Istar of Babylon: A Phantasy. Margaret Horton Potter
My boy, my beloved, my companion! How can I give thee up?"
The shepherd stood still and silent while her hands caressed his shining hair and her breath came and went in a vain effort to re-establish her self-control. After two or three minutes, in which his thoughts spun dizzily, he took both her hands in his own and lifted them to his lips.
"Mother," he said, rather brokenly, "Apollo will forgive, will release me from the vow. I will not go away. I will not leave thee here—alone." He kissed the hand again. "Come with me to the temple of the god, and I will absolve myself from the vow."
Heraia drew the boy still closer, and put her lips to the hair that clustered about his ear. "The gods bless thee, my dear one. Apollo will hardly forgive my weakness. Nay, Charmides, I did not come here to grieve over you, but to talk with you on many things that a mother has in her heart to say to her children. Let us sit here together and look off upon the sea—the sea that I must hereafter watch alone."
Thus speaking, she drew him down upon the ground beside her, into one of the daisy drifts, and they sat in silence for a little, looking off together over the far expanse of shimmering blue, with the turquoise horizon-line melting into the still bluer tint of the sky above. And when Heraia began again to talk, her tone was so low and so even that the words seemed to her listener to mingle with the afternoon, becoming at length so entirely a part of their surroundings that in his memory of the scene, as his mind held it in later years, her voice was forever accompanied by the shining of bright waters and the faint fragrance of the carpet of flowers surrounding her.
"Your father, my Charmides, has talked with you of your long and lonely journey, of men, the ways of men, and your dealings with them. Obey his wishes in all these things, for his advice is that of one who has lived long and wisely in the world. But I, dear son, must speak to you in another way, of things which, were you not as you are, I should not mention before you. But you are young, and you are very pure; and your nature, with its hidden joys and hidden woe, I understand through my own.
"Your face and form, my Charmides, are beautiful—more beautiful and more strange than those of any man I have ever seen." She paused for a moment to look wistfully into that face, with its golden frame of hair, while the boy, astonished and displeased, muttered, resentfully:
"My face is that of a woman!"
His mother smiled at his disgust. "Nay, child, thy face has the man in it most plainly written. There is in it what women love—and it is of this that I would speak.
"Excepting myself, Charmides, you have known no woman well; and the feeling of a man for his mother is never his feeling for any other of her sex. Woman's nature is as yet, I think, closed to your understanding. In this long journey upon which you are faring forth, I do not doubt that you will encounter women, more than one, who will seek you for the beauty of your face. For women love beauty in men, as men desire it in them.
"In your connection with women, whether the acquaintance be of their seeking or of yours, remember this one thing, that I most firmly believe: All women, all in the world, of any land, I think, have in them two natures—one that is evil, and one that is good. It will rest with you alone which one you choose to look upon. For there is no woman so degraded, so lost to virtue, that she cannot remember a time of purity which you can reawaken in her. And there is no woman so good that, for the man she truly loves with her heart and with her soul, she will not fall; for so men have taught them, through the ages, to love. Therefore, my son, may the greatest of all humiliations come upon you if, knowing what I say to be true, you treat any woman with other than reverence and honor. For a woman who clings in dishonor to the man she loves is not to be blamed by the gods so much as the man she has trusted. For a man is strong and should have control over all his senses; but to a woman love is life; and it is decreed that life is all in all to us.
"Yours, Charmides, is a white soul, a soul as beautiful as the body that holds it. As yet it is unspotted by a single act of wrong-doing. That you keep that soul pure throughout your life is my one prayer for you. I give you up to the wide world—to poverty, to wretchedness, to suffering perhaps—but in this I trust you to keep faith with me. Remember that I hold your honor as my own. Though Apollo may not vouchsafe that I see you again after to-morrow—ever; though the memory of me shall grow dim in your after-life; yet remember—strive to remember always—my last words, spoken out of my great, my aching love for you. For in these words my motherhood reaches its end. Your manhood has begun."
She kept her voice steady, her tears from falling, till the end. Not so the boy. When the last word had left her lips and she had bowed her head under her weight of sorrow, Charmides could not speak for the straining of his throat; and his eyes, brimming with salt tears, looked blindly upon the flushing clouds. For many minutes they were silent, sitting together for the last time, while the sunset hour drew on and the golden shadows fell athwart the daisies, and Heraia's words sank deeper into the shepherd's heart. Finally they rose, and moved, hand in hand, in the deepening twilight, back through the field to Theron's house. There Charmides passed once more through the door-way of his youth.
The evening was long and very sad. After the forlorn supper the little group sat close together, saying little, yet loath to make a proposal of bed, for it had come home poignantly to all of them how very empty life would seem with Charmides taken away. After a time Kabir thoughtfully left them and went out to walk alone in the starlight. Then the two slaves, Doris and Sardeis, crept in and seated themselves in a distant corner of the living-room. Doris' wide eyes were tinged with red, and her mien was as dejected as Heraia's; for Charmides had been her comrade always. He had helped her in her tasks, had sung his shepherd songs to her from the fields, had not seldom procured pardon for her for some neglect of duty. And Sardeis, the skilful but rather churlish slave, who hated Phalaris and all his ways, and treated Theron with respect only because it meant a whipping if he failed to do so, had never once objected in his own heart to taking Charmides' flock from him as often as the youth desired lazy freedom, or to performing numberless little kindnesses for him that no beating could have drawn forth for the athlete. He, too, on this eve of the boy's departure, was beyond speech.
After nearly an hour of cheerless silence, Phalaris, with a desperate effort to relieve the general strain, brought out his brother's lyre and put it into Charmides' hands. There was a little repressed sob from Heraia, but the rhapsode's face brightened. For a few seconds he lovingly fingered the instrument. Then, lifting up his voice, he sang a song to the sea, a quaintly rhymed little melody, in his invariable minor. Finishing it, he began again, improvising as he went, with an ease and carelessness that produced wonderfully happy combinations. Now, as always, he found consolation for every grief in his incomparable talent. And when, after a last merry little tune that rose continually from its first tones till it ran out of his range at the end, he finally put the instrument away, Heraia and the slave alike had ceased to weep, Phalaris was smiling, and Theron rose cheerfully:
"Now, Charmides, you must rise at dawn; therefore I bid you go to rest. Be up with the earliest light, and I will go with you to the temple, where, before Archemides, you will renew your vow and offer sacrifice of the youngest lamb in our fold. Kabir will join us there after the service is ended, and with him you will go down to the ship. Good-night. The gods grant you sleep."
Before Charmides had left the room Kabir came in again, and presently went off to his couch with the brothers.
Charmides' rest was broken, filled with dreams of far countries and with uncertain visions of her whom he was to seek. Disconnected sounds of music, bells, and phrases of charmed melody rang through his unconsciousness. Only in the last hour before dawn did he sink into untroubled slumber, from which, with the first glimmer of day, he rose. His mind was at rest, his heart filled with peace in the inward knowledge that what he was going forth alone to seek was no chimera, but a marvellous reality. It was, then, with a great, confident joy written upon his face that, at the rising of the sun, he stood before the altar of Apollo, and, in the presence of Archemides, the high-priest, surrounded by his father, brother, and the elders of Selinous, renewed his solemn vow and offered prayer and sacrifice to the Olympian of the Silver Bow.
The hour following the ceremony was painful enough. As the boy looked