“Have you got into that crazy head of yours that just because I let Eione take you up there when this Moon was young you’ll see that same chit of a dairy-wench waiting for you in the same place now this Moon is old?
“O yes! and another thing, Pontopereia, while I’ve got you to myself; for I don’t know what Zenios would do if he heard of this little new game of yours. Don’t you ever again — yes, you may well steal into the shadow of that Bust of Kadmos! — but you must listen to me now, though I can see how white your cheeks have gone and how those clumsy great legs of yours are shivering and shaking! — Don’t you ever again, my girl, go into Zenios’ underground treasury! I expect you’ve so often heard me laugh at the old fool about his pride and his miserliness and about all that nonsense of his being the rightful heir to the throne of Thebes, that you’ve begun to fancy you can play any of your wild-girl games upon the old stick-in-the-mud.
“But I can assure you, my fine girl, that though you may be a prophet’s daughter, and though you may even have prophetic visions of your own, there’s one thing you can’t do, and that is meddle with Zenios’ treasure-shelves! Why, my dear crazy child, if he found me — yes, me, my very, very self! — fumbling and fidgetting, and flopping, and flouncing from shelf to shelf in that treasury of his there’d be a rumpus that would bring Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos up from the fields!
“And do you think he’d put up with a child like you flibbertigibbetting down there? I don’t like to try even to think of what he might do — yes! do to you and do to me too for not looking after you better! — for I’ve seen him in these furious moods, which is something you, my good child, have never seen, and I can assure you if you had seen him in one of them you’d never again take that silver key from its hook in his bedroom, never again go down those steps to that door.”
It was clear that Pontopereia would be obedient. But it was absolutely certain also that had the inscrutable Atropos met the eyes of this lovely guardian of a clumsy girl at this particular second the woman’s exultation over her victory would have sunk to the vanishing point.
“Where is Zenios? Is he coming home to supper?” enquired Pontopereia when she had recovered herself.
“O yes,” replied Okyrhöe, glancing at the reflection of them both in the big polished shield hanging on the wall over their heads, the shield which Zenios always swore had belonged to Kadmos himself, “he’ll be back all right for supper. In fact he’s got to meet that funny old man Moros, your friend Eione’s father or grandfather. I forget which it is! But he’s a quaint old fellow; and he certainly knows how to flatter. Zenios thinks highly of him since he’s ready to listen without end to endless talk about the great House of Kadmos, whence it came, and whither—”
“Whither it’ll go when you and I have escaped from it!” interrupted Pontopereia; and though the girl’s eyes were fixed on the arched entrance to the room where they were talking, an entrance which in some incredible antiquity, had been carved out of ten yards of solid rock, Okyrhöe’s eyes were still absorbed in the reflection of the two of them in that great polished shield. And so intense was the power of concentration with which Okyrhöe’s self-interest had endowed her vision that it seemed to her a quite natural yielding to a quite natural impulse when she allowed the young girl to steal from her side and slip away in silence through that low deeply-cut arch into the open air, while she watched herself arrange her hair, arrange the veil that covered her hair, arrange what covered the veil that covered her hair, and, as she did so, permitted herself luxuriously and voluptuously to lie back in her chair and to tell herself, for the thousandth and one time, the thrilling story of her life up to date and all its drastic moves and dramatic crises.
It must have been her feminine suspicion that Pontopereia had taken advantage of Zenios’ troublesome mania for being flattered to start an amorous affair with some farmer’s son of the neighbourhood, or even to exalt this new friendship with Eione into a romantic attachment, that set her own mind running so recklessly upon her own youth.
Anyway she let herself recall the time when, being younger than Pontopereia was today, she had been a fellow-attendant along with Arsinöe among the crowd of spirited young girls from every part of the mainland at the court of King Priam in Ilium.
Her inspiration for these memories came from her own beautiful face; and as at this moment, with Zenios walking to meet his aged flatterer and Pontopereia remorsefully pretending to be looking for a black sail on water that was already too dark to reveal any sail, and with Nemertes, the stalwart mother of their three faithful servants, Omphos, Kissos, and Sykos, yes, with Nemertes, she told herself, now at work in the kitchen preparing a plentiful meal for the three lads and a no less plentiful, but rather more elegant one for Zenios and herself, there was no immediate necessity to leave this shield-mirror, she allowed the motions of her fingers, about her head, her hair, and her perfect throat, to follow the arbitrary motions of her memory.
And she remembered how her crafty mother from Crete, who had made her change her name from Genetyllis to Okyrhöe, had warned her against making friends with a wild strange girl at the same court whom everyone but the girl herself knew to be a bastard daughter of Hector.
But with Arsinöe she had insisted on making friends; and had proved her wisdom in this when the crash came and the city was taken, for she succeeded in making Andromache, Hector’s widow, believe that it was she, and not Arsinöe, who had the right to call Hector father, and she had betrayed Arsinöe into the hands of Phoenician merchants bound for Ithaca, and while clinging herself to the ill-starred Andromache, she had succeeded at last in becoming the wife of the miser Zenios, and in aiding him in his flight from Thebes in company with Pontopereia.
It had only been when Zenios in his craving for masculine society had begun to exercise his hospitable influence on the susceptible Moros that Okyrhöe learnt that Arsinöe like herself was a refugee in Ithaca; and although this piece of news had at first been a considerable shock to Okyrhöe, she was now, as she airily, though by no means absent-mindedly, practised various expressions in profile, in three-quarters-face, and in full face, telling herself a fine story as to what she would do if by any strange chance she found herself confronting once again her old acquaintance, Arsinöe, the daughter of Hector the son of Priam….
“Okyrhöe! what do you think? Who do you suppose—” The beautiful lady rose and swung round from her shield-mirror like an indignant sea-mew from the crest of a wave.
The shock of seeing Pontopereia so quickly again and in such an unaccountable whirl of excitement was as irritating as it was startling. The girl had left her at her shield-mirror. The girl now found her at her shield-mirror. There was something annoying in being thus caught practising seductive expressions and the effective manipulation of dramatic drapery.
“How often must I tell you, Pontopereia, that I won’t have you calling me Okyrhöe! You must call me Mother.”
“But you are not—” the girl began; but seeing real anger in the woman’s face she hurriedly broke off. “The King of Ithaca has come, mother! He’s come with a heap of golden treasure to buy me from you and take me away with him!”
The excitement of Pontopereia was so overwhelming that it seemed to have loosened her hair, enlarged her breasts, increased her height, and transformed her whole being to such an extent that her figure seemed to fill the arched passage that led out into the air. As a growing girl the daughter of Teiresias was at the opposite pole of girlhood from the young Eione: for, while this latter’s face was plain and homely, her limbs were those of a perfect dancer; but while Pontopereia’s limbs were thick, heavy, awkward and unwieldy, her face was moulded with exquisite delicacy as if for the perfect expression of pure inspiration. It was a face that lent itself to be possessed by a power that, even as you watched it, seemed able to change human flesh and blood into some rarer essence, as though air, water, and fire had joined in revolt against the heavier and more substantial fourth element with which they are normally associated.