CHAPTER IX

STARS IN WATER

As an excuse for not appearing in time at the Agape, Castor had asserted that he had been engaged on his Master’s work elsewhere. That was true. He had been at the house of the timber merchant as we have seen, and he had been detained by Æmilius as he left it. This latter had been lying on his bed resting, whilst his garments were being dried.

He had overheard what had passed in the room of the dying woman.

When the bishop went forth, then Æmilius rose from his bed, cast the ample toga about him, and walked forth. He caught Castor as he descended to the water’s edge to be paddled away.

After a short salutation, the young lawyer said: “A word with you, sir, if your time is as generously to be disposed of to a stranger as it is lavished on the poor and sick.”

“I am at your service,” answered the bishop.

“My name,” said the young man, “is Æmilius Lentulus Varo. My profession is the law. I am not, I believe, unknown in Nemausus, or at Arelate, where also I have an office. But you, sir, may not have heard of me—we have assuredly never met. Your age and gravity of demeanor belong to a social group other than mine. You mix with the wise, the philosophers, and not with such butterflies as myself, who am a ridiculous pleasure seeker—seeking and never finding. If I am not in error, you are Castor Lepidus Villoneos, of an ancient magisterial family in Nemausus and the reputed head of the Christian sect.”

“I am he,” answered the bishop.

“It may appear to you a piece of idle curiosity,” said the young man, “if I put to you certain questions, and esteem it an impertinence, and so send me away empty. But I pray you to afford me—if thy courtesy will suffer it—some information concerning a matter on which I am eager to obtain light. I have been in the apartment adjoining that in which the mother of the hostess lay, and I chanced—the partition being but of plank—to overhear what was said. I confess that I am inquisitive to know something more certain of this philosophy or superstition, than what is commonly reported among the people. On this account, I venture to detain you, as one qualified to satisfy my greed for knowledge.”

“My time is at your disposal.”

“You spoke to the dying woman as though she were about to pass into a new life. Was that a poetic fancy or a philosophic speculation?”

“It was neither, it was a religious conviction. I spoke of what I knew to be true.”

“Knew to be true!” laughed Æmilius. “How so? Have you traveled into the world of spirits, visited the _manes_, and returned posted up in all particulars concerning them?”

“No. I receive the testimony from One I can trust.”

“One! All men are liars. I knew a fellow who related that he had fallen into an epileptic fit, and that during the fit his spirit had crossed the Styx. But as he had no penny wherewith to pay the fare, I did not believe him. Moreover, he never told the story twice alike, and in other matters was an arrant liar.”

“Whom would you believe?”

“None, nothing save my own experience.”

“Not Him who made and who sustains your existence, my good sir?”

“Yes, if I knew Him and were assured He spoke.”

“That is the assurance I have.”

Æmilius shook his head. “When, how, where, and by whom did He declare to men that there is a life beyond the tomb?”

“The _when_ was in the principate of Tiberius Cæsar, the _how_ was by the mouth of His only‐begotten Son, the _where_ was in Palestine.”

The young lawyer laughed. “There is not a greater rogue and liar on the face of the earth than a Jew. I cannot believe in a revelation made elsewhere than at the center of the world, in the city of Rome.”

“Rome is the center of the world to you—but is it so to the infinite God?”

Æmilius shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. “I am a lawyer. I ask for evidence. And I would not trust the word of a Jew against that of a common Gaulish peasant.”

“Nor need you. The witness is in yourself.”

“I do not understand you.”

“Have not all men, at all times and everywhere desired to know what is to be their condition after death? Does not every barbarous people harbor the conviction that there is a future life? Do not you civilized Romans, though you have no evidence, act as though there were such a life, and testify thereto on your monumental cenotaphs?”

“I allow all that. But what of it?”

“How comes it that there should be such a conviction based on no grounds whatever, but a vague longing, unless there were such a reality provided for those who have this desire in them? Would the Creator of man mock him? Would He put this hunger into him unless it were to be satisfied? You have eyes that crave for the light, and the light exists that satisfies this longing! You have ears that desire sounds, and the world is full of voices that meet this desire. Where there is a craving there is ever a reality that corresponds with and gives repose to that desire. Look,” said the bishop, and pointed to the water in which were reflected the stars that now began to glitter in the sky. “Do you see all those twinkling points in the still water? They correspond to the living luminaries set above in the vault. You in your soul have these reflections—sometimes seen, sometimes obscured, but ever returning. They answer to realities in the celestial world overhead. The reflections could not be in your nature unless they existed in substance above.”

“There is a score of other things we long after in vain here.”

“What things? I believe I know. Purity, perfection, justice. Well, you do not find them here entire—only in broken glints. But these glints assure you that in their integrity they do exist.”

A boat was propelled through the water. It broke the reflections, that disappeared or were resolved into a very dust of sparkles. As the wavelets subsided, however, the reflections reformed.

Castor walked up and down beside Æmilius in silence for a few turns, then said:—

“The world is full of inequalities and injustices. One man suffers privation, another is gorged. One riots in luxury at the expense of the weak. Is there to be no righting of wrongs? no justice to be ever done? If there be a God over all, He must, if just—and who can conceive of God, save as perfectly just?—He must, I say, deal righteous judgment and smooth out all these creases; and how can he do so, unless there be a condition of existence after death in which the wrongs may be redressed, the evil‐ doers be punished, and tears be wiped away?”

“There is philosophy in this.”

“Have you not in your conscience a sense of right as distinct from wrong—obscured often, but ever returning—like the reflection of the stars in the water? How comes it there unless there be the verities above? Unless your Maker so made you as to reflect them in your spirit?”

Æmilius said nothing.

“Have you not in you a sense of the sacredness of Truth, and a loathing for falsehood? How comes that, unless implanted in you by your Creator, who is Truth itself?”

“But we know not—in what is of supreme interest to us—in matters connected with the gods, what our duties, what our destiny—what is the Truth.”

“Young man,” said the bishop, “thou art a seeker after the kingdom of Heaven. One word further, and I must leave thee. Granted there are these scintillations within—”

“Yes, I grant this.”

“And that they be reflections of verities above.”

“Possibly.”

“Whence else come they?”

Æmilius did not, could not answer.

“Then,” said Castor, “is it not antecedently probable that the God who made man, and put into his nature this desire after truth, virtue, holiness, justice, aye, and this hunger after immortality, should reveal to man that without which man is unable to direct his life aright, attain to the perfection of his being, and look beyond death with confidence?”

“If there were but such a revelation!”

“I say—is it conceivable that the Creator should not make it?”

“Thou givest me much food for thought,” said the lawyer.

“Digest it—looking at the reflection of the stars in the water—aye! and recall what is told by Aristotle of Xenophanes, how that casting his eyes upward at the immensity of heaven, he declared _The One_ is God. That conviction, at which the philosopher arrived at the summit of his research, is the starting point of the Christian child. Farewell. We shall meet again. I commend thee to Him who set the stars in heaven above, and the lights in thine own dim soul.”

Then the bishop sought a boat, and was rowed in the direction of the town.

Æmilius remained by the lagoon.

Words such as these he had heard were novel. The thoughts given him to meditate on were so deep and strange that he could not receive them at once.

The night was now quite dark, and the stars shone with a brilliancy to which we are unaccustomed in the North, save on frosty winter nights.

The Milky Way formed a sort of crescent to the north, and enveloped Cassiopeia’s Chair in its nebulous light. To the west blazed Castor and Pollux, and the changing iridescent fire of Algol reflected its varying colors in the water.

Æmilius looked up. What those points of light were, none could say. How was it that they maintained their order of rising and setting? None could answer. Who ruled the planets? That they obeyed a law, was obvious, but by whom was that law imposed?

Æmilius paced quicker, with folded arms and bowed head, looking into the water. The heavens were an unsolved riddle. The earth also was a riddle, without interpretation. Man himself was an enigma, to which there was no solution. Was all in heaven, in earth, to remain thus locked up, unexplained?

How was it that planets and constellations fulfilled the law imposed on them without deviation, and man knew not a law, lived in the midst of a cobweb of guesses, entangling himself in the meshes of vain speculations, and was not shown the commandment he must obey? Why had the Creator implanted in his soul such noble germs, if they were not to fructify—if only to languish for lack of light?

Again he lifted his eyes to the starry vault, and repeated what had been said of Xenophanes, “Gazing on the immensity of heaven, he declared that the One was God.” And then, immediately looking down into the depths of his own heart, he added: “And He is reflected here. Would that I knew Him.”

Yet how was he to attain the desired knowledge? On all sides were religious quacks offering their nostrums. What guarantee did Christianity offer, that it was other than the wild and empty speculations that swarmed, engaged and disappointed the minds of inquirers?

Unconscious how time passed, Æmilius paced the bank. Then he stood still, looking dreamily over the calm water. A couple of months more and the air would be alive with fire‐flies that would cluster on every reed, that would waver in dance above the surface of the lagoon, tens of thousands of drifting stars reflecting themselves in the water, and by their effulgence disturbing the light of the stars also there mirrored.

Thinking of this, Æmilius laughed.

“So is it,” said he, “in the world of philosophic thought and religious aspiration. The air is full of fire‐flies. They seem to be brilliant torch‐bearers assuring us guidance, but they are only vile grubs, and they float above the festering pool that breeds malarial fevers. Where is the truth, where?”

From the distant city sounded a hideous din, like the bellow of a gigantic bull.

Æmilius laughed bitterly.

“I know what that is, it is the voice of the god—so say the priestesses of Nemausus. It is heard at rare intervals. But the mason who made my baths at Ad Fines, explained it to me. He had been engaged on the temple and saw how a brazen instrument like a shell of many convolutions had been contrived in the walls and concealed, so that one woman’s breath could sound it and produce such a bellow as would shake the city. Bah! one religion is like another, founded on impostures. What are the stars of heaven but fire‐flies of a higher order, of superior flight? We follow them and stumble into the mire, and are engulfed in the slough.”