As they went down the steep, Cimon and Democrates came running to join them, and in the brisk chatter that arose the omen of the cloud and fears of the Persian faded from Hermione’s mind.
* * * * * * *
It was a merry party such as often went down to the havens of Athens in the springtime and summer: a dozen gentlemen, old and young, for the most part married, and followed demurely by their wives with the latter’s maids, and many a stout Thracian slave tugging hampers of meat and drink. Laughter there was, admixed with wiser talk; friends walking by twos and threes, with Themistocles, as always, seeming to mingle with all and to surpass every one both in jests and in wisdom. So they fared down across the broad plain-land to the harbours, till the hill Munychia rose steep before them. A scramble over a rocky, ill-marked way led to the top; then before them broke a second view comparable almost to that from the Rock of Athena: at their feet lay the four blue havens of Athens, to the right Phaleron, closer at hand the land-locked bay of Munychia, beyond that Zea, beyond that still a broader sheet—Peiræus, the new war-harbour of Athens. They could look down on the brown roofs of the port-town, the forest of masts, the merchantman unloading lumber from the Euxine, the merchantman loading dried figs for Syria; but most of all on the numbers of long black hulls, some motionless on the placid harbour, some propped harmlessly on the shore. Hermione clouded as she saw them, and glanced away.
“I do not love your new fleet, Themistocles,” she said, frowning at the handsome statesman; “I do not love anything that tells so clearly of war. It mars the beauty.”
“Rather you should rejoice we have so fair a wooden wall against the Barbarian, dear lady,” answered he, quite at ease. “What can we do to hearten her, Democrates?”
“Were I only Zeus,” rejoined the orator, who never was far from his best friend’s wife, “I would cast two thunderbolts, one to destroy Xerxes, the second to blast Themistocles’s armada,—so would the Lady Hermione be satisfied.”
“I am sorry, then, you are not the Olympian,” said the woman, half smiling at the pleasantry. Cimon interrupted them. Some of the party had caught a sun-burned shepherd in among the rocks, a veritable Pan in his shaggy goat-skin. The bribe of two obols brought him out with his pipe. Four of the slave-boys fell to dancing. The party sat down upon the burnt grass,—eating, drinking, wreathing poppy-crowns, and watching the nimble slaves and the ships that crawled like ants in the haven and bay below. Thus passed the noon, and as the sun dropped toward craggy Salamis across the strait, the men of the party wandered down to the ports and found boats to take them out upon the bay.
The wind was a zephyr. The water spread blue and glassy. The sun was sinking as a ball of infinite light. Themistocles, Democrates, and Glaucon were in one skiff, the athlete at the oars. They glided past the scores of black triremes swinging lazily at anchor. Twice they pulled around the proudest of the fleet,—the Nausicaä, the gift of Hermippus to the state, a princely gift even in days when every Athenian put his all at the public service. She would be Themistocles’s flag-ship. The young men noted her fine lines, her heavy side timbers, the covered decks, an innovation in Athenian men-of-war, and Themistocles put a loving hand on the keen bronze beak as they swung around the prow.
“Here’s a tooth for the Persian king!” he was laughing, when a second skiff, rounding the trireme in an opposite direction, collided abruptly. A lurch, a few splinters was all the hurt, but as the boats parted Themistocles rose from his seat in the stern, staring curiously.
“Barbarians, by Athena’s owls, the knave at the oars is a sleek Syrian, and his master and the boy from the East too. What business around our war-fleet? Row after them, Glaucon; we’ll question—”