“Quick! The others are Barbarians and you a Hellene. Your chance—leap!”
He did not stir. The “others”—two strangers in Oriental dress—were striving to enter the pinnace. The seamen thrust their dirks out to force them back.
“Full enough!” bawled the “governor.” “That fellow on the poop is mad. Cut the rope, or we are caught in the swirl.”
The elder Barbarian lifted his companion as if to fling him into the boat, but Brasidas’s sword cut the one cable. The wave flung the Solon and the pinnace asunder. With stolid resignation the Orientals retreated to the poop. The people in the pinnace rowed desperately to keep her out of the deadly [pg 155]trough of the billows, but Glaucon stood erect on the drifting wreck and his voice rang through the tumult of the sea.
“Tell them in Athens, and tell Hermione my wife, that Glaucon the Alcmæonid went down into the deep declaring his innocence and denouncing the vengeance of Athena on whosoever foully destroyed him!—”
Brasidas waved his sword in last farewell. Glaucon turned back to the wreck. The Solon had settled lower. Every wave washed across the waist. Nothing seemed to meet his gaze save the leaden sky, the leaden green water, the foam of the bounding storm-crests. He told himself the gods were good. Drowning was more merciful death than hemlock. Pelagos, the untainted sea, was a softer grave than the Barathrum. The memory of the fearful hour at Colonus, the vision of the face of Hermione, of all things else that he would fain forget—all these would pass. For what came after he cared nothing.
So for some moments he stood, clinging upon the poop, awaiting the end. But the end came slowly. The Solon was a stoutly timbered ship. Much of her lading had been cast overboard, but more remained and gave buoyancy to the wreckage. And as the Athenian awaited, almost impatiently, the final disaster, something called his eye away from the heaving sky-line. Human life was still about him. Wedged in a refuge, betwixt two capstans, the Orientals were sitting, awaiting doom like himself. But wonder of wonders,—he had not relaxed his hold on life too much to marvel,—the younger Barbarian was beyond all doubt a woman. She sat in her companion’s lap, lifting her white face to his, and Glaucon knew she was of wondrous beauty. They were talking together in some Eastern speech. Their arms were closely twined. It was plain they were passing the last love messages before entering the great mystery together. Of [pg 156]Glaucon they took no heed. And he at first was almost angered that strangers should intrude upon this last hour of life. But as he looked, as he saw the beauty of the woman, the sheen of her golden hair, the interchange of love by touch and word,—there came across his own spirit a most unlooked-for change. Suddenly the white-capped billows seemed pitiless and chill. The warm joy of life returned. Again memory surged back, but without its former pang. He saw again the vision of Athens, of Colonus, of Eleusis-by-the-Sea. He saw Hermione running through the throng to meet him the day he returned from the Isthmia. He heard the sweet wind singing over the old olives beside the cool Cephissus. Must these all pass forever? forever? Were life, friends, love, the light of the sun, eternally lost, and nothing left save the endless sleep in the unsunned caves of Oceanus? With one surge the desire to live, to bear hard things, to conquer them, returned. He dashed the water from his eyes. What he did next was more by instinct than by reason. He staggered across the reeling deck, approached the Barbarians, and seized the man by the arm.
“Would you live and not die? Up, then,—there is still a chance.”
The man gazed up blankly.
“We are in Mazda’s hands,” he answered in foreign accent. “It is manifestly his will that we should pass now the Chinvat bridge. We are helpless. Where is the pinnace?”