All of a sudden the Homeric couplet mouthed by the man returned with terrific force to his mind.
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,
Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
The poet stopped short in his tracks. “Golly-dieu! I see it all now. I’ve been talking with a murderer! And they always come back to revisit the scene, every one knows that. Of course, he didn’t do up as many as twelve. It was remorse made him nutty about the number. I wonder now—”
His wonder lit his eyes and freshened his steps until he reached the garden-gate, with the great apple tree over it, and the carved millstone below as a tread. Old Peter was probably just coming up from the pool. He himself needed a bath, frightfully! Then he saw his mother, in the white-and-purple iris dress he loved, walking toward the green tea-table under the pergola. Agnes with her tray would soon appear. For the present, Royal’s appointed rounds were over. An immense wave of tenderness suffused his whole being. Mother, bath, scones, sanctuary! Those first and last words he called aloud. Mother, sanctuary!
V
Left to himself, the elder traveller pounced on the peaches and devoured them, smearing their juice on his dry lips. He then tore the meat from the poor hearts of the sandwiches, and began to eat it greedily. It was his first meat in four days, and he was distinctly of the carnivorous order, and no mere nut-eater. The maid at the Canaan inn had looked suspiciously at him, four days ago, and from that moment, fear had palsied him. Not daring to buy gas under the pitiless publicity of the red pump, he had abandoned his stolen Ford. Like Royal, he was now on a solitary walking tour.
Since the incident at the inn, he had lived on package food, bought at obscure crossroads grocery stores. All his life, he had kept a fine contempt for package food, the various frugal tinned and cartoned things the bourgeois eat. He himself always wanted everything fresh from the vine, he used to say. Everything except the grape; that was different. Just at present, he was more thirsty than hungry. Royal’s black cigars were a poor substitute for a living drink.
“Blast the boy with his clean airs! ‘A traveller like myself!’ Little Lord Bountiful, to be sure!”
His face looked very old in the afternoon light. It was purplish red as to the forehead, and that whitishness around the mouth was not wholly to be explained by a four days’ stubble of graying beard. Even while he blasted the boy, he likened himself to him. “Just what I was at his age, a little Lord Bountiful! And, God, look at me now!”