"Let him come!" he said between his teeth. "Let him come!"
"Wait," she repeated. "Thou hast built gigantically on no foundation. Let something happen. And if I am pleased to follow thy plans, I may; but be assured if I am not, I will not. My debt to thee is less than thy demands, Avillus."
She arose and put on her mantle, while he stood watching her every movement.
"I shall wait," he said presently, "only a little time."
She made a motion of impatience and withdrew from the atrium.
He stood motionless for a long time; then he called his atriensis.
"Send hither the chief apparitor," he said.
The captain of the proconsul's personal guard appeared and saluted. Flaccus, in the meantime, had searched through the documents on the floor and by the dim light identified one.
"Take this," he said, handing the apparitor the parchment, "and make search for the man herein described. Seek him in Ptolemais, wherever a Nazarene warren hides, in Jerusalem, in Alexandria--meet every incoming ship, spend the half of my fortune, wear out my army--but find him, or lose thy life!"
The chief apparitor looked unflinching into the proconsul's gray-brown eyes.
The proconsul waved his hand and the soldier withdrew.
Meanwhile Marsyas lay on his straw pallet at the house of Peter, the usurer, in Ptolemais, night after night and made calculation.
By fair winds, Agrippa should reach Alexandria in so many days. Allowing time to begin and complete the negotiations for a loan, so many more days should elapse. Then the same number with a few allowed for foul weather would be required to return to Ptolemais. About such a day, so many weeks hence, he told himself he should be ransomed.
Six weeks is a long time for a free man to be enslaved. He sighed and turned again on his pallet and trusted in the God who does not forget prayers.
It was a strange, sordid biding of time for Marsyas. The man he served was the first of the kind he had ever known. The ascetic refinement of the white old Essene, the simple purity of Stephen, the polished rigor of the Pharisee Saul, the naïve sophistication of the Romanized Herod had constituted his social horizon, and he had come to believe that the world's manner was either cultured or simple.