The Last Days of Pompeii

  Chapter V

  NYDIA ENCOUNTERS JULIA. INTERVIEW OF THE HEATHEN SISTER AND CONVERTEDBROTHER. AN ATHENIAN'S NOTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

  'WHAT happiness to Ione! what bliss to be ever by the side of Glaucus,to hear his voice!--And she too can see him!'

  Such was the soliloquy of the blind girl, as she walked alone and attwilight to the house of her new mistress, whither Glaucus had alreadypreceded her. Suddenly she was interrupted in her fond thoughts by afemale voice.

  'Blind flower-girl, whither goest thou? There is no pannier under thinearm; hast thou sold all thy flowers?'

  The person thus accosting Nydia was a lady of a handsome but a bold andunmaidenly countenance: it was Julia, the daughter of Diomed. Her veilwas half raised as she spoke; she was accompanied by Diomed himself, andby a slave carrying a lantern before them--the merchant and his daughterwere returning home from a supper at one of their neighbors'.

  'Dost thou not remember my voice?' continued Julia. 'I am the daughterof Diomed the wealthy.'

  'Ah! forgive me; yes, I recall the tones of your voice. No, nobleJulia, I have no flowers to sell.'

  'I heard that thou wert purchased by the beautiful Greek Glaucus; isthat true, pretty slave?' asked Julia.

  'I serve the Neapolitan, Ione,' replied Nydia, evasively.

  'Ah! and it is true, then...'

  'Come, come!' interrupted Diomed, with his cloak up to his mouth, 'thenight grows cold; I cannot stay here while you prate to that blind girl:come, let her follow you home, if you wish to speak to her.'

  'Do, child,' said Julia, with the air of one not accustomed to berefused; 'I have much to ask of thee: come.'

  'I cannot this night, it grows late,' answered Nydia. 'I must be athome; I am not free, noble Julia.'

  'What, the meek Ione will chide thee?--Ay, I doubt not she is a secondThalestris. But come, then, to-morrow: do--remember I have been thyfriend of old.'

  'I will obey thy wishes,' answered Nydia; and Diomed again impatientlysummoned his daughter: she was obliged to proceed, with the mainquestion she had desired to put to Nydia unasked.

  Meanwhile we return to Ione. The interval of time that had elapsed thatday between the first and second visit of Glaucus had not been too gailyspent: she had received a visit from her brother. Since the night hehad assisted in saving her from the Egyptian, she had not before seenhim.

  Occupied with his own thoughts--thoughts of so serious and intense anature--the young priest had thought little of his sister; in truth,men, perhaps of that fervent order of mind which is ever aspiring aboveearth, are but little prone to the earthlier affections; and it had beenlong since Apaecides had sought those soft and friendly interchanges ofthought, those sweet confidences, which in his earlier youth had boundhim to Ione, and which are so natural to that endearing connection whichexisted between them.

  Ione, however, had not ceased to regret his estrangement: she attributedit, at present, to the engrossing duties of his severe fraternity. Andoften, amidst all her bright hopes, and her new attachment to herbetrothed--often, when she thought of her brother's brow prematurelyfurrowed, his unsmiling lip, and bended frame, she sighed to think thatthe service of the gods could throw so deep a shadow over that earthwhich the gods created.

  But this day when he visited her there was a strange calmness on hisfeatures, a more quiet and self-possessed expression in his sunken eyes,than she had marked for years. This apparent improvement was butmomentary--it was a false calm, which the least breeze could ruffle.

  'May the gods bless thee, my brother!' said she, embracing him.

  'The gods! Speak not thus vaguely; perchance there is but one God!'

  'My brother!'

  'What if the sublime faith of the Nazarene be true? What if God be amonarch--One--Invisible--Alone? What if these numerous, countlessdeities, whose altars fill the earth, be but evil demons, seeking towean us from the true creed? This may be the case, Ione!'

  'Alas! can we believe it? or if we believed, would it not be amelancholy faith answered the Neapolitan. 'What! all this beautifulworld made only human!--mountain disenchanted of its Oread--the watersof their Nymph--that beautiful prodigality of faith, which makeseverything divine, consecrating the meanest flowers, bearing celestialwhispers in the faintest breeze--wouldst thou deny this, and make theearth mere dust and clay? No, Apaecides: all that is brightest in ourhearts is that very credulity which peoples the universe with gods.'

  Ione answered as a believer in the poesy of the old mythology wouldanswer. We may judge by that reply how obstinate and hard the contestwhich Christianity had to endure among the heathens. The GracefulSuperstition was never silent; every, the most household, action oftheir lives was entwined with it--it was a portion of life itself, asthe flowers are a part of the thyrsus. At every incident they recurredto a god, every cup of wine was prefaced by a libation; the verygarlands on their thresholds were dedicated to some divinity; theirancestors themselves, made holy, presided as Lares over their hearth andhall. So abundant was belief with them, that in their own climes, atthis hour, idolatry has never thoroughly been outrooted: it changes butits objects of worship; it appeals to innumerable saints where once itresorted to divinities; and it pours its crowds, in listening reverence,to oracles at the shrines of St. Januarius or St. Stephen, instead of tothose of Isis or Apollo.

  But these superstitions were not to the early Christians the object ofcontempt so much as of horror. They did not believe, with the quietscepticism of the heathen philosopher, that the gods were inventions ofthe priests; nor even, with the vulgar, that, according to the dim lightof history, they had been mortals like themselves. They imagined theheathen divinities to be evil spirits--they transplanted to Italy and toGreece the gloomy demons of India and the East; and in Jupiter or inMars they shuddered at the representative of Moloch or of Satan.

  Apaecides had not yet adopted formally the Christian faith, but he wasalready on the brink of it. He already participated the doctrines ofOlinthus--he already imagined that the lively imaginations of theheathen were the suggestions of the arch-enemy of mankind. The innocentand natural answer of Ione made him shudder. He hastened to replyvehemently, and yet so confusedly, that Ione feared for his reason morethan she dreaded his violence.

  'Ah, my brother!' said she, 'these hard duties of thine have shatteredthy very sense. Come to me, Apaecides, my brother, my own brother; giveme thy hand, let me wipe the dew from thy brow--chide me not now, Iunderstand thee not; think only that Ione could not offend thee!'

  'Ione,' said Apaecides, drawing her towards him, and regarding hertenderly, 'can I think that this beautiful form, this kind heart, may bedestined to an eternity of torment?'

  'Dii meliora! the gods forbid!' said Ione, in the customary form ofwords by which her contemporaries thought an omen might be averted.

  The words, and still more the superstition they implied, wounded the earof Apaecides. He rose, muttering to himself, turned from the chamber,then, stopping, half way, gazed wistfully on Ione, and extended hisarms.

  Ione flew to them in joy; he kissed her earnestly, and then he said:

  'Farewell, my sister! when we next meet, thou mayst be to me as nothing;take thou, then, this embrace--full yet of all the tender reminiscencesof childhood, when faith and hope, creeds, customs, interests, objects,were the same to us. Now, the tie is to be broken!'

  With these strange words he left the house.

  The great and severest trial of the primitive Christians was indeedthis; their conversion separated them from their dearest bonds. Theycould not associate with beings whose commonest actions, whose commonestforms of speech, were impregnated with idolatry. They shuddered at theblessing of love, to their ears it was uttered in a demon's name. This,their misfortune, was their strength; if it divided them from the restof the world, it was to unite them proportionally to each other. Theywere men of iron who wrought forth the Word of God, and verily the bondsthat bound them were of iron also!

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p; Glaucus found Ione in tears; he had already assumed the sweet privilegeto console. He drew from her a recital of her interview with herbrother; but in her confused account of language, itself so confused toone not prepared for it, he was equally at a loss with Ione to conceivethe intentions or the meaning of Apaecides.

  'Hast thou ever heard much,' asked she, 'of this new sect of theNazarenes, of which my brother spoke?'

  'I have often heard enough of the votaries,' returned Glaucus, 'but oftheir exact tenets know I naught, save that in their doctrine thereseemeth something preternaturally chilling and morose. They live apartfrom their kind; they affect to be shocked even at our simple uses ofgarlands; they have no sympathies with the cheerful amusements of life;they utter awful threats of the coming destruction of the world; theyappear, in one word, to have brought their unsmiling and gloomy creedout of the cave of Trophonius. Yet,' continued Glaucus, after a slightpause, 'they have not wanted men of great power and genius, norconverts, even among the Areopagites of Athens. Well do I remember tohave heard my father speak of one strange guest at Athens, many yearsago; methinks his name was PAUL. My father was amongst a mighty crowdthat gathered on one of our immemorial hills to hear this sage of theEast expound: through the wide throng there rang not a singlemurmur!--the jest and the roar, with which our native orators arereceived, were hushed for him--and when on the loftiest summit of thathill, raised above the breathless crowd below, stood this mysteriousvisitor, his mien and his countenance awed every heart, even before asound left his lips. He was a man, I have heard my father say, of notall stature, but of noble and impressive mien; his robes were dark andample; the declining sun, for it was evening, shone aslant upon his formas it rose aloft, motionless, and commanding; his countenance was muchworn and marked, as of one who had braved alike misfortune and thesternest vicissitude of many climes; but his eyes were bright with analmost unearthly fire; and when he raised his arm to speak, it was withthe majesty of a man into whom the Spirit of a God hath rushed!

  '"Men of Athens!" he is reported to have said, "I find amongst ye analtar with this inscription:

  TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.

  Ye worship in ignorance the same Deity I serve. To you unknown till now, to you be it now revealed."

  'Then declared that solemn man how this great Maker of all things, whohad appointed unto man his several tribes and his various homes--theLord of earth and the universal heaven, dwelt not in temples made withhands; that His presence, His spirit, were in the air we breathed--ourlife and our being were with Him. "Think you," he cried, "that theInvisible is like your statues of gold and marble? Think you that Heneedeth sacrifice from you: He who made heaven and earth?" Then spoke heof fearful and coming times, of the end of the world, of a second risingof the dead, whereof an assurance had been given to man in theresurrection of the mighty Being whose religion he came to preach.

  'When he thus spoke, the long-pent murmur went forth, and thephilosophers that were mingled with the people, muttered their sagecontempt; there might you have seen the chilling frown of the Stoic, andthe Cynic's sneer; and the Epicurean, who believeth not even in our ownElysium, muttered a pleasant jest, and swept laughing through the crowd:but the deep heart of the people was touched and thrilled; and theytrembled, though they knew not why, for verily the stranger had thevoice and majesty of a man to whom "The Unknown God" had committed thepreaching of His faith.'

  Ione listened with wrapt attention, and the serious and earnest mannerof the narrator betrayed the impression that he himself had receivedfrom one who had been amongst the audience that on the hill of theheathen Mars had heard the first tidings of the word of Christ!