Hypatia - Charles Kingsley (best books to read for students txt) 📗

can argue. To me such questions are an unknown land.’

‘Well …. Perhaps I may be tempted to do even that. At least a thoroughly converted philosopher—for poor dear Synesius is half heathen still, I often fancy, and hankers after the wisdom of the Egyptian—will be a curious sight; and to talk with so famous and so learned a man would always be a pleasure; but to argue with him, or any other human being, none whatsoever.’

‘Why, then?’

‘My dear sir, I am sick of syllogisms, and probabilities, and pros and contras. What do I care if, on weighing both sides, the nineteen pounds weight of questionable arguments against, are overbalanced by the twenty pounds weight of equally questionable arguments for? Do you not see that my belief of the victorious proposition will be proportioned to the one over-balancing pound only, while the whole other nineteen will go for nothing?’

‘I really do not.’

‘Happy are you, then. I do, from many a sad experience. No, my worthy sir. I want a faith past arguments; one which, whether I can prove it or not to the satisfaction of the lawyers, I believe to my own satisfaction, and act on it as undoubtingly and unreasoningly as I do upon my own newly-rediscovered personal identity. I don’t want to possess a faith. I want a faith which will possess me. And if I ever arrived at such a one, believe me, it would be by some such practical demonstration as this very tent has given me.’

‘This tent?’

‘Yes, sir, this tent; within which I have seen you and your children lead a life of deeds as new to me the Jew, as they would be to Hypatia the Gentile. I have watched you for many a day, and not in vain. When I saw you, an experienced officer, encumber your flight with wounded men, I was only surprised. But since I have seen you and your daughter, and, strangest of all, your gay young Alcibiades of a son, starving yourselves to feed those poor ruffians— performing for them, day and night, the offices of menial slaves— comforting them, as no man ever comforted me—blaming no one but yourselves, caring for every one but yourselves, sacrificing nothing but yourselves; and all this without hope of fame or reward, or dream of appeasing the wrath of any god or goddess, but simply because you thought it right …. When I saw that, sir, and more which I have seen; and when, reading in this book here, I found most unexpectedly those very grand moral rules which you were practising, seeming to spring unconsciously, as natural results, from the great thoughts, true or false, which had preceded them; then, sir, I began to suspect that the creed which could produce such deeds as I have watched within the last few days, might have on its side not merely a slight preponderance of probabilities, but what the Jews used once to call, when we believed in it—or in anything—the mighty power of God.’

And as he spoke, he looked into the Prefect’s face with the look of a man wrestling in some deadly struggle; so intense and terrible was the earnestness of his eye, that even the old soldier shrank before it.

‘And therefore,’ he went on, ‘therefore, sir, beware of your own actions, and of your children’s. If, by any folly or baseness, such as I have seen in every human being whom I ever met as yet upon this accursed stage of fools, you shall crush my new-budding hope that there is something somewhere which will make me what I know that I ought to be, and can be—If you shall crush that, I say, by any misdoing of yours, you had better have been the murderer of my firstborn; with such a hate—a hate which Jews alone can feel—will I hate you and yours.’

‘God help us and strengthen us!‘said the old warrior in a tone of noble humility.

‘And now,’ said Raphael, glad to change the subject, after this unwonted outburst, ‘we must once more seriously consider whether it is wise to hold on our present course. If you return to Carthage, or to Hippo—’

‘I shall be beheaded.’

‘Most assuredly. And how much soever you may consider such an event a gain to yourself, yet for the sake of your son and your daughter—

‘

‘My dear sir,’ interrupted the Prefect, ‘you mean kindly. But do not, do not tempt me. By the Count’s side I have fought for thirty years, and by his side I will die, as I deserve.’

‘Victorius! Victoria!’ cried Raphael; ‘help me! Your father,’ he went on, as they came out from the tent, ‘is still decided on losing his own head, and throwing away ours, by going to Carthage.’

‘For my sake—for our sakes—father!’ cried Victoria, clinging to him.

‘And for my sake, also, most excellent sir,’ said Raphael, smiling quietly. ‘I have no wish to be so uncourteous as to urge any help which I may have seemed to afford you. But I hope that you will recollect that I have a life to lose, and that it is hardly fair of you to imperil it as you intend to do. If you could help or save Heraclian, I should be dumb at once. But now, for a mere point of honour to destroy fifty good soldiers, who know not their right hands from their left—Shall I ask their opinion?’

‘Will you raise a mutiny against me, sir?’ asked the old man sternly.

‘Why not mutiny against Philip drunk, in behalf of Philip sober? But really, I will obey you …. only you must obey us …. What is Hesiod’s definition of the man who will neither counsel himself nor be counselled by his friends? .... Have you no trusty acquaintances in Cyrenaica, for instance?’

The Prefect was silent.

‘Oh, hear us, my father! Why not go to Euodius? He is your old comrade—a well-wisher, too, to this …. this expedition …. And recollect, Augustine must be there now. He was about to sail for Berenice, in order to consult Synesius and the Pentapolitan bishops, when we left Carthage.’

And at the name of Augustine the old man paused.

‘Augustine will be there; true. And this our friend must meet him. And thus at least I should have his advice. If he thinks it my duty to return to Carthage, I can but do so, after all. But the soldiers!’

‘Excellent sir,’ said Raphael, ‘Synesius and the Pentapolitan landlords—who can hardly call their lives their own, thanks to the Moors—will be glad enough to feed and pay them, or any other brave fellows with arms in their hands, at this moment. And my friend Victorius, here, will enjoy, I do not doubt, a little wild campaigning against marauding blackamoors.’

The old man bowed silently. The battle was won.

The young tribune, who had been watching his father’s face with the most intense anxiety caught at the gesture, and hurrying forward, announced the change of plan to the soldiery. It was greeted with a shout of joy, and in another five minutes the sails were about, the rudder shifted, and the ship on her way towards the western point of Sicily, before a steady north-west breeze.

‘Ah!’ cried Victoria, delighted. ‘And now you will see Augustine! You must promise me to talk to him!’

‘This, at least, I will promise, that whatsoever the great sophist shall be pleased to say, shall meet with a patient hearing from a brother sophist. Do not be angry at the term. Recollect that I am somewhat tired, like my ancestor Solomon, of wisdom and wise men, having found it only too like madness and folly. And you cannot surely expect me to believe in man, while I do not yet believe in God?’

Victoria sighed. ‘I will not believe you. Why always pretend to be worse than you are?’

‘That kind souls like you may be spared the pain of finding me worse than I seem …. There, let us say no more; except that I heartily wish that you would hate me!’

‘Shall I try?’

‘That must be my work, I fear, not yours. However, I shall give you good cause enough before long’ doubt it not.’

Victoria sighed again, and retired into the tent to nurse the sick.

‘And now, sir,’ said the Prefect, turning to Raphael and his son; ‘do not mistake me. I may have been weak, as worn-out and hopeless men are wont to be; but do not think of me as one who has yielded to adversity in fear for his own safety. As God hears me, I desire nothing better than to die; and I only turn out of my course on the understanding that if Augustine so advise, my children hold me free to return to Carthage and meet my fate. All I pray for is, that my life may be spared until I can place my dear child in the safe shelter of a nunnery.’

‘A nunnery?’

‘Yes, indeed; I have intended ever since her birth to dedicate her to the service of God. And in such times as these, what better lot for a defenceless girl?’

‘Pardon me!’ said Raphael; ‘but I am too dull to comprehend what benefit or pleasure your Deity will derive from the celibacy of your daughter …. Except, indeed, on one supposition, which, as I have some faint remnants of reverence and decency reawakening in me just now, I must leave to be uttered only by the pure lips of sexless priests.’

‘You forget, sir, that you are speaking to a Christian.’

‘I assure you, no! I had certainly been forgetting it till the last two minutes, in your very pleasant and rational society. There is no danger henceforth of my making so silly a mistake.’

‘Sir!’ said the Prefect, reddening at the undisguised contempt of Raphael’s manner …. , ‘When you know a little more of St. Paul’s Epistles, you will cease to insult the opinions and feelings of those who obey them, by sacrificing their most precious treasures to God.’

‘Oh, it is Paul of Tarsus, then, who gives you the advice! I thank you for informing me of the fact; for it will save me the trouble of any future study of his works. Allow me, therefore, to return by your hands this manuscript of his with many thanks from me to that daughter of yours, by whose perpetual imprisonment you intend to give pleasure to your Deity. Henceforth the less communication which passes between me and any member of your family, the better.’ And he turned away.

‘But, my dear sir!’ said the honest soldier, really chagrined, ‘you must not!—we owe you too much, and love you too well, to part thus for the caprice of a moment. If any word of mine has offended you— forget it, and forgive me, I beseech you!’ and he caught both Raphael’s hands in his own.

‘My very dear sir,’ answered the Jew quietly; ‘let me ask the same forgiveness of you; and believe me, for the sake of past pleasant passages, I shall not forget my promise about the mortgage …. But-here we must part. To tell you the truth, I half an hour ago was fearfully near becoming neither more nor less than a Christian. I had actually deluded myself into the fancy that the Deity of the Galileans might be, after all, the God of our old Hebrew forefathers—of Adam and Eve, of Abraham and David, and of the rest who believed