Читать книгу Demophon, a Traveller's Tale - Forrest Reid - Страница 4

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From that memorable day upon which he passed into the keeping of the new nurse, Demophon throve and grew apace. Of the nurse herself they learned nothing beyond the extremely little she had already told them, and they stood too deeply in awe of her to ask the questions Metanira never tired of asking when she was not there. They were questions, to be sure, upon which only Deo could have thrown much light, but Metanira continued to ask them, supplying the answers also, and if these were more remarkable for variety than consistency, at least nobody was in a position to contradict them. Metanira, at the same time, had the good sense to refrain from interfering between Deo and her little boy, though the stranger’s methods were in some respects by no means to her liking.

For in this small household Deo and her charge lived very much apart. To Keleos it mattered nothing; he went his customary ways; but Metanira found it harder and harder to accept an arrangement which practically ignored her existence. It was humiliating. Deep down in her heart she was still grateful to the woman who had saved her child’s life (or at least had arrived at the mysterious turning point in his illness, for Metanira was becoming sceptical): nevertheless, she was hurt by Deo’s attitude of aloofness. If the nurse was fond of one member of the family, it seemed to Metanira that she ought to be fond of them all. And if she wasn’t fond of them all—then she might at least try not to show it quite so plainly.

At first she had thought Deo to be merely reserved, and she had waited hopefully for this reserve to thaw into a more genial relationship. As the months passed, however, the futility of such a hope became apparent. It was not reserve at all: it was an unconscious and complete indifference. In vain Deo’s attention was drawn to the charms of Iole and Rhodea: the nurse looked at them, and then, without a word, sank back into her own thoughts. What were these thoughts, Metanira wanted to know? And why did she refuse to speak even of her lost daughter? It was only with Keleos that she now and again entered into conversation, giving him advice about farming matters, of which she seemed to possess an exhaustive knowledge. And since her advice invariably led to the happiest results, Keleos had come to regard her with an absurd admiration. There was no use in appealing to him. Metanira’s growing dissatisfaction was in fact expressed chiefly to the pots and pans, and in sudden unexpected slaps of which Iole and Rhodea bore the brunt. She admitted all Deo’s good qualities, but because one did this there was no need to be blind to her faults. Metanira was not blind to them. She decided that of all human imperfections what she most disliked was secretiveness. It was not, she assured her husband, that she had the slightest wish to pry into Deo’s affairs (though one would have thought that between two women more or less of the same age there might be some little show of confidence); it was——

Metanira never definitely stated what it was, so Keleos never quite understood. But if she did not wish to pry into Deo’s secrets—then he did not see what she had to complain of. He himself did not believe there were any secrets.

That was because he was a man, Metanira told him. All women had secrets—including, if he cared to know it, his own wife. This last remark, however, was lost upon Keleos. He had passed the age when it might have aroused uneasiness. He merely pointed out how Demophon was flourishing under the new nurse’s care, and Metanira could not deny it. The boy was growing in strength and beauty as she had never known a child to grow before. “Why does she want to sit up at night after everybody else has gone to bed?” Metanira demanded, choosing a safer point of attack. “When does she go to bed? Twice I lay awake on purpose to listen, and I never heard a sound. What does she do? And the fires she keeps up! They’re not out even in the morning. Why should she waste so much wood?”

“Surely that is a small matter!” Keleos answered good-humouredly. “What are a few logs of wood—one way or another?”

Metanira had expected this reply. “You don’t understand,” she said impatiently. “Nobody grudges her the wood.... If there was any sense in it! But there isn’t; and she might easily fall asleep and the whole place be set on fire. I’ve peeped through the door, and the room was as bright as day. We don’t want to be all burned in our beds.”

That night she tried again to lie awake and listen, but it was hard after the long toil of the day, and very soon she fell asleep.

Her grievance remained alert. It entered into her dreams, and she dreamed of a long conversation with Deo, in which she boldly asked as many questions as she wanted to. In the morning this bravery had vanished.... And so it went on, till at last it seemed to Metanira that unless she could share one of these mysterious vigils with Deo her mind would never be at rest again.

On the very next night, summoning up all her courage, she resolved to do so. She entered with a rather tremulous excuse of sleeplessness, and sat down by Deo’s side. The nurse took no notice of the excuse, nor indeed of Metanira’s presence. And very soon poor Metanira wished she had not come. The hearth, as she had expected it to be, was heaped with great logs that blazed and crackled, shooting out fierce tongues of scarlet flame, like angry serpents, and filling the whole room with light and rapid shadows. The economical Metanira longed to extinguish the fire, but she dared not say a word. In front of it Deo sat motionless. She had taken Demophon from his bed, and he sat on her knees, wide awake and watching the flames, holding out his hands as if to encourage them. Surely he ought to have been asleep hours ago! To Metanira, watching him wistfully, he never once turned his head.

She had again that painful, humiliating feeling of supreme unimportance. And she felt incapable of drawing attention to herself by even the timidest speech; for alone here, in the great empty hall at night, with this mysterious nurse, her subconscious uneasiness had risen to the surface and had turned to fear. It was not that she could associate any thought of evil with that stern silent figure beside her. It was almost, indeed, a holy dread, such as might be awakened by the loneliness of great plains and silent mountains, by the sea or the sky. And it seemed to Metanira that Demophon, little boy though he was, had somehow passed out of her reach, had passed from her small busy world into this other, vaster, more remote world, which was Deo’s—that he was no longer her son, but the son of the woman who held him in her arms. Irrepressible tears rose in Metanira’s eyes and flowed one by one down her thin cheeks. But she uttered no sound, made no complaint.

And presently, try as she would to keep awake, the drowsy coils of sleep began to steal like a heavy vapour into her brain. Through the gathering dimness, that grew ever denser and closer, she became aware of a shadowy form towering above her; then she ceased to struggle, and her soul was borne down and down, far below the level of consciousness....

When she opened her eyes dawn was breaking, and she was once more in her own bed in her own room. She would have liked to believe she had never left it—to believe she had only dreamed of that late visit—of Deo, and the child, and the fire. But she could not deceive herself; she knew it had all actually happened.... Keleos was yawning and muttering below his breath: he was up and dressing, moving about in the semi-darkness of the gray winter morning....

So the days slid by, till winter turned to spring, and the new tender herbage, like a delicate green mist, crept over the awakened earth, and over the dark boughs of the trees. The birds were abroad, happily building their small houses. In the valleys were violets, crocuses, and hyacinths. Primroses decked the mossy banks of the water meadows, and the sweet fresh perfume of leaf and blossom mingled pleasantly with the salt smell of the sea.

Iole and Rhodea gathered baskets full of wild flowers, making the whole farm house gay with them. Demophon had attained his seventh birthday; and in face and body and limbs was lovely as a little God. He would sit in the swing near the oak tree, while Deo pushed it high and higher, and Tauros watched it till he grew tired of moving his old head from side to side. But when Iole pushed it, it only went a little way, and when Rhodea pushed it, it did not go at all.

Nobody could have imagined he had ever been ill. He laughed and shouted and played from morning till night. Even if he fell and hurt himself he did not cry. To simple-hearted Keleos it was a joy to watch him: only to Metanira there seemed something unnatural in that flawless physical perfection. It would have pleased her better had he, when he tumbled and cut his knees, come weeping to her for consolation; it would have pleased her better had she to find an excuse now and again for some passing fretfulness such as other children showed. How could she feel he was really hers when she could neither scold him nor comfort him?

And a new anxiety had arisen, for in these golden days of early summer Deo kept him for long hours out of doors, and they wandered deep into the woods, only returning when the evening shadows were stretching across the fields. Had she been able to watch them in their rambles, Metanira might have been more alarmed still. What kind of nurse was this, at whose touch a bright, new flower would spring up out of the ground? Demophon would dance round it, shouting and clapping his hands. He, too, touched the grassy bank with a small finger in very careful imitation of Deo; but no flower sprang up, though he stood gazing in solemn expectancy. Then Deo, whom Metanira knew only as cold and stern and silent, would laugh and catch him in her arms and hold him close, breathing a divine sweetness about him, so that the flame of life in him was strengthened, and through all his body and limbs there glowed the dawning spirit of a God.

And sometimes in the very heart of the woodland, where a stream ran out from a rocky ferny cave, and the dark mossy ground was starred with red anemones, a visitor would come to them. He was a boy of fifteen or thereabouts. His thick hair was short and curly—so curly that it was like the little curls of astrakhan, except that it was yellow. The first faintest golden down had just touched his cheeks, and his bright eyes were the merriest Demophon had ever seen. He wore nothing but a big flat-brimmed country hat at the back of his head, and on his feet sandals with queer little wings attached to them. He carried a rod, and twining up this rod were two golden snakes. The moment he saw him Demophon felt happier than he had ever felt before.

This boy must be a boy Deo knew, for she was not a bit surprised to see him; but it was for Demophon he had come, and in two minutes they were friends. He was the most wonderful person in the world. He could make toys out of wood or clay or pomegranate skin; he made a pipe of hemlock stalks (binding the hollow stems with white wax), and when it was finished he showed Demophon how to blow out of it musical sounds. He taught him how to throw a spinning quoit; he taught him how to run and leap and wrestle and box and swim; he turned the sylvan glade into a green gymnasium and Demophon himself into the smallest of small athletes.

They were the jolliest sports imaginable, though with his present instructor Demophon would have found any sport jolly. He had conceived for him a kind of worshipping admiration, and trotted after him whithersoever he led, filled with unbounded trust. He imitated this glorious leader in all his words and actions, sometimes so unsuccessfully that his hero would nearly die of laughing. But probably the leader was less careless than he seemed to be. Deo, at all events, was willing to trust them together far out of her sight and hearing, nor did Demophon’s subsequent descriptions of hairbreadth escapes and reckless adventures bring more than a smile to her lips. Even when he told her how he had fallen out of the very top of an oak tree, and how the other boy had just managed to catch him before he reached the ground, she only made him promise that he would not attempt such feats when he was by himself. And once he asked her, “Is he my brother?”

She looked at him in surprise, for Demophon was quite old enough to know that brothers are not picked up in the woods in this haphazard fashion. He did know it. He himself did not understand why he had asked such a question; and the only explanation he could give was to repeat passionately, “I want him always—always.”

Deo took him in her arms. “You queer little boy,” she murmured, looking into his dark, shining eyes. “You are very human after all.”

“I love him,” Demophon answered. “And I love you....” Then he added, as if the thought dimly troubled him, “I don’t think I love anybody else. Ought I to?”

“You love Keleos a little,” Deo said, “and Tauros.”

Next morning the woodboy brought a young ram on his shoulders. He gave it to Demophon, telling him it was a present for him, if he could keep it; and he watched him closely as he struggled to do so. Demophon struggled stoutly, very red in the face, till the ram suddenly butted him in the stomach. Then he tumbled over in the grass, and the woodboy laughed; but the ram ran away and was never seen again.

Demophon had learned to be nearly as silent concerning his doings as Deo herself, yet a chance word about this ram, the wooden boats, the Pan-pipes, and other similar treasures, set the parents asking questions, and then exchanging conjectures as to who the mysterious playmate might be. Keleos could think of nobody, but Metanira thought of Linos, the son of Phaleris, an idle, good-for-nothing boy, much given to wandering about the countryside, spying after the water nymphs, and the cause of endless trouble to his good old father and mother, who were decent hard-working people. In this way she created for herself a further grievance against Deo, who, characteristically, either could not or would not tell them anything. Nor was it removed when she discovered that the new playmate could not have been Linos, because Linos had run away from home early in the year, following a troop of dancers to Megara. The fact is, in Metanira’s heart, her first feeling of gratitude to Deo had long since given place to jealousy. From now on she began to take wretched counsel with herself, and at last, in the name of prudence, to shape a secret plan.

Every night, as usual, she retired early with her husband to their bedchamber; but one night, as soon as she heard from his breathing that Keleos had dropped asleep, she got up, and wrapping a woollen fleece about her, sat down to wait. She was very patient, and not till she believed it to be past the middle of the night did she stealthily open her door. Then, like a ghost, Metanira glided into that room where the fire was burning with its great light. Before the hearth sat Deo, and kneeling on her knees was Demophon. His hands were clasped round Deo’s neck, and she was anointing his body, though with what mysterious unguent Metanira could not tell. But as she stood there a sudden thought, and this time a quite new thought, came to her. It entered her mind, not as a suspicion, not as a possibility, but fully grown, as if some one had whispered it in her ear. Tales had reached her, as they had indeed reached all the world, of the witches of Thessaly, of their powerful charms which could raise furious storms on a cloudless night, or draw down the moon into a pail of water. And Metanira was convinced that she had been harbouring one of these baleful women in her house. She knew enough of their magic to know what unholy transformation followed on the anointment of their bodies. She half expected at that moment to see feathers sprouting on the body of Demophon, to see both nurse and boy taking flight in the form of screech-owls. It had been by magic, she now saw, that Demophon had been cured. It had been by magic that first he had been made sick, thus giving the witch an opportunity to enter the house, and so to draw him more completely within her power. And suddenly her blood froze in horror, for she saw Deo bend down with the boy in her arms, and place him in the red heart of the fire, and rake the ashes over him. So great was the shock she received that for a few seconds she could neither move nor speak. Then her wild shrieks rang through the sleeping house, and she rushed from her hiding-place. But Deo had already snatched the boy out of the fire and set him on the floor, where he stood, covered with cinders, clutching her dark robe.

Aroused by the mother’s screams, the others—Keleos, Iole, Rhodea—appeared in the doorway, trembling, fearful of what they might find. Metanira, pointing to Deo, continued to scream. She had lost all self-control, and with her gray disordered hair and white convulsed face looked herself at that moment much more like a witch than Deo did.

“She is a witch! The stranger is a witch!” Metanira shrieked, tearing herself free from Keleos, who had put his arms round her and was trying to restrain her. “Ask her what she has done with our child. I saw her smear his body with her drugs. I saw her put him in the fire. But it is she who shall be burned—burned alive——” Her voice broke suddenly and she dropped to the floor moaning and wailing.

And Deo stood there, terrible at last in her anger. “Fool,” she said pitilessly. “Poor raving fool. I would have made your son immortal. I, even I, swear it by the waters of Styx. Eternal youth I would have given him, and the glory of the deathless Gods. Nightly I anointed him with ambrosia, and nightly I placed him like a brand in the fire, and nightly there was burned out of him some portion of the gross and earthy element. The task was almost accomplished, but now it is undone—undone by prying and suspicion. Take him back, then; but know that you have dragged him back to change and old age and death.... Yet because he has lain on my knees, and breathed my breath, some touch of divinity must still be his, marking him off from the common race of men. For I am Demeter, great even among the Immortals, and I came here because that old man’s simple heart found favour in my eyes. Now I must go again, and you will never see me more.”

As she spoke, she pushed Demophon to his mother. And suddenly her form towered up, filling the room with a blinding glory, and her head touched the roof-beams. The semblance of age dropped from her; her yellow hair was like the corn at harvest time.

But the wretched Metanira and Keleos fell on their knees at her feet, begging her forgiveness. Iole and Rhodea too knelt down, weeping, though they did not know what had happened, except that it was some terrifying calamity. Only Demophon remained as he was. He wanted his Deo, and he still clutched her robe. But the Goddess loosened his grasp and pushed him towards his mother. Then she passed out of the house, and there was a loud beating of immense wings, and a chariot drawn by two dragons rushed down through the moon-washed night. The winged dragons stood there in the moonshine, their great eyes glowing like emerald lamps, their fierce tails lashing the ground, their green and scarlet scales shining like precious stones over which a stream of fire flows. The Goddess stepped into her golden chariot, and the dragons spread their coloured, gorgeous wings, which were eyed like a peacock’s tail. And they mounted into the wide air, and rose higher and higher, passing across the face of the moon, and leaving a trail of crimson stars behind them as they sped up through the sky to Olympos.

When the last flaming star had burned out; when the chariot had utterly disappeared, silence flowed back over the earth, like the closing in of sundered waters. In the dark heavens once more only the moon floated, shedding peace on the quiet fields. A nightingale began to sing; a cock crew; the shrill voices of the frogs rose from the water meadows. Then, kneeling side by side on the holy ground before the door, Keleos and his wife and children prayed aloud to the offended Goddess.

When they re-entered the house they found Demophon standing in the middle of the floor, sulky and covered with cinders. Passionately Metanira clasped him in her arms. Already her alarm had subsided. She was conscious now only of the love that for so long had found no outlet. Her thoughts were not the thoughts of Keleos. Secretly she was glad that the Goddess had gone away; secretly she was glad that she had spied upon her, and screamed; secretly she was glad that Demophon was not a little God but a little boy, and that she had him now, once more and for ever, all to herself. But she felt him struggle in her arms, and as he fought against her close embrace her tears fell. She spoke little love words to him, but he frowned and repulsed her, and drew streaks of dirt across his wet cheeks as he rubbed away his tears. He did not want her, he did not want Iole, he did not want Rhodea, he did not want Keleos, he wanted Deo. He lifted his hand and struck at Metanira, who still tried to clasp him. “You sent her away. You sent her away,” he cried, bursting anew into angry sobs. “Leave me alone. I hate you.”