CHAPTER III
THERIA, SEVEN YEARS OLD
A little girl in an ancestral house—a slender, vivid, flashing little girl whom yet the rich traditions of her line filled to the brim with dreams—such had been Theria in her childhood.
The town in which she was born had not grown haphazard, had not been founded for trade nor for its nearness to some natural wealth.
Its central life was the god, the god of light and of enlightenment, of beauty and judicial fairness. Apollo was its source of happiness and its livelihood as well. He moulded the daily life. The focus of all Delphi was the shrine where, from a windy cleft beneath the temple, Apollo spoke, answering the wistful questions of men.
And of such an idealizing force it is true, that while it affects the community as a whole, it gives to certain individuals a heaped-up gift. Such a gift was upon this child, peculiar to her in Nikander’s house. Delphi had imprinted that expression on her baby face, that unmistakable look of spiritual life which had been the life of her fathers for at least four hundred years. So many traditions, so many prides, upliftings, adventures, poetries, and faiths, entering into the heart of a little girl. Nikander’s sons were just hearty, playful Greek boys. Theria was a Delphian.
One spring morning, when all Delphi was joyous with an awakening sky and earth, it happened that Theria was seven years old. She came tripping down the stairway of the inner court, fresh-washed from the hands of her nurse, fresh-dressed in a single garment which did not reach her knees.
“Now be good,” the old nurse had admonished her as she gave the last touch to her dark curls. “Your twin brother is playin’ that sweet down in the aula. Don’t ye go now and stir him up with your mischievous ways.”
And here in the court sure enough Dryas was playing “that sweet.” He had made a circle of pebbles and stones and was marching around and around it chanting some childish, made-up thing—perfectly absorbed, unseeing. Sunbeams slanted across the court leaving him in a sort of magic, refracted light; small rain-pools here and there among the worn pavement-flags gave back the blue, or wrinkled suddenly from the unseen breeze. In the corner the old, old tiny altar, upon which many generations of Nikanders had sacrificed, breathed yet the smoke of the morning rite. The place smelt sweet of wood-smoke. Now Theria was aware of a shadow moving across the court and looking up saw an eagle swoop down the sunlit air.
In after years Theria—a woman and far away—was to recall this scene cut clear and deep by the love she bore her home, but now she tripped recklessly down the unbalustered stair and scattered Dryas’s circle of stones with her foot.
“Let’s play,” she announced.
“Am playin’—threshin’-floor,” responded Dryas, breathless from circling.
“You don’t play threshing-floor now. That’s past.”
The Threshing-Floor was an ancient circular platform in the Precinct of Apollo. Every four years a sacred drama of the Python-snake was performed upon it and this year little Dryas had seen it.
“I’ll tell you,” said the disturbing Theria, “you fetch more stones. We’ll make the village and the road that goes by to the Oracle.”
The Oracle was the treasury of beauty and wonder of all Hellas, but to Delphic children it was just a dear bright place within high walls and the scene of their holidays.
Dryas did not answer, but he stopped his play and trotted off toward the outer room, which led to the front door, for the pebbles.
Theria waited impatiently while he brought in skirtful after skirtful of stones. Then she began to make her village, a stone for each well-known house, a line of little stones to show the road which passed their own door and ran windingly along the mountain slope. Theria set her miniature precinct in the sunny part of the court. To her the sunlight always and inevitably rested on that temple place where fane after fane and shrine after shrine mounted the hillside up to the matchless Apollo temple itself, set like a jewel of red and peacock-blue and gold against the shining cliffs.
“The Sacred Way,” murmured Dryas happily as he made the path between the temples. “Here it turns—an’ oh, here’s a sparkly stone for the ’Thenian Treasury.”
“The Knidian Treasury,” corrected Theria. “It’s the Knidian Treasury at the turn.”
“No—’Thenian!”
“No, don’t you remember the pretty marble ladies who hold up the porch?”
Still Dryas maintained his Athenian Treasury.
“Shu! You’ve never been there,” he said, “an’ I’ve been there lots o’ times.”
“I go every day,” announced the little girl.
At this evident whopper Dryas’s rosy mouth fell open in dismay.
“Never have you been there. You are only a girl.”
“I go there every day,” repeated Theria.
Quarrel was imminent; was averted only by Dryas scrambling to his feet to seek old Medon as judge.
“Never mind Medon, I’ll show you how I go,” and, taking her twin brother’s hand with an air of great bestowing, Theria led him up stairs and forward to her father’s bedchamber, to its one window. Out of this she leaned so far that only her chubby legs remained within. Sure enough, so leaning she could see beyond the shoulder of a cliff a spur of farther hill, and there in a bath of light the golden tip-edge of a little temple and on a higher level a single pillar bearing a sphynx of lofty wings.
“I see it every day,” she announced again.
“Only a little piece,” said Dryas contemptuously.
“When I see that I see all,” repeated the child enthusiast. “Medon has told me all.”
Dryas opened his lips to answer but thought better of it. Theria was a most determined little person when once she had made up her mind.
They went back to the aula. Here ruin met them. Baltè, the old nurse, was sweeping up their shrine of Apollo in great indignation.
“Whatever made ye litter up the aula like this?” She complained. “Rubble and rubbish when the rain washed all so clean last night. Never ye mind. I’ll be rid o’ one of ye after to-day.”
Dryas did not notice this speech but Theria looked up in alarm.
“Which one?” she asked.
“Never ye mind. There; I should not ’a’ spoken.”
“Why shouldn’t you spoken?”
Such caution was unusual in Baltè. The threat sounded real. Theria caught Baltè’s skirt.
“Is something goin’ to happen?”
“There, don’t you worry, darlin’. It won’t be you,” said the old nurse as she hurried away.
Dryas had rescued enough stones to recommence his threshing-floor. To tell truth, he had preferred this all along.
Theria sat beside him watching his play. The “something” was not going to happen to herself. Then surely it would happen to Dryas. Her heart began to yearn over her brother with that frightened tenderness which children know. She leaned over and kissed him. Dryas wiped off the kiss in frank disgust.
“Don’t,” he said.
She remembered the eagle. There was no bird so sure of omen as an eagle.
“Dryas,” she said softly, “I’ll tell you a story now.”
“No—please.”
Yet Theria lingered. Dreadful it was that she could do nothing for her brother when the eagle would so soon be carrying him away.
“I wish you would let me,” she said faintly. “I’ll give you all my honey cake at noon if you will.”
To such a bribe Dryas consented, squatting down in a chubby heap beside his pebbles.
“It’s about baby Hermes,” Theria began. “First, he was born, and when he was three hours old he got out of his cradle and walked straight up Parnassos Mountain—to the very top.”
“He couldn’t,” objected her auditor.
“But god-legs is strong.”
“Presè’s got a baby three months old and it can’t walk yet. Its worse’n a puppy.”
“Presè’s a slave. Slave legs is different.”
“But even a god, he couldn’t do it.”
And though Theria knew her story was correct, she did not press the point.
“And little Hermes found some cows,” she went on. “Oh, beautiful wild cows with sharpy-sharp horns. All the cows were white and were eating white flowers that grow in the meadows up against the sky.”
“Clouds?” suggested Dryas.
“Yes, clouds were their food,” went on Theria who knew the tale by rote. “For they were the herd of Apollo. And the little baby called the cows and they left their white flowers and came; for who can resist the call of a god? And Hermes, swift of foot——”
“Three-hours-old foot,” interposed Dryas.
“—leaped down the path, and all the cows they followed him. And when he came to the deep forest he sacrificed the cows to his father, Zeus, and the smoke went up through the trees to heaven and smelt very sweet. Then Hermes found a tortoise, and out of the tortoise and the cows’ pretty horns he made a lyre—oh, the first, first lyre that ever was made. And the baby Hermes began to play on the lyre—
‘Twink, twink,
Twinky, twink, twink’
—Oh, god-music, as pretty as Father plays or Pindar when he——”
“Here, here!” came an unexpected voice. “It’s very well to compare Pindar to Hermes but your father is another matter.”
The children scrambled to their feet with faces of delight. It was rare to see their father at this hour. And Father always brought gaiety.