Part 1
# The just steward ### By Dehan, Richard
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THE JUST STEWARD
BY
RICHARD DEHAN
AUTHOR OF "THE DOP DOCTOR," "BETWEEN TWO THIEVES," ETC.
NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
THE JUST STEWARD. II
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_TO THAT DAY WHEN ALL FAITHS SHALL BE MERGED IN ONE FAITH. TO THE HOPE THAT LIVES WAITING THE OPENING OF THE GATE._
_Beeding, Sussex, July 5, 1922._
CONTENTS
_Book the First:_ THE SEEKING
_Book the Second:_ THE SENDING
_Book the Third:_ THE FINDING
_Book the Fourth:_ THE PASSING
_PREFATORY NOTE By THE AUTHOR_
_This is a work of fiction and the characters moving through its Pages are imaginary, save in the instance of Hamid Bey, whose sinister activities were exercised as Commandant of a War Prisoners' Camp near Smyrna in 1917. Care has been exercised to avoid the use of surnames and titles belonging to actual persons. Where these have been inadvertently employed, apology is made beforehand._
THE JUST STEWARD
_Book the First:_ THE SEEKING
I
Beautiful even with the trench and wall of Diocletian's comparatively recent siege scarring the orchards and vineyards of Lake Mareotis, splendid even though her broken canals and aqueducts had never been repaired, and part of her western quarter still displayed heaps of calcined ruins where had been temples, palaces and academies, Alexandria lay shimmering under the African sun. Between the turquoise of the Mediterranean on the north and west, the beryl green of the Delta on the east, and the flaming opal of the Desert south and again east of the Delta, the Queen city of the dead old Ptolemies, set about with vineyards, fair orchards and stately palm-groves stretching in a broad band of shade and fruitfulness from the Lake across the Desert, and fringing both sides of the Nilotic canal, well merited the title: "Queen Emerald of the Jewelled Girdle," bestowed upon her by the librarian who unloaded upon Posterity a geographical treatise in heroic verse.
The vintage of Egypt was in full swing, the figs and dates were being harvested. Swarms of wasps and hornets, armed with formidable stings, yellow-striped like the dreaded nomads of the south and eastern frontiers, greedily sucked the sugary juices of the ripe fruit. Flocks of fig-birds twittered amongst the branches, being like the date-pigeons, almost too gorged to fly. Half-naked, earth-brown or tawny-skinned native labourers, hybrids of mingled races, with heads close-shaven save for a topknot; dwellers in mud-hovels, drudges of the water-wheel, cut down the heavy grape-clusters with sickle-shaped copper knives.
Ebony, woolly-haired negroes in clean white breech-cloths, piled up the gathered fruit in tall baskets woven of reeds and lined with leaves. Copts with the rich reddish skins, the long eyes and boldly-curving profiles of Egyptian warriors and monarchs as represented on the walls of ancient temples of Libya and the Thebaïd, moved about in leather-girdled blue linen tunics and hide sandals, keeping account of the laden panniers, roped upon the backs of diminutive asses, and carried to the wine-presses as fast as they were filled. There would be a glut of the thin sweet drink that was exported in clay flagons with round bases; a vintage as disesteemed in the era of the last Queen Cleopatra by the wine-bibbing Alexandrians, as to-day under the joint sway of the Emperor Diocletian and his co-regent, the swineherd Maximianus.
The negroes sang as they set snares, and the fig-birds beloved of the epicurean fell by hundreds into the limed horse-hair traps. Greek, Egyptian and negro girls, laughing under garlands of hibiscus, periwinkle and tuberoses, coaxed the fat morsels out of the black men to carry home for a supper-treat; while acrobats, comic singers, sellers of cakes, drinks and sweetmeats, with strolling jugglers and jesters, and Jewish fortune-tellers of both sexes, assailed the workers and the merrymakers with importunities, and made harvest in their own way.
Despite the scars left by the siege of Diocletian,--whose clemency in stopping the pillage of the city was recalled by a bronze statue of the tyrant, placed on the summit of a column in the middle of the Serapium,--Alexandria was still not only mistress of her own huge trade in corn, but the port through which the European trade of India and Arabia passed.
The Great Port and its fellow basin of Eunostus were crowded with shipping both native and foreign, the quays were choked with merchandise of innumerable kinds, and thronged with men of all the world's known nations. The copper-hued Egyptian, the diamond-eyed, sharp-witted Greek, the olive-skinned, aquiline-featured Hebrew with his furred robe, high headdress, long beard and side-curls, jostled the supple Italian, the lively Gaul, the slow Boeotian, and the Ethiopian cloaked with leopard-skins, displaying ivory rings in his dark ears, and on his arms and fingers, and ivory suns and moons suspended from a thread of sacred knots upon his naked breast. Here merchants from the scarce-known Tsin State, south of Hind, pig-tailed, slant-eyed men in cartwheel hats of woven grass, embroidered silks and felt-soled shoes--again encountered, on this neutral soil of Egypt, their ancient enemy, the Tartar. Here also were Hindu Buddhist pilgrims wearing yellow robes, and carrying begging-bowls and armpit-crutches, Fire-worshippers in snowy white, and Persian merchants in long-sleeved caftans and tall lambskin headdresses. The nomad of the Desert--his black leather head-veil bound by thongs about his lean, brown temples, his great striped mantle of camel's hair cast about his painted nakedness, bartering spices and frankincense from Arabia Felix, for gold and silver jewellery and strings of pink and blue pearls from the eastern shores of the Red Sea to deck his womankind, rubbed shoulders with the Scythian, thick of tongue, solid of bone and heavy of shoulder, bow-legged with continual riding, his shaggy head protected by a cone-shaped cap of hairy horse-hide, his back cloaked, his feet shod, and his loins clouted with tanned horse-leather, which also covered his brass-nailed shield and sheathed his short iron sword. And among the slaves of many nations, staggering under great crates and bales between the quays and the warehouses, were seen huge semi-naked men with matted yellow hair, and blue or grey eyes; whose white skins were decorated with animals, birds and flowers traced in blue pigment, and upon whose limbs were soldered the heavy bronze anklet and armlet, with rings to accommodate a chain, often needed by the refractory slave.
"They are Britons," the Alexandrians would say, fanning themselves and smiling. "We have mercenaries of the race in our Tenth Legion, but these are dull fellows, too stupid to fight. What can you expect from a country that produces nothing but tin and oysters? Strong slaves and comely enough, but dangerous when goaded. And in captivity they never laugh!"
A charge which could not be laid to the accusers, for ground as they were to the earth beneath the iron heel of a despotic Roman government, the Alexandrians laughed in season and out. They made their successive rulers dread to provoke the onslaughts of their waspish ridicule. Wit was the point of the dagger that could find its way through a tyrant's harness, a venomed jest could make him writhe with much more safety to the community than the contents of the poison-phial dropped into the dish before its cover was put on, and the steward's clay seal affixed. They were tepid in their religion, vain, proud, boastful and spiteful, unstable in their friendships, languid in business, indifferent to reputation, fickle in friendship, furious in lust, unrelenting in vengeance, merciless in jealousy, cold in their natural affections, and faithless in love. They wrote no histories, but had a cultured taste in cookery, perfumes, dress, music and dancing; erotic poetry, and exotic vice; and on the stars of the theatre, of the Gymnasium and the Hippodrome, they lavished all the enthusiasm they possessed. The famous charioteer, the great singer or dancer, the comic actor whose jokes set the whole city in a roar; the unconquerable wrestler, or swordsman, or pugilist who happened to be the idol of the moment, daily walked surrounded by his admirers on the promontory of Lochias, or in the public gardens under the palm-groves, attired in the scarlet robes of the ultra-fashionable, loaded with jewelled necklaces, carrying in gem-encrusted fingers a golden-handled fan of flamingo or parrots' feathers, and wearing scented garlands on his crimped and perfumed hair. Banquets were given to famous fighting-cocks, which, perched at the right hand of the couch of the host, fed upon sesame from golden platters, and sipped distilled water from precious bowls of white and purple Murrhine spar.
Amidst the luxury and corruption of this city, whose roaring floods of traffic rolled between buildings marvellously diverse in their mingling of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Semitic styles of architecture, the clash of creeds was never wanting, and ancient faiths and newer revelations struggled for supremacy. The glorious psalms of David, rising from the Synagogue, mingled with the shrill rattle of the sistrum, and the strains of the hymn addressed to Isis, the goddess of the Throned Moon. Serapis, lord of the under-world, was yet worshipped though the Serapium lay in ruins,--the Persian Mithra had his following, and the annual festival of Pan was celebrated in the temple--wrought in pink African granite to the semblance of a phallus, that dwarfed every other building in Alexandria save the Lighthouse of the Pharos, soaring four hundred feet above its base of Cyclopæan rock. And a purer and more radiant light than that of the Pharos burned in Alexandria, where the Mysteries of the Catholic Church of CHRIST were celebrated in temples converted from the service of the deities of Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
The four hundred columns of the ruined Serapium overhung the quadrangle of thick-walled, buttressed stone buildings where the Christian Patriarch, his clergy, monks, deacons and aspirants were unpretendingly housed. Of his followers, religious and secular, thirty thousand mustered in Alexandria, whilst the lay helpers, organised in the vast Guild of the Parabolani, literally "_those who expose themselves to danger_" laboured by day and night amongst the miserable, the homeless, the famine-bitten and the fever-stricken, rotting in the purlieus, the prisons and the poorest quarters of the city, sufferers chiefly of Greek and Egyptian nationality, for the population of the teeming Jewish quarter were as always, charitable to their own. Thus Christian schools and orphanages were set up, supported and instructed; hospitals established, staffed and maintained; catechumens brought to the priests for instruction, and the dead buried with all decency by Christian men who went forth in the coarse habit of sackcloth, with the cowl that covered the entire face, and only showed the eyes.
The persecution of Maximianus, much more severe than that following the issue of the New Law of Diocletian, had now exposed the disgraceful practices of these besotted dupes. For weeks past the city had buzzed and stung like a veritable nest of hornets, poked into venomous life by the secret activities of Arius the Presbyter, the open malevolence of the Pagans, and the bitter enmity of the Jews.
The deceased Prefect of Egypt had been a ruler not favourably disposed towards the Christians. By his successor, Mettius Rufus, the savage Imperial edict was ruthlessly enforced.
Christian prelates, priests, monks, nuns, deaconesses and catechumens had been arrested, imprisoned, executed or tortured by the soldiers of the Third Egyptian Legion,--far more accustomed of late years to quelling street riots and displaying their glittering harness and handsome persons at military and civic spectacles, than to making wholesale battues of unarmed and unresisting men and women. Detachments of cohorts stationed throughout Libya were sent to raid the hermitages, monasteries and nunneries on the Nile banks and upon the borders of the Desert. At Mount Nitria and in Scete as at Scyras, they had made many captures; though at Tabenna in the Thebaïd, where the venerable Abbot Pachomius had gathered about him thirteen hundred followers, so stout a resistance was made by the monks, with staves, great stones and boiling pitch and water, that three maniples of soldiers of the Fourth Lusitanian Legion, compelled to abandon the siege, returned, to exhibit their wounds and burns to Perocles, the military prefect of Apollinopolis, entreating him with tears of rage, to send them back in sufficient force to wipe out the shame of defeat sustained at such abominable hands.
All classes of society were sifted by a process which netted a number of suspects. Amongst the labourers in the vineyards, the toilers on the quays, in the thronged marts of commerce, as amongst the crowds at the baths, the lecture-halls, the theatre, the Gymnasium and the Hippodrome, moved close-lipped, silent men in plain clothing, with sharp, greedy ears and keen, observant eyes. These were called The Listeners, and carried in the sleeve short rods tipped with a gilt Roman Eagle, and the maw of that fierce and bloody bird was never satisfied. Apostasy was rewarded by temporary immunity. Obduracy merited what it received, in banishment to the mines, forfeiture of property, exile, slavery or torture to the death. Many persons accused, even before coming into Court, renounced the Faith and reverted to Paganism, or after imprisonment and some degree of torture, sacrificed, and were set free. Yet others escaped into Syria, where the law, though the same in effect, was less unmercifully carried out. But others who held public posts were fettered by their official duties, and even had it been possible, would have scorned to seek safety in flight.
"_Whither wouldst thou go, O My Servant Whom I have chosen to die for Me?_"
In the case of certain men and women, wealthy or poor, highly placed or humble, the Voice that speaks to the destined martyr cried and would not be shut out. Thus the comic singer Metras whose impromptu verses were wont to set the whole city in a roar, the famous retiarius Apollos, conqueror in twenty battles against armed gladiators, and the aged historian Sinias, confessed themselves Christians and were dragged away to death.
Hesychius, the editor of the Septuagint, heard the call as he worked amongst the rolls of papyri in his study, and like others, he sustained the ordeal and claimed the crown and palm. And it came to the noble Roman, Philoremus Florens Fabius, Prætor of the taxes of Egypt, and a personal friend of the Prefect: Fabius, who sat daily in public as a judge in Alexandria, purple-robed, attended by lictors, _librarii_ and _commentarienses_; surrounded by a guard of the Third Egyptian Legion; deciding all causes relative to the taxes, and administering the law....
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.