Chapter 7
Paul was back again in his quiet dining-room, seated at the table and waited on by his mother. Fortunately there was now something they dare talk about and the flight of King Nicodemus was being discussed. Having hastily deposited the silver amphora and other things taken out for the rite and doffed his red cope, Antiochus had run off to collect news. The first time he came back it was with a strange report; the old man had disappeared and his relations were said to have carried him off in order to get possession of his money.
"They say that his dog and his eagle came down and carried him off themselves!" corrected some sceptic jestingly.
"I don't believe in the dog," said one of the old men, "but the eagle is no joke. I remember that when I was a boy, one carried off a heavy sheep from our yard."
Then Antiochus came back with the further news that the sick man had been overtaken half-way up to the mountain plateau, where he wished to die. The last upflickering of his fever lent him a fictitious strength and the dying hunter walked like a somnambulist to the place where he longed to be, and in order not to worry him and make him worse, his relatives had accompanied him and seen him safely to his own hut.
"Now sit down and eat," said the priest to the boy.
Antiochus obeyed and took his place at the table, but not without first glancing inquiringly at the priest's mother. She smiled and signed to him to do as he was bidden and the boy felt that he had become one of the family. He could not know, innocent child, that the other two, having exhausted the subject of the old hunter, were afraid of being alone together. The mother would see her son's uneasy wandering eyes arrested suddenly, as though upon some unseen object, with a stony, sombre gaze, o'er-shadowed by the darkness of his mind, and he in turn would start from his preoccupation, aware that she was observing him and divining his inward grief. But when she had placed the meal on the table she left the room and did not return.
With the bright noonday the wind rose again, but now it was a soft west wind that scarcely stirred the trees upon the ridge; the room was flooded with sunshine chequered by the dancing of the leaves outside the window, and white clouds drifted across the sky like harp-strings whereon the wind played its gentle music.