“The daughter of the rich Porphyrius sang for your entertainment? Yours?” said Karnis laughing. “By Sirius! The world is turning upside down. Now that girls are forbidden to perform to the gentlefolks, art is being cultivated by the upper classes; it cannot be killed outright. For the future the listeners will be paid to keep quiet and the singers pay for the right of torturing their ears—our ears, our luckless ears will be victimized.”
Orpheus smiled and shook his head; then, again dropping his knife, he went on eagerly:
“But if you could only hear her! You would give your last copper piece to hear her again.”
“Indeed!” muttered his father. “Well, there are very good teachers here. Something by Linus did you say she sang?”
“Something of that kind; a lament for the dead of very great power: ‘Return, oh! return my beloved, came back—come home!’ that was the burthen of it. And there was a passage which said: ‘Oh that each tear had a voice and could join with me in calling thee!’ And how she sang it, father! I do not think I ever in my life heard anything like it. Ask mother. Even Dada’s eyes were full of tears.”
“Yes, it was beautiful,” the mother agreed. “I could not help wishing that you were there.”
Karnis rose and paced the little room, waving his arms and muttering:
“Ah! so that is how it is! A friend of the Muses. We saved the large lute—that is well. My chlamys has an ugly hole in it—if the girls were not asleep... but the first thing to-morrow Ague.... Tell me, is she handsome, tall?”
Herse had been watching her excitable husband with much satisfaction and now answered his question: “Not a Hera—not a Muse—decidedly not. Hardly above the middle height, slightly made, but not small, black eyes, long lashes, dark straight eyebrows. I could hardly, like Orpheus, call her beautiful...”
“Oh yes, mother.—Beautiful is a great word, and one my father has taught me to use but rarely; but she—if she is not beautiful who is?—when she raised her large dark eyes and threw back her head to bring out her lament; tone after tone seemed to come from the bottom of her heart and rise to the furthest height of heaven. Ah, if Agne could learn to sing like that! ‘Throw your whole soul into your singing.’—You have told her that again and again. Now, Gorgo can and does. And she stood there as steady and as highly strung as a bow, every note came out with the ring of an arrow and went straight to the heart, as clear and pure as possible.”