Melitta turned in astonishment, and the slave hastily uttered a few words which made her mistress frown. She seemed to contradict her attendant, who became more and more vehement.
Callippides had sharp ears—he was a sycophant—and the distance from the two speakers to the spot where he stood was only thirty or forty paces. First he caught one of the slave’s words, then more, until at last he distinctly heard her say:
“As sure as you’re General Myronides’ daughter, he belongs to the venomous brood whose pathway is filled with curses, blood, and corpses. You can see for yourself that he is marked by the wrath of the gods! Is not his shadow blacker than other men’s?”
As Callippides stood in the green dusk under the plane-tree, with the white wall of the house behind him, so dense a shadow really fell upon him that, from the sunlit spot where the two women stood, it was impossible to discern the colors in his dress.
Disturbed by the slave’s words, Melitta herself fancied she saw something spectral and threatening in the tall, dark man. With a shriek she dropped the water-jar, gathered the folds of her robe around her, and rushed into the house. By the terror with which she closed the door behind her, Callippides understood that it had shut between them forever.
Quietly as ever, though somewhat paler than usual, he went back to the house. Sometimes he fancied he again heard the door banged, and each time he felt as though his heart would break.
The lonely and desolate condition, the seclusion from intercourse with others in which he had spent his later years had often weighed heavily, nay almost unendurably upon him, yet never had his heart been so empty, so dead to all hope, as now. “Alas!” he murmured, “everything might have been different, entirely different—but it is too late.” He gazed steadily into vacancy, and his eyes expressed a sombre resolve.
Soon after he had come in from the garden he sat down to write, but twice tore up what he had traced before he was satisfied. Then he made an exact copy of it.
“Now it only needs the signatures of the witnesses,” he said to himself, as he put his seal-ring on his finger.
After standing for some time absorbed in deep thought, he took from a chest a flask with a wicker basket-work covering called a lagynos. When he had assured himself that it was empty, he smelled it and was in the act of calling Manes when he suddenly stopped.