He tried to recall the few
frigid lines that reconveyed to him the last letter he had sent her,
with the announcement of her death and the hope that "his persecutions"
would now cease. A wild idea had sometimes come to him out of the very
insufficiency of his knowledge of this climax, but he had always put
it aside as a precursor of that madness which might end his ceaseless
thought. And now it was returning to him, here, thousands of miles away
from where she was peacefully sleeping, and even filling him with the
vigor of youthful hope.
The brief mountain twilight was giving way now to the radiance of the
rising moon. He endeavored to fix his thoughts upon his partners who
were to meet him at Hymettus after these long years of separation.
Hymettus! He recalled now the odd coincidence that he had mischievously
used as a gag to his questioning fellow traveler; but now he had really
come from a villa near Athens to find his old house thus classically
rechristened after it, and thought of it with a gravity he had not felt
before. He wondered who had named it. There was no suggestion of the
soft, sensuous elegance of the land he had left in those great heroics
of nature before him. Those enormous trees were no woods for fauns or
dryads; they had their own godlike majesty of bulk and height, and as he
at last climbed the summit and saw the dark-helmeted head of Black Spur
before him, and beyond it the pallid, spiritual cloud of the Sierras, he
did not think of Olympus.
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