Part 10

“Only the bare wall of a quiet room, and much rice-water, and my paints and brushes,” said the stranger, his eyes gleaming.

And he was allotted such a room as he desired; and, by his wish, none, not even the Emperor, came near him while he wrought. But every day Shun-yuen looked from his Palace windows upon the surrounding emptiness, and wondered when he was to see arise there the first evidences of the glorious fabric which Wu Taotsz was to build for him of his Imagination. And still every morning his soul was unsatisfied and the waste glared desolate.

Now in the meantime speculation was rife as to the stranger and his genesis. Some believed him to be a wizard embryo hatched from the sands of the great river; others that he was the spirit of the kilns where they baked the earth Kaolin into the porcelain which, in its hues and forms of increasing beauty, was coming to express more and more day by day the creative genius of the age. But of all these surmises Wu Taotsz was unconscious, as he worked on alone in his empty room.

And at last one morning he sent for the Emperor.

Eagerly Shun-yuen, dispensing, for the first time in his life, with forms and punctilio, hurried to obey the summons, and entered the room alone. And instantly he uttered a cry of rapture, and stood like one half stupefied. For there before him stood realised the pleasance of his dreams, only a thousand times transfigured.

He was gazing upon the clustered minarets of a palace such as his soul had never conceived, a fabric all builded of cloud and amber and foam, and yet as solid as the sward from which it sprang. There, in the midst of heavenly gardens which receded down terrace on terrace of loveliness to low hills and a blue horizon, the pearly structure sprang into a sky of lazulite; and to the golden gates of the main pavilion a flight of marble steps ascended.

Rousing himself as if from a trance of ecstasy, the Emperor spake:

“Who builded this, Wu Taotsz?”

“Imagination,” was the answer.

“Bid, then, Imagination to make the winds blow, the river sing, the birds warble.”

“They are vocal to my ears, Shun-yuen, and beautiful are the forms within the house.”

At that moment a droning fly settled with a flop upon the golden gate. The emperor started violently, and cried out, “A fly, and so far yet so plain!”

He hurried forward, peered closely, put out his hand and turned, with a scream of fury.

“Wretch! This is no more than a painted picture.”

“To Imagination it is real,” said Wu Taotsz.

The Emperor, his face orange with rage, leapt and drew his sword.

“Impostor,” he shrieked, “let Imagination, so it can, preserve thee from my wrath.”

He flew at the artist, who sped before him, across and round the room, until, reaching the foot of the painted steps, up the flight sprang Wu Taotsz, and, with a laugh, disappeared within the golden gates.

Following blindly in his anger, the Emperor rushed at the steps, staggered, recovered himself, gave a mortal gasp, and fell back. Before his eyes was just the blank wall of the room. The Palace and Wu Taotsz had vanished together.

Cleopatra and the Decurion

On the headland of Lochias, where it pushed towards the overlapping promontory of Pharos, stood the palace and gardens of the Ptolemies. The great lighthouse on the opposite shore glowed across the strait, and in the deep waters between were planted a number of islets, like gigantic stepping-stones, their intervals closed with booms and chains. These, and the arms of land, enlocked the harbour of Alexandria, all round whose mighty circumference the city flamed like a belt of fire, impassable, magnificent. It was thirty years before the birth of Christ, and the battle of Actium had been fought and, for all that it meant to Egypt and the world, lost. Cleopatra was doomed, and Magdalen, perhaps, conceived.

Mark Antony, desperate, though infatuated still, had come out of his retirement on Pharos, whither he had retreated to brood over his leman’s treachery. The two were reconciled in a way, and sought perpetually to drown in revelry the horror of an impending judgment. The beautiful queen, last expression of a monstrous demonism, its heir and epitome, had no instinct at the last but to gore the world that crushed her--to glut herself with blood and suffering. In these final days her inhumanity surpassed itself. And crowned Antony, glooming in his purple and diamonds, watched and was silent.

One night they sat at supper in the Palace, a fierce nucleus, where enthroned, to all the blazing splendour of the hall. It was so alight with torches that the marble columns on which those hung aloft looked, in their deep reflections in the pavement, as if they were rooted in hell fire. Not a sleek Nubian crossing the floor with a golden dish in his hands but had his “fellow in the cellarage” keeping step with him, like a devil reversed and busy in that under inferno. There were far faint cries in the air--of a doomed city, of some nearer anguish--punctuating the throb and swoon of harps. The swaying of peacock fans in soft undulating arms stirred the floating incense, lest the rank breath of torture should enter and overpower it. There was not a man or woman there whose heart, for all the sensuous glamour, was void of fear--unless it were, perhaps, the Decurion Dentatus. He was young, cold, beautiful as Antinous--a Græco-Roman of the heroic type--and he loved his master Antony.

A Hebe, sweet in years and looks, filled the wine cups of the King and Queen. Antony, lifting his, hesitated on the draught. His eyes, already inflamed, sought his partner’s, half covertly, half challengingly. Cleopatra laughed, and putting her glass to her full lips, drank. She followed a formula in doing so, conceding it agreeably to the very madness of his passion. He was haunted, since his defeat, with the thought that she would poison him to save herself. And yet he loved her. It was not the first or the last time in the history of worship that the supreme egotism had evoked the supreme adoration.

Presently, amidst some amorous fondlings, the Queen took the lily chaplet from her hair and shredded a petal or two from it into her lord’s wine.

“Do you the same by mine, my soul,” she whispered, “and let us drink the very perfume of each other’s wit.”

His eyes burning, he lifted the wreath from his brow and obeyed, dropping a flower into her cup. As he raised his own to drink, she stopped him, coaxed the vessel from his hand, and calling the little Hebe to her, bade her take it.

“Thou art fair,” she said. “My lord pledges thee. Drink to his passing fancy.”

Like one of those woodland growths which, being torn, flush a faint, slow sapphire through all their tender flesh, the child’s face, as she stood, seemed to sicken to the hue of death. She shuddered; her limbs began to fail her.

“Drink!” said Cleopatra, rising in her place with a smile. “Drink, child--for thine own sake.”

Better swift death than nameless torture. The poor slave drained the cup, and, casting it, with a scream, from her, dropped upon the pavement, a glittering, voluble shadow, writhing to its own reflection.

Antony had risen, the company with him--speechless all, breathing out the long minutes of the tragedy. It amounted to no more than this, that the child had been so young and lovely--and that now she was spoiled.

At the end, the Queen, scornful, magnificent, turned her burning eyes on her lover’s face. There was a look in its ruined strength which made her pause a moment.

“Read there, sweet lord,” she said, “the groundlessness, the unworthiness of thy suspicions. Were my love false, what precautions of thine could avail against my wit and will to end thee?”

He turned, still without a word, and, the light glinting a moment on his grizzling hair and fuddled, frowning eyes, passed from the banquet.

Then, coming down into the hall, Cleopatra, with a wave of her hand, dismissed the company, the slaves, the musicians--all without exception, save the Decurion Dentatus, whom she called to her.

Under the blazing lights the two stood together, and the body of the dead girl lay at their feet. The Queen pointed to it. Her arm and hand were of faultless beauty. She was thirty-eight, but with all the bloom and fullness of just-ripened womanhood. Years had not set one streak of alloy in the treasure of her golden hair, or clouded the azure of her eyes, or done more than perfect in her the natural weapons of the sorceress. She might have been the Decurion’s sister, so like he was to her in grace and Grecian fairness.

She fixed him with her eyes.

“I marked thee, Decurion,” she said--“and not for the first time. Thy looks defied me, thine eyes condemned. What--did you dare! And thy lip curled when Antony yielded me the cup. Answer why, so thou wouldst not----”

He stayed her fearlessly:

“Because I love him.”

“What, then?” she said, wondering.

“Could he not see, as we all saw,” he answered, “that thou hadst poisoned it? For his wit’s sake I would have had him comprehend; for his nobility’s sake I would have had him refuse thee the cup; for his soul’s sake I would have had him drink from it himself, and die, and be free.”

“Free? From what?”

“From his thrall.”

“What callest thou that?”

“The Curse of Antony.”

“Meaning Cleopatra?”

“Meaning thee, O Queen!”

She laughed. She did not strike his mouth, as was her first mad impulse.

“Darest thou?” she breathed again; then stared into his eyes in pure amazement. Was he not the first man who had ever spoken to her thus?

“Well, thou lovest him,” she said presently, with a deep sigh--“and I, too, in my poor way. It shall be a contest of loves between us.”

She gazed a moment unmoved on the little distorted body at her feet, glanced mockingly at the Decurion, and, turning, left him lost in wonderment.

He never saw her again until near the end. She was occupied in the meanwhile in building herself an unsurpassable mausoleum, and in testing on the bodies of slaves the effects of various poisons. Foreseeing the worst, and prepared for it, she would yet woo Death like a voluptuary, and borrow rapture of his embrace. Yet so far the test had failed her; and not from any inhumanity; for indeed she would have kissed in ecstasy that slave who suffered nothing in obliging her. But one and all they would persist most perversely in dying in extreme agony.

And then one day she sent for the Decurion Dentatus, who, in the thick of the general treachery, was among the few noble who stood by their leader. It was when Octavius was at Pelusium, and the fate of Alexandria appeared sealed.

The soldier was brought in to the Queen where she lay in a private chamber of her Palace. Two faithful women attended upon their mistress; an enamelled casket lying on a table near by was half buried under scented blossoms. Cleopatra fanned herself languidly; a luminous green scarab burned on her forehead between the wings of golden hair; the gauzy film which enwrapped her deepened to a tender flush over hips and bosom. Yet in her eyes some shadow of a mortal fear belied the sensuous abandonment of her attitude.

“The contest of our loves, Decurion,” she said. “Art thou prepared to wage it?”

He looked at her steadfastly, and answered, “Yes, Queen.”

“To free thy master,” she said, “from this curse? Wilt thou teach me how to die?”

“Aye, gladly,” he said.

She pointed to the casket. “It lies therein--the means. Open and handle it. It is said its sting benumbs--puts Death asleep. So thou diest sweetly, I am thy slave and grave-fellow.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, he strode to the casket, and unfastened and raised the lid. Within, upon a mat of green leaves, lay coiled a thick emblazoned worm, all bronzed and gold--a poisonous horned viper. He grasped and held it aloft; received the stabbing tooth, once, twice, in his arm; flung the reptile back into its box and closed the lid.

After long waiting, he was down upon his knees, pallid but triumphant.

“Sufferest thou?” she demanded.

“But too much bliss,” he answered faintly. “I swoon from it.”

He crawled towards her, but sank on the way and died, forcing a smile to his agonised lips.

Then, when it was over, she rose in great emotion, and looked down upon the body.

“I have conquered all others,” she said. “Thou conquerest me. Greater than mine is thy love.” She turned to her trembling women. “Keep the worm safe.” And then she kneeled and, bending, kissed the dead man’s lips. “Take me for thy slave, Dentatus,” she whispered, “in the shadows to come. Not Antony, not another, but thou alone.”

The Galilean

A solitary goatherd sat crouched on a slope above the Sea of Galilee. It was approaching morning, and he had lit a little fire on the rocks in order to roast his breakfast of fish. It was still dark, though the embroidered velvet canopy overhead was beginning to reveal a grape-like bloom along its eastern verge. Seven miles across, on the opposite shore, the lamps of Tiberias, minute and liquid, dripped threads of gold into the motionless lake; to the north the snows of Mount Hermon lay like a pillow to the quiet hills; everywhere was the swoon and stillness which characterise that last deep hour of slumber when sleep itself sleeps.

The smoke of the goatherd’s fire rose in a thin, unbroken shaft; the hiss and explosion of its thorns were uttered in a subdued voice; he himself sat like a figure carved in old ivory. His arms and legs were bare; his only garment was a tunic of brown sackcloth; he was the gauntest man of his race in all Galilee. He suggested some grotesque vulturine fledgling rather than a human being, in his leathery skin, denuded scalp, prominent eyes, and great horny beak of a nose. Whatever juice there was in him must have been as brown and acrid as a walnut’s.

He had laid his sticks upon a little ledge or plateau where the green of the banks, rising some fifty feet or so from the margin of the lake, first strayed to lose itself among the waste and tumble of the sandstone heights above. Scattered among the bents and yellow boulders from which he had descended lay his silent flock. He was the only soul awake, it seemed, in all that heaped-up solitude.

Suddenly he raised his head. The sound of a footstep, distant at first, but regularly approaching, penetrated to his ears. It fell low and loud, unmistakably human, until it resolved itself into the tramp of a worried man coming over the hills from the south. The goatherd was not interested or concerned. He sat apathetic, even when the traveller, appearing round a bend of the rocks, walked grunting into the firelight and revealed himself a Roman soldier.

The new-comer had a heavy, colourless face with thick black eyebrows. The close chin-piece of his small cap-like helmet gave his lower jaw a bulldog look. His body to the hips was cased in a laminated cuirass of brass, epaulets of which covered his shoulders, and his short tunic was garnished with hanging straps of leather plated with strips of the same metal. Skin-tight drawers descended to the middle of his calves, and were succeeded by puttees of pliant felt, which ended in military caligæ with spiked soles. A short, double-edged sword hung in a sheath at his right side, and in his hand he carried a javelin of about his own height, the shaft of which had served him for a staff. Weary and benighted as he appeared to be, his speech and bearing expressed the arrogance of the dominant race.

“Ho!” he said, “ho!” and stretched himself relieved. “Food and fire, and a respite at least from this cursed chase. What lights are yon across the lake, goatherd?”

“Tiberias.”

It might have been an automaton speaking. The soldier swore by all his gods.

“Eighty miles from Jerusalem--a land of rogues and fools! Now directed this way, now that, mountains where I was told valleys, and torrents for fords, and to find at last that I have taken the wrong bank! Harkee, thou wooden Satyrus: my horse fell foundered among the hills, and I saw thy fire and made for it on foot. Well, I carry dispatches for thy Tetrarch, and thou tellest me that is Tiberias yonder. Should I not do well to beat thee for it?”

The large eyes of the goatherd conned the speaker immovably.

“Tiberias,” he repeated. And then he added, “With dawn will come the fishermen.”

The soldier cursed: “What, calf!” and checked himself. “Thou meanest,” he said, “a boat to carry me across?” He heaved out a sigh. “Well, goatherd, so be it; and while I wait I starve. Dost thou not hunger too?”

“Aye,” said the goatherd, “always and for ever.”

The fish were spluttering on the embers. The soldier speared one with his javelin, and, blowing on it, began to eat unceremoniously.

“I would not concede so much to _my_ Fates,” he said. “I would rob sooner. Besides, here is proof plenty that you lie, old goatherd.”

The goatherd bent forward, and prodded the speaker once with a finger like a crooked stick.

“How old wouldst call me?” he said.

“A hundred.”

“I am seven-and-twenty, Roman.”

The soldier laughed and stared.

“Bearest thy years ill. Since when beganst to age?”

“Since I began to starve.”

“And when was that?”

“When one said to me, ‘Feed on the illusions of the flesh until I come again.’”

“One--one? What one?”

“A strange white man. They called him Jesus of Nazareth about here.”

The soldier, his cheek bulged with fish, stopped masticating a moment to stare, then burst into a hoarse laugh.

“Ho, ho! my friend! Art in a sorry case indeed! Thou shalt starve and starve, by Cæsar. Tell me the story, goatherd.”

The gaunt creature mused a little.

“Why, there is none, Roman, but just this. I had heard of him and scoffed--I, a practical man--and one day (it was many seasons back) he came across the water to these hills, and a great multitude followed and gathered to him from all sides. And they brought with them a number that were maimed and sick, and the man touched them and they appeared healed, rising and blessing his name, so that I, though counting it an illusion of the spirit, could not but marvel in his magic and the people’s blindness. Now the crowd abode here into the third day, and they felt neither thirst nor hunger; but I, that durst not leave my flock, waiting for them to go, was like a ravenous wolf. And on the third day this Jesus called for food to give to his followers, and some that were his went down to the boat, and I with them. And, lo! there were but a few loaves and fishes--nothing at all for such a multitude. But I helped to carry these up, and on the way the largest fish of all I hid beneath my tunic, for I thought, ‘Great he may be, but nothing is lost that I take precautions against his failure to assuage my hunger.’ Then did he bid us all to sit upon the ground, and he blessed and brake the fish and bread; and so it happened--account it to what you will--for every soul there was a meal and to spare. But when it came to my turn he would give me none; only, gazing on me, he bade me, since faith I had not, to feed on the illusions of the flesh until he came again. And I laughed to myself, thinking of the fish; but, Roman, that fish when I came to devour it was like a shadow in the water, having form but no substance, and so it is with all food to me since. Though I behold it, handle it, I put a shadow to my lips. Yet every day do I prepare my meal, hoping the curse removed, and knowing always it shall not be until he come again.”

The soldier broke into a roar of laughter.

“Until he come again!” he cried, “until he come again! O, a jockeyed Jew, a poor deluded Jew!”

He was so gloriously tickled that he had to gasp and choke himself into sobriety.

“Harkee, goatherd,” he said presently; “there was a day, not long past, in Jerusalem--a lamentable day for thee. It thundered--gods, how it thundered, rattling the Place of Skulls! I ought to remember, seeing I was on duty there. Nazareth was it, now? Why, to be sure--I know my letters, and it was writ plain enough and high enough. Jesus of Nazareth, who saved others, but could not save himself--that was it--one of three rogues condemned. Well, he laid an embargo on thee, did he? You see this spear----”

He paused, in the very act of lifting his javelin, and sat staring stupidly at it. Its point was tipped with crimson.

“The rising sun!” muttered the goatherd, and, getting suddenly to his feet, stood gazing seawards. The soldier came and stood beside him.

The whole wide valley, while they spoke, had opened to the morning like a rose, the clustered hills its petals, its calyx the deep lake, the lights upon it dewdrops shining at its heart. And there upon the dim waters, swinging close inshore, was a fisherman’s boat, its crew gathering in an empty net.

Now the two on the hill stood too remote to distinguish sounds or faces, while the conformation of the rocks hid the shore from their view. But of a sudden, as they looked, the forms in the boat started erect, and, all standing in a huddled group, appeared to gaze landwards. And instantly, as if they had received therefrom some direction, they seized and cast their net the other side of the boat and drew on it, and the watchers saw by their straining muscles that the net was full. Perceiving which, one of the fishermen, a burly fellow, quitted his hold of the cords, and, leaping into the water, floundered for the shore and disappeared.

“What now?” said the soldier. “Do they spy and seek us?” He muttered vacantly, and glanced again at his spearhead, and shook the haft impatiently. But the sunrise would not be detached from it.

Now the goatherd ran to a cleft which commanded the shore below, and, glaring a moment, returned swiftly, his face alight.

“Rabboni,” he said excitedly, “it is the man of Nazareth himself come back, and he ascendeth the hill towards us, and the spell will be removed from me so that I shall taste fish once more.”

But the words were hardly out of his mouth when the soldier seized his arm, and, dragging him to the shelter of a great boulder at a distance, forced him to crouch with him behind it, so that they might see without being seen. And so hidden, they were aware of a shape that came into the firelight, and it was white like a spirit of the hills and waters, and it stretched its hands above the embers, so that they leaped again.

And the goatherd heard the soldier mutter in his ear:

“A practical man--you say you are a practical man! Now, who is it?”

“Jesus of Nazareth,” he answered.

But the soldier looked at his javelin and it ran with sunrise.

“That cannot be,” he said, “for seven days ago I opened his side with this spear as he hung upon the cross, and there is the blood to testify to it.”

“I know nothing about that,” said the goatherd; “my palate is sufficient evidence for me. Look where they come and lay their fish upon my embers. The very savour of their cooking tells me I can taste again. It is Jesus, sure enough!”

[The End]

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

The author produced two books titled _Historical Vignettes_: one in 1910 (T. Fisher Unwin, London), and the other in 1912 (Sidgwick & Jackson, London). Being the later, “2nd Series” has been appended to the title to distinguish it from the former (_i.e._ “1st Series”).

Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ birdseller/bird-seller, etc.) have been preserved.

Alterations to the text:

Abandon the usage of drop-caps.

[Title page]

Add “2nd Series” to the book title. (See above).

[The Princess Elizabeth]

Change “... when the Earl came home. _prepared_ to attend...” to _Prepared_.

[James II]

“_Abaddie_, the valet, was a loyal but fibreless” to _Abbadie_.

[George III]

“Of a sudden _be_ became aware... was all about him again” to _he_.

[End of text]