Her body shrank, her head dropped, as though a knife were thrust into her breast.
But her lips kept their silence to the last. They were so strong, they were so mute; they did not even once cry out against him, "For thy sake!"
CHAPTER XVII.
In the springtime of the year three gods watched by the river.
The golden willows blew in the low winds; the waters came and went; the moon rose full and cold over a silvery stream; the reeds sighed in the silence. Two winters had drifted by, and one hot, drowsy summer; and all the white still shapes upon the walls of the granary already had been slain by the cold breath of Time. The green weeds waved in the empty casements; the chance-sown seeds of thistles and of bell-flowers were taking leaf between the square stones of the paven floors; on the deserted threshold lichens and brambles climbed together; the filmy ooze of a rank vegetation stole over the loveliness of Persephone and devoured one by one the immortal offspring of Zeus; about the feet of the bound sun-king in Phæros and over the calm serene mockery of Hermes' smile the gray nets of the spiders' webs had been woven to and fro, around and across, with the lacing of a million threads, as Fate weaves round the limbs and covers the eyes of mortals as they stumble blindly from their birthplace to their grave. All things, the damp and the dust, the frost and the scorch, the newts and the rats, the fret of the flooded water, and the stealing sure inroad of the mosses that everywhere grew from the dews and the fogs had taken and eaten, in hunger or sport, or had touched and thieved from, then left gangrened and ruined.
The three gods alone remained, who, being the sons of eternal night, are unharmed and unaltered by any passage of the years of earth,—the only gods who never bend beneath the yoke of Time, but unblenchingly behold the nations wither as uncounted leaves, and the lands and the seas change places, and the cities and the empires pass away as a tale that is told, and the deities that are worshiped in the temples change name and attributes and cultus at the wanton will of the age that begat them.
In the still, cold moonlit air they stand together hand in band, looking outward through the white night-mists. Other gods perished with the faith of each age as it changed; other gods, lived by the breath of men's lips, the tears of prayer, the smoke of sacrifice; but they—their empire is the universe. In every young soul that leaps into the light of life, rejoicing blindly, Oneiros has dominion, and he alone. In every creature that breathes, from the conqueror resting on a field of blood to the nest-bird cradled in its bed of leaves, Hypnos holds a sovereignty which nothing mortal can long resist and live. And Thanatos—to him belongs every created thing, past, present, and to come; beneath his foot all generations lie, and in the hollow of his hand he holds the worlds. Though the earth be tenantless, and the heavens sunless, and the planets shrivel in their courses, and the universe be desolate in an endless night, yet through the eternal darkness Thanatos still will reign, and through its eternal solitudes he alone will wander and he still behold his work.
Deathless as themselves, their shadows stood; and the worm and the lizard and the newt left them alone and dared not wind about their calm clear brows, and dared not steal to touch the roses at their lips,—knowing that ere the birth of the worlds these were, and when the worlds shall have perished they still will reign on,—the slow, sure, soundless, changeless ministers of an eternal rest, of an eternal oblivion.
A little light strayed in from the gray skies, pale as the primrose-flowers that grow among the reeds upon the shore, and found its way to them trembling, and shone in the far-seeing depths of their unfathomable eyes.