The slaves slipped down upon their knees and began to groan together.  The silver coins on the lamp began to swing; the brass cyanthus which Amaryllis had recently drained of her last drink of wine moved gradually to the edge of the pedestal upon which she had placed it.

The dual nature of the uproar was now distinct; organized warfare and popular disaster at the same time.  The Roman was sweeping up the ancient ravine.  Jerusalem had fallen.

The gradual crescendo now attained deafening proportions; the hanging lamp increased its swing; the silver coins began to strike together with keen and exquisitely fine music.  Juventius the Swan, with his dim eyes filled with horror, was looking at them.  The peculiar desperate indifference of the wholly hopeless seized him.  His long white hands began to move with the motion of the lamp; the music of the meeting coins became regular; he caught the note, and mounting, with a bound, the rostrum that had been his Olympus all his life, began to sing.  The melody of his glorious voice struggled only a moment for supremacy with the uproar of imminent death and then his increasing exaltation gave him triumph.  The great hall shook with the magnificent power of his only song!

The Maccabee confronted Amaryllis, with fierce question in his eyes.  She pointed calmly at the heavy white curtain pulled to one side and caught on a bracket.  The brass wicket over the black mouth of the tunnel was wide.

Without a word, the Maccabee plunged into it and was swallowed up.

Amaryllis looked after him.

“And no farewell?” she said.

The thunder of assault began at her door.  Juventius sang it down.  The athlete and the girl crept toward the mouth of the black passage, wavered a moment and plunged in.  After them tumbled a confusion of artists and servants who were swallowed up, and the hall was filled only with music.

The woman by the lectern and the singer on the rostrum had chosen.  To live without beauty and to live without love were not possible to the one who had known beauty all his life, to the one who had learned love so late—­after she had been beggared of her dowry of purity.

There was hardly an appreciable interval between the time of the desertion of her artists and the thunder of assault at her door, but in that space there passed before Amaryllis that useless retrospect which is death’s recapitulation of the life it means to take.  And out of that long procession, she singled one conviction which made the step of the Roman on her threshold welcome.  It was an old, old moral, so old that it had never had weight with her, who believed it was time to reconstruct the whole artistic attitude of the world.

And that was why she waited impatiently at her doorway for death, which was a kinder thing than life.

Chapter XXIV

THE ROAD TO PELLA