“But if your lordship knows who this man is,” said the ex-corporal, becoming more at home, “might I ask his name?”
“A name is a serious thing to divulge,” responded the strange man: “and really I prefer you should guess. Do you know the story of Œdipus and the Sphinx?”
“I went to see a tragedy of that title and fell asleep, unfortunately, in the fourth act.”
“Plague take me, but you ought not to call that a misfortune!”
“But I lose by it now.”
“Not to go into details, suffice it that Œdipus, whom I knew as a boy at one royal court and as a man at another, was predicted to be the murderer of his father and the husband of his mother. Believing King Polybius this father, he departed from his realm, but would not take a hint from me about the road. The result was that he met his own sire on the road where, as neither would turn out, a fight ensued in which he slew his father. Some time after he met the Sphinx. It was a monster with a woman’s head on a lion’s body which I regret never to have seen, as it was a thousand years after her death that I travelled that road. She had the habit of putting riddles to the wayfarers and eating those who could not read them aright. To my friend Œdipus she put the following:
“'What animal goes upon four legs at morning, two at noon and three at night?'”
“Œdipus answered off-hand: ‘Man, who in the morning of life as a child crawls on all fours; as an adult walks upright; as an old man hobbles with a stick.'”
“That is so,” exclaimed Beausire: “it crossed the sphinx!”
“She threw herself down a precipice and the winner went on to where he married his father’s widow to accomplish the prophecy.”