Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face by Charles Kingsley (most popular novels of all time .TXT) 📕

‘To enchant you with it, to your ruin!’

‘Brute of a slave-dealer! you fancy every one as base as the poor wretches whom you buy and sell to shame, that you may make them as much the children of hell, if that be possible, as yourself!’

Miriam looked at him, her large black eyes widening and kindling. For an instant she felt for her poniard—and then burst into an agony of tears, hid her face in her withered hands, and rushed from the room, as a crash and shout below announced the bursting of the door.

‘There she goes with my jewels. And here come my guests, with the young monk at their head.—One rising when the other sets. A worthy pair of Dioscuri! Come, Bran!...Boys! Slaves! Where are you? Steal every one what he can lay his hands on, and run for your lives through the back gate.’

The slaves had obeyed him already. He walked smiling downstairs through utter solitude, and in the front passage met face to face the mob of monks, costermongers and dock-workers, fishwives and beggars, who were thronging up the narrow entry, and bursting into the doors right and left; and at their head, alas! the young monk who had just trampled the necklace into the mud...no other, in fact, than Philammon.

‘Welcome, my worthy guests! Enter, I beseech you, and fulfil, in your own peculiar way, the precepts which bid you not be over anxious for the good things of this life..For eating and drinking, my kitchen and cellar are at your service. For clothing, if any illustrious personage will do me the honour to change his holy rags with me, here are an Indian shawl-pelisse and a pair of silk trousers at his service. Perhaps you will accommodate me, my handsome young captain, choragus of this new school of the prophets?’

Philammon, who was the person addressed, tried to push by him contemptuously.

‘Allow me, sir. I lead the way. This dagger is poisoned,-a scratch and you are dead. This dog is of the true British breed; if she seizes you, red-hot iron will not loose her, till she hears the bone crack. If any one will change clothes with me, all I have is at your service. If not, the first that stirs is a dead man.’

There was no mistaking the quiet, high-bred determination of the speaker. Had he raged and blustered, Philammon could have met him on his own ground: but there was an easy self-possessed disdain about him, which utterly abashed the young monk, and abashed, too, the whole crowd of rascals at his heels.

‘I’ll change clothes with you, you Jewish dog!’ roared a dirty fellow out of the mob.

‘I am your eternal debtor. Let us step into this side room. Walk upstairs, my friends. Take care there, sir!—That porcelain, whole, is worth three thousand gold pieces: broken, it is not worth three pence. I leave it to your good sense to treat it accordingly. Now then, my friend!’ And in the midst of the raging vortex of plunderers, who were snatching up everything which they could carry away, and breaking everything which they could not, lie quietly divested himself of his finery, and put on the ragged cotton tunic, and battered straw hat, which the fellow handed over to him.

Philammon, who had had from the first no mind to plunder, stood watching Raphael with dumb wonder; and a shudder of regret, he knew not why, passed through him, as he Saw the mob tearing down pictures, and dashing statues to the ground. Heathen they were, doubtless; but still, the Nymphs and Venuses looked too lovely to be so brutally destroyed... There was something almost humanly pitiful in their poor broken arms and legs, as they lay about upon the pavement.... He laughed at himself for the notion; but he could not laugh it away.

Raphael seemed to think that he ought not to laugh it away; for he pointed to the fragments, and with a quaint look at the young monk—

‘Our nurses used to tell us, ‘“If you can’t make it, You ought not to break it.”’

‘I had no nurse,’ said Philammon.

‘Ah!—that accounts—for this and other things. Well,’ he went on, with the most provoking good-nature, ‘you are in a fair road, my handsome youth; I wish you joy of your fellow-workmen, and of your apprenticeship in the noble art of monkery. Riot and pillage, shrieking women and houseless children in your twentieth summer, are the sure path to a Saint-ship, such as Paul of Tarsus, who, with all his eccentricities, was a gentleman, certainly never contemplated. I have heard of Phoebus Apollo under many disguises, but this is the first time I ever saw him in the wolf’s hide.’

‘Or in the lion’s,’ said Philammon, trying in his shame to make a fine speech.

‘Like the Ass in the Fable. Farewell! Stand out of the way, friends! ‘Ware teeth and poison!’

And he disappeared among the crowd, who made way respectfully enough for his dagger and his brindled companion.