Arachne — Complete

CHAPTER XVII.

Complete darkness enfolded the white house. Hermon saw only two windows lighted, the ones in his friend’s studio, which looked out into the open square, while his own faced the water.

What did this mean?

It must be nearly midnight, and he could no longer expect Myrtilus to be still at work. He had supposed that he should find him in his chamber, supported by his slaves, struggling for breath. What was the meaning of the light in the workrooms now?

Where was his usually efficient Bias? He never went to rest when his master was to return home, yet the carrier dove must have announced his coming!

But Hermon had also enjoined the care of Myrtilus upon the slave, and he was undoubtedly beside the sufferer’s couch, supporting him in the same way that he had often seen his master.

He was now riding across the open space, and he heard the men who carried the Gaul talking close behind him.

Was the wounded barbarian the sole acquisition of this journey?

The beat of his horse’s hoofs and the voices of the Biamites echoed distinctly enough amid the stillness of the night, which was interrupted only by the roaring of the wind. And this disturbance of the deep silence around had entered the lighted windows before him, for a figure appeared at one of them, and—could he believe his own eyes?—Myrtilus looked down into the square, and a joyous welcome rang from his lips as loudly as in his days of health.

The darkness of the night suddenly seemed to Hermon to be illumined. A leap to the ground, two bounds up the steps leading to the house, an eager rush through the corridor that separated him from the room in which Myrtilus was, the bursting instead of opening of the door, and, as if frantic with happy surprise, he impetuously embraced his friend, who, burin and file in hand, was just approaching the threshold, and kissed his brow and cheeks in the pure joy of his heart.

Then what questions, answers, tidings! In spite of the torrents of rain and the gale, the invalid’s health had been excellent. The solitude had done him good. He knew nothing about the carrier dove. The hurricane had probably “blown it away,” as the breeders of the swift messengers said.

Question and reply now followed one another in rapid succession, and both were soon acquainted with everything worth knowing; nay, Hermon had even delivered Daphne’s rose to his friend, and informed him what had befallen the Gaul who was being brought into the house.

Bias and the other slaves had quickly appeared, and Hermon soon rendered the wounded man the help he needed in an airy chamber in the second story of the house, which, owing to the heat that prevailed in summer so close under the roof, the slaves had never occupied.

Bias assisted his master with equal readiness and skill, and at last the Gaul opened his eyes and, in the language of his country, asked a few brief questions which were incomprehensible to the others. Then, groaning, he again closed his lids.

Hitherto Hermon had not even allowed himself time to look around his friend’s studio and examine what he had created during his absence. But, after perceiving that his kind act had not been in vain, and consuming with a vigorous appetite the food and wine which Bias set before him, he obliged Myrtilus—for another day was coming—to go to rest, that the storm might not still prove hurtful to him.

Yet he held his friend’s hand in a firm clasp for a long time, and, when the latter at last prepared to go, he pressed it so closely that it actually hurt Myrtilus. But he understood his meaning, and, with a loving glance that sank deep into Hermon’s heart, called a last good night.

After two sleepless nights and the fatiguing ride which he had just taken, the sculptor felt weary enough; but when he laid his hand on the Gaul’s brow and breast, and felt their burning heat, he refused Bias’s voluntary offer to watch the sufferer in his place.

If to amuse or forget himself he had caroused far more nights in succession in Alexandria, why should he not keep awake when the object in question was to wrest a young life from the grasp of death? This man and his life were now his highest goal, and he had never yet repented his foolish eccentricity of imposing discomforts upon himself to help the suffering.

Bias, on his part, was very willing to go to rest. He had plenty of cause for weariness; Myrtilus’s unscrupulous body-servant had stolen off with the other slaves the night before, and did not return, with staggering gait, until the next morning, but, in order to keep his promise to his master, he had scarcely closed his eyes, that he might be at hand if Myrtilus should need assistance.

So Bias fell asleep quickly enough in his little room in the lower story, while his master, by the exertion of all his strength of will, watched beside the couch of the Gaul.

Yet, after the first quarter of an hour, his head, no matter how he struggled to prevent it, drooped again and again upon his breast. But just as slumber was completely overpowering him his patient made him start up, for he had left his bed, and when Hermon, fully roused, looked for him, was standing in the middle of the room, gazing about him.

The artist thought that fever had driven the wounded warrior from his couch, as it formerly did his fellow-pupil Lycon, whom, in the delirium of typhus, he could keep in bed only by force. So he led the Gaul carefully back to the couch he had deserted, and, after moistening the bandage with healing balm from Myrtilus’s medicine chest, ordered him to keep quiet.

The barbarian yielded as obediently as a child, but at first remained in a sitting posture and asked, in scarcely intelligible broken Greek, how he came to this place.

After Hermon had satisfied his curiosity, he also put a few questions, and learned that his charge not only wore a mustache, like his fellow countrymen, but also a full beard, because the latter was the badge of the bridge builders, to which class he belonged. While examining the one crossing the canal, it had fallen in upon him.

He closed his eyes as he spoke, and Hermon wondered if it was not time for him to lie down also; but the wounded man’s brow was still burning, and the Gallic words which he constantly muttered were probably about the phantoms of fever, which Hermon recognised from Lycon’s illness.

So he resolved to wait and continue to devote the night, which he had already intended to give him, to the sufferer. From the chair at the foot of the bed he looked directly into his face. The soft light of the lamp, which with two others hung from a tall, heavy bronze stand in the shape of an anchor, which Bias had brought, shone brightly enough to allow him to perceive how powerful was the man whose life he had saved. His own face was scarcely lighter in hue than the barbarian’s, and how sharp was the contrast between his long, thick black beard and his white face and bare arched chest!

Hermon had noticed this same contrast in his own person. Otherwise the Gaul did not resemble him in a single feature, and he might even have refused to compare his soft, wavy beard with the harsh, almost bristly one of the barbarian. And what a defiant, almost evil expression his countenance wore when—perhaps because his wound ached—he closed his lips more firmly! The children who so willingly let him, Hermon, take them in his arms would certainly have been afraid of this savage-looking fellow.

Yet in build, and at any rate in height and breadth of shoulders, there was some resemblance between him and the Gaul.

As a bridge builder, the injured man belonged, in a certain sense, to the ranks of the artists, and this increased Hermon’s interest in his patient, who was now probably out of the most serious danger.

True, the Greek still cast many a searching glance at the barbarian, but his eyes closed more and more frequently, and at last the idea took possession of him that he himself was the wounded man on the couch, and some one else, who again was himself, was caring for him.

He vainly strove to understand the impossibility of this division of his own being, but the more eagerly he did so the greater became his bewilderment.

Suddenly the scene changed; Ledscha had appeared.

Bending over him, she lavished words of love; but when, in passionate excitement, he sprang from the couch to draw her toward him, she changed into the Nemesis to whose statue she had just prayed.

He stood still as if petrified, and the goddess, too, did not stir. Only the wheel which had rested at her feet began to move, and rolled, with a thundering din, sometimes around him, sometimes around the people who, as if they had sprung from the ground, formed a jeering company of spectators, and clapped their hands, laughed, and shouted whenever it rolled toward him and he sprang back in fear.

Meanwhile the wheel constantly grew larger, and seemed to become heavier, for the wooden beams over which it rolled splintered, crashing like thin laths, and the spectators’ shouts of applause sounded ruder and fiercer.

Then mortal terror suddenly seized him, and while he shouted for help to Myrtilus, Daphne, and her father Archias, his slave Bias, the old comrade of Alexander, Philippus, and his wife, he awoke, bathed in perspiration, and looked about him.

But he must still be under the spell of the horrible dream, for the rattling and clattering around him continued, and the bed where the wounded Gaul had lain was empty.

Hermon involuntarily dipped his hand into the water which stood ready to wet the bandages, and sprinkled his own face with it; but if he had ever beheld life with waking eyes, he was doing so now. Yet the barbarian had vanished, and the noise in the house still continued.

Was it possible that rats and mice—? No! That was the shriek of a terrified human being—that a cry for help! This sound was the imperious command of a rough man’s voice, that—no, he was not mistaken—that was his own name, and it came from the lips of his Myrtilus, anxiously, urgently calling for assistance.

Then he suddenly realized that the white house had been attacked, that his friend must be rescued from robbers or the fury of a mob of Biamites, and, like the bent wood of a projectile when released from the noose which holds it to the ground, the virile energy that characterized him sprang upward with mighty power. The swift glance that swept the room was sent to discover a weapon, and before it completed the circuit Hermon had already grasped the bronze anchor with the long rod twined with leaves and the teeth turned downward. Only one of the three little vessels filled with oil that hung from it was burning. Before swinging the heavy standard aloft, he freed it from the lamps, which struck the floor with a clanging noise.

The man to whom he dealt a blow with this ponderous implement would forget to rise. Then, as if running for a prize in the gymnasium, he rushed through the darkness to the staircase, and with breathless haste groped his way down the narrow, ladderlike steps. He felt himself an avenging, punishing power, like the Nemesis who had pursued him in his dreams. He must wrest the friend who was to him the most beloved of mortals from the rioters. To defeat them himself seemed a small matter. His shout—“I am coming, Myrtilus! Snuphis, Bias, Dorcas, Syrus! here, follow me!” was to summon the old Egyptian doorkeeper and the slaves, and inform his friend of the approach of a deliverer.

The loudest uproar echoed from his own studio. Its door stood wide open, and black smoke, mingled with the deep red and yellow flames of burning pitch, poured from it toward him.

“Myrtilus!” he shouted at the top of his voice as he leaped across the threshold into the tumult which filled the spacious apartment, at the same time clashing the heavy iron anchor down upon the head of the broad-shouldered, half-naked fellow who was raising a clumsy lance against him.

The pirate fell as though struck by lightning, and he again shouted “Myrtilus!” into the big room, so familiar to him, where the conflict was raging chaotically amid a savage clamour, and the smoke did not allow him to distinguish a single individual.

For the second time he swung the terrible weapon, and it struck to the floor the monster with a blackened face who had rushed toward him, but at the same time the anchor broke in two.

Only a short metal rod remained in his hand, and, while he raised his arm, determined to crush the temples of the giant carrying a torch who sprang forward to meet him, it suddenly seemed as if a vulture with glowing plumage and burning beak was attacking his face, and the terrible bird of prey was striking its hard, sharp, red-hot talons more and more furiously into his lips, cheeks, and eyes.

At first a glare as bright as sunshine had flashed before his gaze; then, where he had just seen figures and things half veiled by the smoke, he beheld only a scarlet surface, which changed to a violet, and finally a black spot, followed by a violet-blue one, while the vulture continued to rend his face with beak and talons.

Then the name “Myrtilus!” once more escaped his lips; this time, however, it did not sound like the encouraging shout of an avenging hero, but the cry for aid of one succumbing to defeat, and it was soon followed by a succession of frantic outbursts of suffering, terror, and despair.

But now sharp whistles from the water shrilly pierced the air and penetrated into the darkened room, and, while the tumult around Hermon gradually died away, he strove, tortured by burning pain, to grope his way toward the door; but here his foot struck against a human body, there against something hard, whose form he could not distinguish, and finally a large object which felt cool, and could be nothing but his Demeter.

But she seemed doomed to destruction, for the smoke was increasing every moment, and constantly made his open wounds smart more fiercely.

Suddenly a cooler air fanned his burning face, and at the same time he heard hurrying steps approach and the mingled cries of human voices.

Again he began to shout the names of his friends, the slaves, and the porter; but no answer came from any of them, though hasty questions in the Greek language fell upon his ear.

The strategist, with his officers, the nomarch of the district with his subordinates, and many citizens of Tennis had arrived. Hermon knew most of them by their voices, but their figures were not visible. The red, violet, and black cloud before him was all he could see.

Yet, although the pain continued to torture him, and a voice in his soul told him that he was blinded, he did not allow the government officials who eagerly surrounded him to speak, only pointed hastily to his eyes, and then bade them enter Myrtilus’s studio. The Egyptian Chello, the Tennis goldsmith, who had assisted the artists in the preparation of the noble metal, and one of the police officers who had been summoned to rid the old house of the rats and mice which infested it, both knew the way.

They must first try to save Myrtilus’s work and, when that was accomplished, preserve his also from destruction by the flames.

Leaning on the goldsmith’s arm, Hermon went to his friend’s studio; but before they reached it smoke and flames poured out so densely that it was impossible even to gain the door.

“Destroyed—a prey to the flames!” he groaned. “And he—he—he—”

Then like a madman he asked if no one had seen Myrtilus, and where he was; but in vain, always in vain.

At last the goldsmith who was leading him asked him to move aside, for all who had flocked to the white house when it was seized by the flames had joined in the effort to save the statue of Demeter, which they had found unharmed in his studio.

Seventeen men, by the exertion of all their strength, were dragging the heavy statue from the house, which was almost on the point of falling in, into the square. Several others were bearing corpses into the open air-the old porter Snuphis and Myrtilus’s body servant. Some motionless forms they were obliged to leave behind. Both the bodies had deep wounds. There was no trace of Myrtilus and Bias.

Outside the storm had subsided, and a cool breeze blew refreshingly into Hermon’s face. As he walked arm in arm with the notary Melampus, who had invited him to his house, and heard some one at his side exclaim, “How lavishly Eos is scattering her roses to-day!” he involuntarily lifted the cloth with which he had covered his smarting face to enjoy the beautiful flush of dawn, but again beheld nothing save a black and violet-blue surface.

Then drawing his hand from his guide’s arm, he pressed it upon his poor, sightless, burning eyes, and in helpless rage, like a beast of prey which feels the teeth of the hunter’s iron trap rend his flesh, groaned fiercely, “Blind! blind!” and again, and yet again, “Blind!”

While the morning star was still paling, the lad who after Hermon’s landing had raced along the shore with the burning torch glided into the little pronaos of the Temple of Nemesis.

Ledscha was still standing by the doorpost of the cella with uplifted hand, so deeply absorbed in fervent prayer that she did not perceive the approach of the messenger until he called her.

“Succeeded?” she asked in a muffled tone, interrupting his hasty greeting.

“You must give the goddess what you vowed,” was the reply. “Hanno sends you the message. And also, ‘You must come with me in the boat quickly-at once!’”

“Where?” the girl demanded.

“Not on board the Hydra yet,” replied the boy hurriedly. “First only to the old man on the Megara. The dowry is ready for your father. But there is not a moment to lose.”

“Well, well!” she gasped hoarsely. “But, first, shall I find the man with the black beard on board of one of the ships?”

“Certainly!” answered the lad proudly, grasping her arm to hurry her; but she shook him off violently, turned toward the cella again, and once more lifted her hands and eyes to the statue of Nemesis.

Then she took up the bundle she had hidden behind a pillar, drew from it a handful of gold coins, which she flung into the box intended for offerings, and followed the boy.

“Alive?” she asked as she descended the steps; but the lad understood the meaning of the question, and exclaimed: “Yes, indeed! Hanno says the wounds are not at all dangerous.”

“And the other?”

“Not a scratch. On the Hydra, with two severely wounded slaves. The porter and the others were killed.”

“And the statues?”

“They-such things can’t be accomplished without some little blunder-Labaja thinks so, too.”

“Did they escape you?”

“Only one. I myself helped to smash the other, which stood in the workroom that looks out upon the water. The gold and ivory are on the ship. We had horrible work with the statue which stood in the room whose windows faced the square. They dragged the great monster carefully into the studio that fronts upon the water. But probably it is still standing there, if the thing is not already—just see how the flames are whirling upward!—if it is not already burned with the house.”

“What a misfortune!” Ledscha reproachfully exclaimed.

“It could not be helped,” the boy protested. “People from Tennis suddenly rushed in. The first—a big, furious fellow-killed our Loule and the fierce Judas. Now he has to pay for it. Little Chareb threw the black powder into his eyes, while Hanno himself thrust the torch in his face.”

“And Bias, the blackbeard’s slave?”

“I don’t know. Oh, yes! Wounded, I believe, on board the ship.”

Meanwhile the lad, a precocious fourteen-year-old cabin-boy from the Hydra, pointed to the boat which lay ready, and took Ledscha’s bundle in his hand; but she sprang into the light skiff before him and ordered it to be rowed to the Owl’s Nest, where she must bid Mother Tabus good-bye. The cabin-boy, however, declared positively that the command could not be obeyed now, and at his signal two black sailors urged it with swift oar strokes toward the northwest, to Satabus’s ship. Hanno wished to receive his bride as a wife from his father’s hand.

Ledscha had not insisted upon the fulfilment of her desire, but as the boat passed the Pelican Island her gaze rested on the lustreless waning disk of the moon. She thought of the torturing night, during which she had vainly waited here for Hermon, and a triumphant smile hovered around her lips; but soon the heavy eyebrows of the girl who was thus leaving her home contracted in a frown—she again fancied she saw, where the moon was just fading, the body of a gigantic, hideous spider. She banished the illusion by speaking to the boy—spiders in the morning mean misfortune.

The early dawn, which was now crimsoning the east, reminded her of the blood which, as an avenger, she must yet shed.