WITHOUT doubt Typhon now entered into the shadow that love casts before, though the substance still remained far distant. Dawn had broken in his virgin heart — a dayspring cool, gentle, enveloped in mists, that obscured its uncertain magic. Melancholy was mingled with the surprise that he experienced when he found his twilight mind so full of Ægle. The sun had yet to rise, melt away misgiving, resolve doubt in revelation and turn wonder into joy. But there was no rapture in Typhon’s spirit at this time. Rather he puzzled to find the problem of the girl persisting above more important things and leaping, so often and so suddenly, from the dark corners of his brain. He marvelled at his impulse to shield and defend her, to add happiness to her life by quick inspirations and ingenious thoughts sprung whence he could not tell.
He suspected enchantment, and doubted sometimes whether such unutterable beauty as growing Ægle revealed could belong to an earthborn child. Had the gods woven this fair shadow and sent it to companion him for purposes as yet undiscovered? But always he recoiled from the thought that she was too beautiful to be true. She had told him how identical ideas clouded her own vision respecting him, and he had assured her that he was only human and knew his parents very well.
“They also,” said he, “are exceedingly human — both of them.”
Sadness, half-sweet, half-bitter, haunted his sleeping hours, and once it seemed that an after-fever from his panic flight had touched him; for on a day when he rested under a silvery buckthorn-tree and Ægle had wandered to pick wild raspberries for him, Typhon felt a dark and dreadful prompting to rise up and fly and never see her more. It was horrible yet real; and long afterwards, as he retraced his thoughts through the dim labyrinths of first love, and remembered those lights and shadows, doubts and sudden gleams of hope, he judged that some jealous and grudging god, beholding him so near to happiness, had sent this bat-winged illusion from Hades to ruin him.
He could not leave her, and he was wondering why it had become impossible to do so, when she returned to him with sweet fruits and sweeter laughter. Here they made their camp, because the day was done, and under an overhanging cliff Typhon found shelter and lighted a fire with his flint and steel.
Hippophaë, the buckthorn, shone brightly against the ironstone rock of the precipice. Her foliage had already taken on a frosted silver, which is her special beauty; her last russet bud had broken, and she sparkled and caught the rosy reflections of the afterglow; but her berries, of a lustrous orange-amber, had yet to gleam upon the bough.
She was a learned tree and told Typhon that Apollo Smintheus held her in special regard.
“Why I enjoy this privilege I have never learned,” said the buckthorn, “but so it is.”
“Who is Apollo Smintheus?” inquired the listener, and Hippophaë explained:
“He is the Mouse Apollo, and permits that little animal to associate with him. There is much hidden virtue in the mouse, and this generation is apt to overlook it. Have you yourself, for example, ever dwelt in serious thought upon the mouse?”
“Never,” answered Typhon. “One knows there are such things, but little more.”
“Exactly; and yet the creature enjoys a respectable place in history and can claim gifts which make it worthy of respect. Egypt recognises it as an honoured associate of Thoth, the god of the moon. This is that divine Thoth who cured Horus of the scorpion bite, restored his eye when Set, the black pig, blinded him, and contrived to unite the shattered fragments of Osiris on a critical occasion. How much or how little the mouse helped in these operations I know not; but certain it is that he shall be found sitting at the base of the Rod of Destiny on which were measured the lives of men. Such a position argues no small importance. In Greece, as I tell you, he is the companion of Apollo, though one may suspect, after the manner of the female kind, that Artemis loves him not. Why women entertain such a dread of mice I have yet to learn, though you may be better informed.”
“Why do you hate mice, Ægle?” inquired Typhon, and she for whose benefit the buckthorn’s learning was repeated, could not tell.
“I hate them — all save the dormouse, which I love,” she answered.
“To continue then,” said the tree. “Homer it is who speaks of Smintheus Apollo, and Strabo will tell you that many human centres of activity bore his august name. At Rhodes and Gela, at Lesbos and in Crete — the blessed birthplace of Zeus himself — intelligent and faithful persons held mouse feasts, and were doubtless the better and wiser for this act of faith. Your mouse grilled ensures long life. He is a source of fertility and well-being. I am reminded of the Trojan story, which bears a stamp of truth. When certain Cretans established a settlement in Anatolia, they were directed by an oracle to select for their future dwellings that region whereon the children of the soil should first attack them. And behold! At Hamaxitus in the Troad swarms of vigorous mice fell upon their leathern armour and nibbled through their bowstrings. Therefore they abode upon that place to their great advantage. Nor was this all. Isaiah, a learned poet of the Hebrew people, refers to the mouse-eating custom, though not, I think, with due respect; and the Philistines, when stricken with pestilence, placed five golden mice in the ark — a piece of furniture connected with their highest gods. Thus you see the Mouse Apollo is worthy of great honour and the mouse-cure a matter for consideration.”
Ægle was bored by these particulars, but nothing now ever bored Typhon, and he gave weight to the facts. To-night he felt melancholy and the victim of emotions that he could not understand. Moreover his companion had sharply chid him as they made their first stage in the journey to old Zethis.
“You do so many good and kind things, and help the people, and delay so often in your quest for Soter,” said she, “that I fear sometimes if you are seeking it as you should, or obeying the direction of your master, Epicurus. You cannot return to him empty-handed.”
“I sometimes doubt if I shall find it,” answered Typhon.
“Never doubt! Would he have put upon you a task beyond your power? You must now quest with greater ardour; and I will help you. But if I thought that it was I who came between your hand and this precious plant, then would I leave you, Typhon, and never see you again.”
“You cannot leave me.”
“Indeed I can. My wits would keep me and the folk would receive me, as they do you. You are not putting Soter before everything, as you should, and there is danger lying in wait for you.”
Marvelling to find such a practical mind in one so fair, Typhon smiled upon her, but said nothing; yet the waking day was not ended until Ægle had surprised the young man still more, and for the first time sharp-winged words fell between them and anger darkened their eyes.
Thus it happened. Impressed by the lore of the buckthorn, Typhon presently slew two wood mice and broiled them upon the embers of the fire that he had made.
“A mouse,” he said, “will cheer us, fortify us and help me to clearer seeing. I have cooked them cleverly, and so small are they prepared for our table that they will be gone in a moment. Nor need you shrink from this little entertainment, for the mouse is a clean fellow, and eats only grain and berries, nuts and the pulp of fruit.”
With that he placed her roasted mouse on Ægle’s lap in a dock leaf; but she scorned the meal and threw it from her with disgust.
“Wretched Typhon!” she cried. “What would you do! Never — never will I eat mouse — no, not if Smintheus Apollo himself commanded me!”
He entreated, but she would not yield to the young man’s petition. Then he, too, grew a little warm and flung both mice into the fire. The old scowl returned to his brow, where it had not lingered for many days, and his violet eyes were clouded with wrath.
Upon this Ægle rose up, flung down the bread and onion she was eating and leapt into the darkness. He heard her swift feet in the glade behind them and then all was silent, save for the whisper of the night wind on the forehead of the precipice above.
“Behold!” cried Typhon to the buckthorn, “what your infernal nonsense has done for me.” But Hippophaë slept and replied not.
Then he ran and sought Ægle and wearied himself on a stony hill-side amid thorn-clad thickets. He called her again and again until a thousand echoes clashed above the tree-tops, and he asked the wakened shrub and bush which way she had gone; but none could tell.
For hours he hunted thus and lost his own way in the darkness; but at length, worn, weary and distraught, he perceived a red eye glimmering upon night and found again the overhanging cliff and his fire dying beside it. Despairing and stricken to the heart with woe, Typhon flung himself upon the earth. He was hoarse with shouting and torn with many thorns. His blood had dried upon his arms and thighs. So fatigued was he that he could no longer keep awake, and presently his senses left him and he slumbered through nightmares of grief and terror.
He wakened at the first shiver of dawn, to find tears running down his cheeks and Ægle sleeping peacefully beside him. Whereupon his pain and sorrow vanished. He lifted his hands to the morning and blessed the gods who had brought her back to him. Gods and goddesses he blessed — all that he could think upon — only Smintheus Apollo he did not name, nor did he evermore show friendship to a buckthorn-tree.
He suffered Ægle to sleep on, but when presently she opened her eyes he was sitting beside her with a bowl of water from the spring, a handful of wild strawberries and a cake of white meal from their store.
“You have hurt me, Ægle,” said Typhon.
“I have hurt myself more than you,” she replied.
“Where did you hide from me?” he asked.
“Behind a stone, as you rushed out to seek me. Then you did not return and I stopped there and fell asleep. When I awoke you had come back and slumbered beside the fire, crying my name in dreams; and I was very glad, and curled beside you and slept once more.”
“No such thing must happen again!” declared Typhon.
“I will eat salamanders rather than it should happen again,” promised Ægle.
“You shall eat what you list and drink what you list.”
“May the time come when I have more choice, brave Typhon.”
“It will,” he answered,” perhaps sooner than we imagine.”
And they laughed together once more, yet spoke little for a long while.
Without adventure they reached the lonely home of Zethis, and when he saw again that solitary cypress, Typhon spoke with it and begged to know if all were well with the aged man.
“All is not well with him,” replied the dark tree. “For two days I have not seen him emerge. This leads me to suppose that he is dead; for since he came here to dwell I have never known that he refused the air.”
Typhon hastened and soon stood beside the pallet of Zethis. He still lived, and at sight of the visitor roused from stupor and showed pleasure.
“I feared that you would not be in time,” said he, “and yet I did ill to fear. My days are, however, numbered, and I go the happier in that two children of men are beside me to close my eyes.”
“Perhaps we will cure you instead,” whispered Ægle, and then, in her practical fashion, she set about to minister and make the aged one more at ease. With that inspiration which is a gift from the gods, and not to be learned, Ægle, who had never nursed anybody in her life, now took her place beside a bed of death and softened it for Zethis.
Typhon marvelled at her understanding and did all that she bade him, so that presently the sufferer’s brain grew clear and his speech distinct. Despite the indifference he had expressed, they had brought sweet and wholesome fare for the hermit, and after he received a little wheaten bread soaked in wine, and three ripe dates, the old man awoke into no small animation of mind.
While Typhon held his hand and Ægle from time to time moistened his lips, Zethis spoke fitfully to them.
“Pity has come to you before the aspect of my profound and withered age,” said he. “And pity is not a vile weakness, as the moderns declare, but a source of strength and knowledge. If you would be wise, serve the world rather than stamp upon it, for pity rewards the pitiful and quickens understanding. To know yourself, seek first to know the meaning hidden in your neighbour, for the clue to your secret lies in him. The blessed sun would be as naught were there not peopled planets for it to shine upon, and the heaven-born genius among us wins his fame from lesser men, without whom he must become nothing. Therefore bring the solvent of compassion, lacking which we may not measure the meaning of mankind. To philosopher, artist, statesman, sympathy is vital — I know it now and read it in your young eyes — too late….”
They were silent and he continued:
“The highest part of wisdom, and the hardest, is to use wisdom. Without use it goes bad, or rusts, or perishes, as mine will. But the truly wise have never erred as I. Epicurus catches a light from the gods and reflects it tempered to mortal vision. For well he knows that wisdom hidden under a bushel is only folly.”
“And yet,” said Typhon, “Epicurus is not greatly in love with the gods, and doubts, not so much their friendship, as their power to show it.”
“I have heard him on that subject,” replied the ancient one; “and I have questioned the limitations he set upon his Guides. It matters not, however, how we interpret them, for what a man does rather than what he comprehends shall enlist their good graces. The gods believe in many who do not believe in them: it is a part of godhead to see through a man’s opinions to his heart; and I have actually known those upon the steep road to celestial applause who deny the possibility of any such thing. The Master himself is one of these, and his sincerity may well shame Olympus. As are all great men, Epicurus is praised and censured for the wrong qualities. Dogma must ever be a shadow to such as he, for he sees the truth beyond. He holds hegæmonia over all philosophy and our fleeting, contemporary wisdom, yet well he knows that the present is ever a step, not a station — the rung of a ladder, not a resting-place. We ascend to loftier thinking, higher hope, purer perception, since the gods have willed that intellect shall never abide in one conclusion. Advance to wider vision, my children, is the incomparable reward of every truth-seeker — the highest payment that he can hope, or desire. Remember, too, the modesty of right wisdom. Our very greatest know that the pebbles they lift from the shores of discovery are of little worth, and though they may drop their pebbles presently, for other and brighter ones, there is an act from which they always abstain: never do they use their pebbles to stone other men who gather different splinters from that boundless beach.”
“But the gods do not teach us what you teach us, Zethis,” said Typhon gently.
“The gods,” replied he, “are very subtle, my son. They have a marvellous art to force upon us the practice of virtues by abstaining from those virtues themselves. We must do what they command us rather than what they perform. If they were not pitiless and without compassion what need for human ruth and mercy? If they were not indifferent to justice, the sense of justice had never awakened in man. Their apparent contempt for our destiny arouses in us a fierce and generous championship of our neglected race; their hubris creates, in self-defence, our aidos. But if the gods were merciful, long-suffering, patient and just with us, the need for our own finest qualities — our very justification — would vanish. The gods, in fact, look to it that we shall never be spoiled — not, as great Epicurus thinks, because they are powerless to spoil us if they would; but rather that we may struggle forward, advance, conquer the disabilities of our origin and reach at last those glories, as yet unknown, to which conscious existence should rightly aspire. Their attitude, as I have come to see through these long and silent years of thought, is thus explained, and their asperity and seeming disregard for common honesty and decency in their dealing with us have reacted upon the human soul and opened the only way to those attributes and evidences we call ‘divine,’ but which are really human, and not possessed and displayed upon Olympus, where no tears fall.”
“Men beat their Makers then?” said Typhon.
“No,” replied old Zethis; “men misunderstand their Makers. It is a belief of mine that the gods only reveal themselves at all because they must, and will no longer do so when the need has disappeared.”
“The gods ought to set an example to us, not we to the gods,” declared Ægle; but the ancient held up his hand.
“Let me finish, for there is a tremendous conclusion to my thought,” he whispered. “We have always had such gods as we deserved. We have always suffered and endured them, because they held it meet that we should do so, since suffering is the spur they choose for us; but what follows? This: that when man has reached an eminence so supreme that he no longer desires the gods, then no longer will he be called upon to endure them.”
“A rede something too deep for me,” answered Typhon, whose heart held no place for metaphysics in these days.
“It would be,” said Zethis. “But remember.”
Then Typhon asked a question that concerned himself.
“Shall I seek Soter for ever, or return and tell the Master that I cannot find it?”
“Seek earnestly for one more year,” replied Zethis; “and then, I think, you will find it, though you know not when you do.”
“Tell me, dear old man,” begged Ægle, as she ministered to his fading strength, “if what the arbutus-tree declared to Typhon be true or false. The tree spoke evil of women and uttered hateful words respecting all of us.”
She imparted the opinion of the arbutus and Typhon listened earnestly to know what their dying friend might reply.
“Of women I know little,” replied he; “but yet enough to say that the arbutus lied in every leaf when he told you these things. A beautiful woman can conquer both iron and fire. But her beauty must burn from within her, shine through and through her; and such all-victorious perfection comes from the spirit. You are upon the way to Eros, you twain. My proleptic vision already beholds you in presence of the god; but this I say: that nature is at odds with the human soul too often and blinds our deeper seeing. Man still chooses his mate, as the bird the berry, for a bright outside: hence breakdown, misfortune and tragedy — not because Love failed, since Love was never there, but because a sated hunger perished. The god shall tell you more of this.”
Presently Zethis became insensible, and for a long time they held his hands and whispered kindly words into his deaf ears, while the soul, that for a century had dwelt within him, struggled to break the aged clay.
Then he died.
“Alas!” said Typhon, “he never gave me the message for Epicurus.”
“Perhaps he did and we knew it not,” answered Ægle. “Be that as it will, you shall repeat to your Master all that he told us.”
“We will bury him at the foot of the cypress-tree,” declared Typhon; “and roll great stones before the entrance of his dwelling-place, so that wild beasts shall never enter it.”
“We will bury him as you determine,” said Ægle; “but we will not roll stones before the entrance of his dwelling-place; rather will we live in it ourselves, while we roam the mountains and climb the snows until we find Soter, as Zethis has foretold. It would be good to him to know that we remain here for a season before we go back into the world.”
So Typhon went afar for pick and spade, and returned and made a grave, where the shadow of the cypress cooled noonday. And they laid Zethis in it, and covered him with rosemary and rue, and then smoothed the earth upon him, and lifted a monolith, whereon the young man cut his name.