“I must go with you.”
“No, I go alone. You might incur danger where I am safe. After all, I am a woman. … And, fierce as they are, they will not dare to harm me.”
The old man shook his head.
“Look now,” she said smilingly, laying her hands on his shoulders, and looking into his face. … “You tell me that I am beautiful, you know; and beauty will tame the lion. Do you not think that this face might disarm even a monk?”
And she laughed and blushed so sweetly, that the old man forgot his fears, as she intended that he should, and kissed her and went his way for the time being, to command all manner of hospitalities to the soldiers, whom he prudently determined to keep in his house as long as he could make them stay there; in pursuance of which wise purpose he contrived not to see a great deal of pleasant flirtation between his valiant defenders and Hypatia’s maids, who, by no means so prudish as their mistress, welcomed as a rare boon from heaven an afternoon’s chat with twenty tall men of war.
So they jested and laughed below, while old Theon, having brought out the very best old wine, and actually proposed in person, by way of mending matters, the health of the Emperor of Africa, locked himself into the library, and comforted his troubled soul with a tough problem of astronomy, which had been haunting him the whole day, even in the theatre itself. But Hypatia sat still in her chamber, her face buried in her hands, her heart full of many thoughts; her eyes of tears. She had smiled away her father’s fears; she could not smile away her own.
She felt, she hardly knew why, but she felt as clearly as if a god had proclaimed it to her bodily ears, that the crisis of her life was come: that her political and active career was over, and that she must now be content to be for herself, and in herself alone, all that she was, or might become. The world might be regenerated: but not in her day;—the gods restored; but not by her. It was a fearful discovery, and yet hardly a discovery. Her heart had told her for years that she was hoping against hope—that she was struggling against a stream too mighty for her. And now the moment had come when she must either be swept helpless down the current, or, by one desperate effort, win firm land, and let the tide roll on its own way henceforth. … Its own way? … Not the way of the gods, at least; for it was sweeping their names from off the earth. What if they did not care to be known? What if they were weary of worship and reverence from mortal men, and, self-sufficing in their own perfect bliss, recked nothing for the weal or woe of earth? Must it not be so? Had she not proof of it in everything which she beheld? What did Isis care for her Alexandria? What did Athens care for her Athens? … And yet Homer and Hesiod, and those old Orphic singers, were of another mind. … Whence got they that strange fancy of gods counselling, warring, intermarrying, with mankind, as with some kindred tribe?
“Zeus, father of gods and men. …” Those were words of hope and comfort. … But were they true? Father of men? Impossible!—not father of Pelagia, surely. Not father of the base, the foul, the ignorant. … Father of heroic souls, only, the poets must have meant. … But where were the heroic souls now? Was she one? If so, why was she deserted by the upper powers in her utter need? Was the heroic race indeed extinct? Was she merely assuming, in her self-conceit, an honour to which she had no claim? Or was it all a dream of these old singers? Had they, as some bold philosophers had said, invented gods in their own likeness, and palmed off on the awe and admiration of men their own fair phantoms? … It must be so. If there were gods, to know them was the highest bliss of man. Then would they not teach men of themselves, unveil their own loveliness to a chosen few, even for the sake of their own honour, if not, as she had dreamed once, from love to those who bore a kindred flame to theirs? … What if there were no gods? What if the stream of fate, which was sweeping away their names; were the only real power? What if that old Pyrrhonic notion were the true solution of the problem of the Universe? What if there were no centre, no order, no rest, no goal—but only a perpetual flux, a down-rushing change? And before her dizzying brain and heart arose that awful vision of Lucretius, of the homeless Universe falling, falling, falling, forever from nowhence toward nowhither through the unending ages, by causeless and unceasing gravitation, while the changes and efforts of all mortal things were but the jostling of the dust-atoms amid the everlasting storm. …
It could not be! There was a truth, a virtue, a beauty, a nobleness, which could never change, but which were absolute, the same forever. The God-given instinct of her woman’s heart rebelled against her intellect, and, in the name of God, denied its lie. … Yes—there was virtue, beauty. … And yet—might not they, too, be accidents of that enchantment, which man calls mortal life; temporary and mutable accidents of consciousness; brilliant sparks, struck out by the clashing of the dust-atoms? Who could tell?
There were those once who could tell. Did not Plotinus speak of a direct mystic intuition of the Deity, an enthusiasm without passion, a still intoxication of the soul, in which she rose above life, thought, reason, herself, to that which she contemplated, the absolute
