The Silver Chalice (20 page)

Basil sighed with relief. “Then we are over the worst.”

“I hear,” said Benjie, eying him closely, “that Ananias is taking a
very
great interest in the head of Paul. I am not sure we are over the worst.” He paused at the door to say, “Simon the Magician will make an appearance in the city within a few days. Ananias has given his consent and has even agreed to let him use Herod’s Gymnasium. These are indeed strange times, young artist.”

After two days spent in the gloom of his sanctuary the spirits of the prisoner in that dark corner of the warehouse reached a low ebb. The air became heavy and the flicker of light in the pewter lamp made his eyes ache. He could not work and he could not sleep; nor after the second day could he any longer control his thoughts. He paced about in the darkness, his arms locked behind his back. Four steps would take him from one wall to the opposite one, and he began to understand the wild longings and the despair of a caged animal. His head throbbed continuously.

A plan for the silver framework had already taken shape in his mind. He would design an open scroll of grapevines into which the figures would be introduced, as well as small objects symbolic of the times and of the individual lives of the chosen twelve. The base would be a lotus blossom with two rows of petals. He could see this clearly in his mind and at intervals his fingers felt the urge to get started. To his dismay, however, he found himself unable to concentrate for any length of time. Other thoughts would come unbidden to fill his mind.

On the third night he had a dream. At the time he was not sure it was a dream because it seemed too real; the conviction of its unreality came to him later. He was lying on his couch and the light in the lamp had guttered down so low that most of the room was in shadow. He became
aware with a start of surprise and fear that Ignatius was in the room and staring at him with hollow and sorrowful eyes.

“Father!” he cried, sitting up in his nakedness on the edge of the bed. He wanted to tell this visitor from beyond the grave that he had been despoiled, that the thieving Linus had robbed him of his inheritance. Something in the steady gaze with which his father was regarding him was proof, however, that this was not necessary.

“My son,” said the spirit of the man who had been the great merchant prince of Antioch, “I have come to beg a favor of you.”

Basil felt a cold chill pass over him. His midnight visitor seemed hazy of outline and lacking in substance. There was a weariness about him that carried no hint of everlasting content.

Ignatius continued speaking slowly and solemnly. “You must win back the fortune that you carelessly allowed my brother to steal from you, the fortune I made by a lifetime of toil and which he is now using to such corrupt purposes. It must come back to you so that it can be used as I intended.” The visitor gave vent to a lugubrious sigh. “I am very unhappy, my son. I have not found favor because of the kind of life I lived. I am judged to have been grasping and unfair in my dealings with other men. It is held against me that I was a hard taskmaster to my slaves. There is one point in my favor, and one only, the purpose to which I desired my wealth put. Because of this I have not yet been wholly condemned. I am allowed to remain in the House of Suspended Judgment. The sheet they keep on Ignatius, oil merchant of Antioch, can be balanced in his favor only if you do as I bid you; if you get back what I left and spend it as I desired.”

The eyes of the pale visitor were fixed on Basil with so much love mingled with supplication that the latter felt an eagerness to do what he could about the adverse balance sheet. “Father,” he said, “I am going to see Kester of Zanthus as soon as I reach Rome.”

The spirit nodded. “I know about your plans. I may tell you, my son, that Kester is an honest man. I can see into his mind and I know he remembers everything that happened on the day of your adoption. But he is an old man. I have been admitted to the house far beyond the skies above us where the sands run in the hourglasses, and there is little left in the one that bears the name of Kester of Zanthus. Basil, Basil, you must see him at once or it will be too late.”

Basil was convinced now that it was not a dream, that it was really his father who had come into the room. He rose from his couch.

“Do not come too close!” exclaimed Ignatius. “It—it is not allowed.”

“Father, I must explain,” said Basil. “I want to do as you command me, but there is a difficulty. I have another task to perform and I am told I must attend to it first. It will take me to Rome, and there I shall see Kester. I shall then return to Antioch and use what he has told me to dispossess Linus. But all this will require much time.”

Ignatius sighed deeply and gave his head a shake. “I know about the other task. It is allowed us in the House of Suspended Judgment to see and hear what goes on in the world. At this moment we are watching three wars, a king dying of poison administered by his favorite wife, an earthquake in Seen that is burying cities and changing the shape of an empire. But all of us know that what you are doing is of greater importance than everything else that is happening in the world. If you succeed, there will be great rewards for you. But will that help me? No, Basil, not if the sands run out in the hourglass of Kester before you get to Rome.”

Basil had been aware from the first that they were not alone in the room, that someone else was present who could not be seen. At this point a voice joined in the conversation, a sharp and acid voice. It seemed to come from behind him, which was impossible because his couch was against the wall. It even seemed to him that the voice proceeded from the back of his own mind.

“Ignatius, you must not count on this ungrateful son,” said the unfriendly voice. “He is a frail reed to lean upon. How do I know?” There was a laugh at this point, a bitter and scornful laugh. “I know because I live with him. I dwell inside him. I know everything that passes in his mind.”

“Who are you and why do you speak in this way?” demanded Ignatius, looking about him to locate the owner of the voice, and failing to do so.

“Who am I? I am nothing now, no more than an evil spirit. Once I was a man of substance and wealth as you were, Ignatius of Antioch. My name was Claudius and I traded in naval stores at Joppa. I was not honest in my dealings and sometimes I sent ships out with bad food and inadequate supplies. Because of this I, too, failed to find favor when I reached the house where you stay. But now I want to explain to you that this son you adopted is a weakling and that he has no stomach for the kind of revenge a proper man would seek. He does not believe that an eye must be demanded for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. This is because he is becoming
a Christian. He does not know this himself, not yet. But I, who dwell in his brain, know it.”

“A Christian?” Ignatius seemed to have doubts on this point.

“Yes. They are all Christian in this house. They are followers of the Nazarene—and they are striving to win your son over. He has been so far persuaded that now his thoughts are full of tenderness and love instead of plans for his revenge on Linus. If you were to slap him on one cheek, what would he do? He would turn the other cheek.

“You asked who I am and so I must tell you more about myself. Mine is the kind of voice you will hear coming out of clouds and thickets and from mouths such as this. I go about doing evil. It is not that I always enjoy this duty that has been imposed upon me. It is a hard thing for a soul, which has lived in the physical comfort of a body, to find itself condemned to wander in the winds and the cold of space. There are many of us and sometimes, because of our mutual need, we flock together. I cannot explain why it is, but we gather in the most dolorous of places. At the dumps, where we cluster over heaps of fish scales and rotting bones and we are shoved about by snarling, sniffling dogs. Or we congregate outside the city walls after the gates have been closed for the night. There is no place more mournful than this; with the wailing of lepers and the complaining of travelers who have not arrived in time to be admitted as they shiver in their cloaks, and with the donkeys staked out where there is no grass to crop, and the wind whipping back and forth with the whimper of the lost souls on it.”

The face of Ignatius wore a puzzled frown. “There is so little time for us to talk,” he complained. “And this voice goes on and on. Will it never stop?”

The voice of the lost soul had no intention of stopping. “Even when we succeed in getting inside a living body, we are not very content. We are all people who have sinned greatly and we have no patience with the incitements of little minds to poor little wrongdoings. How would that magnificently wicked queen Jezebel enjoy living in the sour mind of a tattling, nagging woman? How would Herod, the greatest sinner of all, bear the stupidities of a dull, grasping merchant with no thought beside the price of dried fish?”

The evil spirit proceeded then to talk of its own experiences with the relish of one who has long been denied the sweetness of an audience. “I took possession of this young man when he was sold as a slave. His mind was then of the kind one could enjoy sharing. It was filled with dark
thoughts of revenge. I fed these thoughts.
Aiy
, it was exhilarating!

“But when we reached Jerusalem I was conscious of an immediate change. He stopped listening to me. Instead he was listening to the little granddaughter. His mind became soft and almost involved in the sickening throes of young love. How could I, a thoroughly bitter spirit, be contented in a mind filled with the honey of sweet thoughts?”

“Is there to be no end to this?” asked Ignatius in a despairing voice.

“I have said my say,” declared the voice.

Basil fell back into sounder sleep at this point. When he wakened in the morning he remembered everything that had been said and he was certain it had been a dream. Later he began to wonder. He felt depressed in mood and irritable. He criticized without just cause the servant who brought him his morning meal, and when he fell to his pacing back and forth his mind was filled with an unaccustomed bitterness toward those who had abandoned him to such discomfort. He had never been like this before, and at one point he checked himself in his stride and asked aloud, “Can it be that there
was
a Claudius of Joppa and that he has taken possession of my mind?”

Later in the day something happened that convinced him it had not been a dream. He had seated himself at his table for the purpose of putting some finishing touches to a bust of Luke that he had been making from memory. It had been a labor of love and he felt he had been more successful with it than with any of the others. Every facial characteristic of the kindly physician had been faithfully recorded, every hollow and fullness, every wrinkle. He looked at it now, however, with a critical viewpoint and decided that it had one fault.

“The eyes are a shade too small,” he said to himself.

In these lands where men’s eyes narrowed to slits in the fierce light of the sun and were subject to many serious ailments as a result of exposure to light and heat and dust, the Greek people enjoyed a degree of immunity not granted to any other race. They were sometimes called Those Who See Much. Luke had eyes of a particularly generous size. Convinced that he had not done justice to his benefactor in this respect, Basil set to work to make the eyes larger. It was a difficult correction, but he began to feel as the work progressed that he was succeeding.

His mind in the meantime began to wander. It went back to the dream of the night before and finally came to rest on Linus. A picture of the usurper drove everything else out; Linus in rich robes, fat of body and smug of face, sitting in the offices of the white palace and issuing orders
to the men who had once worked for Ignatius. A black hatred boiled up inside Basil. The voice that had spoken last night was right. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth! What joy there would be in taking the throat of his father’s brother in his hands and squeezing the life out of him!

In response to this inner impulse, his fingers dug deeply into the damp clay. The face of Luke vanished under the savage pressure. In the fraction of a second the loving labor of days was reduced to a formless mass.

Seeing what he had done, Basil placed the clay on the table in front of him and gazed in horrified silence at the hands that had committed this act of vandalism.

“It was not a dream after all!” he said to himself. “It was real. This happened. There is a spirit inside me. I heard it speak last night. And now it has done this! It took control of my hands and caused me to destroy my own work.”

A cold tremor of fear passed over him. He got to his feet with an instinctive desire to run away. Then he realized that this was impossible; he could not run away from himself.

“What am I to do?” he asked aloud. “How am I to go on working since I can no longer control my hands?”

A sense of impending failure took possession of him. He would not be able to make the silver Chalice. Getting to his feet, he began to pace about the restricted space of the room in a spirit of desperation.

“I am sure of it,” he said to himself again and again. “An evil spirit has taken possession of me! How am I to get rid of this demon inside my mind?”

Summoned by special messenger, Luke arrived at the house of Joseph early the next morning. It was apparent at once that a crisis had arisen. The hall before Joseph’s room was filled with his people, the men silent and depressed, the women with drawn faces and eyes red from weeping.

“Did you hear the dogs in the outer court baying last night?” asked one man of those about him.

“Mine was crawling on his belly,” contributed another. “It is a sign.”

Aaron emerged at this moment from the door of his father’s room. He was followed by the three most prominent medical men of Jerusalem, all wearing expressions which gave little promise or hope. They were
greeted by a respectful clamor of questions. How was the master now? Would he survive this new attack? He had survived so many in the past, the good old master, that surely the dread hand would be stayed another time!