CHAPTER XLVI
THE DOOR OF ESCAPE
Then followed a busy, happy winter. All the months must be passed in making ready the colony which was to start with the early navigation of the spring. Eëtíon journeyed to his old home in Argos, and found there, as he had expected, certain citizens who were faithful to Hellas and secretly grieving over Argos’s faithless stand in the war.
Xerxes, the Persian king, was gone from Greece. But a formidable army of Persians yet lingered in Greece. Before these were vanquished fighting was yet to be—and these few Argive men were horrified at the prospect of fighting against their own. They returned with Eëtíon to Delphi. Theria tested these men, shrewdly asking them questions, watching their faces. Eëtíon, spite of experience, was a less keen judge than she. From wrong premises she was continually drawing right conclusions. After trying to help her Eëtíon gave up, laughing. The feminine way was new.
In Delphi itself, Karamanor and Agis and a number of other kinsmen were glad to go. Those who were not married took brides forthwith. The new generation in the colony would have a strong Delphic stamp. Here was more business for the œkist, for not a bride among them wanted to go. Theria visited from one to the other, picturing the new life, persuading them.
“No one in the colony shall be homesick if I can help it,” she told them. And remembering her own first reluctance to go, she could not be hard upon their timidity. Theria had never known girl-friends, but in these earnest conferences she acquired them. One little wife in particular—a girl of fourteen years, delicate, pale, whose father had been very severe and whose husband was now taking his turn at severity—Theria took to her heart with great tenderness. She was herself astonished at the way the little creature bloomed and grew strong under the new encouragement.
And now Theria must receive the grain to be laden in the ships, grain both for food and for planting. Theria tended the tiny grape-vines and treasured the seeds of useful herbs and vegetables to be carried over seas. No seeds of flowers, for the Greeks did not plant them. Besides, were not the slopes and capes of Sicily one far-flung flowerland?
As for Nikander, the days were not long enough for him to teach his daughter all she now must know: the Delphic laws, the modes of city government, precautions for city health, religious customs in which she must be vigilant and exacting. Her hungry learning brought tears to Nikander’s eyes. But often these were tears of pride for the quickness of her mind, her strong opinion so intimately his own, her quick refusal of wrong methods or shallow reasoning.
But it was perhaps Melantho who in these days noted the greatest change in Theria. Theria had always been haughty toward her mother, disobedient, and sharp of answer.