Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/790

782 sad, as of one who desires a voice from the lips of the dead. Hastily she flung the charm away, and gentle grace returned to the listening boy, from whom, sleeping, some nymph might have stolen his lyre, whose complaining chords now vibrated to his ear and called their master to the pursuit. Evadne reposed on the steps of the temple, and fixedly gazed upon the god. Her fancy endowed the firm hand with an unbent bow; then the figure seemed to pause in the chase, and listen for the baying of the hounds. Then she imaged a shepherd's staff, and the shepherd-god waited tenderly for the voice of a lost lamb.

"So stood Apollo in Thessaly," she softly said, "when he carried the shepherd's staff. Oh that I were the lost Thessalian lamb for whom he waits, that he might descend and I die for joy on his breast!"

Then, half afraid that the lips might break their marble stillness in reply, she asked the protection of the deity, whom she was fain to adore, but whom her adopted parents dared to despise.

Sole worshipper at a deserted shrine, she had no offering to place there, but of flowers. She wove a crown and laid it at his feet, and, while she bent by the pedestal, to hang a garland there, oh, terror! a voice cried, "Evadne! Evadne!" A tide of fear rushed to her heart. The god stood motionless yet. Who could have uttered her name? A falling branch, a swift zephyr, may have seemed for an instant articulate, and yet it was surely a human voice which had called her. Her reverie was broken now, like a cataract brought to its downfall. A moment since, all was peace and joyfulness; now she remembered, with alarm, how long she had left her foster-parents alone, and the way by which she had come was unknown, as if she had never traced it. She crossed the floor of the temple, and, as she turned to whisper, "Farewell! beautiful god!" the form gently inclined itself, and the uplifted hand stirred lightly. Evadne darted forward and looked no more behind. She bounded over chasms in the pathway, and broke the tender branches before her with impatient hands, so that her descent from the temple was one mad flight.

Evadne returned to Alpheus and to her foster-mother, she was silent concerning her discovery, and it seemed the more sweet to her for being secret. Her thoughts made pilgrimages to the temple hidden by the laurels once set to adorn it, and the deserted God of Youth and Immortal Beauty drew from her an untaught and voiceless worship. How tedious now appeared the labors of their half-savage life!—for the ensnaring of fish and the gathering of fruits for the little household gave the child no leisure to climb the hill a second time, to seek the lost temple, now all her own. Two weary days had passed, and on the morning of the third Evadne performed all her labors, such as they were, of field or of the house.

Eleusa was absorbed in the art, new to her, of repairing a broken net, when the child abruptly fled away into the forest, crying out, "I go to seek wild grapes." She would not hear the voices calling her back. She gained rapidly the path, already familiar, and wherein every bough and every leaf seemed expectant of her coming footsteps.

Hamadryads veiled themselves, each in her conscious tree, eluding human approach. She steals more gently along, that she may haply surprise a vision. The little grassy plain appears beyond the wavering oak-branches. It is reached at last, and there,—surely it is no delusion,—there rests a sleeping youth! Another step, and she bent aside the boughs. He stands erect, listening.

"It is the god!" she cries; and, falling back, would have been precipitated from the rock, had not the youth rapidly bounded forward and grasped her hand.

"Little one, beautiful child," he cried, "do not fear me! I have indeed played the god formerly, to scare from my hunting-ground the poor fools who dread the