Istar of Babylon Part 5

The prospect of departure was, too, far easier for Charmides to contemplate than it would have been for Phalaris, with all the athlete's affected stoicism. Up to this time Charmides had led a lonely life; no tastes that rendered him companionable towards others, or, rather, holding within himself resources that enabled him to lead a life in which the presence of others was unnecessary and undesirable. The existence that his imagination conjured up from the lands of the unreal had become dearer to him than that of actualities. He had created a world for himself, and peopled it with creatures of his fancy. With these he walked and held converse, and no one but Heraia, his mother, could have understood how completely they satisfied his every need of companions.h.i.+p. Thus he was able to take away with him almost all of his former life; and Charmides and Heraia both realized, in their secret hearts, that the way of another in his place would have been far harder than it promised to be for him.

During the last week before the sailing of the s.h.i.+p, Charmides held one or two long and serious talks with his father and brother. Theron, with grave, undemonstrative affection, gave him good counsel and excellent advice as to his dealings with men, and his behavior in various possible situations with them. Theron was not a poor man, neither was he an ungenerous one; and the bag of silver coins given the shepherd to carry away with him contained enough to transport him to the gates of the great city itself. Regarding the object of that journey, the father, after the first morning, said not one word. He felt that Charmides knew best what he intended to do; and it must be confessed that, despite his piety and his reverence for the G.o.ds of his race, the Selinuntian felt his credulity much taxed when it came to Istar, the living G.o.ddess of Babylon, of whose existence Kabir was their single witness, and at that a witness only at second hand, according to the Tyrian's own admission.

Phalaris shared his father's views on this point; but, to his credit be it said, not the least suggestion of this feeling ever escaped him in his brother's presence after Charmides' decision to go had been finally and irrevocably made.

Kabir, in the mean time, found his admiration of the shepherd increasing. Charmides now held many a talk with him on practical things, and the Phnician found his prospective companion by no means lacking in common-sense. The young Greek very soon read enough of the other's nature to realize that poetry and imagination held small places in his category of desirable characteristics; and the young man ceased to lay before the older one any pretty notions regarding sea-myths in which he was indulging himself when contemplating the long, eastward voyage. Now and then they spoke of Istar, and Tyre, and Babylon, which Kabir knew well by hearsay. But legends of mischievous Tritons and dangerous Sirens, of fair Nymphs and hideous sea-monsters, and stories of Delos and Naxos, of Crete and Halicarna.s.sus, the rhapsode kept for himself and his lyre.

At length came the dawning of the last day of the shepherd's old life.

The galley was launched and ready to sail. Food and water were stowed away on board; and the libations and sacrifices had taken place on the beach the evening before. Now, on this last afternoon, Charmides sat alone, a little way in front of the house, looking off upon the seas to which, to-morrow, he was to trust himself for safe convoy to such distant lands. It was a fair afternoon, and very warm. The rhapsode, basking in the sunlight, felt his emotions dulled under the beauty around him. His blue eyes wandered slowly over the familiar and yet ever-changing scene. His mind was almost at rest. Indeed, his eyelids had begun to droop with suspicious heaviness, when a gentle hand was laid upon his shoulder, and he turned to find his mother at his side.

"Charmides!" she said, in a strained voice. And then again: "My Charmides!"

"My mother!" And she was held close in his arms, her tears raining down upon his face, his head drawn close upon her breast.

"Charmides! My boy, my beloved, my companion! How can I give thee up?"

The shepherd stood still and silent while her hands caressed his s.h.i.+ning hair and her breath came and went in a vain effort to re-establish her self-control. After two or three minutes, in which his thoughts spun dizzily, he took both her hands in his own and lifted them to his lips.

"Mother," he said, rather brokenly, "Apollo will forgive, will release me from the vow. I will not go away. I will not leave thee here--alone."

He kissed the hand again. "Come with me to the temple of the G.o.d, and I will absolve myself from the vow."

Heraia drew the boy still closer, and put her lips to the hair that cl.u.s.tered about his ear. "The G.o.ds bless thee, my dear one. Apollo will hardly forgive my weakness. Nay, Charmides, I did not come here to grieve over you, but to talk with you on many things that a mother has in her heart to say to her children. Let us sit here together and look off upon the sea--the sea that I must hereafter watch alone."

Thus speaking, she drew him down upon the ground beside her, into one of the daisy drifts, and they sat in silence for a little, looking off together over the far expanse of s.h.i.+mmering blue, with the turquoise horizon-line melting into the still bluer tint of the sky above. And when Heraia began again to talk, her tone was so low and so even that the words seemed to her listener to mingle with the afternoon, becoming at length so entirely a part of their surroundings that in his memory of the scene, as his mind held it in later years, her voice was forever accompanied by the s.h.i.+ning of bright waters and the faint fragrance of the carpet of flowers surrounding her.

"Your father, my Charmides, has talked with you of your long and lonely journey, of men, the ways of men, and your dealings with them. Obey his wishes in all these things, for his advice is that of one who has lived long and wisely in the world. But I, dear son, must speak to you in another way, of things which, were you not as you are, I should not mention before you. But you are young, and you are very pure; and your nature, with its hidden joys and hidden woe, I understand through my own.

"Your face and form, my Charmides, are beautiful--more beautiful and more strange than those of any man I have ever seen." She paused for a moment to look wistfully into that face, with its golden frame of hair, while the boy, astonished and displeased, muttered, resentfully:

"My face is that of a woman!"

His mother smiled at his disgust. "Nay, child, thy face has the man in it most plainly written. There is in it what women love--and it is of this that I would speak.

"Excepting myself, Charmides, you have known no woman well; and the feeling of a man for his mother is never his feeling for any other of her s.e.x. Woman's nature is as yet, I think, closed to your understanding. In this long journey upon which you are faring forth, I do not doubt that you will encounter women, more than one, who will seek you for the beauty of your face. For women love beauty in men, as men desire it in them.

"In your connection with women, whether the acquaintance be of their seeking or of yours, remember this one thing, that I most firmly believe: All women, all in the world, of any land, I think, have in them two natures--one that is evil, and one that is good. It will rest with you alone which one you choose to look upon. For there is no woman so degraded, so lost to virtue, that she cannot remember a time of purity which you can reawaken in her. And there is no woman so good that, for the man she truly loves with her heart and with her soul, she will not fall; for so men have taught them, through the ages, to love. Therefore, my son, may the greatest of all humiliations come upon you if, knowing what I say to be true, you treat any woman with other than reverence and honor. For a woman who clings in dishonor to the man she loves is not to be blamed by the G.o.ds so much as the man she has trusted. For a man is strong and should have control over all his senses; but to a woman love is life; and it is decreed that life is all in all to us.

"Yours, Charmides, is a white soul, a soul as beautiful as the body that holds it. As yet it is unspotted by a single act of wrong-doing. That you keep that soul pure throughout your life is my one prayer for you. I give you up to the wide world--to poverty, to wretchedness, to suffering perhaps--but in this I trust you to keep faith with me. Remember that I hold your honor as my own. Though Apollo may not vouchsafe that I see you again after to-morrow--ever; though the memory of me shall grow dim in your after-life; yet remember--strive to remember always--my last words, spoken out of my great, my aching love for you. For in these words my motherhood reaches its end. Your manhood has begun."

She kept her voice steady, her tears from falling, till the end. Not so the boy. When the last word had left her lips and she had bowed her head under her weight of sorrow, Charmides could not speak for the straining of his throat; and his eyes, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with salt tears, looked blindly upon the flus.h.i.+ng clouds. For many minutes they were silent, sitting together for the last time, while the sunset hour drew on and the golden shadows fell athwart the daisies, and Heraia's words sank deeper into the shepherd's heart. Finally they rose, and moved, hand in hand, in the deepening twilight, back through the field to Theron's house. There Charmides pa.s.sed once more through the door-way of his youth.

The evening was long and very sad. After the forlorn supper the little group sat close together, saying little, yet loath to make a proposal of bed, for it had come home poignantly to all of them how very empty life would seem with Charmides taken away. After a time Kabir thoughtfully left them and went out to walk alone in the starlight. Then the two slaves, Doris and Sardeis, crept in and seated themselves in a distant corner of the living-room. Doris' wide eyes were tinged with red, and her mien was as dejected as Heraia's; for Charmides had been her comrade always. He had helped her in her tasks, had sung his shepherd songs to her from the fields, had not seldom procured pardon for her for some neglect of duty. And Sardeis, the skilful but rather churlish slave, who hated Phalaris and all his ways, and treated Theron with respect only because it meant a whipping if he failed to do so, had never once objected in his own heart to taking Charmides' flock from him as often as the youth desired lazy freedom, or to performing numberless little kindnesses for him that no beating could have drawn forth for the athlete. He, too, on this eve of the boy's departure, was beyond speech.

After nearly an hour of cheerless silence, Phalaris, with a desperate effort to relieve the general strain, brought out his brother's lyre and put it into Charmides' hands. There was a little repressed sob from Heraia, but the rhapsode's face brightened. For a few seconds he lovingly fingered the instrument. Then, lifting up his voice, he sang a song to the sea, a quaintly rhymed little melody, in his invariable minor. Finis.h.i.+ng it, he began again, improvising as he went, with an ease and carelessness that produced wonderfully happy combinations. Now, as always, he found consolation for every grief in his incomparable talent. And when, after a last merry little tune that rose continually from its first tones till it ran out of his range at the end, he finally put the instrument away, Heraia and the slave alike had ceased to weep, Phalaris was smiling, and Theron rose cheerfully:

"Now, Charmides, you must rise at dawn; therefore I bid you go to rest.

Be up with the earliest light, and I will go with you to the temple, where, before Archemides, you will renew your vow and offer sacrifice of the youngest lamb in our fold. Kabir will join us there after the service is ended, and with him you will go down to the s.h.i.+p. Good-night.

The G.o.ds grant you sleep."

Before Charmides had left the room Kabir came in again, and presently went off to his couch with the brothers.

Charmides' rest was broken, filled with dreams of far countries and with uncertain visions of her whom he was to seek. Disconnected sounds of music, bells, and phrases of charmed melody rang through his unconsciousness. Only in the last hour before dawn did he sink into untroubled slumber, from which, with the first glimmer of day, he rose.

His mind was at rest, his heart filled with peace in the inward knowledge that what he was going forth alone to seek was no chimera, but a marvellous reality. It was, then, with a great, confident joy written upon his face that, at the rising of the sun, he stood before the altar of Apollo, and, in the presence of Archemides, the high-priest, surrounded by his father, brother, and the elders of Selinous, renewed his solemn vow and offered prayer and sacrifice to the Olympian of the Silver Bow.

The hour following the ceremony was painful enough. As the boy looked back upon it afterwards, it was only a haze of tears, filled with his mother's incoherent words, his father's irrelevant advice, Phalaris'

poor attempts at laughing at the rest: all of these things finally ending in a choked prayer and kiss from Heraia. Her last embrace, given as they stood upon the sh.o.r.e beside the little boat that was to row him out to the galley, sent a sharp pang through his heart. He knew that his father gently loosened her arms from his neck. He had a decided memory of the last mighty grip of Phalaris' fingers. Then he and the Phnician, each with his bundle of clothes and money, stepped into the boat and were pulled over the smooth waters to the side of the _Fish of Tyre_, resplendent in her new rigging and furnis.h.i.+ng.

They were the last to go on board. Eshmun awaited them anxiously, wis.h.i.+ng to get away at once, into the fresh easterly breeze that was bellying out the ready-hoisted sail. Thus the pain of lingering in sight of the city, his home, was not protracted for the rhapsode. Ten minutes after he had stepped upon the deck of the s.h.i.+p her anchor was weighed, the tiller was pushed hard down, the sails sprang full, and the sh.o.r.e and rocky heights of the Greek city began slowly to recede from view.

Now came, for Charmides, twelve days of pure delight. He was alive and he was living upon the sea, that moving plain, every aspect of which was one of new beauty. From dawn to dusk, and back again in dreams to dawn, he fed his mind upon the all-abiding peace, the stillness made more still by the music of the ripples. Perfect freedom was his. He was as in the very centre of the world, the sea around him unbroken, as far as eye could reach, or perhaps some low-hanging, faintly olive-green cloud that others called an island, just touching the distant horizon-line, west or south. It was here and now, only, that the image of Istar, as he conceived her, took absolute possession of his soul. By day he walked with her, by night she watched over his light sleep. He talked to her, believing that she answered him. He sang to her and dreamed of her and prayed to her as something especially his own. Yet, near as was this image of his mind, Charmides never looked straight upon her face unveiled. Dimly, many times, he conjured up her features. Her eyes shone upon him out of the spangled night, but their color he did not know. Her cheek, smooth, warm, semi-transparent, tinted as the petal of the asphodel, was near his lips, but never desecrated by them. And while she thus moved near him, drawing him onward with intenser desire towards her far abiding-place, she was forever the G.o.ddess, in that she kept him always from all desire of a more human approach than this mystic, half-mental companions.h.i.+p.

During the voyage the sailors regarded Charmides with a curiosity tinged with dislike. Eshmun himself was at a loss to comprehend the unsociable and idle existence of the youth, who lay all day long on the high stern, under the awning, singing to his lyre and watching the sea. And Kabir pa.s.sed a good deal of time studying this intense phase of the shepherd's malady, and seeking to think out its cure. Considering the trader's eminent practicality, he conceived, with remarkable penetration, the workings of a poetically unbalanced mind. Only he, out of all the s.h.i.+p's company, cared to listen to the rhapsode's music. Only he lay awake by night to listen to and piece together the strange words that Charmides spoke in his sleep. But even he, it must be confessed, did not respect the effeminate romance that could lead a grown man into such ecstasies over a divine ideal.

The _Fish of Tyre_ took her course down the high coast of southern Sicily, halting once at Akragas and again at the easternmost point, Syracuse, where more water was taken on, and purchase made of a number of jars of a rosier, sweeter liquid. Then away to sea they sailed again, southward, round the heel of Italy, and north once more to the sh.o.r.es of Mother Greece herself, stopping finally at many-storied Crete, where the long sand-stretches on the coast yielded every year to the Phnicians a store of their wonderful little dye-mollusks. Leaving the city of tyrant kings, the galley entered upon the waters that formed a setting for those jewels of the Mediterranean, the Grecian Isles, that rose like so many emeralds upon their amethystine waters, shot with gold by day, lying dim and murmurous by night under the dome of lapis-lazuli p.r.i.c.ked with diamond stars. The galley, homeward bound, carrying her burden of homesick men, made no halt between Crete and Cyprus, which last was, to Tyrians, a second home. Charmides witnessed, with a little tug at his heart-strings, the great joy of his comrades, even Kabir and Eshmun, at once more beholding the familiar sh.o.r.es. A night was spent in the Karchenian harbor, for it was but one day's journey now to Tyre herself.

During that last night, while they were at anchor, Charmides, in his accustomed place on the deck, lay wide awake. The moon, half-grown, set about midnight over the land. The night was still and sweet, and the air warm with approaching summer. The planets shone like little moons, more radiant than Charmides had ever known them before. Now and then, from the town on sh.o.r.e, came the baying of a dog. The Greek's heart swelled with a painful longing that he could not define. It was the first twinge of homesickness, the first realization of the greatness of the world around him, and his own insignificance within it. Istar, the G.o.ddess, might indeed be near him; but the shepherd longed less for divinity than for the clasp of a warm human hand upon his own.

It was better when the dawn, red-robed, came up out of the east. There was a bustle of sailors on deck, a creaking of ropes, and a flapping of sail-cloth. Then came the hoa.r.s.e shouts of Sydyk, rousing the slaves from their chained slumber, bidding them bend cheerily to their oars, for the end of their eight months of agony and toil was near its end.

The little s.h.i.+p sped out of the friendly harbor, gallantly distancing the waves, sending forth two hissing curls of foam off her prow, her rudder cutting a deep, pale line in the smooth wake. As the morning star died on the crimson of the east, the breeze freshened. The whole long horizon was shot with rosy clouds and topped by a line of gold that paled into delicate green as it melted towards the fair blue of the upper sky, in which the white stars had now long since hidden themselves away.

Charmides let his lyre rest as he stood by one of the bulwarks watching a bird float away from the s.h.i.+p, back towards the receding Cyprenian sh.o.r.e. Presently Kabir came to join him, and the two sat down together, cross-legged, on the deck. In one hand the Phnician had brought a platter of cooked fish and some bread, while in the other he had a small jar of sweet wine.

"Food, my poet; food for the morning. Pray Apollo to make it sweet."

"You should be returning thanks to Melkart and Baal for the approaching end of the voyage," returned the Greek, speaking Phnician in rather a subdued voice.

Kabir smiled to himself, but made no answer other than to hold out food to Charmides, who helped himself not too bountifully. The rhapsode, indeed, was in danger of falling into a melancholy reverie at this the very beginning of the day. But, after ten minutes' silence, his self-appointed friend fortunately broke in upon him.

"Aphrodite's rites you practise, Charmides. Istar of the Babylonians you have come to seek. But our Nature G.o.ddess, our divinity of fertility and beauty, you know nothing of. In Tyre, before you move farther to the east, you must let me show you how we are accustomed to wors.h.i.+p Ashtoreth. Across the bay, on the mainland opposite the great Sidonian harbor, she has a vast sanctuary. We shall go there together, you and I, and you shall learn--" Kabir stopped speaking, and regarded the boy contemplatively.

"Learn--what?" asked Charmides, turning towards him slightly.

"Many things, Charmides, that it will be well for you to know. Will you drink of this? And there is new bread, also."

But the Greek refused more food, and was not sufficiently interested in the conversation begun to question Kabir further on the things that he should learn. The sun was rising now--a great, fiery wheel, burnished and dripping, sending its rays of dazzling drops high up the curved way, while it came on more slowly, more surely, till it rolled clear of the horizon, in a cloud of glorious, blinding flame.

Charmides prayed silently till the day was well begun, and sea and sky were resolved into their ordinary hues of blue and white and gold. Then, Kabir having gone again, the rhapsode, spent with his wakeful night, and sorrowful at heart with longing for his distant home, lay down upon the planks and slept. It was near noon when he woke again; and over all the s.h.i.+p one could feel the vibrations of excitement at thought of the nearness of Tyre, the home city. It should show along the horizon by sunset, and for that hour every soul on board was eagerly, impatiently waiting.

To Charmides, standing forlornly near the prow, it appeared, at last, in a dream-like mist of scarlet and gold. Rus.h.i.+ng water and green eddies and that marvellous, blinding haze mingled together and melted away to make room for the long-dreamed-of cloud picture that rose, like a conjured vision, out of the east. It was a mirrored city of white walls and drooping cypress-trees that stood far out in front of the gradually heightening coast-line behind them. It was Tyre, the city of the rising sun, viewed thus for the first time at the day's end. It was the gate of the new world. Charmides had stood long before its closed door, waiting, watching for admittance. Now, at last, the key was in his hand.

"It is fair, my home," observed Kabir, coming to stand at his shoulder, his tone fraught with suppressed joy and pride.

Charmides a.s.sented quietly. "Oh yes, Kabir. It is, indeed, fair.

Very--fair."

IV