outside the curtained entrance of the large apartment at the farther end. When the first two Legionaries with their drawn swords, made as though to prevent his passage, Hazaël said with cutting irony:

"The Prætor Philoremus Fabius labours beneath the displeasure of the Prefect, Mettius Rufus. Thus he is at present a prisoner beneath his own roof. But the Chief Secretary of the Prætor of the Taxes is also an official of the Roman Empire. Until I am deprived of this token of mine office"--he lifted the end of a heavy golden chain that peeped beneath his sheathed beard and lay upon his bosom--"I hold and use it. Lower your swords!"

And he thrust beneath the curtain of many-coloured Egyptian linen, and moved on to the doorway of the room that lay beyond. The guards at this point had overheard; and when Hazaël moved aside the end of his beard and pointed to the broad gold chain of office ending in his hairy bosom, they struck the butts of their javelins twice upon the pavement in salutation, and without a spoken word suffered him to pass.

And so the Jew stepped in, moving noiselessly as some creature of prey in his high black felt knee-boots soled with elephant's leather, and heeled with sections of the nails of the brute, powdered like his skin and garments with the vitreous dust of the Desert and stained with the sweat of the beasts that had carried him.

You saw him as he dropped his great cowled cloak, just within the threshold, to be a man not yet thirty; salient, strong and full of energy, with brawny limbs revealed by the short-sleeved tawny robe hitched mid-leg high by the girdle of hippopotamus-calf hide, that sustained, as well as a wallet and water-gourd, a pair of long sharp daggers and a formidable double-edged sword. From beneath the high, square, fur-trimmed cap that the cowl of the mantle had hidden, a bushy growth of night-black curls, soiled with travel and like the fringes of his tawny robe, tangled with thorns and prickly burrs, fell about his shoulders. He breathed quickly, as though he had been running; and in the stern, bold, swarthy face, and the intent wide gaze of the burning black eyes shadowed under beetling eyebrows, there was sorrow beyond mere words, and devotion too deep, and pure, and selfless to be passionate, as Hazaël after many months stood in the presence of his patron and friend.

The room, or rather hall, had been originally meant for a triclinium, but by reason of its imposing size and height, and the suitable elevation of the mosaic floor at its upper end, the Prætor of the Taxes had set apart the lengthy side-wing and the upper apartments for his private occupation, and transacted here such daily business as did not necessitate his appearance at the Forum. A frieze of lofty height depicted in brilliant hues on a white ground, the combats of the Greeks and Amazons; upon the raised platform at the upper end stood an ivory arm-chair, and a table of ebony inlaid with silver. Small statues of the twelve divinities of Rome, wrought in bronze, ivory or precious metal, adorned the top ledges of two ebony bookcases, set against the walls on the right and left hand, and filled with scrolls that were volumes of reference, and treatises upon Roman Law and Finance.

In the ivory chair sat a man of forty, in a white tunic bordered with a wide stripe of purple, plunged deep in the perusal of a small scroll of papyrus thickly inscribed in the clear rounded characters of Aramaic Greek. An oblong opening in the wall behind him, running from wall to wall of the court-room, gave a view, across an open loggia (where more Roman guards were posted), of the lawns, alleys and fountains of a well-kept garden-enclosure; so that the advantage of light from behind was for the Receiver General of Taxes hearing cases at his table, with the equally desirable boon of fresh air.

No clients thronged to the tribune to-day, vacant were the desks and chairs of his recorders and notaries; the scratch of the ink-filled reed upon the papyrus, the smell of wax tablets virgin of the stylus, the whispering of the clerks and accountants no longer came from the adjoining room....

How pleasantly quiet it was. The reader slightly shifted his feet, shod with _cothurni_ of scarlet leather, ornamented with golden crescents at the instep, upon the dappled leopard-skins that spread beneath his chair. The skins covered a skilfully-concealed trap-door leading down into a strong vault underneath the tribune, where were stored vast sums in gold belonging to the State.

To the man reading and thinking in the ivory chair, and as yet unconscious of the witness on the threshold, the room held no other living creatures save himself and a late butterfly, with peacock wings of gorgeous beauty, that had fluttered in at the window, perhaps attracted by the garlands of wonderfully painted roses forming part of the decorations below the cornice of the wall. A moment the insect wavered to and fro beneath the cornice; mounted--sought to settle--realised the deceit, and would have flown back into the garden, to feast upon the nectar of Truth and Reality--had not a hawking swallow intervened.

There had been no swallows yesterday. To-day, the blue sky above the palms and figs and oleanders, the vine-wreathed sycamores and acacias of the gardens, was alive with the black and white specks of vitality, darting and wheeling, hovering and poising as though sporting with their own swift shadows; hunting their prey of flies, gnats and winged beetles with shrill squeaks of bird-delight--while under the tiled coping of a walled court with a westward aspect, nests were being built in the selfsame spots, from whence they had been dislodged by the gardener's pole earlier in the year.

The swallow's swoop and dart, more rapid than the eye might follow, captured the insect of the jewelled wings. But the man moved; and the startled bird darted upwards towards a brilliant square of blue sky framed in a gilded trellis covered with those deceptive roses, and no less false and treacherous a painted lure than they...

The infinitesimal tragedy was over in a moment. The arrow-like flight cleaved no waves of blue æther, but was arrested by a surface as hard as adamant. The bird dropped close to the foot of Philoremus. He reached down and took it up.