The Yoke Part 15

Weary and happy, he rowed himself back to Memphis and slept soundly on the eve of a great offense against the laws of Egypt.

But the next day, when the young sculptor faced the moment of actual creation, he realized that his G.o.ddess must take form from an unembodied idea. The ritual had been his guide before, and his genius, set free to soar as it would, fluttered wildly without direction. His visions were troubled with glamours of the old conventional forms; his idea tantalized him with glimpses of its perfect self too fleeting for him to grasp. The sensation was not new to him. During his maturer years he had tried to remember his mother's face with the same yearning and heart-hurting disappointment. But this time he groped after attributes which should shape the features--he had spirit, not form, in mind; and the odds against which his unguided genius must battle were too heroic for it to succeed without aid. The young sculptor realized that he was in need of a model. Stoically, he admitted that such a thing was as impossible as it was indispensable. It seemed that he had met complete bafflement.

He took up his tools and returned to Memphis. But each succeeding morning found him in the desert again, desperately hopeful--each succeeding evening, in the city disheartened and silent.

So it followed for several days.

On the sixth of January the festival in honor of the return of Isis from Phenicia was celebrated in Memphis. Kenkenes left the revel in mid-afternoon and crossed the Nile to the hills. He found no content away from his block of stone--no happiness before it. But he wandered back to the seclusion of the niche that he might be moody and sad of eye in all security.

The stone-pits were deserted. The festivities in Memphis had extended their holiday to the dreary camp at Masaarah. Kenkenes climbed up to his retreat and remained there only a little time. The unhewn rock mocked him.

He descended through the gorge and found that the Hebrews were but nominally idle. A rope-walk had been constructed and the men were twisting cables of tough fiber. The Egyptians lounged in the long shadows of the late afternoon and directed the work with no effort and little concern. The young sculptor overlooked the scene as long as it interested him and continued down the valley toward the Nile.

Presently a little company of Hebrew children approached, their bare feet making velvety sounds in the silence of the ravine. Each balanced a skin of water on his head. The little line obsequiously curved outward to let the n.o.bleman pa.s.s, and one by one the st.u.r.dy children turned their luminous eyes up to him, some with a flash of white teeth, some with a downward dip of a bashful head. One of them disengaged a hand from his burden and swept a tangle of moist black curls away from his eyes. The sun of the desert had not penetrated that pretty thatch and the forehead was as fair as a lotus flower.

Kenkenes caught himself looking sharply at each face as he pa.s.sed, for it contained somewhat of that for which he sought. As he walked along looking after them he became aware that some one was near him, He turned his head and stopped in his tracks.

He confronted his idea embodied--Athor, the Golden!

It was an Israelitish maiden, barely sixteen years old, but in all his life he had never looked upon such beauty. He had gazed with pleased eyes on the slender blush-tinted throats and wrists of the Egyptian beauties, but never had he beheld such whiteness of flesh as this. He had sunk himself in the depths of the dusky, amorous eyes of high-born women of Memphis, but here were fathomless profundities of azure that abashed the heavens. He had been very near to loveliest hair of Egypt, so close that its odorous filaments had blown across his face and his artist senses had been caught and tangled in its ebon sorcery. But down each side this broad brow was a rippling wave of gold, over each shoulder a heavy braid of gold that fell, straightened by its own weight, a span below the waist. The winds of the desert had roughened it and the bright threads made a nimbus about the head. Its glory overreached his senses and besieged his soul. Here was not witchery, but exaltation.

Enraptured with her beauty, her perfect fulfilment of his needs, he realized last the unlovely features of her presence. She balanced a heavy water pitcher on her head and wore a rough surplice, more decorous than the dress of the average bondwoman, but the habit of a slave, nevertheless. He had halted directly in her path, and after a moment's hesitancy she pa.s.sed around him and went on.

Immediately Kenkenes recovered himself and with a few steps overtook her. Without ceremony he transferred the heavy pitcher to his own shoulder. The girl turned her perfect face, full of amazement, to him, and a wave of color dyed it swiftly.

"Thy burden is heavy, maiden," was all he said.

The bulk of the jar on the farther shoulder made it necessary for him to turn his face toward her, but she was uneasy under the intent gaze of his level black eyes. She dropped behind him, but he slackened his pace and kept beside her. For the moment he was no longer the man of pulse and susceptibility but the artist. Therefore her thoughts and sensations were apart from his concern. The unfamiliar perfection of the Semitic countenance bewildered him. He took up his panegyric.

Never was a mortal countenance so near divine. And the sumptuousness of her figure--its faultless curves and lines, its lissome roundness, its young grace, the beauty of arm and neck and ankle! Ah! never did anything entirely earthly dwell in so fair, so splendid a form.

As they neared the camp the girl spoke to him for the first time. He recognized in her voice the same serene tone he had noted in his talk with the Hebrew some days before.

"Give me my burden now," she said. "Thou hast affronted thy rank for me, and I thank thee many times."

The sculptor paused and for a moment stood embarra.s.sed. It went sorely against his gallantry to lay the burden again upon her and he said as much.

"Nay, Egypt has no qualms against loading the Hebrew," she said quietly. "Wouldst thou put thy nation to shame?"

Kenkenes opened his eyes in some astonishment.

"Now am I even more loath," he declared. "What art thou called?"

"Rachel."

"It hath an intrepid sound, but Athor would become thee better. Now I am a sculptor from the city, come to study thy women for a frieze," he continued unblus.h.i.+ngly, "and I would go no farther in my search.

Rachel repeated will be beauty multiplied. Let me see thee once in a while,--to-morrow."

A sudden flush swept over her face and her eyes darkened.

"It shall not keep thee from thy labor," he added persuasively.

The color deepened and she made a motion of dissent.

"Nay! thou dost not refuse me!" he exclaimed, his astonishment evident in his voice.

"Of a surety," she replied. "Give me my burden, I pray thee."

Dumb with amazement, too genuine to contain any anger, Kenkenes obeyed.

As she went up the shady gorge, walking unsteadily under the heavy pitcher, he stood looking after her in eloquent silence.

And in eloquent silence he turned at last and continued down the valley. There was nothing to be said. His appreciation of his own discomfiture was too large for any expression.

In a few steps he met the short captain who governed the quarries.

Kenkenes guessed his office by his dress. He was adorned in festal trappings, for he had spent most of the day in revel across the Nile.

"Dost thou know Rachel, the Israelitish maiden?" Kenkenes asked, planting himself in the man's way.

"The yellow-haired Judahite?" the man inquired, a little surprised.

"Even so," was the reply.

The soldier nodded.

"Look to it that she is put to light labor," the sculptor continued, gazing loftily down into the narrow eyes. The soldier squared off and inspected the n.o.bleman. It did not take him long to acknowledge the young sculptor's right to command.

"It does not pay to be tender with an Israelite," the man answered sourly.

Kenkenes thrust his hand into the folds of his tunic over his breast and, drawing forth a number of golden rings strung on a cord, jingled them musically.

The soldier grinned.

"That will coax a man out of his dearest prejudice. I will put her over the children."

Kenkenes dropped the money into the man's palm.

"I shall have an eye to thee," he said warningly. "Cheat me not."

He went his way. The incident restored to him the power of speech.

"Now, by Horus," he began, "am I to be denied by an Israelite that which the favoring Hathors designed I should have? Not while the arts of strategy abide within me. The children, I take it, will come here with the water," he cogitated, stamping upon the wet and deserted ledge which he had reached, "and here will she be, also."

He raised his eyes to the ragged line of rocks topping the northern wall of the gorge.

"I shall perch myself there like a sacred hawk and filch her likeness.

Nay, now that I come to ponder on it, it is doubtless better that she know naught about it. She might drop certain things to the Egyptians hereabout that would lead to mine undoing. The G.o.ds are with me, of a truth."

He descended into the larger valley and went singing toward the Nile.