Part 24

At the corner of the street where the narrow, populous Lane of the Camel-drivers crossed the Colonnades, a storyteller had bewitched a circle of people around him. It was the same old tale of love and adventure that many generations have listened to; but the lively fancy of the hearers rent it new interest, and the wit of the improviser drew forth sighs of interest and shouts of laughter.

A yellow-haired girl on the edge of the throng turned, as Hermas passed, and smiled in his face. She put out her hand and caught him by the sleeve.

“Stay,” she said, “and laugh a bit with us. I know who you are--the son of Demetrius. You must have bags of gold. Why do you look so black? Love is alive yet.”

Hermas shook off her hand, but not ungently.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “You are mistaken in me. I am poorer than you are.”

But as he passed on, he felt the warm touch of her fingers through the cloth on his arm. It seemed as if she had plucked him by the heart.

He went out by the Western Gate, under the golden cherubim that the Emperor Titus had stolen from the ruined Temple of Jerusalem and fixed upon the arch of triumph. He turned to the left, and climbed the hill to the road that led to the Grove of Daphne.

In all the world there was no other highway as beautiful. It wound for five miles along the foot of the mountains, among gardens and villas, plantations of myrtles and mulberries, with wide outlooks over the valley of Orontes and the distant, shimmering sea.

The richest of all the dwellings was the House of the Golden Pillars, the mansion of Demetrius. He had won the favor of the apostate Emperor Julian, whose vain efforts to restore the worship of the heathen gods, some twenty years ago, had opened an easy way to wealth and power for all who would mock and oppose Christianity. Demetrius was not a sincere fanatic like his royal master; but he was bitter enough in his professed scorn of the new religion, to make him a favourite at the court where the old religion was in fashion. He had reaped a rich reward of his policy, and a strange sense of consistency made him more fiercely loyal to it than if it had been a real faith. He was proud of being called “the friend of Julian”; and when his son joined himself to the Christians, and acknowledged the unseen God, it seemed like an insult to his father’s success. He drove the boy from his door and disinherited him.

The glittering portico of the serene, haughty house, the repose of the well-ordered garden, still blooming with belated flowers, seemed at once to deride and to invite the young outcast plodding along the dusty road. “This is your birthright,” whispered the clambering rose-trees by the gate; and the closed portals of carven bronze said: “You have sold it for a thought--a dream.”’

Hermas found the Grove of Daphne quite deserted. There was no sound in the enchanted vale but the rustling of the light winds chasing each other through the laurel thickets, and the babble of innumerable streams. Memories of the days and nights of delicate pleasure that the grove had often seen still haunted the bewildered paths and broken fountains. At the foot of a rocky eminence, crowned with the ruins of Apollo’s temple, which had been mysteriously destroyed by fire just after Julian had restored and reconsecrated it, Hermas sat down beside a gushing spring, and gave himself up to sadness.

“How beautiful the world would be, how joyful, how easy to live in, without religion! These questions about unseen things, perhaps about unreal things, these restraints and duties and sacrifices-if I were only free from them all, and could only forget them all, then I could live my life as I pleased, and be happy.”

“Why not?” said a quiet voice at his back.

He turned, and saw an old man with a long beard and a threadbare cloak (the garb affected by the pagan philosophers) standing behind him and smiling curiously.

“How is it that you answer that which has not been spoken?” said Hermas; “and who are you that honour me with your company?”

“Forgive the intrusion,” answered the stranger; “it is not ill meant. A friendly interest is as good as an introduction.”

“But to what singular circumstance do I owe this interest?”

“To your face,” said the old man, with a courteous inclination. “Perhaps also a little to the fact that I am the oldest inhabitant here, and feel as if all visitors were my guests, in a way.”

“Are you, then, one of the keepers of the grove? And have you given up your work with the trees to take a holiday as a philosopher?

“Not at all. The robe of philosophy is a mere affectation, I must confess. I think little of it. My profession is the care of altars. In fact, I am the solitary priest of Apollo whom the Emperor Julian found here when he came to revive the worship of the grove, some twenty years ago. You have heard of the incident?”

“Yes,” said Hermas, beginning to be interested; “the whole city must have heard of it, for it is still talked of. But surely it was a strange sacrifice that you brought to celebrate the restoration of Apollo’s temple?”

“You mean the ancient goose?” said the old man laughing. “Well, perhaps it was not precisely what the emperor expected. But it was all that I had, and it seemed to me not inappropriate. You will agree to that if you are a Christian, as I guess from your dress.”

“You speak lightly for a priest of Apollo.”

“Oh, as for that, I am no bigot. The priesthood is a professional matter, and the name of Apollo is as good as any other. How many altars do you think there have been in this grove?”

“I do not know.”

“Just four-and-twenty, including that of the martyr Babylas, whose ruined chapel you see just beyond us. I have had something to do with most of them in my time. They are transitory. They give employment to care-takers for a while. But the thing that lasts, and the thing that interests me, is the human life that plays around them. The game has been going on for centuries. It still disports itself very pleasantly on summer evenings through these shady walks. Believe me, for I know. Daphne and Apollo are shadows. But the flying maidens and the pursuing lovers, the music and the dances, these are realities. Life is a game, and the world keeps it up merrily. But you? You are of a sad countenance for one so young and so fair. Are you a loser in the game?” The words a key fits the lock. He opened his heart to the old man, and told him the story of his life: his luxurious boyhood in his father’s house; the irresistible spell which compelled him to forsake it when he heard John’s preaching of the new religion; his lonely year with the anchorites among the mountains; the strict discipline in his teacher’s house at Antioch; his weariness of duty, his distaste for poverty, his discontent with worship.

“And to-day,” said he, “I have been thinking that I am a fool. My life is swept as bare as a hermit’s cell. There is nothing in it but a dream, a thought of God, which does not satisfy me.”

The singular smile deepened on his companion’s face. “You are ready, then,” he suggested, “to renounce your new religion and go back to that of your father?”