“No, no; I am not he, I am free!”
“I don’t believe you are that slave. You have no look of him. You are straight. You are young.”
“I had almost forgotten I was young. I had kept that disguise so long. And how I hated it—the dirt, the miserable matted beard, the stooping. It took me days to stand straight again.”
“Was it not bad enough to be a slave without making yourself like that?” said Theria disgustedly.
“Dear maid, I had to keep so. They would certainly have sold me into Persia. There is great price in the East for beautiful men.”
He said this frankly of himself as a matter of course. Indeed there was something startling in his beauty—an ethereal quality, though he was manly too, but now so full of delight that he seemed like a child. He began hurriedly to tell her of himself.
“Dear lady, I was not born a slave. You will believe that. I was taken at sea by pirates—the whole ship seized. They put us below in the dark hold of their ship and fed us on nuts. That first night I blacked my face with the nut-hulls. I exchanged garments with the meanest man among us. I——”
“But why?” asked Theria.
“I had heard the sea-robbers upon deck above talking of me—and how they would sell me to the Persian Court.” A horror crossed the youth’s sensitive face. “Lady,” he said, “the Persians would have shamed me and made me worse than slave. I would do anything to escape that. In the morning, when the pirates came down looking for me, they thought their beautiful youth had jumped overboard. Stupid Phœnicians.”
This Odyssey was holding Theria fascinated. She forgot all the proprieties. She forgot that the youth might be love-making. Her mind had moved so many days in a doomed circle that now it spread wings of new life.