THE PERILOUS SEAT

BOOKS BY
CAROLINE DALE SNEDEKER

• Seth Way: A Romance of the New Harmony Community
• The Spartan
• The Perilous Seat

THE
PERILOUS SEAT

BY
CAROLINE DALE SNEDEKER

The untaught maid

Mounting the perilous high seat can, for the god

Speak wisdom kings will seek for, but herself

The god will soon destroy.

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1923

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

First Edition

TO
MY SON
KARL SNEDEKER
WHOSE GREEK SCHOLARSHIP HAS
AIDED MY TASK, THIS STORY
OF OLD GREECE IS DEDICATED

PREFACE

The background and details of this story have been carefully authenticated. The founding of the colony Inessa, however, is not an actual event. It is the union of a number of colony traditions. It is therefore correct in character and spirit.

The tale was written at the MacDowell Colony at Peterborough, New Hampshire, and I am constantly mindful of the inspiration given to me by the beautiful and solitary surroundings in which I there worked.

CONTENTS

BOOK I
AT THE PYTHIAN FESTIVAL

CHAPTER I
DRYAS WINS THE PRIZE

Dryas, the young Delphian, finished his song. As he did so he leaped impulsively to the sheer edge of the temple platform, leaning forward in the very attitude of the Archer God. The song was to Apollo. For a moment he seemed to be the young Apollo himself.

The final note was scarce heard for the surge of applause which met it. The people pelted the boy with flowers—snatched off their own garlands to throw to him—until he stood ankle deep in the bloom. He was blushing, shy, now that his song was finished. Awestruck, too, for he heard everywhere the shout:

“The Prize! The Prize!”

Thus ended the first day of the Pythian festival at Delphi. The crowds poured down through the Precinct, a very tumult of colour and motion. White-robed priests, purple-cloaked kings, Sybarites in cloth of gold, young athletes beautiful as the sunlight in which they moved; and upon every man’s head, rich or poor, his crown of flowers.

How freely they talked, how happily gave themselves to laughter! The truce of God was upon them—that peace which Apollo imposed upon the passionate, warring Greeks at festival time. Delphi itself, forbidding amid its beetling cliffs, seemed to lose sternness at this festival. Out on the far-seen hillsides were the booths and bright-coloured tents of the visitors, the flash and glitter of things brought for sale. Even yet crowds of pilgrims were arriving, swarming up the steep winding roads as the bees were fabled of old to have swarmed thither to build the first temple in Delphi.

Dryas, his father, Nikander, and his brother, Lycophron, came down through the stirring Precinct, perhaps the happiest hearts of all the multitude.

The prize at Delphi! It was an immortal honour. The noblest poets of Greece would write hymns in his praise. Dryas’s whole town would bask in the honour of it. Dryas’s statue in bronze would be set up near the Precinct gate, and in future years his sons and sons’ sons would recount the victory.

Neighbours, kinsfolk, strangers, halted them on their homeward way. No man in Hellas was too exalted to pause in humility and delight to greet the young victor with the crown yet fresh upon his head. But it was to the father, Nikander, rather than to Dryas that they addressed themselves, lingering to catch if it were but a reflection of the surprised joy in that father-face.

Nikander walked holding his boy’s hand, or touching his shoulder as he presented him to some famous man.

“You liked it?” he would say, his sensitive face flushing almost as Dryas’s own. “You liked the song? Yes, I, too, enjoyed it—that stern opening—the Dorian mode. It was as new in my hearing as in yours. The dear lad kept it so.”

And Dryas’s answering look showed the father’s praise to be the most precious of all. It was no usual affection which bound these two together.

And now Pindar, the greatest poet, met them, outstretching both his hands.

“Nikander! Dryas! Kairos bless you both! You are tasting the heady joy of victory!”

“Eating victory rather,” put in the elder brother, Lycophron, with a rough laugh. “Feasting on it in courses I should say.”

At his father’s hurt look he stopped and laid his hand upon the father’s shoulder.

“Tut,” he said, “I meant no harm.” Then he turned to the poet: “Pindar, I hope you are coming to us to-night, speaking of feasts; a symposium in Dryas’s honour.”

Pindar frowned at the young man’s forwardness but assented, then smiled again as he turned to Dryas.

“It was almost as good as your father’s victor song years ago.”

“Oh, better, much better,” urged Nikander. At which Pindar moved onward, laughing, shaking his head. A lovable man, Pindar.

They arrived finally at their own door. All the slaves were there bowing and curtseying, Medon, the old pedagogue, at their head. He peered up eagerly to see if the boy really wore the laurel crown and, at sight of it, trembled visibly with joy.

“Little Dryas, little Dryas,” he crooned, all love.

Nikander must needs stop to rehearse all his happiness to the old servant. And who so glad to hear as Medon!

“All Dryas’s songs have been good,” Nikander finished. “But, oh, this one to-day is in a new class! Do you know what the rascal did, Medon? Brought out an utterly new poem, different from any I ever heard. Imagine my amazement when he started out—and my delight!”

“Yes, Master, yes!” assented Medon.

As they talked, they had been moving slowly through the andron and now entered the women’s court.

Melantho, the mother, hearing them enter, came running down the stair to fold her son in her arms. Baltè, the old nurse, hobbled up. Nerea, Clito, and other slave girls came and kissed the hem of his robe.

But Nikander missed one member of the household.

“Where is Eleutheria?” he asked.

Then he caught sight of her standing in the far corner of the court—his daughter, tall, delicately flushed with that air between shyness and pride which is common to all new-flowering things.

“Daughter,” said Nikander, “we have come home with the crown!”

She bowed her dark head, fingering her distaff with its tangled threads.

“Come, my dear,” said Nikander, snapping his fingers to hasten her. “Come, greet your brother victor.”

Then she looked up—a face full of some strange startling emotion.

“No,” she half whispered.

“No? What on earth do you mean?”

“I cannot,” she spoke sharply. “I cannot praise him.”

“You are ill,” said Nikander, going to her. Indeed he feared some fever had deprived her of her wits.

“No, I am not ill.”

“Then what madness is this? What nonsense!” Nikander could hardly believe in this sudden quarrel darkening the brightness of his day of joy.

Dryas crossed over to her. He was ever the peacemaker.

“What has happened, Theria?” He began gently.

Her great eyes looked fearfully at him.

“You know perfectly well what has happened. How dare you ask!”

Nikander was now thoroughly angry.

“Theria,” he said, “greet your brother at once or go to your room. Your whims are unbearable.”

“Theria,” began Dryas again. But at his urging voice her anger took flame.

“I won’t praise you!” she cried wildly. “You know the song is mine, mine. I made it myself.”

“Great gods!” laughed Lycophron. “Here’s a pother for you!”

“No pother at all,” spoke Dryas quickly. “Who’ll believe her?”

“Nobody, nobody, my son,” sounded Nikander’s deep voice. “Now, Theria, go! I shall punish you myself for this!”

Here Melantho lifted horrified hands. “What jealousy, Theria! Shame on you! Shame!”

Theria had already reached the stair-foot, but at this word she faced them again.

“I am not jealous, I can prove that I made it,” she said, her voice suddenly clear. “I can sing my song.”

As at sacrilege, Nikander answered:

“Indeed you will do no such thing. Do you suppose I would allow that perfect creation to be caricatured by you?”

“Father, she heard me sing it,” thus Dryas, pale with the hurt Theria had given. “She has a perfect memory.”

“My dear boy, do you suppose the matter needs argument?”

“Oh, let her try. Why not?” came the heavy voice of Lycophron. “Then we can finish the scene with a good laugh, anyway.”

“You will not laugh at me,” cried out Theria. “By Hermes, you will not laugh!” The look in her face, suddenly visionary and unafraid, found response in an unexpected quarter.

“Oh, let her try.” Lycophron spoke in a different tone. “Give the poor child a chance.”

“Surely you need no proof,” said the father.

“Be damned if I don’t,” responded the elder brother.

“Then have your proof. It will need few moments.”

Nikander swiftly took the lyre from Dryas’s slave and gave it into Theria’s hand. The girl received it with an almost hungry eagerness as though the song within her burned for expression. Every vestige of anger died from her. Something from within seemed to sweep her up into a mobile erectness, holding her delicately steady as a flame is held aloft.

She struck a deep chord from the lyre upon her hip and sang. To their astonishment, it was not Dryas’s song though haunted ever and again with bits of the Dryas melody. She tossed the melody from grave to gay with ease and in the changes swayed softly.

Wherefore, O Muse, dipping from highest heaven

Down through the ambient air

Com’st thou to me in my thick-walled shadowy chamber

To lay on my lips the honey of sweet song?

I am a woman, a spinner.

Not for such is the glory of singing;

Not for such the happiness free in the sunshine

of Pythian contests in song.

In answer the Muse

Inexorable goddess,

Drew with yet stronger cords my will and my spirit.

“Sing!” she commanded, “Sing!”

At this point the rhythm with an increasing purposeful tread marched into the very tune of Dryas. The ancient story of Apollo slaying the Python-snake and winning the place of the Oracle from which to speak to men. The song was greatly enhanced by its prelude:

Fair, fair on the mountains the feet of Apollo striding;

Swift is our God and stern.

Dark, dark in the valley, the snake coiling and sliding

Lone mid the Delphic fern.

Ha, old Dragoness, dost thou possess it—

Oracle meet for the voice of a God?

Nay, for our archer God comes to redress it.

Already are trod

The dear paths of Delphi by feet mysterious, divine.

Apollo, we shall be thine!

Coils of the Python lie over the place

Of Loxias’s[1] grace

The heartening word

Is choked in the depth,

Unheard.

Dark dark is Delphi,

Dark is the dell,

There in the murk the birds of ill-omen, softly horribly fly,

And like waters of hell

Castaly streams from her gorge and is lost in Castaly’s well.

That gleam in the gorge!

That glint in Phaëdriades cleft!

Like a golden spool in the weft

Like a golden bird which flits

’Mong solemn crags of the ghostly place:

Before the God cometh, cometh his grace.

Ha! flash of silver bright as a bolt from the sky

A piercing cry

And straight to the heart of the monster

The arrows of Loxias fly!

Writhe, O Monster, lifting on high.

Now thou must die!

And now from Castaly’s gorge like the beauty of day

Steppeth the God with bow bent broad to the fray

Drawing with lifted arm the shaft to the tip.

Paian, Paian, the pure!

Thou art here, thou art sure,

Immortally tall, fair tressed, crowned with bay.

God of the far-borne voice,

So dost thou capture with valiance the place of thy choice—

Delphi, murmuring, golden.

Hail to thee—God of Day!

[1] Loxias, Son of Leto, Archer God, Paian, son of Zeus—all are affectionate, worshipful names of Apollo.

To the end she sang it. Not with Dryas’s sensitive handling but with a dramatic power, possessive, from within, making it inalienably her own.

Then she seemed to waken. She looked around. Her father stood with bowed head and hidden face. Melantho was weeping. Lycophron motioned a slave to shut the door lest someone come upon them, and Dryas sat gazing at the ground with an expression of misery and defeat which scattered the last vestige of Theria’s creative joy.

Suddenly she would have given worlds not to have sung. All kept silence as if they were all guilty. And like a guilty thing, Theria gave the lyre back to the slave and went up the stair.

CHAPTER II
PARENTAL JUSTICE

Theria was gone. Yet in the room the awkward silence held. Then by some hidden sympathy Nikander’s hand beckoned to Dryas and Dryas himself started forward at the same moment.

“I wanted,” faltered Dryas, “oh, I wanted you to be proud.”

“I would have been proud anyway,” said Nikander loyally. Dryas began to sob.

“Son, why did you deceive me? There was no need. I would never have told the judges.”

“I don’t care for the judges. It was you—you!”

With sorrowful affection Nikander kissed him, then went slowly up the stair to Theria’s room.

He found her pacing up and down the narrow place. She was talking aloud.

“To take away my song! It wasn’t fair. No! To take away my song!”

Nikander spoke passionately: “Theria, this was the happiest day of my life and you have made it the most sorrowful.”

“Father!” she cried. “Father!”

She stood instantly still. Tears were running down her face. “Oh, I was sorry the minute I had done it. There was no use to tell and it only gave pain to everyone.”

Wistfully she tried to take his hand. Like most children, she had never told him how intensely she loved him.

“I cannot understand, Theria, why you would give your song to Dryas and then at a crucial moment snatch it back again. Dryas has done wrong, but your wrong is sheer cruelty.”

“But, Father——” she began. Then she stopped. She had done enough harm for one day.

She could not tell him that she had never given the song, but that Dryas had taken it against her will. Dryas had come to her one morning with a song of his own. Theria knew at once that it would never win the prize. They had talked it over, trying to mend it.

That afternoon her own song had flashed upon her. It was, as such flashes are apt to be, the culmination of long striving and dreaming. And for days afterward she had worked and perfected it. Then a week before the Pythian festival she had taken the song to Dryas and had sung it for him. Of course she was willing to give it to him. It did not occur to her but that Dryas would share with her the honour of it, at least in their own home. This Dryas had refused to do. They had quarrelled, and, at the end, Dryas had flatly told her that since she taught him the song he would take it for his own, whether she willed or no. He had thought she would never dare to tell. But now she had told, and the result was this misery.

“Theria,” said her father wearily, “how did it ever occur to you to write a song?”

“It was just as I told in the singing, Father. I was spinning alone in the spinning-room and the Muse struck across my mind. She would not let me go. The words hurried before I could catch up with them; a new chord waited for every chord I struck.”

Nikander was for a moment awed. He believed in the Muse; no mere poetic figment was she. She was an accepted goddess, and even thus was she wont to act.

“But you must have studied and worked,” he said. “You must have had help.”

“Medon has helped me a little. He taught me the scales, and I have taken your book rolls and made him show me how to read. Do not be angry with Medon. He is only a slave and I commanded him. It was really myself did it. I worked very hard.”

Suddenly it seemed to her that some invisible door, which ever for her, a girl, had always stood ajar, had quietly and irrevocably closed. She had the instinct to turn this way and that for escape. But there was no escape.

“What shall I do?” she moaned. “Oh, what shall I do?” It seemed as though her father, so intelligent, so quick to help all comers to the Oracle, surely he would know some help for her.

“My dear Theria,” said Nikander, “there is much for you to do here at home. You have everything, why are you unhappy?”

She bowed her head without answer. There was so much to say that she could say nothing at all.

“Theria,” he went on kindly, “I must tell you that only yesterday by your mother’s advice I did something for you. I see now how necessary it was.”

Her lips parted as if in fear.

“I have offered you in marriage,” said Nikander, “to Timon for his eldest son Theras. Timon has accepted. I am delighted with the alliance and I shall have the betrothal very soon.”

With a low cry the girl crouched upon the floor, clasping his knees.

“Oh, no, Father, no,” she pleaded. “You are not so angry with me as that. Don’t send me away! Don’t send me away!”

He took her hands gently and lifted her—put his arm about her pitifully trembling shoulders.

“What a strange child. What a strange, foolish child. All maidens look forward to marriage. It is their right.”

“But not I, Father, not I!”

“You must do so. Of course it will be strange at first. Brides are often timid, but you are not lacking in courage. Theria, your constant dwelling upon thoughts which are for men makes you cold toward what is your business in life—which is marriage and childbearing. You are mature in things not for you and in all the rest an undeveloped child.”

This brutal statement was a nearer reading of Theria’s character than Nikander himself guessed. An unevenness of development was hers—a kind of mental hobbledehoy which is not infrequent in high-bred youngsters. Nay, more than this: An actual shrinking purity was the concomitant of her poetic gift. Other girls of Delphi discussed the facts of marriage with primitive frankness and looked forward to marriage as the one event to break monotony. Theria never spoke of it, and thought of it almost with horror—the strange house, the strange man, the mysteries from which she hid her eyes.

Shall we add to this the terrific pride of youth—that she held it a certainty that no family equalled the Nikanders? To mate even with another Delphian was a downward step. This pride was in her stubborn answer.

“Father, I cannot—I cannot.”

“Nonsense,” smiled Nikander, “of course you will. He is a good man—Timon’s son.”

“Have I seen him?”

“Daughter! Of course you have not.”

She wrung her hands in sudden wildness.

“I won’t marry,” she cried. “I won’t go away from the house I love to one I have never known. I won’t belong to Theras whom I have never seen. I will only belong to you, you, you!”

“Theria, my dear child,” began Nikander.

But she was quite beside herself. She stamped the floor with her foot.

“I won’t marry Theras! I won’t! I won’t!” she raged.

At the end of the interview Nikander brought out a small whip which was used for child slaves. With this he whipped his daughter. Greek fathers had this right even with grown sons, but Nikander had never used it.

At last, when she stood tall and tearless and he stood trembling in spite of effort to keep steady, he said:

“Daughter, this is not for your present act alone. It is for your year-long disobedience. I believe now that you will obey.”

She stood like a straight reed, so still, so horror struck. And in that stillness her father left her.

An hour later Theria was roused from her apathy by the sound of beautiful music.

It was in the street, and she curiously stole forward to her father’s room to look out of the little window there. She was in time to see Dryas borne along the way on the shoulders of his friends.

The full moon of the festival made the street as bright as day and the torches of the procession twinkled like jewels in the white light. Pindar walked in the procession chanting a strophe in Dryas’s honour. A chorus of youths followed singing the antistrophe, and behind these a boy played the cymbals upon which the glitter of sound met the lovely glitter of the moonlight.

Leaning out of the window, Theria suddenly exulted. “It is my song Pindar is praising. All those words are for me and it is Pindar, Pindar!”

In a burst of joyous music they passed within the house door below her, and Theria heard the pleasant confusion as they took their seats at the board and the scurry of the slaves beginning to serve them.

Then after a time came a faint tuning of a lyre, a pause, and Dryas started once more to sing his song—her song. He faltered. Oh, would her rumpus of the afternoon make him fail? She was in a panic—family pride, family affection were strong in the Nikander household—but after a little flickering Dryas’s flame burned bright. He even imitated his sister’s dramatic singing of the afternoon.

Theria could not hear Pindar’s exclamation of wonder that the lad should sing the song this evening with an entirely new meaning. She heard only the hand clappings, the mingled voices, the chitter of the silver cups—cups treasured many a year by successive Nikander housewives. A wave of loneliness swept over her—a Wave of fear, remembering her father’s purpose. And shrinking back from the window she made her way through the darkness to her room and bed.

BOOK II
A CHILDHOOD IN DELPHI

CHAPTER III
THERIA, SEVEN YEARS OLD

A little girl in an ancestral house—a slender, vivid, flashing little girl whom yet the rich traditions of her line filled to the brim with dreams—such had been Theria in her childhood.

The town in which she was born had not grown haphazard, had not been founded for trade nor for its nearness to some natural wealth.

Its central life was the god, the god of light and of enlightenment, of beauty and judicial fairness. Apollo was its source of happiness and its livelihood as well. He moulded the daily life. The focus of all Delphi was the shrine where, from a windy cleft beneath the temple, Apollo spoke, answering the wistful questions of men.

And of such an idealizing force it is true, that while it affects the community as a whole, it gives to certain individuals a heaped-up gift. Such a gift was upon this child, peculiar to her in Nikander’s house. Delphi had imprinted that expression on her baby face, that unmistakable look of spiritual life which had been the life of her fathers for at least four hundred years. So many traditions, so many prides, upliftings, adventures, poetries, and faiths, entering into the heart of a little girl. Nikander’s sons were just hearty, playful Greek boys. Theria was a Delphian.

One spring morning, when all Delphi was joyous with an awakening sky and earth, it happened that Theria was seven years old. She came tripping down the stairway of the inner court, fresh-washed from the hands of her nurse, fresh-dressed in a single garment which did not reach her knees.

“Now be good,” the old nurse had admonished her as she gave the last touch to her dark curls. “Your twin brother is playin’ that sweet down in the aula. Don’t ye go now and stir him up with your mischievous ways.”

And here in the court sure enough Dryas was playing “that sweet.” He had made a circle of pebbles and stones and was marching around and around it chanting some childish, made-up thing—perfectly absorbed, unseeing. Sunbeams slanted across the court leaving him in a sort of magic, refracted light; small rain-pools here and there among the worn pavement-flags gave back the blue, or wrinkled suddenly from the unseen breeze. In the corner the old, old tiny altar, upon which many generations of Nikanders had sacrificed, breathed yet the smoke of the morning rite. The place smelt sweet of wood-smoke. Now Theria was aware of a shadow moving across the court and looking up saw an eagle swoop down the sunlit air.

In after years Theria—a woman and far away—was to recall this scene cut clear and deep by the love she bore her home, but now she tripped recklessly down the unbalustered stair and scattered Dryas’s circle of stones with her foot.

“Let’s play,” she announced.

“Am playin’—threshin’-floor,” responded Dryas, breathless from circling.

“You don’t play threshing-floor now. That’s past.”

The Threshing-Floor was an ancient circular platform in the Precinct of Apollo. Every four years a sacred drama of the Python-snake was performed upon it and this year little Dryas had seen it.

“I’ll tell you,” said the disturbing Theria, “you fetch more stones. We’ll make the village and the road that goes by to the Oracle.”

The Oracle was the treasury of beauty and wonder of all Hellas, but to Delphic children it was just a dear bright place within high walls and the scene of their holidays.

Dryas did not answer, but he stopped his play and trotted off toward the outer room, which led to the front door, for the pebbles.

Theria waited impatiently while he brought in skirtful after skirtful of stones. Then she began to make her village, a stone for each well-known house, a line of little stones to show the road which passed their own door and ran windingly along the mountain slope. Theria set her miniature precinct in the sunny part of the court. To her the sunlight always and inevitably rested on that temple place where fane after fane and shrine after shrine mounted the hillside up to the matchless Apollo temple itself, set like a jewel of red and peacock-blue and gold against the shining cliffs.

“The Sacred Way,” murmured Dryas happily as he made the path between the temples. “Here it turns—an’ oh, here’s a sparkly stone for the ’Thenian Treasury.”

“The Knidian Treasury,” corrected Theria. “It’s the Knidian Treasury at the turn.”

“No—’Thenian!”

“No, don’t you remember the pretty marble ladies who hold up the porch?”

Still Dryas maintained his Athenian Treasury.

“Shu! You’ve never been there,” he said, “an’ I’ve been there lots o’ times.”

“I go every day,” announced the little girl.

At this evident whopper Dryas’s rosy mouth fell open in dismay.

“Never have you been there. You are only a girl.”

“I go there every day,” repeated Theria.

Quarrel was imminent; was averted only by Dryas scrambling to his feet to seek old Medon as judge.

“Never mind Medon, I’ll show you how I go,” and, taking her twin brother’s hand with an air of great bestowing, Theria led him up stairs and forward to her father’s bedchamber, to its one window. Out of this she leaned so far that only her chubby legs remained within. Sure enough, so leaning she could see beyond the shoulder of a cliff a spur of farther hill, and there in a bath of light the golden tip-edge of a little temple and on a higher level a single pillar bearing a sphynx of lofty wings.

“I see it every day,” she announced again.

“Only a little piece,” said Dryas contemptuously.

“When I see that I see all,” repeated the child enthusiast. “Medon has told me all.”

Dryas opened his lips to answer but thought better of it. Theria was a most determined little person when once she had made up her mind.

They went back to the aula. Here ruin met them. Baltè, the old nurse, was sweeping up their shrine of Apollo in great indignation.

“Whatever made ye litter up the aula like this?” She complained. “Rubble and rubbish when the rain washed all so clean last night. Never ye mind. I’ll be rid o’ one of ye after to-day.”

Dryas did not notice this speech but Theria looked up in alarm.

“Which one?” she asked.

“Never ye mind. There; I should not ’a’ spoken.”

“Why shouldn’t you spoken?”

Such caution was unusual in Baltè. The threat sounded real. Theria caught Baltè’s skirt.

“Is something goin’ to happen?”

“There, don’t you worry, darlin’. It won’t be you,” said the old nurse as she hurried away.

Dryas had rescued enough stones to recommence his threshing-floor. To tell truth, he had preferred this all along.

Theria sat beside him watching his play. The “something” was not going to happen to herself. Then surely it would happen to Dryas. Her heart began to yearn over her brother with that frightened tenderness which children know. She leaned over and kissed him. Dryas wiped off the kiss in frank disgust.

“Don’t,” he said.

She remembered the eagle. There was no bird so sure of omen as an eagle.

“Dryas,” she said softly, “I’ll tell you a story now.”

“No—please.”

Yet Theria lingered. Dreadful it was that she could do nothing for her brother when the eagle would so soon be carrying him away.

“I wish you would let me,” she said faintly. “I’ll give you all my honey cake at noon if you will.”

To such a bribe Dryas consented, squatting down in a chubby heap beside his pebbles.

“It’s about baby Hermes,” Theria began. “First, he was born, and when he was three hours old he got out of his cradle and walked straight up Parnassos Mountain—to the very top.”

“He couldn’t,” objected her auditor.

“But god-legs is strong.”

“Presè’s got a baby three months old and it can’t walk yet. Its worse’n a puppy.”

“Presè’s a slave. Slave legs is different.”

“But even a god, he couldn’t do it.”

And though Theria knew her story was correct, she did not press the point.

“And little Hermes found some cows,” she went on. “Oh, beautiful wild cows with sharpy-sharp horns. All the cows were white and were eating white flowers that grow in the meadows up against the sky.”

“Clouds?” suggested Dryas.

“Yes, clouds were their food,” went on Theria who knew the tale by rote. “For they were the herd of Apollo. And the little baby called the cows and they left their white flowers and came; for who can resist the call of a god? And Hermes, swift of foot——”

“Three-hours-old foot,” interposed Dryas.

“—leaped down the path, and all the cows they followed him. And when he came to the deep forest he sacrificed the cows to his father, Zeus, and the smoke went up through the trees to heaven and smelt very sweet. Then Hermes found a tortoise, and out of the tortoise and the cows’ pretty horns he made a lyre—oh, the first, first lyre that ever was made. And the baby Hermes began to play on the lyre—

‘Twink, twink,

Twinky, twink, twink’

—Oh, god-music, as pretty as Father plays or Pindar when he——”

“Here, here!” came an unexpected voice. “It’s very well to compare Pindar to Hermes but your father is another matter.”

The children scrambled to their feet with faces of delight. It was rare to see their father at this hour. And Father always brought gaiety.

CHAPTER IV
ELEUTHERIA LOOKS OUT OF A WINDOW

Nikander was a tall slender man, a remarkable uniting of sensitiveness and force. Twelve generations of his forbears had been priests of Delphi, statesmen of wide outlook and ministers to the souls of men. Nikander was a resultant type.

He sat down on a stone bench lifting Dryas to his knee, but Theria crept into the hollow of his arm. Her fears took flight like scattered birds. No harm could come to Dryas now that her father was there.

“And what day, think you, is this?” he asked. Birthdays were not so important in those days and the children did not know.

“It is Dryas’s birthday,” he told them.

“Then my birthday, too,” exclaimed Theria, for though she was taller and seemed older than her brother, she was his twin.

“Yes, yours, too.” Quite unconscious of his act, Nikander bent and kissed the little girl. So bending, his face was the mature model for her own.

“And because it is the seventh birthday it is to be the first day of school. Medon will take you, Dryas. He will be pedagogue. And here is your little lyre. Father bought it to-day of the old lyre maker. See what a pretty picture is here beneath the strings. And for you, my daughter, what you have wanted so long.”

He drew from behind the bench the ropes and seat of a swing. “But I wanted a lyre, too,” said Theria with wide, blank eyes.

“A lyre for a little girl! Oh, no, kitten. Besides, did you not ask for a swing?”

“But, oh, Father, it is the lyre I want.”

“Theria must not be envious,” said her father seriously. “That would be a new fault in my little girl.”

But her wide, astonished eyes disturbed him and again he kissed the child before he hurried out.

Dryas with little cluckings of delight plucked at his toy, but Theria stood very still. Since she was to have no lyre, was it also true that she was not to go to school?

She seemed in the presence of a calamity which had been approaching since all the days she had been alive, and now was come. With the vagueness of her seven years, yet very deeply, she knew that not going to school meant the parting of the ways between her and Dryas, the closing away from her of precious things. Yet, strangely enough, in her surface, childish self, she did not believe it at all.

Father had not said she could not go. Besides, she had always got what she wanted if she persisted. She knew from her big brother Lycophron what the school was like—a room or portico up near the Precinct, the master teaching Homer all the day long—wonderful stories which one could not forget, boys playing their lyres merrily then hanging them upon the wall to go out and leap and race in contest in the sunshine. Lycophron had gone to school since the beginning of the world.

Theria did not associate Baltè’s warning with this matter at all.

“I go to school to-day,” she began to say softly to herself. “Then I must hurry.”

With a certain anxiety she crossed the court to Lycophron’s room. Yes, there on the chest were his extra stylus and tablets and hanging on the wall a small lyre which in a temper he had broken.

Theria climbed the chest and got it.

And in possession of these things confidence came to her. She was perfectly sure now that she should go to school. She began to hum briskly to herself. She went back into the court to be near Dryas lest when Medon come he forget her.

Dryas was prancing about, hugging his lyre. He was not slow to taunt her.

“Ai: I’m going to school. You can’t go; you can’t go!”

“I can. Father said I could. I heard him.”

“When did he say it?”

“I don’t know when, but I heard him! ‘Daughter, you are going to school; you are seven years old! Everybody goes to school then.’”

“He didn’t give you the lyre. He gave it to me,” gloried Dryas.

“I’ve a lyre, too, foolish one.” She held it out.

“Ai, what a broken thing, and it’s Lycophron’s. It’s none of yours.”

“If I had a lyre I’d play it, not hug it,” retorted Theria.

Here Medon came into the aula with sandals on. To Theria it was a thunder-clap. She watched him steadily as he crossed to them, then with loving gesture slipped her hand into his.

“But,” said the slave, “my darling is not going to-day. It’s Dryas who must go. Poor Dryas!”

“Oh, no: you didn’t understand,” she reasoned with him. “Father wants me to go.” She pushed back her curls with a nervous little gesture and looked brightly up at him.

Medon dreaded a battle with Theria. The child had a storm-like temper. To be sure it broke seldom, but it was always on some bright day like this and nearly always had to do with going out of the house—a privilege rare for little girls. Most girls did not expect to go out. Theria always expected it, like a boy, and fought for it like a boy, too. Something told him she was going to fight now. He must do his best.

“Medon will buy you a hoop in the market—a hoop, mind you, with bells—if you will be good.”

“I don’t want that.” How tight she held his hand and how black were the childish eyes gazing up at him. “I’ll tell you, Medon, you can give the hoop to Dryas. School will be hard for Dryas. It’s going to be so easy for me.”

“But, my dear little mistress, you cannot go. There are no girls at the school.”

Medon felt the hand tighten sharply in his. The child was looking off at a distance. Then with complete change she slipped her hand out of his.

“Yes, you and Dryas go,” she said.

She ran quickly up the stair to the women’s apartments—no doubt to cry alone, and Medon, seizing his opportunity, fairly fled with his charge from the house.

Medon carried the little boy’s lyre and very peacefully they walked along the road toward the Precinct. They had gone some distance when Medon heard running steps behind him, and, turning, saw to his amazement Theria as if on wings, her black hair streaming behind, her chubby arms clasping a lyre.

“I’m going!” she cried. “I will; I will!”

And then it was that Medon had to carry back along the road a strange wild creature that fought and kicked and bit and clutched at his hair.

The neighbours hearing the cries ran out of their houses and shook their heads at Nikander’s terrible child. Poor Medon was like to drop into the earth for shame. Yet amid all the tumult he kept thinking of a mountain stream which had been dammed back but which one day broke through and rushed away—a mighty flood.

Nikander’s alarmed family—wife, slaves, and all—met them at the door.

“Now for what do the gods punish me?” cried poor Melantho, “that I should have such a child! Look at her eyes. She is beside herself. Baltè, hold her!”

But as Medon set down the little raging tumult old Baltè let her escape. Up the stairs she flew, her voice like a clarion.

“Leave her be, dear mistress,” pleaded wise old Baltè. “Remember, she is a twin child and it does grieve her sore to be separate from her twin.”

In the farthest room of the house Theria found refuge and slammed the door. Here she threw herself face downward and beat the floor with her fists; yes, and kicked, too, as her childish grief surged to and fro within her. Her strength spent itself at last and she fell to sobbing, suffering now as she had not done amid the curious enjoyment of loud woe.

Her thoughts now were not of the school nor of Dryas, but of her father, the strange horror that her father should have done this and not seem to care. Always before this had he mended hurts, not made them. Facing this mystery her dearest faith tottered. Yet after a while even this dread grew faint. Thoughts faded into fancies. Then she fell asleep.

She must have slept a long while for she awoke strangely quiet. Her refuge place was a storeroom. Chests stood about full of things used only at festivals. There were also great earthen jars of grain and wine.

The room was stone floored, stone walled, but its far end was hewn into the native rock. Nikander’s house, standing on a side hill, was two storied in front but here at the back melted to the roof in the hillside. This room had a little low window—the only other window in the house besides that in Nikander’s room.

To this window the little girl crept, and leaned her two elbows on the ledge, her chin in her hands. The window showed her only the side lane which led up between the houses to lose itself in the hill above. This lane was wider than most of the lanes in Delphi, for it had been chosen by one of the mountain streams for a bed, and now in the springtime the foaming waters dashed downward between the house walls beside the footpath.

There was no sound in the lane save the happy speaking of the waters. An amber light lay over all as if the sun were setting, and in this rich light everything stood distinct: ferns, rocks, and the tiny flowers on the mossy roof of Cousin Phaino’s house across the lane. Every little wave as it lifted in the stream turned golden and as it dived under again seemed to peep at Theria and laugh. Presently a child came down from the upper hills into the lane. What could so small a child have been doing up there alone in that wilderness of crags? But what a lovely child he was, what brave, erect little shoulders and rounded legs and what a mischievous, dream-haunted face! How fearlessly he leaped along! He was only a baby. Oh, why should he not leap? Wings were on his heels and two golden wings in his cap—Hermes, and no other!

To Theria it was not strange that Hermes should thus stroll down Nikander’s lane. Not strange, but it made her very glad. Now the dear Hermes child paused by the stream, laid his tortoise lyre to his arm, and began to play. Theria had never heard such music. It was clear like the amber light and filled her with a joy that was to glisten softly down all her years. Yet it was very faint, that music. She had to strain her ears to hear.

Presently under its rhythm the stream grew more turbulent. The waves dashed higher and turned to foaming white. And suddenly from each white wave where it tossed in swift succession there swam out into the air nymphs white as the foam, slender as flowers, immortally fair.

Theria knew it was right for them to come. Nymphs were always the nursemaids of infant gods. Little Hermes must not wander alone, god though he be. How delicately they kissed him, bending over him, then rising, circling up and away as if carried by the breeze. Hermes was safe now no matter how rough the way.

Suddenly a step sounded in the lane, “clump clump,” coming nearer.

The nymphs and Hermes stopped still, listing as hares do in the path. Then instantly, thus poised, they vanished.

“Lentils—good lentils, who’ll buy?” came the call of old Labba, the market woman, so tired with her day’s work, tramping home to her poor scraggy farm in the hills.

Theria watched her. Poor Labba! She could not see the gods. Labba climbed the hill and was lost to view. Theria looked again.

Yes—at once, as though bursting out of invisible pods, they came again, and with them the music so elfin clear. The nymphs formed a circle and danced, with feet which did not touch the rocks, around their baby god. Sometimes they circled above the stream, sometimes swept near under Theria’s very window. So they danced and danced.

Baltè, searching anxiously through the house for her nurseling, found her at length in the far shadowy room. She was sitting by the window, her head resting on the window ledge over which was strewn loose her night-dark hair.

She was sound asleep.

“An’ I only wish,” said Baltè afterward to Medon, “you could ’a’ seen the smile on her face. You wouldn’t ’a’ thought this very mornin’ she was like a whole crew o’ mænads!”

CHAPTER V
THE TRADITIONS OF THE HOUSE

So Theria’s world was bounded by the house. Fortunate was it then that the house was rich in memories. Rich otherwise it was not. No earnest Greek beautified his own house when he could beautify instead the house and temple of his deathless gods. So the walls of Nikander’s house were of plain stucco, its floors, worn flags.

To be sure the furniture, handed down from olden days, was beautiful. The bedsteads were chastely carved, their coverings were of home-made purple, and Melantho’s chair in which she sat to spin was of exquisite shape and balance. The tables in the men’s aula, where Nikander feasted his guests, were of teak-wood brought from afar by some travelled merchant to the Pythian feast. The vases in every room and put to all possible uses were of a grace and workmanship which only the Greeks knew. They were of the ordinary make, which everyone afforded, from the Delphi pottery below the hill. Upon them were painted pictures of the heroes and the gods—Theria’s charming picture books which sometimes told whole stories.

The plain old house had been built upon, lived in, and loved by a dozen generations of Nikanders. It had absorbed within itself the beauty of their daily life and seemed to give it forth again—a sort of fragrance to be sensed the moment you crossed the threshold. The Nikanders were one of those quiet families of exceeding excellence and highmindedness which always exist in great numbers in the background of an age of genius.

Time had harmonized the house. The lines of wall and ceiling were no longer plumb and level. The grey stucco had been stained lavender, yellow, faint rose by lichen growths. No threshold in the house but was worn deep by the tread of feet now passed beyond. In front of the little altar to Hestia the stone floor was hollowed like a bowl, where father and son, father and son had stood to offer reverent sacrifice to the goddess of the hearth.

Into this atmosphere Theria had been born and in it her spirit grew, keeping itself alive within the straitened, prescribed round.

But through the house were also wafted deep draughts of life from the Oracle—that mysterious shrine which seems to us like some myth, but which to the Greek was business-real.

The manner of divination at Delphi was peculiar in that it gave the priests an opportunity to mould the divine answer without at the same time losing faith in its divineness. The Priestess or Pythoness was a simple girl comprehending nothing of the knowledge which she must impart. In preparation for the day of oracle she was subjected to three days of rite. She fasted, drank of the sacred spring, walked through laurel smoke; and with her perfect faith in these rites, she must often have been in the ecstatic state before mounting the tripod.

Then in the shadowy adytum beneath the temple she was placed upon the golden tripod, the “High Perilous Seat” as it was called. The cold wind blew out of the cleft below her and in ecstasy she spoke words she knew not. It is undoubted that in her state of suspended consciousness she often reflected as in a mirror the knowledge and judgments of the priests. Her marvellous answers often filled priests and questioners alike with awe. The priests afterward were allowed to recast the answers into verse and to remould them. But in spite of the liberty which they occasionally felt obliged to use in the recasting the priests sincerely believed that the responses were genuinely from the god.

It was this mingling of faith and liberty which gave Delphi her power, a power which was for the most part grandly used. At the dawn of Hellas, from this eerie mountain glen the authority began to be exercised. It continued down through all the glory of Hellas and for centuries after her decline. Strong and real indeed must have been the religious impetus which could outlast the race.

This was the Oracle which Theria’s kin had served with singleness of heart. Her father, Nikander, served it now. Priest, yes, but priest in the joyous, free fashion of the Greek. In performance of his priestly duties to the Oracle Nikander had travelled far, studying the coasts of the Ægean, Mediterranean, and Euxine seas, wherever lay the colonies of Delphi’s founding. He had mingled with the barbarians or un-hellenic peoples and had even learned some of their languages—a sort of knowledge unknown in Greece. In Thrace he had sojourned with the rude tent dwellers, in Egypt he had visited the stately temples of Isis and Osiris and had seen the great Sphynx which so grimly faced the desert. In Persia he had visited the court of Xerxes and despised its luxury. He had returned to Delphi broadened and sweetened by his experiences.

Among the narrow one-city men of Greece the Delphian was not provincial.

Nikander was a member of that Council, presided over by Delphi, called “Amphyction,” which for hundreds of years had upheld the only international law that Hellas recognized. The Amphyctiony earnestly tried to keep peace between the passionate cities which were its members. Nikander personally had great influence in this Council and used that influence for the constant uplifting of the policy of the Oracle.

Nikander brought with him into his home the very breath of the Oracle. He spent little time at home, but when he did come his children ran to him, for no one could tell such wonder stories as Nikander—stories of shipwreck on savage coasts, of mountains that flamed and smoked, of the great statue Memnon which stood in Egypt and sang when the sun rose. But for the most part Nikander’s tales were tales of Delphi. Delphi was so rich in tradition that Nikander needed never to go far afield for his stories.

It was from her father that Theria heard of the beautiful coming of her own ancestors to Delphi, men brought by Apollo himself to be his worshippers.

“They were in a ship on a trading voyage,” Nikander would relate, “those ancestors of ours, bold young men, unafraid of the sea, for they were Cretan islanders. When suddenly there leaped out of the waves a Dolphin, golden and bright, and lay on their deck. At once the wind changed, speeding them toward the west. They tried to shift their sails but not one whit could they shift their course. The men were sore afraid for they knew they were in the hands of a god.”

“The Dolphin god,” Theria would murmur with Wide eyes.

“Yes, the Delphian,” her father made the age-old pun. “And they saw the immortal creature shimmer with rainbow colours never ceasing. So the strong wind blew them against their will first westward then northward into our own lovely gulf and to our port of Krissa. Here the ship stopped, held by immortal hands.

“Then at once the Dolphin disappeared and in his stead stood a young man strong and beautiful with golden locks out-sprayed upon the winds and eyes whose light was as the dawn of day.”

Theria would clap her hands softly, saying, “And he leaped upon the shore, our dear Apollo, and beckoned the men with his hand.” She knew the tale by heart.

Nikander would continue, smiling:

“And Apollo, lightly stepping, playing upon his heavenly lyre, led the Cretans hither, right by the place where our house now stands and up to the ‘place of golden tripods’ yonder.

“‘This is to be yours,’ he told the Cretans. ‘Here shall ye serve my oracle.’

“Then the Cretans looked about them. They saw the sterile cliffs and rocky hillsides on which nothing would grow. And they asked in apprehension:

“‘How can we live in this place, O Lord Apollo? Here will no grain grow, no cattle find fodder. Here we cannot fish.’”

The children laughed at this.

“Fish! O foolish, foolish Cretans!”

“Yes, foolish Cretans. So Apollo called them. ‘Do ye so love to delve in the earth, and sweat? Do ye so love to be buffeted by salt water and bitter winds? A secret I will tell you! Sit ye here, attend my worship, and all the nations of the earth shall bring you gifts. My altars shall smoke with the fat of lambs, my temples glow with golden things. But your duty shall be to guard my temple and to receive kindly in my name the tribes of men who gather here.

“‘But if any of you ill-treat the stranger, if ye do violence or speak harsh words, then shall others be your masters and make you slaves for ever.’”

“But we will never be slaves?” Theria would inquire anxiously. “We will never do those wicked deeds and be slaved?”

“No, never.” Nikander would kiss the child who cuddled so close in his arms and then with yet more fondness kiss his son Dryas.

Such was the ennobling tradition which the little girl Theria treasured in her heart. But she knew, too, that the Delphi god had not always been master of his shrine. Story upon story, faith upon faith went back into the misty past where the chaste belief in Apollo was underlaid with grotesque stories of Gaia—Mother Earth—and dragons.

It was from her nurse Baltè that she heard these older tales though they were sternly and fearfully believed by all Delphians.

Baltè one afternoon found the little girl sitting by Nikander’s front window gazing outward in silence. It was a place of wide prospect. The house was one of the few which stood above the main road, and so steep was the incline that the roofs across the way seemed but little higher than the road itself. Theria could look over them and over other roofs in sharp downward succession into the violet depth of Pleistos gorge and then up to the fir-clad mountain beyond.

A storm of clear-edged cloud was sweeping along that slope with flashes and mutterings. She watched wistfully its swiftness and its strength.

Baltè came from behind and kissed her.

“Now an’ why aren’t ye down in the aula playin’ with Clitè an’ Nerea? It’s always I find ye by yourself at the window. It isn’t right for little girls to be seen from the street.”

But Theria was full of questions. “Baltè, what does the glen find when it goes down into the shadows? It always seems to stoop down and down.”

“The river, do ye mean, darlin’?”

“But I can’t see the river, I’ve tried so many days.”

“No, the glen is too deep to see the Pleistos.”

“Baltè, did you ever go across the river to the other mountain—far, far over where Father Zeus has driven his clouds?”

“No, child, not I. What ever would I be doin’ there?”

“I’d like to go,” said the child.

“Don’t ye never! Do ye see that little rift-like all black on the mountainside among the firs?”

“Yes, Baltè.”

“Well, down in that rift is the cave o’ Lamia—a woman the upper part of her, but all the rest a snake. In the olden time she did come hitherward and ravaged the country.”

“What’s ravid?”

“Oh, knockin’ down the houses and eatin’ the folk. So at last to quiet her they did take a boy—oh, a nice likely young boy of the village—and leave him for her in that cave.”

“What for?”

“To eat! Every day a boy!”

By this time Theria’s eyes were wide, and she reached furtively and caught Baltè’s skirt.

“But then there came the hero Eurymalos an’ he walked right into the cave, he did. An’ he caught Lamia and pulled her out, and cast her down the cliff. Then she fell down, down, a-bumpin’ and bangin’ her head all the way—right into the river Pleistos.”

“Paian be praised!” breathed the little girl.

“Yes, but them kind don’t stay killed,” said Baltè uncomfortingly. “Look at the other one, the Python now. Apollo killed her long since. But every fourth year the Sacred Boy has to go up there in the Precinct an’ kill her again.”

“But, Baltè, that’s only a play to make a holy memory to the god.” Theria felt sure of this, for not long ago her cousin had been the Sacred Boy in the play and she had heard Mother say that if Dryas continued to do so well in school, and if he grew graceful and fair, he, too, might some day be the “Boy of The Strepterion Drama.” She somehow felt sure that Dryas could not kill a real Python.

But Baltè shook her head.

“Don’t tell me!” she said stoutly. “Ye haven’t seen her. I have. I’ve seen the switch o’ the Python’s tail, an’ heard her teeth grind, the while she dies. An’ when she is dead, don’t they perform all the purifications just as when old mistress died in the house? She’s real, I tell ye!”

Theria was more than half convinced.

Yet even the Python and the boy-eating Lamia did not so strike terror to the childish Theria as did the strange rites which through winter months occupied the Delphians. These were no tales of the past but rites of Dionysos which Theria herself could see.

In the winter came Dionysos, a powerful god, to take possession of the Precinct while Apollo should be away in the north. Then Theban women—a large company—arrived in Delphi to greet him. Theria saw them pass and knew that a like company from Athens was arriving at the other end of the village.

A society of Delphian ladies never else seen publicly came crowding out of their houses into the highway. From her favoured window Theria saw these also, her own kinswomen whom she knew well, no longer sedate and kind and neat, but with hair disordered, clad in strange spotted fawn skins over their chitons. They came leaping, shouting, whirling around in a sort of frenzy as though unable to wait for the rites which they were about to perform. They were no longer themselves, they were possessed by the strange god Dionysos. They were no longer called women, but Bacchantes. They were being swept along by a terrible joy from which the child shrank in shame though she could not understand.

On one such evening Theria watched them, saw the chill, dusky street aflare with their torches, saw how the eyes of the Bacchantes caught the light, staring like the eyes of panthers. Then in a frenzied, noisy rout they rushed away.

Theria sat by her window quivering while the cold yellow light died out on glen and mountain. Then quickly she left the window and stole down to the aula where she sat close to the Hestia fire. One of those first evenings of frost it was when instinctively men draw near to their hearth and wish to have about them the home faces and the comfortable voices of home. Yet the little girl knew that her Aunt Eunomia, her pretty cousin Clodora, and the rest, were speeding half-naked up Parnassos, there in the bitter uplands and the wild to rage madly to and fro at the will of the god.

Lycophron burst into the room, rosy with the cold, rude as fourteen years could make him.

“Did you see the women?” he shouted. “By the gods, I could hardly get home for them. Free at last—that’s what they are, havin’ the time of their lives. Dionysos is only an excuse. Hey, Theria, you are always wanting to get out. Why don’t you join?”

Lycophron did not see his father who had just come down the stair.

“Lycophron,” said the father sternly, “how do you dare such insolence? Let me never hear such from you again.”

And Lycophron disappeared more suddenly than he had come.

Nikander drew near the fire, absently warming his hands. Even at this early time he was disturbed over his eldest son.

“Are they gone?” queried the little girl.

“The Bacchantes? Yes, my child. As I came up the street I saw far up on the mountain their Bacchic fires gleaming through the dusk. It is cold for the night of Bromios.”

Theria knew of what he was thinking—a little great-great-aunt of hers who had died on a night like this, in the cold of the Parnassian rocks. A tiny room next to Theria’s own had belonged to her and she was said to visit it on Bromios night, a white, chattering figure trying in vain to warm herself amid the purple covering of the couch.

Theria stole to her father’s side, slipped her hand In his, and drew him down to whisper:

“Father, must I be a Bacchante some day?”

“God forbid,” spoke Nikander, then added piously, “unless the god demand you, Theria.”

“But he will not demand me. Oh, Father, he will not?”

Again she was in the hollow of his arm and again felt safe even from the god Dionysos himself.

“No, my daughter,” he said, looking into the sane little face. “I do not believe he will.”

CHAPTER VI
THE GUESTS

So throughout the winter months Dionysos, that god who came from far Asia into Greece, held sway in Delphi. Apollo was gone on his distant mysterious journey to the land of the Hyperboreans, those happy, luxurious folk who live on the farther side of the north wind. Theria felt keenly this absence of her god: more keenly perhaps than she would have felt the absence of any person in the household.

For with Apollo’s going the Oracle was silenced. No pilgrims came to consult it. The pure, ordered songs of Apollo, the throbbing lyre, the announcing trumpets were stilled. Instead sounded the nervous wailing of Dionysos pipes. On quiet evenings Theria could hear them, and Baltè told her of the furious satyr dances in the Precinct. And now the absence of Apollo brought the rains and the cold. Yes, in the winter Theria missed her god.

When, therefore, in the spring Apollo returned, the whole heart of the little girl went forth to him in love. Theria knew well how her god must look. Every vase and kylix in the house bore pictures of Apollo. And long ago her child mind had selected, from among the beautiful youths she had seen come by on pilgrimage, one who seemed to her like the god himself. Always at the word “Apollo” Theria saw again that fresh-hearted happy boy moving, flushed and expectant, toward the Precinct, and on his face that same look of dear surprise, youth’s first response to life.

Apollo always arrived at Delphi on his birthday the seventh of Busious. Then the whole Precinct and the town awoke to greet him with song and festival. In Nikander’s house slaves ran to and fro on busy errands; for of a surety guests would be coming from the ends of the earth. The purples and the woven curtains came forth from Theria’s familiar storeroom, and all the house glowed with the patterns and pictures of tapestries. What joy to the little girl that busyness and commotion.

Past the house on the highroad now came throngs of pilgrims, more of them every day. At these times no forbiddings or punishments could keep Theria away from the window.

Here came men from Corinth, Thebes, Argos, and the islands of the sea. Rich men on horseback with trains of slaves, poor men whose anxious faces showed plain their question to the god. “Even the wolves bring gifts to Delphi,” was the saying; and some of these with their heavy mountain faces and clothes of skin seemed wild and wolf-like to the little girl. Now would pass a delegation from some distant Delphian colony bearing the tithe gift to the mother fane; for Apollo was founder of cities. It was he who had first led the colonists to their distant lands over the misty deep. Sculptors came accompanying their statues; poets brought their songs. Now would pass an Ionian gentleman in long purple cloak, laughing, gesturing; now a quiet young philosopher whose large-eyed vivid face showed his spirit-quest. Philosophers were well known in Delphi and more welcome than kings.

How eagerly the visitors talked as they came along. They had arrived after long journeying to within sight of their goal. The broad Doric speech, the melodious Attic, the barbarous dialects mixed with the speech of Scyths, Sikels, and Gauls, all these she heard.

Among these passers-by were sure to be some who would stop and enter Nikander’s door—guests of the priestly house. Often these were men of high renown, but quite as often they would be poor, in threadbare garments, who had came to the Oracle in bitter need. To these Nikander’s ministry was almost un-Greek in its overflowing sympathy. An inherited skill of kindness was his and his poet quality of insight was of no peculiar race or date. Many a troubled wight came forth from Nikander’s presence, serene to face the god.

In the centre of Nikander’s as in every Greek house there was a fast-closed door. Behind this door lived the women. They might, when only the family was in the house, come through this door, but they had no business or occupation on its outer side. At the appearance of a guest the women must quickly disappear.

This door was at once Theria’s greatest grief and greatest delight. Grief that it must constrain her at all. Delight in that she could steal through it and catch glimpses of her father’s guests. Often though she was punished for this Theria always did it. Who would not take punishment for a glimpse of Æschylus, Kimon, Parmenides, or Pindar!

“Back to your room—quick, Daughter!” Nikander would command whenever he noticed her. But often Nikander would be absorbed in his guest, and the room would be confused with serving-slaves. Nikander would not even see Theria’s little figure crouched by a pillar.

Of all the guests the Theban poet Pindar was the one whom Theria loved best. Indeed all children loved Pindar. Not a child in Delphi but would lift up eager hands to that radiant smile as Pindar passed. There was in him an almost aggressive joy. The same vitality which makes a child leap and run and shout—all this was in his adult nature. It shone out of the clear deeps which were his eyes and trembled on his full Greek lips. He seemed always just to have taken a deep breath as if joying in the very air about him. His rather large mouth and his nose both were well-built for breathing. Splendour was his—splendour of imagination. His whole being exulted in response to spiritual beauty unseen by other men.

All Delphi adored him. They had a strangely spiritual custom concerning him. Wherever Pindar might be in bodily comings or goings, the keeper of the Apollo temple when closing the shining doors at sunset hour was wont to call aloud:

“Let Pindar, the poet, go in to the supper of the god!”

Theria was a very little girl when she first saw Pindar. She was awakened by a sweet commotion of music, and getting up from her bed she trotted down into the front aula. The fateful door had been left open and she stole through, a diminutive figure in her short chiton. She went direct to Pindar.

The poet laid his lyre upon the table and lifted the child to his knee.

“There, there; I awakened you, little one,” he said tenderly.

“No,” she answered, “the music called me.”

“Called you, did it? And so you had to come?”

She did not answer but gazed up at him unwinking, her tiny hands folding and unfolding in her utter joy at being so near to him. She was unaware of the others sitting at the feast.

“Where do you get it?” she asked.

“Get what? The lyre? Oh, of the lyre-maker in Athens.”

She shook her curls.

“No, the song. Does it come out of the air?”

“Perhaps so, little one. Apollo gives it, surely.”

“Oh, will he give one to me?” she asked, her hands clasping suddenly close to her breast. “If I make a prayer to him and a sacrifice—a big, big sacrifice like Father’s? A sheep, and burn it all up with leaping flame till it smells so good—so good?”

Her baby nose sniffed deliciously and all the men laughed.

“And where will you get your big sheep?” teased one.

“Nay, do not spoil her hope,” spoke Pindar quickly. He drew the lyre toward her and instantly her chubby hand reached out to touch the strings, sounding them lovingly, softly.

Pindar watched her, absorbed.

“The god will give you your song, darling. Apollo’s answer is already in your eyes and fingers.”

“Do you think so, Pindar?” asked Nikander, amused. “Yet even so the child must not stop our feast. Medon, will you carry her back to her nurse?”

Nikander expected that she would cry and struggle, but she leaned over and kissed the lyre, then went away with Medon, quite satisfied.

Ever from that time Theria awakened at the first sound of Pindar’s lyre. She would steal down as near as she dared. If the door were shut she would press her ear against it in her eagerness to hear. If it were open she would crouch in its shadow. The slaves passing to and fro with the feast never told. Theria was a favourite with them.

It was Pindar’s habit to bring his songs to Nikander when they were glowing new. Nikander, a poet who had never written himself forth, had the keenest sense of poetic values and Pindar was glad of his judgments. Sometimes an ode would be sung again and again before both pronounced it right. Then Pindar would go out into the Delphic starlight humming the altered, perfected refrain:

“Harken, for once more we plough the field

of Aphrodite of the glancing eyes,”

or

“In anywise to slake my thirst for song,

The ancient glory of thy forefathers summoneth me,”

or he would address his own songs, calling them

“My lords of lute,

My feathered arrows of sweet song,

My golden pillars of sweet song——”

These were the familiars of Theria’s childhood and entered into the fabric of her mind. Pindar, as he strode singing away, little recked of the girl-listener drinking at his fountain and transmuted in all her being by his supreme expression.

CHAPTER VII
WHAT GIFTS THE GUESTS BROUGHT

It was through a guest that Theria first came to visualize those distant colonies of the west which gave so many gifts to Delphi and played so important a part in Delphi’s life.

He was a simple-seeming guest, this young man from far-away Elea in Italy. But child though Theria was, she could not but note his face. It shone with an almost startling quietness, a robust and heavenly calm. The soul of the man had been dipped deep and deep again in abstract thought. Earthly things were washed away. The “Parmenidean Countenance of Peace” was soon to be recognized throughout Hellas, for even the disciples of Parmenides acquired this same look.

“Yes,” he said, smiling, as though it were an ordinary happening. “We were nearly shipwrecked off Corcyra. Four days of storm. I thought my earthly term was come. But I knew that I would at once rise from the sea and begin my long progress toward the Eternal Source.”

“Would you have been glad,” asked the amazed Nikander, “to go on pilgrimage to Hades?”

“No—no,” laughed Parmenides. “Too much to do here. Elea needs me. The city is now in my hands to govern quite as I will. I govern by philosophy. And, Nikander, we are happy in Elea! We are a little city and on a far-away coast, yet even Athens has not our justice and calm. Constantly I keep before the minds of our citizens the importance of right, the unimportance of this world’s goods. They know they are in the hands of The One.”

“I could not worship The One,” said Nikander seriously. “Think what a lonely god—an Only One, sitting sole and wordless in Olympos with no other god to speak to, to deal with, or to love. Or even to quarrel with,” he added whimsically.

“But the gods themselves worship my god. They know the One who is above them and controls.”

“Moira?” asked Nikander in a low voice. “Inexorable Fate?”

“No, Nikander, not Fate, but Love—creating all things—healing all things. Love—the First—the Source.”

Parmenides’s eyes shone with eerie light. He was fairly launched now. He began to recite his philosophy. It was—as was all literary expression in those days—a poem. Nikander listened entranced, laying it away in his retentive Greek memory which would give him back whole cantos of it almost entire.

Theria, crouched in the door corner wrapped in a dark cloak, was content to listen to the rhythm. Of the poem she understood not a word. Then she grew weary of her stolen pleasure, but she dared not move from her hiding place.

Presently Baltè began to call her through the house.

“Little mistress, little mistress, your mother asks for you. Little mistress, she is ill and needs you.”

For, strange to say, in Melantho’s frequent headaches it was Theria’s little magnetic hands which helped most of all.

“Apollo has blessed the child with his healing touch,” old Baltè was wont to say.

But now Baltè called in vain, and at last, fearing that her charge might be in forbidden quarters, she left off her call.

But the interminable poem went on. It mingled at last in Theria’s ears into a soft humming. Torches were brought, and the evening meal. Priest and philosopher lingered in ardent converse—that friction of mind upon mind which the Greek men of that day so loved and which with its sparkle and contagion of wit made the Greek look with contempt upon the mere written page.

Nikander, strolling dreamily to bed at midnight, stumbled upon the heap wrapped in its dark cloak, and lifted his daughter in his arms.

“Strange,” he murmured, “this continual disobedience. What can draw her hither—I wonder?”

The childish face sleeping upon his arm reminded him of his mother—a resemblance he had not noted before, and very tenderly he carried her to her bed where Baltè was waiting.

It was from a guest also that Theria heard the first whisper of The War—that steadily approaching war which was yet so far off that only the wise felt its dread.

Theria was older at this time and understood more of what she heard.

Her father one day entered suddenly bringing with him a stranger whose personality started her interest. Unremitting energy! That was the keynote of the man. He talked continually. Theria heard him even before he entered—the clear voice of the orator. His strange Attic dialect, his swift words made him a little difficult for her to understand. Fair he was, tall, blue-eyed, strong, something un-Greek about him. Nikander did not even see Theria this time. He was too absorbed in Themistokles.

Their talk was first about the new play at Athens. Themistokles had just heard the first great drama. His heart was afire with the excitement of it.

“It is new, utterly new and powerful,” he exclaimed. “Prometheus, it is called. Our Æschylus has outdone himself. The very gods come down upon the stage. And actors! We have never had such actors, Nikander. But it is the greatness of the play which creates them—the greatness of the play!”

“The lines!” pleaded Nikander. “Tell me the lines.”

And with ready memory Themistokles began. He gestured swiftly with his hands. “Flashing hands,” Theria named them. He puzzled her. Surely he was not Athenian—not quite moderate and serene—and his cloak with its border of purple and gold was a little too conspicuous of beauty.

In the midst of a scene he broke off.

“But here we talk of the play,” he said. “When I want to talk of dear Athens. Nikander, the Athenians are blind, every one of them, blind!”

“Gracious,” laughed Nikander, “no one else thinks so.”

“They will not believe that the Persian will come again. ‘Oh,’ they boast, ‘We conquered them at Marathon, that deed is done.’ But the deed is not done. Nikander, you know the Persian will return. Ye of Delphi, are you so unaware?”

He seized Nikander’s hand and Nikander sobered instantly.

“Indeed we are not unaware,” he answered.

“Oh, Nikander, the trophies of Miltiades will not let me rest. Such trophies must be won again. May the gods let me win them!”

Nikander did not reply but Theria saw him search the man’s face, as if anxiously measuring him for some great need.

“Have you news, Themistokles—fresh news?”

“No, only straws, but plenty of them. I keep a clever slave down at the Piræus who has no other business than to listen to stories of the ship-merchants and traders. Sailors know the way of the winds—the winds of the future. They push in at every shore. The Great King they tell us is now warring against Egypt, but our turn is next. Oh, it is surely the next. Nikander, the armies which Darius brought against us seven years agone were but a handful to those which his son Xerxes will bring.”

“I believe that,” said Nikander. “Ay, and the Delphian Council believe it, too.”

“Good!” exclaimed the Athenian.

“It is not good. Do you know, Themistokles, what this belief breeds in the Council? Fear; only fear! ‘Hellas cannot withstand the Persian.’ That is what they are whispering here in Delphi. ‘Hellas is doomed.’”

Themistokles’s face took on a horror which startled the listening girl.

“Nikander,” he cried, “you will not allow Delphi to shirk. The Oracle must stand by Athens!”

“I will stand by Athens and by all Hellas,” said Nikander solemnly. “I believe Apollo will defend his own.”

Themistokles now began to talk of the silver mines of Laurium and how he had been trying to persuade the Athenians to forego their yearly gift of silver in order to build ships for fighting against the little island of Ægina.

“Will so many ships be needed?” queried Nikander with sharp insight.

Themistokles leaned toward him, laughing softly, triumphantly. “For the war with Ægina!” he said, low-toned. “Believe me, for that war the ships will not be used. But when the Persian comes, he will find certain ships in our harbour that will give him pause. Remember that, Nikander, so that you may give credit to Themistokles who saw before the event.”

All too soon Themistokles took his departure. Afterward Theria heard the slaves gossiping about the man. “He brought with him a purple tent,” they said, “and furniture and many slaves, even for his short visit.” Themistokles lived like a prince in Delphi.

CHAPTER VIII
DRYAS TAKES A ROBBER

There was no use mincing matters; Lycophron, the eldest son of Nikander, was not satisfactory. Handsome in person, he had nevertheless always been slow to learn and swift in evil doing, the bane of his Delphic schoolmasters. At fourteen years his features had coarsened, his eyes grown less intelligent. Now at eighteen that phase was past and he was clever in a fashion which Nikander vainly tried to think creditable. Nikander wanted to keep close to his boy in study and sports. Lycophron was his first-born. Some day Lycophron would be priest in Nikander’s stead, would take his chair in the Amphictyonic Council. Yet try as he might, Nikander could never look forward to this succession without shame.

Lycophron now began to demand money for horses and a chariot for the Olympian games. Nikander could ill afford so expensive a winning. He had hoped that his eldest son would win the crown for leaping or running, some act which would be reflected back in manly beauty and strength. Yet Nikander managed to give Lycophron money for his horses. He loved his eldest with a sensitive, intimate love.

But now came Dryas. Dryas from the first week of school had shown himself a promising son of the ancient house, and Nikander’s joy in him was beautiful to see. Always when Dryas returned from school Nikander would contrive to be in the aula to greet him, to hear the latest Doric melody the boy had learned, to correct the faults, or recite with him the passage of Homer which had been the lesson of the day.

Sometimes Nikander would linger along the road, meet Dryas, and, dismissing the pedagogue, would himself conduct the boy home.

Dryas was not always strong. Nikander summoned for him the best physicians from Athens and on his ill days would sit beside him patiently trying to ease the child. At such times Theria helped, knowing by that curious instinct of hers what to do. And when the pain was eased, Dryas would draw her face down and kiss her. Nikander was almost jealous of the love that Dryas gave to his twin sister. As he grew taller, however, Dryas grew also well and strong.

One winter evening Dryas and his slave boy were returning from the gymnasium, old Medon his pedagogue being lame and at home. All afternoon Dryas had been exercising. Then in the gymnasium he had stood under the pouring fountain, a chilly bath, and the slave boy had rubbed him to a glow. He was full of life and of a sense of waxing strength. Dreams of Olympian contests were in his heart as they were in the heart of every boy of Greece.

“Come,” said he to the slave. “Let’s go out the eastern road. You have the bow. Maybe we’ll bring down a hare.”

“It will grow dark soon,” ventured the slave. “And your father will be coming to meet you.”

“It won’t be dark,” answered Dryas. “Come, I say.”

So together they walked eastward on the hill road. They passed the row of outer temples and the hillside tombs. Sure enough, against all hope, a hare leaped across the road. Dryas shot it, and the slave fetched and slung it over his shoulder. Then they started back to town.

Twilight had fallen when they repassed the graves. The boys shrank close to each other. Both slave and free were afraid of the spirits which hovered there.

As they came to the roadside temples they saw a man dart quickly around a corner.

“What was that?” asked Dryas sharply.

“I don’t know,” answered the slave. Dryas, with wide eyes of fear, backed behind a rock.

“If he’s stealing from the gods we ought to stop him,” spoke the slave. “See; we have our bow.”

At this word Dryas, ashamed of his fear, came out from hiding.

“Stay by me,” he pleaded, and the slave advanced first.

These small temples, being outside the Precinct wall, were poorly guarded. The boys crept nearer and rounded the corner just in time to see the man with some silver cups in his arms running down the hill.

The boys gave chase. The man circled around so as to come up the hill again. The upper heights were always a fastness for robbers. The boys still followed, and above the road overtook the man.

Dryas with a cry half like a sob leaped upon him while the slave at the same time tripped his heels. The fellow went down like a log, screaming in panic. The boys quickly possessed themselves of the cups. The slave with his own leather belt tied the man’s hands, and together the boys pulled the man down the road—he not resisting at all. They pushed him along toward town.

At the edge of the village Nikander met them. In all his life Nikander never forgot that shock—first the fear, then the joy—as he realized that Dryas, spite of bleeding face and dishevelled hair, was safe and that he had done a brave deed.

“Father, it is a robber,” Dryas was saying excitedly. “I caught him by the outer temples. See, he had the silver temple cups.”

“My son,” said Nikander. “My son!”

At sound of Nikander’s voice the man fell down again, howling like an animal in fear. And strangely, Dryas, too, broke into hysterical weeping.

“Don’t let them kill him, Father. Don’t let them kill the man!”

“But he has committed sacrilege.”

“Oh, no—no, if they kill him I’ll die, too. Oh, I’m afraid! Oh, he would haunt me.”

“Nonsense, Dryas.”

Here the man tried to get upon his feet but tumbled down again.

“Pitiful Hermes!” cried Nikander. “The wretch is starving.”

Dryas, still sobbing, caught nervously at the man’s bonds and pulled them off.

“Here, Son,” said Nikander. “Give him a drachma.”

The poor creature snatched the money and seeing the look of relenting in Nikander’s face, sprang up the hill with sudden life. He was quickly lost among the crags.

The incident soon got abroad in Delphi. The boys at school made a hero of Dryas. They had always liked him.

Nikander, however, could not help recurring to Dryas’s curious, passionate weeping. He told himself that it was natural. The young boy should be pitiful. But the weeping had not seemed to be pity. Something selfish, almost craven was in it. And a look in the slave boy’s face made Nikander think that the slave had done as much or more of the deed than Dryas himself.

Nikander pushed these thoughts from him and when Dryas’s praise came in from every side, Nikander gladly forgot them.

For from this time the Delphians began to take notice of Nikander’s younger son. His beauty was growing every day. He had a voice high, clear, unearthly sometimes, and he played the lyre with firm touch while he sang. He was only fourteen years old.

One day, as the priests broke up their council after the giving of the Oracle, the old Akeratus, president of the priests, detained Nikander. He told him that his boy Dryas had been chosen the “Laurel-Bearer” for the next Strepterion feast. It was the greatest honour the Delphians could give to a young Delphian boy. Then Nikander went home feeling that his cup of joy was full.

CHAPTER IX
LAUREL FROM TEMPÈ

Theria’s joy, too, was full. The tie between Dryas and herself was very strong and his happiness closely touched her.

But, oh, the further marvel! Theria was to go up to the Precinct to see the sacred rite. She was older now. Had she not already dedicated her girlhood toys to Artemis? Soon she would be a woman and for women there were certain rare occasions when they might visit the temple place.

The new white himation which she was to wear she hung on a peg in her room. Gazing at this, fingering it, she could almost realize she was about to go to the Precinct. The joy caught strongly at her throat. Every day she begged her mother to name over each temple that she was to see, each treasury, each statue that flanked the Sacred Way until Melantho clapped hands over her ears and ordered her out of the room.

Theria never moved quietly about the house. She always ran or skipped. Now as she ran, she sang aloud or, leaping into her swing in the court, she swept upward like a swallow, until she could see high over the balcony into the second-story rooms. The whole house felt the contagion of her joy.

“I’m to attend little mistress,” boasted Nerea in the kitchen. “By Hermes, the best o’ the festival will be to see her face goin’ into the gates.”

The Strepterion was a festival which like the Pythia came every fourth year. At the Strepterion was performed the sacred drama, “Apollo Killing the Python,” the very same which Dryas had acted in play when a baby, and now he was to act it in earnest.

Midway in the Precinct was built a temporary hut called the Palace of the Snake. And the snake would be there, a marvel of contrivance, his ugly dragon head, with open mouth and teeth, resting on the threshold. Dryas, arrayed as the boy Apollo, must in mimic dance and gesture fight the dragon. A chorus of boys carrying torches would sing the story. Then after the struggle Apollo must lift his silver bow and shoot the dragon. It would die with great writhings and agony—a joy to the crowd.

Presently all the actors would come in solemn, silent procession down the Sacred Way. They would pass out of the gate of the Precinct, through the village, and away on the western road.

Thus would begin a long journey which would take from moon to moon. Symbolically, the actors would journey to the land of the Hyperboreans beyond the north wind. Actually they would trace an ancient way of pilgrimage, the Pythian Way, to the Vale of Tempè.

At Tempè Dryas, as the Sacred Boy, would gather boughs from a certain famous laurel tree, and bring them home to be woven into crowns for the Pythian victors. For the Pythian festival and games always fell in the same year, a few weeks later than the Strepterion.

All this was to be Dryas’s adventure. He would return to tell of its wonders. He was a dear, companionable boy. Theria knew he would tell her the whole of it.

On the morning of Strepterion she awoke before daybreak and lay in that ecstasy of anticipation which only youth-time knows. Presently dawned the light and showed her her white dress, still hanging ghostly on its peg. She arose and went out into the court-balcony. Here she met Dryas. He, too, had awakened early with the joy of the day.

“Good luck,” she greeted him. “The luck of Loxias.” And he answered piously, “Apollo bless you.”

Between them they roused the whole family.

At sunrise Dryas must be clothed in his ceremonial robes. He stood in the court near the Hestia hearth where all the family could see him, where the slaves could gather proudly to look on. They brought forth the temple himation, yellow with its border of gold, an ancient, precious thing.

Dreamily, sensitively, Dryas suffered them to put it on him, to unplait his long hair that it might flow over his shoulders in the manner of Apollo. Already he felt upon him the sacred character of the god he was to personate.

Nikander advanced to place the golden laurel crown on Dryas’s head. He came slowly, unlike himself, and in the ceremony spoke only the necessary words—no more. He made sacrifice upon the hearth and then, stumbling a little, stepped back.

It was time to go. The whole family were to walk behind Dryas up to the Precinct. Theria stood hand in hand with her mother. Her eyes were like stars.

“Son,” said Nikander in a low voice, “I cannot go with you now. I will come up in a few moments with Medon. The priests will meet you at the gate.”

“Father—but why?” A troubled look crossed the boy’s rapt face.

“I am not quite well. Just for a moment. I’ll be with you soon, my son.”

Theria darted out and touched his hand.

“Never mind, Daughter,” he said. “Make haste, all of you.”

Obediently the family formed in a sort of procession and left the house.

Oh, the golden sunshine of that early morning! The sweet cool air with the blessing of the stars still upon it! Theria took thirsty draughts of it as she went along.

The cliffs towered nobly about as if in prayer and along their face the mists, white spirits new risen from the vale, came shouldering, sinking, lifting, dreamily alive. So tall are the cliffs at Delphi that they meet the blue and cut off from sight the snowy peak of Parnassos which is back above them.

Now the procession turned the shoulder of a cliff. The Precinct burst into view—the Precinct, a golden and many-hued Elysium lying on the slope above the road within its quadrate wall.

It slanted against the hillside in the sunshine. Theria could see the bright little fanes, the golden tripods, the zig-zag of the Sacred Way dividing it in the midst, and the great Apollo temple at the top. The Precinct seemed to spread itself generously before her sight—all of it at once—as though knowing how dearly she loved it.

Above the Precinct were the cliffs again soaring terribly to the sky.

Now the procession was stopping. It was before the great bronze doors. The doors were opening, showing a glimpse of the wonder place within. Here a company of priests, with the old president or Hosios, received them.

They greeted Dryas. Then—

“But where is Nikander?” they asked.

“He said he would join us,” answered Dryas. “He should be with us by now.”

“We will wait for him,” said the old Hosios.

And so they waited. Moments—a half hour and still Nikander did not arrive. The priests began to stir impatiently. Dryas looked around with anxious eyes.

Theria slipped back among the slaves.

“Baltè,” she said, “he does not come!”

“Hist, little mistress, we must not speak in this place.”

“But, Baltè, perhaps he is ill.”

“Medon is there, and Philo.”

Theria suddenly recalled that her father’s hand when she touched it had been cold as ice. How curiously he had stumbled as he turned from the crowning—an ill omen that. Theria had a sure instinct concerning illness. She knew that her father was in trouble. All the joy of the festival and of the out of doors folded its wings in her heart. She could think only of her father.

Now she was dimly aware that the old Hosios had let open the gates and bade Dryas enter. She caught Baltè’s hand.

“I’m going back home,” she said. “Baltè, come quickly.”

“But, little mistress, what a crazy notion is this?”

“I’ll be back for the festival. Oh, I’ll be back in time. But I must meet Father.”

“But, little mistress——”

“Baltè, come at once!”

And Baltè, who never before had obeyed her little girl, came without a word.

They hurried back along the road. Nikander did not meet them on the way. Theria was the more terrified. Entering the house she heard music—the music of the physician. She ran to her father’s room.

He lay gasping upon the bed, his fine face drawn like an old, old man’s. His eyes, haunted with pain, turned toward Theria, but he did not speak; perhaps he could not. The physician in the corner sang nervously the healing ode of Apollo. Medon was clasping his hands.

“Oh, Missy, Missy,” he moaned. “The doctor gave the medicine and it did no good. Now he’s playin’ the music. When he does that—it’s the end—the end!”

The room was suffocating.

“Air,” thought Theria. “Father must have air.”

She stamped her foot at the physician. “Stop that wailing!” she commanded. “Stop it at once.”

The physician was glad enough to obey her. If Nikander died it could be the daughter’s fault.

Then swiftly, businesslike, Theria had them carry her father, bed and all, into the street and sent Baltè for hot water which she applied. She was trembling in very childishness of grief. Sometimes she flung herself upon her father, kissing him, begging him to live. But nevertheless she kept on with her simple remedies—remedies she had used before.

At last, so gradually that she could not tell when it began, the pain abated. Nikander’s eyes grew clear and his breath came even once more.

“Daughter!” he spoke at last. “My darling girl.”

And Baltè, putting down the steaming pot of water, gave a shout of joy.

Meanwhile up in the Precinct the festival was going forward, but Theria had forgotten it.

At length Nikander was strong enough to be carried back into the aula where he fell asleep. Then it was that Theria heard the sound of pipes and shouting in the street. Instinctively she ran upstairs to the window.

The sacred drama was over. Here came the actors—now a happy, laughing rout. It was the custom that the Tempè procession leave the city in haste so as to out-distance all evil. First Dryas came running in the beautiful leaps which Greek racers used. His hair was streaming in the wind. He held aloft his silver bow in triumph and great joy. Then came the swift boy chorus with backward burning torches and beauty of fluttering garments, then the sacred women having an awkward time of it to keep the boys in sight. And the crowd laughing at them and shouting:

“Good luck for the journey. The luck of Loxias.”

So shouting, laughing, the picture of joyous life, they disappeared down the road.

Ah, there was the last gleam of Dryas’s silver bow!

“At least,” thought Theria, “when Dryas comes back, he will have Father to greet him instead of—instead——”

Then with tender happiness—or was it the bitterness of missing her one festival—she hid her face, weeping.

CHAPTER X
A BOY CALLED SOPHOCLES

One hot summer morning Melantho and her daughter were sitting in the upper room spinning. Or rather it was Melantho who was sitting. Theria was pacing to and fro at her task, stretching out the thread with free gesture, her fingers twisting, twisting like fluttering wings. Melantho noted how tall the girl had grown. “Her awkwardness, too, is passing,” she mused as Theria turned, sweeping the thin folds of her chiton against her supple limbs. So might Iris have looked, the slender goddess messenger, running to the divine threshold with news for the blessed gods.

But Melantho had no thought of goddesses.

“She will soon be old enough for a husband,” was Melantho’s thought. “I must speak to Nikander about it.”

Theria sighed and paced again.

“Theria,” said her mother, “if you would sit down you would not be so tired.”

“Tired,” spoke the girl, frowning, “Great Hermes, why should I be tired except from this eternal sitting? There’s no breath in this room.”

“Theria, you grow more impatient every day. Do you suppose your father can ever get you a husband if you frown like that?”

At the word “husband,” the girl gave her mother a startled, puzzled look. She said nothing. Melantho’s thoughts ran in given channels. Her next was of vegetables and fish which Medon must purchase this morning.

“Daughter,” she said, “go down and fetch Medon to me.”

Quick as thought, Theria dropped her spindle into the basket of snowy wool and sped away.

The morning was full of sunshine. Theria carolled like a lark as she tripped down the stair. Housed though she was, Theria never seemed housed. Perhaps the effect upon generation after generation of her forefathers of living out of doors, the strengthening, sweetening effect upon mind and body, had entered into her and made her part of the open air.

Through the inner court she ran and burst open the door into the outer court of the men. Here pure amazement stopped her motion. In the outer court stood the most beautiful boy Theria had ever beheld.

He had laid aside his himation for the heat, and stood in his short chiton, slender, delicately erect, gazing about his new surroundings with shy yet interested eyes. His hair, honey coloured, was cut short and filleted as if for a holiday. He himself was bronzed by the sun as all high-born boys should be. At sight of Theria he smiled.

“Forgive me, lady,” he said. “My father left me here to wait for him.”

“Oh,” said Theria, “I thought perhaps a god had done that.” At which speech he blushed, and became a little lovelier.

She came toward him. She was not shy, for the boy was younger than she. Besides, she was too delighted with his beauty to be shy.

“Whence are you?” she queried.

“From Colonos.”

“The grove near Athens?”

“Yes, the shady, sacred grove. The most beautiful place in the world.”

“More beautiful than Delphi?” she smiled.

“I think so, lady.”

“It is your home,” said Theria gently. “Therefore you love it.”

“My father came to consult the Oracle,” explained the boy. “He questions about his ship which comes not back to us. He is now with your father in the Precinct. For you are Nikander’s daughter, are you not?”

“Yes—his only daughter,” she answered with pride.

How modestly the boy questioned. His respect toward her was something new in Theria’s experience. Both her brothers were brotherly contemptuous. But this stranger was talking with her! To Theria this experience was nothing short of an adventure. She felt it so. Mind and soul sprang up vivid and intense. She began to ask her usual eager questions.

“How did you come to Delphi? Was it a long journey? Oh, was it by sea?”

“No, lady, by land—through Bœotia and over the mountains.”

“How many days?”

“Three days—we did not hurry. Yesterday at sunset we came to the Triple Way.”

“Where Œdipus met his father.”

“Yes,” he answered, “where he killed his father. Of course you know the story. Oh, lady, such a lovely place it is. Up there where the mountains pierce the sky; the road runs among the clouds. Where the clouds broke I could catch glimpses far beneath of the blue valley and the sun setting. Far down I heard the tinkle of goat bells—the herds hidden below the clouds. I seemed to be in the home of the gods. And do you know what I did? I let the others walk onward and I stood there alone. The three roads went this way and that from the place of my feet. Then I seemed to see approaching along one road old Laius and his men, and by the other road Œdipus, young and proud, fulfilling his curse. But before they met I fled. Oh, I could not bear to think that he would kill his father all unknowing! What if it had been my own dear father and myself? The curse of Œdipus, that terrible curse, swept down over me with whirlwind wings.”

The boy put up his hand to his head with a whimsical yet solemn smile.

“It touched me,” he said, “and when I ran up to my dear father and clasped his hand I was weeping. I would not tell them why. Yet I am telling you.”

“I wish I had been there,” breathed Theria.

“I wish you had,” echoed the boy.

And suddenly the boy’s gentle reverence gave Theria a joy utterly new—a sense at once of humbleness and power.

“Come,” she said childishly, seizing his hand, “there’s a swing in the other aula. Let’s swing in it.” Busily she hied him thither. But the boy would not swing.

“It’s for girls; I’ll push you,” he said.

Soon the court rang with their voices and merry laughter. The boy “ran under” and Theria flew like a tall nymph in great dips and soarings. Now her black tresses streamed behind, new they flung over her face—a dusky veil. After a while the boy stopped, breathless, and the swing “died.”

“Guess who came with us all the way,” he said suddenly.

“I cannot guess.”

“Pindar!” he told her joyously. “That’s what made the journey so wonderful. All those three days I heard his divine talk with my father. Never shall I forget it—all about Hellas and the Persians and the war that is coming. I hope it won’t come too soon before I can fight.”

“Pindar is ours,” said Theria with Delphic pride. “There is a chair set in the temple just for him. He sits there and the god gives him song. Tell me: did you hear him sing?”

“Often and often,” boasted the boy. “When we would stop by the road to sup and pour wine to the blessed gods, then a slave would bring Pindar’s lyre. A fine old one it is, always fresh stringed. He would sweep it with his hand and the thing would tremble as if alive. Do you think my hand is like Pindar’s?” he asked, stretching out his right hand. Slender and brown it was, expressive as his face.

“No,” said the girl honestly, “but it is a player’s hand.”

“I’m going to be a poet some day,” ran on the boy.

“I wish I might be a poet,” said Theria.

“You! But you are a girl. For you will be the house and children and the loom.”

“I hate the house!” cried Theria.

“What! The home of your fathers? How can you?” The boy was shocked.

“Oh, I don’t mean the home. I mean the house walls that keep me in. Sometimes I want to scream and struggle as though I were tied down hand and foot.”

“But nothing ties you down.”

“Do you call it nothing to stay all day twisting a miserable thread like this?” Theria spun with her fingers. “When there is so much, oh, so much in the world.”

“But do women feel that way?” he asked. “They always seem contented in the house.”

“Would you be content?”

“By the gods, no.”

“But are we not like you, we girls? We are strong—we like to run and breathe the air. Look at my arm, how ugly white. It has never seen the sun.” She flashed out her fair arm—free of its drapery.

“That is not ugly,” said the boy gently.

“It is! It is! White as a Persian’s!”

“No, it is Greek,” maintained the boy. “By the gods, I’d like to see you running brown and free like Artemis in the wood.”

“You don’t think I am foolish to want to run and leap.”

“No—no—no!”

Theria’s eyes widened with delight.

“You don’t think me foolish to read my father’s books?”

“Books!” Here the boy was puzzled. “Why should you read books? Poems are to sing, not to read.”

“Oh, I sing them, too,” laughed Theria. “Far back in the storeroom, when nobody can hear, I sing them. I have to make up the tunes.”

“I wish I could hear you; oh, I wish I could hear you.”

That any one should care for what she did! No praise could be sweeter, no joy. So absorbed were they both that they did not hear the voices calling through the house, “Sophocles! Sophocles!” until the searchers had entered the open door—that door which should always be closed.

“Eleutheria,” came her father’s voice, sterner than she had ever heard it. “The meaning of this! By Hermes, I must know.”

The two turned in confusion.

“Whatever made you think you could bring a stranger here into the inner court? How long have you been together?”

Theria answered none of his questions. She faced him, her eyes black lakes of astonishment. So intense a mood could not break at once.

“I have done no wrong,” she asserted. “How can you think I have done wrong?”

“But you have. You are almost a woman. You cannot receive my guests.”

“My guest he is, this Sophocles,” she answered with frightened face but steady voice. “We have been talking together about Homer and Pindar. Surely that is no harm. Where is our wrong?”

A low exclamation came from the corner of the room. Pindar himself was there with Sophocles’s father.

The boy spoke, blushing, “I am the one to blame. I came in here to push the swing—not thinking.”

“There is no blame,” repeated the girl passionately. “Don’t call it blame.”

Had Nikander been an ordinary Greek father, Theria would undoubtedly have received her whipping at this time.

“Go to your room, Daughter,” said Nikander quietly. “I cannot talk with you here.”

And Theria fled in an agony of shame.

Pindar’s voice broke the silence.

“By the deep-vested Graces, Nikander, but I think we have broken into a pretty dialogue. Would I had heard some of it.”

The boy, redder still, hid behind his father.

Nikander shook his head in whimsical despair.

“What am I to do with a daughter like that? I never know what she will do next. She’s perfectly good, I assure you. She only breaks rules like a colt.”

“She’s your image,” laughed Pindar. “Your own face faced you when she spoke. Ay, and your spirit, too. By Artemis, did you mark how she fled up the stairs with head held high?”

“She’s a twin, you know,” said Nikander. “The boy is more beautiful.”

“Ay, I know your Dryas. The coming beauty they say, and perhaps the coming singer.”

Nikander’s face flushed with pleasure.

“The lyrists tell me so,” he assented.

Thus Eros brushed his wings across Theria’s fancy and flew away. No business of his was this. But youth was here—fearful impressibility: A breath, and youth is changed.

Who shall say that when in after years this boy sang of a woman and gave her a new type of nobleness the image of this proud sweet maid of Delphi did not float before him and make his creation real?

And as for Theria, the encounter was a peep outward into the world. From this time she became more aware of the hurry of development outside in the awakening land of Greece. From this time she felt it—the joyous advance into the light, new art, new politics, new thoughts.

The amassing knowledge of centuries was converging to a focus and the heart of the Greeks soared into a mental atmosphere never known before or since. This intense point came in Theria’s lifetime. No wonder the light of it penetrated all her walls and restrictions. No wonder she struggled to be free to meet it. Her own youth was of the youth-time of Hellas and longed to be merged with it as flame yearns toward flame.

CHAPTER XI
WHY NOT BE THE PYTHIA?

In times of war we picture every corner of a warring land torn with passion, dark with fear, dyed with blood. But this is not so. In Nikander’s household the four meals a day were served by quiet slaves, the washing was done down in the Pleistos River as the good housewife Melantho required it. Eleutheria received her daily lesson in spinning and weaving and damaged more good wool than any maid of all the generations of Nikanders. This indeed was Dame Melantho’s chief grief, despite the fact that her little land was cowering under the heaviest cloud of war that ever threatened a devoted country.

At every festival came crowding news of the great Persian king across the sea preparing his army to invade and devour. Into every port came sailors telling of the fleets of Phœnicians, Cyprians, Lykians, Dorians of Asia, etc., all of which fleets were making ready to pounce upon Greece. Then arrived the actual ambassadors of the King, demanding earth and water. Which was to say: “Consent to slavery and the Persians will leave you out of the fight.” Many cities gave these tokens immediately.

“Who, then, will resist?” “What will happen if any should resist?” “Will the gods help?” “Have the gods forgotten their beloved Hellas?”

Such were the questions which poured into Delphi. These days Nikander might be seen pacing to and fro in some lesche or near the Council House, seeing naught before him, blind to the beauty of hills and far-glimpsed vale. Then perhaps in desperation he would stride down the hill and along the road toward home.

In the women’s aula Melantho would greet him with the small worries of the day. A slave child was ill and she knew not what to do for it. She must have more grain to store away in the storeroom or Nikander would have to go without his special cake next winter.

“And will you have a cake now?” she asked. “And a little wine? Do, now; you look tired.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

And so she went out to make the slaves do all in order.

Meanwhile, Theria came in and sat upon a stool near by. She spoke no word but tried to untangle a thread from her distaff, parting wisp from wisp with slender fingers, and watched her father with keen, quiet eyes. Melantho returned chattering and Nikander ate his cake in silence, and still Theria watched.

She knew that the Amphictyonic Council, that famous council of many states, was meeting to-day in its house west of the town. Why was it meeting now? This was not the season. She knew that her father had been with it. He was one of the Amphictyons. There had been hot dispute, she could see that in his face. But had he won? And what was the strife about? She knew something of the danger which threatened the land. This she knew in spite of the fact that Nikander had been strict in keeping the news away from the household. He hated the aspects of fear: these would come soon enough.

Bitterly Theria longed to ask questions. She knew that there was no use. She knew that her father had come home for peace, for a respite.

After a while Melantho was called away, and Theria moved over beside her father on the bench and slipped her hand into his. He sighed restfully as she did so. Then care again settled like closing wings upon him. Theria decided that he had not won in the Council—at least not for to-day. She also decided that the controversy had been serious. She could not guess that it had to do with the whole policy of the Oracle in the face of the Persian attack. In that Council Nikander and one friend stood alone for the defence of Greece. All the others stood for surrender.

Theria’s first instinct was the woman’s, to mend her father’s disappointment by some diversion.

“Father,” she said, “I have been thinking all day of the birds that Homer tells of on the Scamandrian plain.”

He frowned and came out of his dream. “What is Homer to you, child?” he said impatiently.

“Nothing, Father; but I often think of those things. I love the birds,” she added quietly. “They are so merry and move so swift, so swift. They are kind, too.”

“Kind! What do you mean?”

“They come to me when I go to the window—oh, just a few moments at the window, Father, to breathe the air. Then I call them their own calls and they fly down out of the air, very timid at first. I put out my hand and hold it still and talk to them. Finally, one of them is sure to flutter near and sit on my finger with its little sharp claws. They watch me with clever quick turnings of the head and chirp to make me laugh.”

She leaned forward—very child in this childish pleasure. “Father, tell me what Homer says about the birds.”

“I am in no mood for Homer’s lines.” And indeed he was not. But presently he began to say them—

“As the many tribes of feathered birds,

Wild geese and long-necked swans

On the Asian mead by Kystrios stream

Fly hither and thither joying in their plumage

And with loud cries settle ever onward——”

“What a picture!” he commented. “I never realized before how fine it is.”

Did his nearness to the ardent Theria bring this realization? Who can tell how mind may leap toward mind?

So they were sitting when Olen, the slave boy, came and stood beside them.

“Master, a consultant,” he announced, “at the street door. He will not come in.”

Nikander rose from the bench, strangely refreshed, and went to the outer aula. As Olen was following, Theria made him an imperious gesture and the slave reluctantly left ajar the dividing door. Then Theria moved to sit where she could command the outer room.

She saw enter a man with white, wrecked face.

“But I must not come in,” he objected. “O priest, I might bring it upon your house.”

“My house is not afraid,” said Nikander. He sat down, indicating the bench beside him, and the man sat down fearfully, like one unclean, at the farther end.

“It is a curse, O priest,” he said. “I am under a curse.”

Very skilfully Nikander quieted him, urging upon him kindness and wisdom of the Oracle, persuading him to speak. It was a terrible tale of this man Corobios and his friend Pythias—one of those Greek friendships so seriously considered that marriage was not allowed between the children of the two.

“We were on a journey,” said Corobios. “Five robbers leaped from ambush upon Pythias. It was him they were after, not me. I whipped out my sword and struck at one of them. And just at that moment Pythias was thrown in the struggle straight under my blade. It cut him to the bone. Oh, if he had only lived to exculpate me! If he had only spoken some word. But there was no time. I saw only his eyes raised to me in agony, in reproach. O priest—in terrible reproach. Ah, I see them now! Wherever I go I see them! The Eumenides are coming upon me. To my children’s children will the curse run unless Apollo will clean me.”

How Theria loved her father as he leaned toward the man laying his hand upon the shaking shoulder, fearless of the terrible curse which could run so quickly from man to man.

“The Son of Leto will hear you,” Nikander said. “Our god is pitiful of those whose hearts are clean. Do not fear. To-morrow you shall consult the god. I shall see that you go in first of them all to the Oracle. Your case is needy.”

The interview was long. For as the man grew quieter, Nikander did not fail to sound him as to his attitude in the coming war. Every pilgrim was so tested by Nikander. Thus Nikander learned the public mind.

At Corobios’s departure Nikander wandered back to where Theria sat. He was quite unaware that he was seeking his daughter again.

Theria ran toward him with overflowing eyes.

“Oh the poor man, the poor man! Father, surely the Oracle will help him—it must help him!”

“The poor man, hey! What do you know about the poor man? Theria, I will not have you listening from corners—do you heed me?”

“But why did the dying Pythias reproach him? Couldn’t he see that Corobios didn’t mean to hurt him? Couldn’t he trust his friend that much?”

“Probably Pythias didn’t blame Corobios at all. The eyes were in death-agony, already unconscious.”

“But will the Pythia tell him that? After all, how can the Pythia help him? Corobios is a murderer—poor man! poor man!”

“Corobios is not a murderer, Theria. Murder is of the heart’s intention, not the hand’s mistake. Nay, his hands are clean; cannot you see that?”

Nikander was forgetting the proper reproaches for Theria’s eavesdropping. The question of blood-guilt was a burning one at Delphi. It concerned a brand-new policy of the Oracle: that sin was a thing of the heart and not of outward accident. This moral advance is, in every age, the most important and most difficult for the human mind to achieve. Nikander was fighting more battles than the defence against the Persian.

“I wish,” said Nikander, “the people could see that the curse does not come that way—without fault of the accursed. Corobios is not under a curse.”

“Not under a curse?” repeated Theria. “Will the god tell him that?”

“How do I know what the god will tell him?” answered Nikander piously.

“Oh, if I were the Pythia I would pray the dear Son of Leto till he gave me that answer.”

“But you are not the Pythia.”

On a sudden the wish of many moons sprang to Theria’s lips.

“Father, let me be the Pythia, the next Pythian priestess. Oh, Father, you do not know how I can pray to the god and—and how——”

“Nonsense; the Pythian priestess is a stupid girl. You would never do.”

“But the Pythia need not be a stupid girl,” Theria was talking now breathlessly. “Father, when I pray, Apollo answers me. He does.”

Nikander took her chin in his hand, lifting her pleading face.

“What a queer child it is,” he mused. “What do you mean by Apollo answering you?”

“I don’t know, Father; but he does. Oh, with the coming down upon me of something out of the air like wings—no, not like wings—but I know it is the god.”

Her eyes grew mystic with a curious inner seeing.

“You strange Theria,” said her father. “If you saw all the visions of the gods it would not make you a good Pythia. You know perfectly well that the Pythia is a girl of empty mind. The mind must be vacant for the god to speak through it. She is but the mouthpiece of the god. Besides all this, she writhes in agony when the oracle comes upon her. Sometimes it kills her.”

“I wouldn’t mind if it killed me, just so I were Pythia,” Theria urged solemnly. “Just so I could speak for the god.”

“Well, you’re not going to be Pythia, my child. This whole question is nonsense. It grows out of nothing but your eternal desire to be doing something.”

Nikander was right. It was Theria’s burning desire to use the power that was in her which kept her constantly urging. Her face turned tragic and Nikander’s anger sharpened. He was under great stress.

“Now, no passion, mind. Theria, I have enough burdens in these terrible days without your foolish notions. Pythia—faugh! I’d be disgraced to have you Pythia. Silly girl!”

So he strode out of the house.

Theria ran to her room. She expected to cry but she did nothing of the sort.

“I will be Pythia,” she said, throwing her long arms above her head and clasping her hands.

“I will be Pythia—no matter what——”

The springs of poet inspiration are hidden and very strange. Could it be this opposition which drove Theria to make her song—the prize song of Dryas? The next day after these events that song came across Theria’s mind like the flash. Anger was part of its origin. Longing for outlet was another part. Strongest of all was the damming back of the birth-right power within her until it welled higher than its nature and broke over into song.

It was the following week that she showed her song to Dryas, and a yet further week when Dryas sang the song at the Pythian festival and Theria snatched it back again. The result was disastrous, as we have seen.

And after her father’s whipping, Theria strangely knew that she would soon do something to deserve another whipping.

BOOK III
WITHIN THE ORACLE

CHAPTER XII
“THE PLACE OF GOLDEN TRIPODS”

Theria awoke in the first grey of dawn. She sat bolt upright in her narrow bed. A dream had awakened her, or rather a purpose, a purpose full formed in sleep. Awake, even her bold mind could not have dared it.

Theria was going to dare to go out of the house! Out into the free morning. Under the sky. Away through Delphi. Up into the beloved Precinct. Oh, she would see all of it—this once!

The consequence? Never once did she think of consequence. She was simply doing what she did as if a god had pushed her to it, feeling vaguely that she was in the hands of her god. She sprang from bed and threw about her bare lovely body her chiton, pinning it at the shoulders. How her fingers trembled! Then around her supple waist went her zone, drawn tight; then came cloak and sandals.

The key to the front door was in her father’s room. Nikander slept soundly, but Melantho slept, like puss by the fire, with one eye open. “If they see me they will whip me again,” she thought. “Well, what of that?”

Noiselessly she stepped out upon the court gallery. Everything in the court stood strangely distinct in the dawn. Would she ever see again the little altar, the swing that hung motionless in its place? No one could tell what might ensue if she went out. Theria stole forward to her parents’ room.

Yes, they were asleep. The key was kept in the chest among the book-scrolls. With an instinctive prayer, she opened the chest and put her hand deftly among the metal cylinders. But one of them settled noisily into a new position. It clattered like a chariot in her ears, and she crouched terror-struck. Her father moved, sighed. The key was not there. In desperation she arose and pushed her hands behind some clothes on a peg. There, O Kairos! it hung. And grasping it in her hand, Theria disappeared like a shadow, and so descended the stair.

The porter would be near the door; but at this hour surely in his lodge asleep. And Medon was growing very deaf these days. He was hardly a fit porter, but Nikander would not grieve the old man by taking away his office. Theria had grace enough to feel a passing regret that Medon through this escapade of hers might lose his beloved duty.

Now she was at the door, fitting the great key into its hole. Careful Medon was asleep but lying almost across his door. Oh, if she could be quicker! If she would not so lose breath! But slowly the door opened. It did not creak—not very much.

She slipped through the crack.

Then, O Hermes, O gods of all open spaces and swift feet! She was out of doors. She was under the sky. So high that sky that she was dizzy looking up at it. Not the accustomed low ceiling of the room or the narrow opening above the court. It was the lofty treading place of the Immortals. All the air in the world met her first deep-taken breath—fragrance a thousand fold—the uprising spirit of the morn meeting her spirit.

She ran like a deer along the road in the grey silver light. A marvellous place in which to be set free. A vast amphitheatre of hills, spaceful and she in the midst of the space. On every side in a far-flung circle rose dim mountain forms to the silvery sky. On a nearer hillside, aslant like a picture, lay the precious sanctuary, framed four square within its clear-seen walls. But within all was dim and confused, for the cliffs which towered above it still had it in their shadow.

She stopped to gaze at it with that tenderness which we feel toward things asleep and with a reverence born of twelve generations of worship. Men of her blood and bone had here met the god and here had builded his temple. Hers the Precinct had been long before she was born. Hers it would be when she was dead a thousand years.

But how was she to get in? The Precinct was so strictly guarded, the wall so high. Her spirit shrank as she thought of it.

Suddenly Theria heard a footfall coming toward her and quick as a thought she turned down one of the steep streets. Once within the narrow blackness she could see a little—could see the house doors set down and down the terraces, and the Apollo statues standing pillar-like beside each door. No one was abroad in the street.

She passed down the better section and came below into the slave quarter. Here a stench met her which was almost more than she could bear. In this fetid place doors were wide open and crowded slaves snoring within. The sweat and weariness of slaves were the very smell of the place. Was it here that Olen and the kitchen slaves had to come after their day’s work was done? Now she passed some half-naked women asleep in the street. Great pity for them swept her, pity for their slave life and slave lowness. She stooped over one of them, gazing into her face.

The creature awoke with a howl of terror.

“Ye fool,” she cried. “Damned of Hades. If ye come home late as this can’t ye keep still? Ho, I’ll trounce ye.”

The woman leaped to her feet. Theria fled down the street, turned the corner, and fled down another, the woman in full chase, her cries arousing the quarter. Here was real danger. This was the place where thieves and ruffians hid themselves who came to rob the Precinct. But even in her fright Theria had no instinct to run home. She only fled farther away down the hill. She outdistanced the woman, who presently gave up the chase. Then Theria found herself below the town in the depth of the glen.

She was hurt as if the woman had struck her. Never had she heard loathsome oaths such as had been flung after her. Their meaning filled her with horror. Thus much had her cloistering done for her that it had kept her whitely pure. She crouched like a wildwood thing amid the bushes—confused, daunted. Then slowly her determination came back, and she began to climb cautiously upward.

At last she regained the highroad.

While this low adventure was chancing a whole new world had been made—a world of dawn, of faint rose and amethyst under an awakened sky, immense, marvellous, holy.

Theria had emerged directly below the sanctuary. Its great wall towered above her with glimpses over it of temple roofs. Above all rose the great Phaidriades cliffs, colossal, shutting out the east. Their colour now was the ripe bloom of a plum from their base up to where their clear-cut summits met the zenith. Theria stood clasping and unclasping her hands. She was a living spark of expectancy in that expectant morning world. Here outside the wall near the gate stood the victor statues. She could not but pause by one. She knew its place well, her supple, young great-grandfather, who had won the running match for boys. There he stood, long limbed, spare, archaically smiling at her and, for all time, fourteen years old. Dryas also would have a statue here among the music victors. Tenderly proud Theria marked the place for it near their ancestor. In her present mood she had no jealousy or regret.

According to custom, ancient and immutable, Theria must now pass by the Precinct and go onward some distance to Castaly’s fount before entering the sacred place. She wrapped herself in her cloak and hurried forward.

She easily found Castaly—a pool glassy-still in its rock-cut basin at the foot of the sheer cliff. It was quite deserted and hidden from the road. Birds fluttered up at her approach. A solemn place.

She looked about her. In mortal fear she took off her cloak and dropped her chiton to her feet. So, like a white nymph, very small at the foot of the cliff, Theria stepped down into the sacred pool. She met the icy water with a shivering cry, but she took the plunge. No one might enter the temple who had not first bathed here. She came out tingling, touched with ecstasy. For holy Castalia cleansed the soul as well as the body. Quickly she put on her garments, quickly walked back to the Precinct.

She dared not even think now of the difficulty of entrance. One terrible moment would decide. She mounted the six steps to the Precinct gate, dipped her trembling fingers in the lustral bowl—then knocked. They were great bronze doors opening inward.

At once came steps within and the clanking of heavy keys—the rasp of the unlocking. Then the doors slowly, stingily, opened.

When she saw the keeper’s hideous face at the crack, her courage sank in her.

“I want to come into the sanctuary,” said her faint voice. “I want to pray to the god. I would like to make a sacrifice.”

“Ye can’t consult no priests now,” said the man. “They’re just gettin’ out o’ their beds.” Behind the man she saw the glitter of the armed guard.

“I don’t want to consult a priest, I want to pray—to pray for myself and my house.”

“Women like you ain’t got no house. Now get along with you.” He was shutting the doors. Desperately she laid her hand in the crack. “I pray you, I pray you,” she cried. Then she tore off the himation which wrapped her head. “Judge you whether I have a house or no”—lifting her face—“I am a Nikander.”

“Great gods in Olympos!” quoth the keeper. “Ye sure be.”

He opened the doors slowly, hesitating even yet. The guard fell back.

“Line for line an’ feature for feature,” murmured the keeper of the keys. “That daughter of Nikander’s. It’s crazy she is. I’ve heard o’ her.”

Theria slipped through the narrow opening.

She was within! Locked into a wilderness of beauty. Multitudes of little temples, red, blue, and gold; multitudes of statues, some of hoary eld, some glossy new; statues of wood, marble, bronze, standing under graceful porticoes, or standing bareheaded by the wayside looking out dreamily from life-like eyes.

And over all the still holiness of the morning the unearthly light whose steady increase affected her spirit like a joyous, irresistible call.

A child set free in fairyland? Oh, Theria was more than that. A soul set in heaven, if ever heaven came down to earth; and, in sooth, it sometimes does. Theria’s soul leaped up from its depths. Suddenly she could not see for the tears which filled her eyes. She brushed them away impatiently. She must not waste one moment of her seeing.

Right at hand stood the Athenian Gift after Marathon—statues of Athenian gods and heroes standing so friendly, mortal with immortal together in their portico.

“Ah, Athena, thou art dreaming of thine own hill in Athens,” she cried, moving closer. “No, thou must not. Be happy here, dear Athena.” Bred in the worship of images, Theria quite forgot that all these were not alive.

Here was Miltiades. He who nine years ago had won the battle of Marathon. He was a noble statue in the new manner. Almost a portrait, with his curling beard and fearless eyes. Theria touched his robe.

“It was thou who saved Hellas,” she said seriously. “Oh, thou couldst do it, thou hast the look.”

Suddenly Theria realized that the light was much increased. She had told her name at the gate. That would mean quick capture. She must hasten. Before her the white Sacred Way zigzagged boldly among the treasuries up to the lordly temple of Apollo above them all. In Delphi there is neither near nor far, but only below and above.

Swiftly Theria chose out what she must see and what she must pass by, perhaps never to see again. For though she might some day walk here in processions she could never linger as now. Every object had its story, “history,” she would have called it, for she believed them all.

Here near by was the Argive bronze horse given to commemorate the Wooden Horse which Odysseus made and gave to Troy. Everyone knew that tale. And here was the Sikyonian Treasury. Theria must see that, because it was the first little temple at the wayside and was very old. It was round with a circle of chaste pillars upholding the roof. She mounted the three shallow steps. The doors had been just opened, for some god had destined her to go in. The little circular cella held many treasures, but of these Theria saw only the central one—a book unrolled upon a marble table. The antique lettering was of pure gold. Eagerly she began to read. No one had told her of this book. It was the epic poem of Aristomache of Erythrai, a woman! Aristomache had won the prize at the Isthmian games. Of course it was long ago. But a woman had won it! The poem, how lovely, how much more noble than Theria’s; but a woman’s, a woman’s! Theria would try again, try to reach the high goal this woman had set. Oh, she would try soon! She was heartened and came out of that treasury with shining, purposeful face.

Theria had lingered here longer than she had intended. In haste she had to pass the treasuries higher up the way, the Knidian—a little temple exquisite as a jewel lifted high upon its tower-like foundation, its porch upheld by tall, long-haired maidens—“Korai,” she called them.

She began to meet caretakers on the way, yawning after their night watch, going to their homes.

Now came the first turn upward of the Way. Here stood her beloved Naxian Sphynx, the one the top of whose wing she had always glimpsed from her window. How wonderful now, close at hand, high on her high pillar, her breast covered with brilliant feathers, her blue wings flung up lofty to the sky, her woman’s face dreamily smiling. Ah, well she kept her wisdom to herself, Mistress Sphynx! Theria knew she was dreaming tenderly over the silent dead. For she was Gê, mistress of earth and underworld.

Theria climbed dreamily higher up the Way, passing now the threshing-floor where Dryas had enacted the play. Memories, stories, faiths—all these swam together in her mind until she dreamed herself away and became part of the poesy about her.

Now the Sacred Way made its last steep turn. From here the whole Delphic Vale burst into view. The Way here ran upward and clung against the wall-like foundation of the Great Temple, but on its outer side was a veritable Olympos, full of gods and godlike men, statues which would remake art if we could but see them now.

All were in action. Achilles on horseback and his beloved young Patroclos running beside the horse and gazing up at him. Apollo and Heracles both grasping the tripod (for they had once had a quarrel over it). The mother Leto and sister Artemis were trying to quiet the angry god, and Athena was quieting the boisterous hero. The eyes of these statues were set with living coloured stones and looked in anger, command, compassion, whatever they willed. No wonder Theria shrank from them a little afraid.

Suddenly Theria was aware beyond the statues of the great depth of vale—the Pleistos a silver ribbon visible for miles, the hills away and away, and ah! the direct golden sunlight in long level shafts flooding the vale. The sun had risen high over the mountain. Her time was almost spent. She fairly ran up to the remaining Way to the platform of the great Temple.

She stood breathless, awed before the greatest temple of all Hellas. It was pure Doric. Grandeur spoke from its mighty columns, repose from its perfect roof. It was at once solemn and tender—man’s thought of God made visible. And indeed the god breathed forth in every line of it. No mere thing of white marble was this. Gorgeous it faced the sunrise, crimson of column, blue and orange of architrave, and golden griffined at eaves and peak.

The doors were newly opened and he who had opened them was busily brushing the threshold with a laurel branch for broom. He was singing softly to himself. Happy young priest at his happy task!

Theria came softly nearer. She knew what was in the temple, every bit of sacred furniture and age-old thing. She wanted to see each object, to treasure it in her heart for ever. The young priest saw her and stopped his sweeping in amazement.

“May I go in?” she asked.

“You know very well you may not,” was his answer. Unlike the rude porter he knew that Theria was a lady. “I cannot imagine, Despoinia, how you managed to come up here.”

“I cannot imagine either,” she answered. The joy of it overcame her and she laughed a gay ripple of laughter. This angered the young man.

“You had no business to come here,” he said severely. “You have disobeyed in coming, that I know, or you would not be alone.”

Just at this moment an eagle circling down from the cliffs above made a swoop like a falling stone for the altar where the early sacrifice lay. Instantly the young man seized a bow, near at hand for such adventure, lifted it Apollo-wise, and shot the bird. The he bounded down the temple steps to seize it.

And Theria quick as thought darted into her beloved fane. How lofty it was within, the flickering light from the hearth-flame playing everywhere and meeting palely the day that poured in at the eastern door. This hearth-flame was eternal and must never go out. An old priestess was tending it. Theria paused by the famous navel stone which marked the centre of the earth. Who knows how many thousands of years men had worshipped it. It was a rude stone, but immeasurably holy. Two golden eagles were perched either side of it—commemorating those whom Zeus had sent to meet at Delphi. Farther within, near the Statues of the Fates, was Pindar’s chair, waiting for him always to come and sit and sing inspired songs—the songful Apollo welcoming the human singer and giving him of his own divine fire.

Theria bent and kissed the chair for the love she bore the poet. As she did so her shoulder was seized and roughly shaken.

“What do you mean by coming in here when I had forbidden you?” said the furious priest.

Theria was too startled to speak.

“Answer me!” he shouted.

“I had wished for this,” she faltered. “Perhaps I can never come——”

“I should say not.”

Theria came to herself and stood like a tall goddess.

“How dare you speak to me like that?” she cried. “How dare you?”

But the priest seized her shoulder again. “Get out,” he stormed. “The priests even now are coming up the road with visitors. Get out, I say.”

Theria had no time for either dignity or resistance. The youth pushed her out of the cella, across the temple porch and down the steps.

She fled across the platform. A single glance showed her the whole Precinct below. The little shrines, unearthly in new golden light, the bronze tripods all aglitter. Yes, and the Way! The priests coming up the Way. She was in terror—not of punishment, but of more unkindness. She was almost sobbing.

CHAPTER XIII
IN PLEISTOS WOODS

She sped across the road and hid behind the Phokian offering. She could hear the priests’ pleasant voices talking of Delphi. From where she stood a little path set out here behind the shrines and treasuries. She followed it to the Precinct wall and went searching for a side gate. Found one at last. The keeper was almost asleep.

“Let me pass out,” she commanded. “Let me pass at once.”

The man spat. “Now, Missy, this here lock’s rusty. You go on down to the big gate. It won’t be far.”

“I will not go to the great gate. Be quick or I shall have you punished.” Theria’s voice had a ring of command. Besides, she did not speak the dialect of women, but the speech of men.

“I will, Missy; I will,” hastily said the man, fishing the key from his belt and fitting it. Noisily it creaked. Theria twisted her fingers in nervous fear. She could hear footsteps again. The Precinct was filling.

“It’s awful rusty, Missy: I can’t—— Ho, Hermes! there it goes.” The door swung open and Theria darted out.

Her Precinct hour was over. Where now to go? What to do? She was bitterly lonely. “Dryas can come to the Precinct whenever he will,” she thought heartbrokenly. “And Father brings him there and tells him all things. But I—I am hounded out as if I were a thief.”

She would not go home! No, she would not go home—not yet. She crossed the highway into the eastern end of Delphi town, and passed down through it to the glen.

The glen was deeper here, even wilder than where she had seen it below her home. It was so steep that no buildings could cling. It was given over to wild olives and laurel trees with gnarled roots, and to huge rocks, the gift of earthquakes from the cliffs above. Theria pushed doggedly down through it, tearing her hands, bruising her feet. At last, after a special tumble, she kirtled up her long chiton, pulling it up through her belt, took off her himation and formed it into a long roll which she tied about her waist. She was amazed at the ease this gave her. No wonder the Goddess Artemis could leap after the stag in this her special costume.

Now she was in the midst of stark, slender pine trees which soared from the vale into the height to feather out against the sun. She paused with upturned face.

“Are they always so solemn-thoughted, these dryads here?” she asked herself. For of course each tree had its dryad and the mood of the tree was the dryad’s own mood. “Do they always pray so seriously to their father Zeus?”

Theria would never willingly have come into the forest. No Greek would have exchanged the man-beautified sanctuary for this wild. But once here the forest mysteriously received her. She who had never before known the sweet ministration of trees began to be strangely quieted. The forest distances, infinite yet hidden, mobile, shifting with her every step, what a relief after the rigid walls of her house. How twilight-dim it was. Yet sunlight filtered through the dimness—pools of gold among the tree roots, shatterings of gold on boles and boughs. Beneath her feet, which had never trod aught save floor and pavement, was the deep pine-needle mass springy under her step. She looked down, wondering at it; a carpet no hands had ever woven, or perhaps a carpet woven by some delicate god.

So the forest silence entered her heart—the silence which is not silence at all, but the deep breathing of all living things. She seemed to have grown wings which would make her essentially free no matter in what house of stone or clay.

But no, it was not the forest itself which received Theria. She could never have conceived such a thought. It was rather the thousand delicate dwellers of the wood—dryads, fauns, satyrs, nymphs. These were touching her with unseen hands. These were they who dogged her footsteps with invisible service, who ceased from their gay dances, slipping into invisibility, that she might move across their place. Did she not see their lairs among the ferns, and the footprints perhaps of Artemis herself where she had crushed the starry mosses? Most of these beings were sinister. They could lay spells upon you. They could whisk you away into sleep. But to-day they had no mischief in their hearts. They were only kind.

Gradually came sweeping across the silence the voice of a rushing stream. Theria pushed forward eagerly to behold it—a lovely living thing, leaping, running, singing, between its banks. It was the same little stream she had seen falling down Castaly’s gorge, here set free on the hillside. Who has not been touched by the immortal force of moving water? Surely Theria was touched by it. She knelt by the stream, stooped her dark head low, her breast among the fern, and drank. The ineffable fragrance of the waterfall met her—a fragrance new to Theria.

Did not the gods breathe fragrance such as this? Ha, the nymph Castalia—her veritable presence!

Theria sprang to her feet, hiding her face. At any moment Castalia might be visible. No, no; Theria would not spy upon her.

Fearfully she said the accustomed stream-prayer, then took off her sandals and waded across. No Greek would cross a stream without first asking its pardon. Once on the farther bank she quickened her step, and began to breathe again. A narrow escape was that from a supernatural sight!

So noon came lordly into the sky, and afternoon. Theria found herself in the enclosure of Athena Forethought, the farthest shrine of Delphi; or its first, if you came from the east. The Forethought Fane, a little circular temple, was far above her on the road. She could scarce see it for crag and tree. Here, weary with wandering, Theria sat down to rest.

CHAPTER XIV
THE POOR SLAVE

And here so late, she met the adventure of her day.

Sounds of distress brought her quickly to her feet. She hastily wrapped herself in her himation. She peered down the slope and could see the figure of a man moving wildly about among the trees. Now he lifted convulsive hands on high, now spread both arms abroad and groaned. Greek woe never repressed itself. It rather flung out, wind-swept, fiery, real. “But,” thought Theria, “this must be some physical agony.” She remembered her remedies at home, yet what could she do for the man in this wild place?

She started down the hill. Nearer at hand she saw that the man was a slave, rough bearded and clad in an old slave cloak. Her adventure with the cruel woman of the morning came back to her. A slave might hail from any barbaric coast. Wild deeds, wild, unthinkable crimes were committed by slaves. Theria stopped in fear but at that moment the slave saw her. His arms dropped to his sides, he gazed at her wide-eyed, terrible—then suddenly pathetic.

“Forethoughtful One,” he faltered, “hast thou come to punish or to save?”

What did the man mean? The “Forethoughtful One” could be none other than Athena herself. Theria laughed outright.

“Surely you do not think I am the goddess?” she queried.

The mistake was not unnatural—Theria, slender amid the slender trees, the light behind her, and all in the Athena Precinct. However, the man looked a little ashamed.

“Forgive me, Despoina, my lady. I am beside myself, I—you startled me.” He was still wondering at her. “You are a priestess?”

“You can see I am not,” she answered, businesslike. “You are ill. I thought I might help you.”

Again he wondered at her. Then his face changed back to its misery.

“I am not ill, Despoina, not bodily ill. My courage is gone! The gods know how I shall ever pick it up again.”

“What took your courage?”

He began to pace again.

“A slave’s tale; a miserable slave’s tale. Why should you hear it? Oh, Mistress, you can do nothing, nothing.” Yet he burst out with the telling.

“My freedom money. It is gone! Gone, I tell you. My damned master knew all the while where it was hid. He let me work and hope and hoard it. And now when all but two drachmæ are there”—he held out his hand with these last coins—“he came and seized it. The beast! How can the just gods let such a man walk the earth?”

Theria came nearer, interested, absorbed.

“You mean that you earned the money to buy your freedom?”

“Yes, Despoina—to buy it from Apollo.”

He was referring to one of the noblest customs of the Oracle. Both of them knew it well. A slave might sometimes be so fortunate as to get money to buy himself from his master. But the Greek master could seize him again and once caught, the slave had no redress. But Apollo of Delphi would buy slaves. They could come to his temple and pay the money down to the god. The terms of the transaction were engraved on the stones of the temple foundation for all men to see. Then the slave went free, protected by this divine ownership. No former master would dare touch him. Wherever the former slave might go, he was under divine protection, Apollo’s ward.

“How long did it take you to earn the money?” she asked.

“Four years, Mistress. Oh, gods! four long years. I cannot do it again, and, if I did, would not my master seize it as before?”

“How did you earn it?”

“My work is in the pottery, lady—the pottery there below the hill toward Kirrha.” He showed her his hands marred with the clay. “It is I who make the best pictures on the pots.”

“I like those pictures,” spoke Theria. “They are beautiful, those gods and men that you make.”

Tears ran straight down the man’s dirty cheeks. Praise was rare for a slave.

“Do you think so?” he queried. “Do you think so, my lady?”

Theria did not answer. She was thinking.

“My father, now. If you could bring your money to my father, each drachma as you earn it.”

“Do you mean me to begin all over again, my lady? Then I will. If only my master does not take me away from the pottery. He wants me for a body servant. He is always threatening to take me for a body servant!”

“But to be a body servant is easier,” said Theria. Privately she was wondering what sort of a body servant this uncouth man would make.

“I hate to be a body servant,” he said loathingly. “Besides, I would not then know where to turn to earn extra money.”

Suddenly Theria clapped her hands with a cry of delight. “I have it! I have it!” she said. “I can help you myself.”

The man gazed at her as if his faith in her goddesshood had quite returned.

“I have jewels,” she went on, moving her hands in her excited telling. “They are ancestral jewels and were given me at my birth. I am supposed to give them to my first daughter at birth. Well, my first daughter can do without them. They are rich pearls. They are worth more than the price of a slave.”

“Lady, lady! Oh, they would free me at once!”

“Yes, free you at once. But the matter is dangerous. The priests may think you have stolen the jewels. If they do, call for Nikander’s daughter.”

“Yes, blessed one.”

“And when you go to the Precinct ask for Kobon as your priest. The Kobons are angry with us and have never been in our house. Kobon will not recognize the jewels.”

“Yes—yes,” he said as if in a dream.

“But how to get them to you. Mother will not allow me, Father will not—Baltè, no; no slave would dare to do it for me. Besides, I hate to let slaves know anything. They are so apt to tell.”

The man started out of his dream.