But, though the rulers and those in authority had set Herod up as their representative in power, they were not fond of him. So, when John the Baptist began to fulminate against him and his moral obliquities, and when the public journals began to publish these fulminations for general reading, Herod’s political friends rather enjoyed the situation. They laughed at him, and even jested with him about it. They knew that he was powerless to punish the preacher, for he did not dare to alienate the lower class that so largely helped to uphold him in power. His political friends knew that he must submit to whatever attacks were made against him, and they enjoyed his helplessness and his probable sufferings.
When he would drop into his club on his way home, he would perhaps be hailed with an inquiry as to whether he had seen the evening paper, and that there was lively reading in it. Another advised him to take the sheet home with him to his wife, and that she would be interested to see what was being said of her. A third opined the sauce would do instead of tobasco with her oysters. At these jocularities Herod would maybe laugh. Probably he did not much mind these attacks, nor the pseudo-witticisms with which he was favored, for he did not care a great deal about public opinion one way or the other.
But it was not so with the woman whom he called his wife. She writhed under the lash of the spoken words and the printed paragraphs with a feeling sometimes almost as of physical nausea.
She was writhing now, but silently, over the evening paper which she had brought in from the library and which she was just then reading. The butler came in and lit the lamp, but she did not look up from her paper; she was too intently absorbed with the pain she was inflicting upon herself to notice anything else.
Her daughter, Salome, sat at the window looking out into the dull twilight of the street. She sat with one foot on a hassock, her elbow upon her knee, and her chin resting upon the palm of her hand. She looked listless and bored as she sat staring out into the falling twilight. The two women were singularly alike, only that the dark, heavy beauty of the mother was merely brunette in the daughter; that the somewhat square face of the elder woman was oval in the younger; that the rouge of the woman’s face was the dusky red of nature in the girl’s cheeks.
The words Herodias was reading must have cut suddenly to a deeper nerve, for she drew a sharp breath that was almost articulate. Her white teeth clicked together. She made a sudden motion as though to crush the paper she held; then she went on reading again. The girl nodded and smiled recognition to some one passing along the gray twilight of the street. Then the smile slowly faded, and the listless look settled back upon her face again.
There was a sound of footsteps crossing the hall, and Herod himself came into the room. He was a rather stout, thick-set man of about forty or forty-five. He wore a long mustache, the beard beneath being closely clipped and trimmed to a point. The cut of the beard and hair gave his countenance an air of quality that was belied by his puffy, mottled cheeks and the thick, red, sensual lips. Herodias looked up at him as he came within the circle of light. “Did you see this?” she said, hoarsely, holding the paper out towards him. She pointed to the column she had been reading, and her fingers trembled with the intensity of her self-repression. The paper rustled nervously as she held it out.
“See what?” said Herod. “Oh, that! Yes, I saw that down at the club. What do you read it for if you don’t like it?”
“And do you mean to say you aren’t going to do anything to this cursed Baptist? What are the laws good for, anyhow?”
Herod grinned. “They’re good for nothing when an election’s only six months off.”
The woman tried to speak; she could not. “It’s a damned shame,” she cried out, at last, still in the same hoarse voice.
Salome turned her head. “Oh, mamma,” she said, “how awfully vulgar.”
The mother glared at the daughter. She looked as though she were about to speak, but she only said, “Pshaw!”
There was a minute or two of silence. Herod stood with his hands in his pockets. “Was Corry King here, do you know?” he said, at last.
Herodias shook her head. Then Herod turned away and walked across the room towards the library. Just as he was about to quit the room, Herodias spoke again. “Did you get that box for the opera to-night?”
He stopped at the door and turned. “Yes, I did,” he said.
“Did you leave orders for the carriage?”
“Yes; I ordered it for eight o’clock, sharp.” Then he went on out of the room.
III
THE PRIESTS AND THE LEVITES
MR. THEODORE CAIAPHAS was rector of the Church of the Advent. It was said of that church that when the congregation were all at the sanctuary and seated in their places the building contained a representation of capital equivalent to a billion dollars of wealth.
It is hardly necessary to describe the Church of the Advent, for nearly everybody knows of it; even those who do not live in the metropolis have seen pictures of it. It occupied, with the rectory, half a square of ground in one of the most valuable parts of the city. It was estimated that if the land on which it stood were covered all over with ten-dollar bills, an approximate value of the real estate would just about be represented. The church itself was an architectural triumph, within and without. It was built of white marble, carved elaborately and exquisitely; the four large windows cost it cannot be told how many thousands of dollars, and the interior decorations were all that art could make them. The church was connected with the rectory by a glazed cloister of exquisite proportions, and the rectory itself, retired well back from the street behind parti-colored beds of flowering plants, was in perfect keeping with the church. The great plate-glass windows looked out across the little lawn upon the busy street where the thunder of life was forever passing and repassing.
One time the Church of the Advent was in the upper part of the town; then the flood of business had risen to it, and finally overwhelmed it and its surroundings. At the time of this story the church looked down upon a tumult of passing life and the bells clashed out their chimes almost unheard in the roar that rose up from the stony streets below. At first the ceaseless, roaring thunder had been very disturbing to Dr. Caiaphas, but he became used to it so that he never noticed it, except to miss it in the stifled, leaden silence of the country during his vacation. The rectory was a very pleasant home, and almost any bright day one could see children playing on the lawn in front of the house (for Dr. Caiaphas had quite a large family), and occasionally the rector himself might have been seen pacing up and down the gravelled driveway–especially on a Saturday afternoon, when he was in the throes of composing his addresses for the morrow.
Dr. Caiaphas was a very notable man. He was a liberal and advanced reformer, not only in religious matters, but in political and social matters as well. Not only had he written a number of pamphlets attacking those lingering superstitions that had so long operated as a clog to check the church in its advance abreast of the progress of civilization, but he had, besides, written hundreds of open letters and papers and several magazine articles upon the social problems of the age–the labor question, the question of social vice, the pauper question, and other similar topics. His passion for attacking and reforming abuses led him even into politics. It was largely through his instrumentality that the committee had been appointed to investigate into the affairs of the police department, and great things had been looked for as the outcome.
When it is taken