Laodice halted abruptly in her appeal, breathless with feeling.
The amusement had gone out of his face and his expression was one of
mingled discomfort and surprise at her speech.
"Since you are a thinking woman," he answered, "I must answer you
soberly. Even I, expecting disorder and uproar in Jerusalem, when I
came from Ephesus, was not prepared for this chaos! Never was such a
time! Order is not possible in this extreme. It is unthinkable.
Nothing human can save Jerusalem!"
She laid her hand upon him.
"Nothing human!" she repeated quickly. "Seest not that this is the
time of the Messiah? Be ready to be helped of God!"
Philadelphus drew away from her uneasily and looked at her from under
lowered brows.
"They say," he said in a suppressed voice, as fearing his own words,
"that He has come and gone!"
She looked at him blankly. He was glad he had thought of this; it
would divert her from a discourse momently growing unpleasant for him.
And yet he was afraid of the thing he had said.
"What dost thou say?" she asked.
"He is come and gone--they say."
"Come and gone!"
He nodded irritably. It made him nervous to dwell on the subject.
"Who say?" she demanded.
"Many! Many!" he whispered.
"It is not--do you believe it?" she persisted, with strange terror
waiting upon his answer. He moved uneasily but he answered the truth.
It was superstition in him that spoke.
"Something in me says it is true," Philadelphus whispered.
She stood transfixed; then all her horror rose in her and cried out
against the story.
"It can not be!" she cried. "See the misery and oppression, here,
tenfold! Nothing has been done! Nobody heard of Him! He could not
fail! What a blasphemy, what a travesty on His Word, to come and
fulfil it not and go hence unnoticed! It can not be!"
"But, but--" he protested, somehow terrified by her denial, "only you
have not heard. Everywhere are those who believe it and I saw--I
saw--"
The growing violence of dissent on her face urged him to speak what
his shamed and guilty tongue hesitated to pronounce.
"I saw in Ephesus one who saw Him; I saw in Patmos one who had
reclined on His breast!"
"A--a--woman?" she whispered.
"No! No!" he returned in a panic. "A man, a prisoner, old and white
and terrible! But it was in his youth! He told me! And the one in
Ephesus, a red-beard, hunchbacked and half-blind and even more
terrible than the first! He saw Him after He was dead!"
"Dead!" Her lips shaped the word.
"They--yes! He was crucified!"
Her lips parted as if to speak the word, but her mind failed to grasp
it certainly. She stood moveless in an actual pain of horror.