Melissa presently returned, and the youth whose hand she still held was, as might be seen in every feature, none other than the sculptor’s son. Both were dark-eyed, with noble and splendid heads, and in stature perfectly equal; but while the son’s countenance beamed with hearty enjoyment, and seemed by its peculiar attractiveness to be made—and to be accustomed—to charm men and women alike, his father’s face was expressive of disgust and misanthropy. It seemed, indeed, as though the newcomer had roused his ire, for Heron answered his son’s cheerful greeting with no word but a reproachful “At last!” and paid no heed to the hand the youth held out to him.
Alexander was no doubt inured to such a reception; he did not disturb himself about the old man’s ill-humor, but slapped him on the shoulder with rough geniality, went up to the work-table with easy composure, took up the vice which held the nearly finished gem, and, after holding it to the light and examining it carefully, exclaimed: “Well done, father! You have done nothing better than that for a long time.”
“Poor stuff!” said his father. But his son laughed.
“If you will have it so. But I will give one of my eyes to see the man in Alexandria who can do the like!”
At this the old man broke out, and shaking his fist he cried: “Because the man who can find anything worth doing, takes good care not to waste his time here, making divine art a mere mockery by such trifling with toys! By Sirius! I should like to fling all those pebbles into the fire, the onyx and shells and jasper and what not, and smash all those wretched tools with these fists, which were certainly made for other work than this.”
The youth laid an arm round his father’s stalwart neck, and gayly interrupted his wrath. “Oh yes, Father Heron, Philip and I have felt often enough that they know how to hit hard.”
“Not nearly often enough,” growled the artist, and the young man went on:
“That I grant, though every blow from you was equal to a dozen from the hand of any other father in Alexandria. But that those mighty fists on human arms should have evoked the bewitching smile on the sweet lips of this Psyche, if it is not a miracle of art, is—”
“The degradation of art,” the old man put in; but Alexander hastily added:
“The victory of the exquisite over the coarse.”
“A victory!” exclaimed Heron, with a scornful flourish of his hand. “I know, boy, why you are trying to garland the oppressive yoke with flowers of flattery. So long as your surly old father sits over the vice, he only whistles a song and spares you his complaints. And then, there is the money his work brings in!”
He laughed bitterly, and as Melissa looked anxiously up at him, her brother exclaimed:
“If I did not know you well, master, and if it would not be too great a pity, I would throw that lovely Psyche to the ostrich in Scopas’s court-yard; for, by Herakles! he would swallow your gem more easily than we can swallow such cruel taunts. We do indeed bless the Muses that work brings you some surcease of gloomy thoughts. But for the rest—I hate to speak the word gold. We want it no more than you, who, when the coffer is full, bury it or hide it with the rest. Apollodorus forced a whole talent of the yellow curse upon me for painting his men’s room. The sailor’s cap, into which I tossed it with the rest, will burst when Seleukus pays me for the portrait of his daughter; and if a thief robs you, and me too, we need not fret over it. My brush and your stylus will earn us more in no time. And what are our needs? We do not bet on quail-fights; we do not run races; I always had a loathing for purchased love; we do not want to wear a heap of garments bought merely because they take our fancy—indeed, I am too hot as it is under this scorching sun. The house is your own. The rent paid by Glaukias, for the work-room and garden you inherited from your father, pays for half at least of what we and the birds and the slaves eat. As for Philip, he lives on air and philosophy; and, besides, he is fed out of the great breadbasket of the Museum.”
At this point the starling interrupted the youth’s vehement speech with the appropriate cry, “My strength! my strength!” The brother and sister looked at each other, and Alexander went on with genuine enthusiasm:
“But it is not in you to believe us capable of such meanness. Dedicate your next finished work to Isis or Serapis. Let your masterpiece grace the goddess’s head-gear, or the god’s robe. We shall be quite content, and perhaps the immortals may restore your joy in life as a reward.”
The bird repeated its lamentable cry, “My strength!” and the youth proceeded with increased vehemence:
“It would really be better that you should throw your vice and your graver and your burnisher, and all that heap of dainty tools, into the sea, and carve an Atlas such as we have heard you talk about ever since we could first speak Greek. Come, set to work on a colossus! You have but to speak the word, and the finest clay shall be ready on your modeling-table by to-morrow, either here or in Glaukias’s work-room, which is indeed your own. I know where the best is to be found, and can bring it to you in any quantity. Scopas will lend me his wagon. I can see it now, and you valiantly struggling with it till your mighty arms ache. You will not whistle and hum over that, but sing out with all your might, as you used when my mother was alive, when you and your apprentices joined Dionysus’s drunken rout. Then your brow will grow smooth again; and if the model is a success, and you want to buy marble, or pay the founder, then out with your gold, out of the coffer and its hiding-place! Then you can make use of all your strength, and your dream of producing an Atlas such as the world has not seen—your beautiful dream-will become a reality!”
Heron had listened eagerly to his son’s rhapsody, but he now cast a timid glance at the table where the wax and tools lay, pushed the rough hair from his brow, and broke in with a bitter laugh: “My dream, do you say—my dream? As if I did not know too well that I am no longer the man to create an Atlas! As if I did not feel, without your words, that my strength for it is a thing of the past!”
“Nay, father,” exclaimed the painter. “Is it right to cast away the sword before the battle? And even if you did not succeed—”
“You would be all the better pleased,” the sculptor put in. “What surer way could there be to teach the old simpleton, once for all, that the time when he could do great work is over and gone?”
“That is unjust, father; that is unworthy of you,” the young man interrupted in great excitement; but his father went on, raising his voice; “Silence, boy! One thing at any rate is left to me, as you know—my keen eyes; and they did not fail me when you two looked at each other as the starling cried, ‘My strength!’ Ay, the bird is in the right when he bewails what was once so great and is now a mere laughing-stock. But you—you ought to reverence the man to whom you owe your existence and all you know; you allow yourself to shrug your shoulders over your own father’s humbler art, since your first pictures were fairly successful.—How puffed up he is, since, by my devoted care, he has been a painter! How he looks down on the poor wretch who, by the pinch of necessity, has come down from being a sculptor of the highest promise to being a mere gem-cutter! In the depths of your soul—and I know it—you regard my laborious art as half a handicraft. Well, perhaps it deserves no better name; but that you—both of you—should make common cause with a bird, and mock the sacred fire which still burns in an old man, and moves him to serve true and noble art and to mold something great—an Atlas such as the world has never seen on a heroic scale; that—”
He covered his face with his hands and sobbed aloud. And the strong man’s passionate grief cut his children to the heart, though, since their mother’s death, their father’s rage and discontent had many a time ere now broken down into childish lamentation.
To-day no doubt the old man was in worse spirits than usual, for it was the day of the Nekysia—the feast of the dead kept every autumn; and he had that morning visited his wife’s grave, accompanied by his daughter, and had anointed the tombstone and decked it with