Hypatia

then with herself, for being weak enough to think of her. Was it not positive defilement of her mind to be haunted by the image of so defiled a being? She would purify her thoughts by prayer and meditation. But to whom of all the gods should she address herself? To her chosen favourite, Athene? She who had promised to be present at that spectacle? Oh, how weak she had been to yield! And yet she had been snared into it. Snared⁠—there was no doubt of it⁠—by the very man whom she had fancied that she could guide and mould to her own purposes. He had guided and moulded her now against her self-respect, her compassion, her innate sense of right. Already she was his tool. True, she had submitted to be so for a great purpose. But suppose she had to submit again hereafter⁠—always henceforth? And what made the thought more poignant was, her knowledge that he was right; that he knew what to do, and how to do it. She could not help admiring him for his address, his quickness, his clear practical insight: and yet she despised, mistrusted, all but hated him. But what if his were the very qualities which were destined to succeed? What if her purer and loftier aims, her resolutions⁠—now, alas! broken⁠—never to act but on the deepest and holiest principles and by the most sacred means, were destined never to exert themselves in practice, except conjointly with miserable stratagems and cajoleries such as these? What if statecrafts and not philosophy and religion, were the appointed rulers of mankind? Hideous thought! And yet⁠—she who had all her life tried to be self-dependent, originative, to face and crush the hostile mob of circumstance and custom, and do battle single-handed with Christianity and a fallen age⁠—how was it that in her first important and critical opportunity of action she had been dumb, irresolute, passive, the victim, at last, of the very corruption which she was to exterminate? She did not know yet that those who have no other means for regenerating a corrupted time than dogmatic pedantries concerning the dead and unreturning past, must end, in practice, by borrowing insincerely, and using clumsily, the very weapons of that novel age which they deprecate, and “sewing new cloth into old garments,” till the rent become patent and incurable. But in the meanwhile, such meditations as these drove from her mind for that day both Athene, and the ode, and philosophy, and all things but⁠—Pelagia the wanton.

In the meanwhile, Alexandrian politics flowed onward in their usual pure and quiet course. The public buildings were placarded with the news of Heraclian’s victory; and groups of loungers expressed, loudly enough, their utter indifference as to who might rule at Rome⁠—or even at Byzantium. Let Heraclian or Honorius be emperor, the capitals must be fed; and while the Alexandrian wheat-trade was uninjured, what matter who received the tribute? Certainly, as some friends of Orestes found means to suggest, it might not be a bad thing for Egypt, if she could keep the tribute in her own treasury, instead of sending it to Rome without any adequate return, save the presence of an expensive army.⁠ ⁠… Alexandria had been once the metropolis of an independent empire.⁠ ⁠… Why not again? Then came enormous largesses of corn, proving, more satisfactorily to the mob than to the shipowners, that Egyptian wheat was better employed at home than abroad. Nay, there were even rumours of a general amnesty for all prisoners; and as, of course, every evildoer had a kind of friend, who considered him an injured martyr, all parties were well content, on their own accounts at least, with such a move.

And so Orestes’s bubble swelled, and grew, and glittered every day with fresh prismatic radiance; while Hypatia sat at home, with a heavy heart, writing her ode to Venus Urania, and submitting to Orestes’s daily visits.

One cloud, indeed, not without squalls of wind and rain, disfigured that sky which the Prefect had invested with such serenity by the simple expedient, well known to politicians, of painting it bright blue, since it would not assume that colour of its own accord. For, a day or two after Ammonius’s execution, the Prefect’s guards informed him that the corpse of the crucified man, with the cross on which it hung, had vanished. The Nitrian monks had come down in a body, and carried them off before the very eyes of the sentinels. Orestes knew well enough that the fellows must have been bribed to allow the theft; but he dare not say so to men on whose good humour his very life might depend; so, stomaching the affront as best he could, he vowed fresh vengeance against Cyril, and went on his way. But, behold!⁠—within four-and-twenty hours of the theft, a procession of all the rascality, followed by all the piety, of Alexandria⁠—monks from Nitria counted by the thousand⁠—priests, deacons, archdeacons, Cyril himself, in full pontificals, and borne aloft in the midst, upon a splendid bier, the missing corpse, its nail-pierced hands and feet left uncovered for the pitying gaze of the Church.

Under the very palace windows, from which Orestes found it expedient to retire for the time being, out upon the quays, and up the steps of the Caesareum, defiled that new portent; and in another half-hour a servant entered, breathlessly, to inform the shepherd of people that his victim was lying in state in the centre of the nave, a martyr duly canonised⁠—Ammonius now no more, but henceforth Thaumasius the Wonderful, on whose heroic virtues and more heroic faithfulness unto the death, Cyril was already descanting from the pulpit, amid thunders of applause at every allusion to Sisera at the brook Kishon, Sennacherib in the house of Nisroch, and the rest of the princes of this world who come to nought.

Here was a storm! To order a cohort to enter the church and bring away the body was easy enough: to make them do it,