'Who (it said) is my companion in this awful hour? Athenian Glaucus, it is thou?'
'So, indeed, they called me in mine hour of fortune: they may have other names for me now. And thy name, stranger?'
'Is Olinthus, thy co-mate in the prison as the trial.'
'What! he whom they call the Atheist? Is it the injustice of men that hath taught thee to deny the providence of the gods?'
'Alas!' answered Olinthus: 'thou, not I, art the true Atheist, for thou deniest the sole true God--the Unknown One--to whom thy Athenian fathers erected an altar. It is in this hour that I know my God. He is with me in the dungeon; His smile penetrates the darkness; on the eve of death my heart whispers immortality, and earth recedes from me but to bring the weary soul nearer unto heaven.'
'Tell me,' said Glaucus, abruptly, 'did I not hear thy name coupled with that of Apaecides in my trial? Dost thou believe me guilty?'
'God alone reads the heart! but my suspicion rested not upon thee.'
'On whom then?'
'Thy accuser, Arbaces.'
'Ha! thou cheerest me: and wherefore?'
'Because I know the man's evil breast, and he had cause to fear him who is now dead.'
With that, Olinthus proceeded to inform Glaucus of those details which the reader already knows, the conversion of Apaecides, the plan they had proposed for the detection of the impostures of the Egyptian upon the youthful weakness of the proselyte. 'Therefore,' concluded Olinthus, 'had the deceased encountered Arbaces, reviled his treasons, and threatened detection, the place, the hour, might have favored the wrath of the Egyptian, and passion and craft alike dictated the fatal blow.'
'It must have been so!' cried Glaucus, joyfully. 'I am happy.'
'Yet what, O unfortunate! avails to thee now the discovery? Thou art condemned and fated; and in thine innocence thou wilt perish.'
'But I shall know myself guiltless; and in my mysterious madness I had fearful, though momentary, doubts. Yet tell me, man of a strange creed, thinkest thou that for small errors, or for ancestral faults, we are for ever abandoned and accursed by the powers above, whatever name thou allottest to them?'
'God is just, and abandons not His creatures for their mere human frailty.
God is merciful, and curses none but the wicked who repent not.'
'Yet it seemeth to me as if, in the divine anger, I had been smitten by a sudden madness, a supernatural and solemn frenzy, wrought not by human means.'
'There are demons on earth,' answered the Nazarene, fearfully, 'as well as there are God and His Son in heaven; and since thou acknowledgest not the last, the first may have had power over thee.'
Glaucus did not reply, and there was a silence for some minutes. At length the Athenian said, in a changed, and soft, and half-hesitating voice.
'Christian, believest thou, among the doctrines of thy creed, that the dead live again--that they who have loved here are united hereafter--that beyond the grave our good name shines pure from the mortal mists that unjustly dim it in the gross-eyed world--and that the streams which are divided by the desert and the rock meet in the solemn Hades, and flow once more into one?'
'Believe I that, O Athenian No, I do not believe--I know! and it is that beautiful and blessed assurance which supports me now. O Cyllene!' continued Olinthus, passionately, 'bride of my heart! torn from me in the first month of our nuptials,' shall I not see thee yet, and ere many days be past? Welcome, welcome death, that will bring me to heaven and thee!'
There was something in this sudden burst of human affection which struck a kindred chord in the soul of the Greek. He felt, for the first time, a sympathy greater than mere affliction between him and his companion. He crept nearer towards Olinthus; for the Italians, fierce in some points, were not unnecessarily cruel in others; they spared the separate cell and the superfluous chain, and allowed the victims of the arena the sad comfort of such freedom and such companionship as the prison would afford.
'Yes,' continued the Christian, with holy fervor, 'the immortality of the soul--the resurrection--the reunion of the dead--is the great principle of our creed--the great truth a God suffered death itself to attest and proclaim. No fabled Elysium--no poetic Orcus--but a pure and radiant heritage of heaven itself, is the portion of the good.'
'Tell me, then, thy doctrines, and expound to me thy hopes,' said Glaucus, earnestly.
Olinthus was not slow to obey that prayer; and there--as oftentimes in the early ages of the Christian creed--it was in the darkness of the dungeon, and over the approach of death, that the dawning Gospel shed its soft and consecrating rays.
