We shall have no peace till the gods are gone.
The child had raised herself to watch the minstrel. As he sang the last words the skies seemed to snap overhead; a quick flash shot downwards, like the thrust of ghostly steel. For a moment the child’s eyes were dazzled; then the loud roar of thunder seemed to fill the forest and the sky. When she looked again she saw that the minstrel had fallen forward on his face; by his side was his lyre, with the strings broken and smouldering; from his body, charred by the lightning, delicate strays of smoke curled up. The child came, and knelt by the side of the dead minstrel. She raised his head, and looked piteously upon it, for the beauty had all gone out of it now; then she pressed her little red lips to the blackened lips of the dead man, and went on her way. It was the first kiss she had ever given.
And still she did not weep; but the blood in her veins seemed to be as fire, and strange voices were sounding in her head. When the evening fell she stood by the edge of the swamp. Out of a dim cavern crept an old lion, and looked at her with green, hungry eyes. His lips curled a little backward. The child called to him: “Come, then! I have been seeking for you! Torture me, and then let me die!”
The lion turned swiftly round, and fled with a howl back into the cavern.
The child wandered on. She ate the black poison berries, but they would not hurt her. At last, when the moon was up, she saw a dark, deep pool, and flung herself into it; but the pool cast her back again on to the shore. She was fain to die, and to atone; but the gods knew their business better than to allow it.
And still she walks through the forest, seeking rest and finding it not, and she speaks to none. Only sometimes at night, when the golden moon comes up behind the low grey hills, she sings in a sweet child’s voice a few lines of a remembered song:
Let me win there ere the break of day,
Ere the first faint light o’er the hills grows grey!
I am tired of my work and tired of my play,
And I’ll make better songs in the land far away,—