18: Journey's End

HE WAS awakened by the sun shining on his face. A cool breeze was blowing, and his mind and body felt refreshed, as if they had been newly cleansed. He had a sense of recovered sanity; he felt that he had recovered actually from a spiritual sickness, some poison or enchantment, so that his very memory of it, of all that fevered unnatural life with Xanthis, its exotic luxuries, its enervation and excitement, was grown faint and unreal. He remembered everything clearly up till the beginning of his journey through the valley, but after that all was confused, bewildering, inexplicable. . . .

Demophon sprang to his feet, and then stood motionless. Before him, and on and on to where the sky seemed to rest upon it like a soft blue veil, stretched an immense unbroken plain. But it was not grown with grass, it was composed of fields of wheat and barley, which in the distance showed flat and still as a wash of colour, but closer at hand trembled under the light wandering winds that shook the nearly ripened ears. Where the growth was more scanty there were gleams of pure blue---the blue of corn flowers---gleams of white and red---the white and red of daisies and pimpernels. And the very openness of the landscape lent it a cool and delicate beauty---a beauty responsive to every change of cloud and sunshine---a beauty perpetually changing in expression as the cloud shadows swept across it.

Here and there, like small islands, rose clumps of hawthorn and bramble, thickets of dog rose and honeysuckle, crowning the bank of some hollow, and sparkling with dew. The air was filled with the golden wine of sunshine, with scents so mingled as to be hardly distinguishable, the dark scents of earth, the green scents of growing things. It was filled, too, with a low murmurous noise, the fanning of tiny transparent wings, the stirring of minute particles of soil---the stirring of pollen, of swelling bud and dropping seed, the rustling of leaf against leaf, blade against blade---sounds so low that the distant voice of a bird was sufficient to drown them utterly. And now and then a hardly perceptible motion in the corn showed that some larger creature---furred or scaled or feathered---was moving through it. A beetle droned close by Demophon's cheek, a yellow moth hovered just above him, a bumble bee crawled over his foot. . . .

+++

This place was sacred. The wooden image of the God, when the wind touched it, made a faint humming sound. He had slept under the shadow of that image, and its benign influence had passed into him.

Perhaps in his sleep he had received a direct message, for he had a feeling of happiness, a profound assurance of safety. It was indeed not unlike the feeling which had come to him that afternoon when, after leaving Glaukos, he had wandered along the cliffs of Euboea. Or when he had knelt by the haunted pool. Now, as then, he was conscious of a watchful, guarding spirit---an angel, a God, a protector, a lover---one who had been with him, perhaps, from the beginning, ready in the moment of danger to intervene---sending forgetfulness to Laomedon, giving a voice to the ash-tree, clouding the mind of the witch so that he had been able to escape out of her snares.

For how else could he have come through all those perils unharmed? Demophon had a sudden sense of a great brightness in the sky, of an approaching glory. And he was not alone in this recognition: the music of bird and insect had died away; into the very air had come a new quality---a quality of expectancy, of hushed excitement. . . .

And still---silence. . . . But the silence was not oppressive, was not even dreamy; behind it he was aware of an intensely wakeful, vigilant life. Something---some person---some revelation or fulfilment was drawing near---and the whole world of nature knew.

Demophon broke off a branch of honeysuckle. He laid it at the foot of the image and knelt down before it. Then he bowed his head and prayed.

"O God of the wide-spreading fields, Hermes, for you I gathered this honeysuckle I found growing by the wayside. Grant that my mind and heart may be fresh and clean as these flowers, and accept this gift which is the gift of fidelity and love."

His eyes remained closed, and his hands folded. He knelt on. He knelt on because an indescribable gladness had entered into and filled his body and spirit. He knelt on till close beside him a voice spoke his name. He knew that voice; he knew who stood there, and he raised his head. Though he was older, and somehow graver than Demophon remembered him; though he was a youth, a young shepherd, he was still the boy who had come to him in the woods, his lost playmate, his hero, his friend. Demophon knew those tight golden curls, that open brow, those clear grey eyes and parted lips.

"Where have you been? Where have you been?" he cried, hiding his face in the warm fleecy cloak.

A full and passionate joy swept through him as he clung in that close embrace. "I have been looking for you so long," he said, still keeping his countenance hidden. "Why did you leave me? I looked for you in the wood. . . . I called your name. I waited and waited. I did not think you had forgotten me, but I did not understand. . . .

The voice of Hermes was pleasant and loving---with the woodboy's laughter in it, the laughter of his old playfellow. I could not be with you always; but never for long was I far away. And sometimes you did see me---in a dream."

"And now you will never go away again?"

"I must, Demophon. And I think you know that. One day you will be with me; but it cannot be yet. See, I will give you a token, and for the rest you must trust me. You have trusted me in the past---that is why I am here now."

He plucked one of the golden hairs from his own head and placed it among Demophon's black ones. "And now you are indisputably mine," he said; "marked with my mark. Not all the kings of the earth could remove it. I will tell you further, that I myself, even if I desired to, could not remove it, for our laws are not like your laws, and what we have once decreed remains unalterable."

Demophon put his hand up to his hair, touching it very carefully, as if he hoped to feel among all that dark mop this one particular golden thread. "Is it there?" he whispered.

"It is there," Hermes answered, "and it is there for ever. I have done, though in a different way, something of what Deo tried to do. Just exactly what she had planned can never now be done: that golden hair will not prevent you from growing old. But it is a promise that at the appointed time I shall come again for you; and that in the end all will be well. . . . And now we had better be starting on our journey. I am going to see you safely home, and though at your father's gate I must say good-bye, the whole long day is before us."

So they set out together, hand in hand, through the waving barley fields.

THE END