The rain cleared on the way. The air was soft and fresh; yet I thought at Epidauros it would be sweeter. Looking back from my chariot, at the turn of the road, I could hear far off the votive cocks all crowing; the birds of light, greeting the sun.
We reached the bounds of Troizen at evenfall. The shadow of the wooded mountain drowned the house in gloom; great folded sheets of blood-red light stretched over the sky and dyed the islands; the sea was a dun pale blue. On the road ahead, gold glittered and burned like torchlight; plumes and manes tossed; above them was a paler shine. It was my son riding to meet me.
We met in twilight. He had come in state; his charioteer held the horses, while he jumped down on foot and came to stand by my wheels, putting his rank aside. His shadowed eyes looked almost black. As he handed me down, I met them; and a darkness touched me, as night’s first finger had touched the Palace. This gaze of a warrior armed for a doomed battle; why should it hold compassion? It was a face of fate. And it was as though he had let me glimpse it against his will, like a mortal wound, in some last hope of help from me that he had known must fail.
I was tired from the drive, aching and cold; my mind on a hot bath, mulled wine, and a good warm bed. This strangeness chilled my spirits, the only part of me that had been at ease. I remembered his flight from Athens, the strange vigil before. This came, I thought, from meddling in women’s mysteries. No good could come of it, only bad dreams and sick fancies. It was best made light of; and I greeted him briskly, with some joke about the journey.
The dread and sorrow left his face; he smiled, as one might draw a mantle to cover blood, ashamed of having shown it. Then he went over to Phaedra’s litter. I saw him bow his head; but she opened her curtains a bare handsbreadth when she answered. I was displeased; she owed better manners, both to King Pittheus’ heir and to my son. A bad beginning.
V
THE PEBBLE MOVES UPON the mountain, shifted by a goat’s foot or the scour of rain. For a while it tumbles and rolls, and a child’s hand could stop it. But soon it takes great bounds, swift as a slingshot; at last it leaps out from the crag like Apollo’s arrow, and can pierce through a war-helm into the skull of a man.
So swiftly came the end. Or it seems so now. Yet time passed at Troizen, days passed, there was time even for the year to move. Mists hung in the mountain oak woods, and blew away; the drifted oak leaves lay ankle-deep and crisp, warning the deer of the hunter; rain fell upon the drifts and they turned to leaf-pads, which clung to the earth, dark as old hides, smelling of smoke.
As some ancient ship settles evenly in a dead calm, so it was with Pittheus. His eyes had turned milk-white now, and saw only moving shadows; and his mind was much the same. He liked to have my mother by him; but half the time he took her for some long-dead handmaid he had carried off in war when he was young. He would tell her to sing, and to please him she asked all the old folk what songs this girl had known; but no one remembered even her name. It was sixty years since a king had died in Troizen; when we came to bury him, there would be no one living to tell us what the custom had been before. It must be this great life ending, I thought, which made the very light seem strange, as it is before the thunder, when far isles look near and clear.
My mother was all day in his upper room, coming out only for the household business, or the rites, or else to rest. So she did not watch us; and if she saw death-omens in the spinning of spiders or the cry of birds, that was nothing strange.
Akamas had come back from Epidauros, but still slept in the grove one night in three, the priests saying they could not get omens yet to pronounce him cured. The place seemed to have sobered him; from his quiet he might have been a priest himself. All his time indoors he spent with one of the Palace craftsmen, making a lyre; he had been told to do this, as an offering to Apollo. But whenever he could get his brother to take him along, he followed him like a shadow. I could see Phaedra did not like to see them slipping off. But what could I tell the boy? “Hippolytos is four years your elder: years of the Amazon, when your mother, daughter of Minos and a thousand years of kings, waited in Crete till I had time to spare”? At his age, he might have seen it for himself.
Once I said to him, “You ought to spend more time with your mother; she came all this way in the bad season for your sake.” He seemed to shrink into himself; then said quite steadily, “She doesn’t mind, sir; she knows I am better now.” For a moment it might have been a grown man speaking, used to keeping his own counsel. But it was true enough she never asked for him, once he was out of sight.
From decency more than choice, I had brought no handmaid with me. It was high time in any case that our marriage was put in order. But at night there was always something: faintings, headaches, unlucky signs, or the moon. The time was long past when I would have turned her women from the room and had it out with her. But she had never been unwilling, until this year. I was not yet fifty, and no woman could ever say I had disappointed her; yet now I began to think, “Am I getting old?” The mists of autumn damped my spirits; I grew restless, mewed indoors, kept even from hunting by the rain. I made up my mind to go back to Athens, leaving Phaedra behind; but on that same evening, there was a new pretty girl among the homely bath-women, the battle-prize of some house-baron lately dead. It was clear her tears would never disturb his shade. King Pittheus, she said, bringing out her lesson pat, had sent her to wait on me. I had seen him that day; he hardly knew night from morning. This shy gift came from my son.
He is a good lad, I thought, and means well to me. Yet it seemed odd, unlike him. Though I kept the girl, who pleased me, yet it nagged my pride, to think it was common talk that I slept alone. I said nothing, thinking like him that it would not be seemly. For that matter, we seldom talked much now. The moodiness I had seen at meeting him had not lifted, but grown. It was more than his old daydreams; something was wrong; the lad was brooding; I should have said he was sick, if I had not seen him climbing the crags like a mountain lion. The closed drawn look he had had in Athens at the shrine was seldom off him now. He was losing flesh; in the morning his eyes were heavy; he would be gone by the day together, no one knew where. Hearing him asked for, I found he was neglecting even the kingdom’s business; fixing times for it, forgetting and going away. Often from the walls I would see along the Epidauros road his chariot going as if it raced for a prize; he would come back mud-splashed from head to heel, plunged in deep thought, barely coming out of it to smile and greet me. Or he would be gone on foot; I would glimpse his bright hair on the path that led to Zeus’s oak wood, and beyond. My mind’s eye followed him, past the rock with the eye of stone. What did he seek, what omen? Would he have more welcome there than I?
One day his slow young page came up to me, asking awkwardly if I had seen him; he had a note for him from the Queen. When I offered to see it he gave it me quite easily. Perhaps he was simple; perhaps less simple than he seemed.
The tablet said, “Theseus misses you; do you forget he is your guest? Of myself, no matter. You offend and slight him. What is it that you fear?”
I told the page I would see to it, and went straight to her room. When I had her alone, I said to her, “What is this? What have you been up to with Hippolytos? Is this your promise?”
I finished more quietly than I began, for I could see she was not well. She had sunk back, with her hand clasped to her throat. She had been full of vapors lately; yet she had refused to go to Epidauros, after all.
“Come, calm yourself,” I said. “I am to blame; I should have known you two would never agree. Why, we both know; but what use to speak of it? What’s done is done; but it was long ago, and she is dead. You came here to see Akamas; you know now he is well. Any day the old man may die; I will not have strife brought into the house, when my son is taking up his heritage. Two days from now I am going back to Athens. You will come with me.”