There were scores like them at whose doors she knocked, or whose chambers she entered. The brief kind night was over, and they had to arise and work,—or die.
"Why do they not die?" she wondered; and she thought of the dear gods that she had loved, the gods of oblivion.
Truly there were no gifts like their gifts; and yet men knew their worth so little;—but thrust Hypnos back in scorn, dashing their winecups in his eyes; and mocked Oneiros, calling him the guest of love-sick fools and of mad poets; and against Thanatos strove always in hatred and terror as against their dreaded foe.
It was a strange, melancholy, dreary labor this into which she had entered.
It was all dark. The little light she bore scarcely shed its rays beyond her feet. It was all still. The winds sounded infinitely sad among those vaulted passages and the deep shafts of the stairways. Now and then a woman's voice in prayer or a man's in blasphemy echoed dully through the old half-ruined buildings. Otherwise an intense silence reigned there, where all save herself were sleeping.
She used to think it was a city of the dead, in which she alone was living.
And sometimes she had not the heart to waken them; when there was a smile on some wan worn face that never knew one in its waking hours; or when some childless mother in her lonely bed sleeping, in fancy drew young arms about her throat.
This morning when all her tasks were done, and all the toilers summoned to another day of pain, she retraced her steps slowly, bearing the light aloft, and with its feeble rays shed on the colorless splendor of her face, and on her luminous dilated troubled eyes that were forever seeking what they never found.
A long vaulted passage stretched between her and the foot of the steps that led to the tower; many doors opened on it, the winds wailed through it, and the ragged clothes of the tenants blew to and fro upon the swaying cords. She traversed it, and slowly mounted her own staircase, which was spiral and narrow, with little loopholes ever and again that looked out upon the walls, and higher on the roofs, and higher yet upon the open sky. By one of these she paused and looked out wearily.
It was dark still; great low rain-clouds floated by; a little caged bird stirred with a sad note; mighty rains swept by from the westward, sweet with the smell of the distant fields.