There were two weeks of golden days.
The sun rose clear over the green hills behind the
villa, and dropped at night into the blue sea the
other side of Rome. Daphne counted off the minutes
in pulse beats that were actual pleasure. Between
box hedges, past the clusters of roses, chrysanthemums,
and dahlias in the villa garden, she walked, wondering
that she had never known before that the mere crawling
of the blood through the veins could mean joy.
She was utterly alone, solitary, speechless; there
were moments when the thought of her sister’s
present trouble, and of the letter she was expecting
from New York, would take the color from the sky;
but no vexatious thought could long resist the enchantment
of this air, and she forgot to be unhappy. She
saw no more of the shepherd god, but always she was
conscious of a presence in the sunshine on the hills.
On the eighth morning, as she paced
the garden walks, a lizard scampered from her path,
and she chased it as a five year old child might have
done. A slim cypress tree stood in her way; she
grasped it in her arms, and held it, laying her cheek
against it as if it were a friend. Some new
sense was dawning in her of kinship with branch and
flower. She was forgetting how to think; she
was Daphne, the Greek maiden, whose life was half
the life of a tree.
When she took her arms from the tree
she saw that he was there, looking at her from over
the hedge, with the golden brown lights in eyes and
hair, and the smile that had no touch of amusement
in it, only of happiness.
“Sometimes,” he murmured,
“you remind me of Hebe, but on the whole, I
think you are more like my sister Diana.”
“Tell me about Diana,”
begged Daphne, coming near the hedge and putting one
hand on the close green leaves.
“We were great friends as children,”
observed Apollo. “It was I who taught
her how to hunt, and we used to chase each other in
the woods. When I went faster then she did, she
used to get angry and say she would not play.
Oh, those were glorious mornings, when the light was
clear at dawn!”
“Why are you here?” asked
Daphne abruptly, “and, if you will excuse me,
where did you come from?”
“Surely you have heard about
the gods being exiled from Greece! We wander,
for the world has cast us out. Some day they
will need us again, and will pluck the grass from
our shrines, and then we shall come back to teach
them.”
“Teach them what?” asked
the girl. She could make out nothing from the
mystery of that face, and besides, she did not dare
to look too closely.
“I should teach them joy,” he answered
simply.
They were so silent, looking at each
other over the dark green hedge, that the lizards
crept back in the sunshine close to their feet.
Daphne’s blue gown and smooth dark hair were
outlined against the deep green of her cypress tree.
A grapevine that had grown about the tree threw the
shadow of delicate leaf and curling tendril on her
pale cheek and scarlet lips. The expression
of the heathen god as he looked at her denoted entire
satisfaction.
“I know what you would teach
them,” she said slowly. “You would
show them how to ignore suffering and pain.
You would turn your back on need. Oh, that makes
me think that I have forgotten to take your friend
Antoli any soup lately! For three days I took
it, and then, and then I have been worried
about things.”
His smile was certainly one of amusement now.
“You must pardon me for seeming
to change the subject,” he said. “Why
should you worry? There is nothing in life worth
worrying about.”
Fine scorn crept into the girl’s face.
“No,” he continued, answering
her expression. “I don’t ignore.
I am glad because I have chosen to be glad, and because
I have won my content. There is a strenuous
peace for those who can fight their way through to
it.”
Suddenly, through the beauty of his
color, the girl saw, graven as with a fine tool upon
his face, a story of grief mastered. In the lines
of chin and mouth and forehead it lurked there, half
hidden by his smile.
“Tell me,” said Daphne
impulsively. Her hand moved nearer on the hedge,
but she did not know it. He shook his head, and
the veil dropped again.
“Why tell?” he asked.
“Isn’t there present misery enough before
our eyes always, without remembering the old?”
She only gazed at him, with a puzzled
frown on her forehead.
“So you think it is your duty
to worry?” he asked, the joyous note coming
back into his voice.
Daphne broke into a smile.
“I suppose I do,” she
confessed. “And it’s so hard here.
I keep forgetting.”
“Why do you want to remember?”
“It is so selfish not to.”
He nodded, with an air of ancient wisdom.
“I have lived on this earth
more years than you have, some thousands, you remember,
and I can assure you that more people forget their
fellows because of their own troubles than because
of their own joys.”
The girl pulled at a tendril of the
vine with her fingers, eyeing her companion keenly.
“I presume,” she said,
with a tremor in her voice, “that you are an
Englishman, or an American who has studied Greek thought
deeply, being tired of modern people and modern ways,
and that you are trying to get back to an older, simpler
way of living.”
“It has ever been the custom,”
said Apollo, gently taking the tendril of the vine
from her fingers, “for a nation to refuse to
believe the divinity of the others’ gods.”
“Anyway,” mused the girl,
not quite conscious that she was speaking aloud, “whatever
you think, you are good to the shepherd.”
He laughed outright.
“I find that most people are
better than their beliefs,” he answered.
“Now, Miss Willis, I wonder if I dare ask you
questions about the way of living that has brought
you to believe in the divine efficacy of unhappiness.”
“My father is a clergyman,”
answered the girl, with a smile.
“Exactly!” said the heathen god.
“We have lived very quietly,
in one of the streets of older New York. I won’t
tell you the number, for of course it would not mean
anything to you.”
“Of course not,” said Apollo.
“He is rector of a queer little
old-fashioned church that has existed since the days
of Washington. It is quaint and irregular, and
I am very fond of it.”
“It isn’t the Little Church
of All the Saints?” demanded her companion.
“It is. How did you know?”
“Divination,” he answered.
“Oh!” said Daphne. “Why don’t
you divine the rest?”
“I should rather hear you tell it, if you don’t
mind.”
“I have studied with my father
a great deal,” she went on. “And
then, there have been a great many social things,
for I have an aunt who entertains a great deal, and
she always needs me to help her. That has been
fun, too.”
“Then it has been religion and dinners,”
he summarized briefly.
“It has.”
“With a Puritan ancestry, I suppose?”
“For a god,” murmured
Daphne, “it seems to me you know a great deal
too much about some things, and not enough about others.”
“I have brought you something,” he said,
suddenly changing the subject.
He lifted the sheepskin coat and held
out to her a tiny lamb, whose heavy legs hung helpless,
and whose skin shone pink through the little curls
of wool. The girl stretched out her arms and
gathered the little creature in them.
“A warm place to lie, and warm
milk are what it needs,” he said. “It
was born out of its time, and its mother lies dead
on the hills. Spring is for birth, not autumn.”
Daphne watched him as he went back
to his sheep, then turned toward the house.
Giacomo and Assunta saw her coming in her blue dress
between the beds of flowers with the lambkin in her
arms.
“Like our Lady!” said Assunta, hurrying
to the rescue.
The two brown ones asked no questions,
possibly because of the difficulty of conversing with
the Signorina, possibly from some profounder reason.
“Maybe the others do not see
him,” thought the girl in perplexity. “Maybe
I dream him, but this lamb is real.”
She sat in the sun on the marble steps
of the villa, the lamb on her lap. A yellow
bowl of milk stood on the floor, close to the little
white head that dangled from her blue knee. Daphne,
acting on Assunta’s directions, curled one little
finger under the milk and offered the tip of it to
the lamb to suck. He responded eagerly, and
so she wheedled him into forgetfulness of his dead
mother.
An hour later, as she paced the garden
paths, a faint bleat sounded at the hem of her skirt,
and four unsteady legs supported a weak little body
that tumbled in pursuit of her.