Motion Picture Story Magazine (Feb 1914 - Sep 1916 (assorted issues))

INTO THE LION'S PIT 11 with the swift instinct of the animal, she scented danger to herself should Marius embrace this sect, with its teachings of an asceticism dangerously at variance with the warm throb of her pagan creed. Marius mused a moment. "It seems a thing men die for," he returned, "and men do not die, my Dacia, for petty things." "They do not know of the joys of life, these Christians," exclaimed the girl; "they have not known the wine of the grape and the revelry of the banquet-hall — and such loves as ours, Marius. It is for this that life was made. Have not the gods of Olympus taught us so, and surely you do not forsake them, too?" But Marius was silent. Red lips, dark eyes, throbbing flesh — these things had been his world, and he had found them good. But his heart had been touched by the sweet, Galilean Kingdom of God, and calling to that sleeping self were hints of the forest aisle and vestal fires, with strange, blue flames, and years that were lean of the wine-cup and debauch. And so, for the first time since she had touched her lips to his, Dacia found Marius unresponsive. Well she knew, fully had she been trained to a knowledge of the wealth of her white body, to the value of the fire of her caress, and the light in her eyes that maddened as it lured. Full of these things, the proud beauty rose in scorn and shame. "Let the unrepentant Magdalene go, my Marius," she sneered; "mayhap some virtuous Mary will fulfill my place." With the departure of Dacia from the banquet-hall and from his house, the vaulted chamber seemed, to Marius, to take on a new aspect. The dawn of a new day struggling faintly in from the colonnaded apertures touched, with a wan distaste, the wine-cups and other tokens of the night's high revelry, and Marius rose from his couch with a sudden knowledge that his battlefields had brought him only the indelible scars, and his amours an aftermath turned wormwood overnight. Christ had said to His disciples on the mount, "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you; seek, and ye shall find." Yet, to many, the seeking leads down the path of weary years and constant struggles, and the finding is a Holy Grail bleedingly acquired. Christ could not return to His Father save thru the Crucifixion. Thus, with Marius, the new dawn did not discover a converted Christian. The old allegiances were many and powerful, and the Gospel teaching had reached him only thru the medium of more or less ardent exponents. Thru the crust of long years of profligate adherence to the gods of the senses, must come a closer call than that. Moreover, the city was under the influence of the earlier reign of Nero, when, if license and barbarousness had not reached their zenith and the Christians had not incurred any penalty worse than contempt and ridicule, still the atmosphere was charged with the trend things were taking. And Marius, unthinking, went with the populace. Just outside the city walls stretched, in a dark and silent loftiness, the rank and file of a great forest. Here, it seemed as if the stench and tumult of a pleasuring city could not reach; as if the cool air, made fragrant with cedar and wild, growing things, breathed down a benediction of peace. And it was here that Marius sought to allay the fever in his veins, the longing for the din and fray of combat, the thirst for strife, red blood, fierce struggle and gory victory. All things had staled in his grasp, and he was sick at soul with the deadly sickness of inertia. It was twilight as he walked in the woods this day, and he was thinking on Christianity and the precepts that it taught, wondering whether, in the words of the crucified Christus, was to be found a healing peace for such a one as he. And, like an answer to his bitter doubt, she came, straight and clean and true, vestured in simple, spotless white, with the martyr-spirit in her wide, gray eyes. It was as if the