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If your lifeless victims yonder were human beings, after all, they would have cause to thank you; for what is existence?" "To these creatures, everything," said Myrtilus, the Alexandrian's other cousin, beckoning to Daphne, who had summoned him to her aid by a beseeching glance, to draw nearer. "Gladly as I would always and everywhere uphold your cause, I can not do so this time. Only look here!
When a boy, before the doom of slavery had been pronounced upon him and his father, his mother, by the priest's advice, took him there to recover from the severe attack of fever which he could not shake off amid the damp papyrus plantations surrounding his parents' house. In the dry, pure air of the desert he recovered, and he would guide Hermon there before returning to Myrtilus.
"Bias, faithful Bias!" fell from the blind man's lips, and when he felt the returned slave sink down before him, cover his hand with kisses and wet it with tears, he raised him in his strong arms, clasped him in a warm embrace, kissed his checks, and gasped, "And Myrtilus, my Myrtilus, is he alive?" "Yes, yes, yes," sobbed Bias. "But you, my lord-blind, blind! Can it be true?"
Groaning and deeply disturbed, half awake, he struggled onward, always toward one goal, to find his Myrtilus again, when suddenly the sound of the knocker on the entrance door and the barking of Lycas, his Arabian greyhound, shook the house. Recalled to waking life, he started up and listened.
And he persisted in this intention, indignantly silencing the secret voice which strove to shake it. It temptingly urged that Myrtilus, so rich in successes, needed no new garland. His lost sight would permit him, Hermon, from reaping fresh laurels, and his friend would so gladly bestow this one upon him.
The goldsmith had directed the rescue of the Demeter, yet he would scarcely have been able to distinguish it from the statue by Myrtilus; for though, like his friend, he had often employed his skilful hands in the arrangement of the gold plates at the commencement of the work, the Egyptian had been summoned to Tennis before the statues had attained recognisable form.
Leaning on the goldsmith's arm, Hermon went to his friend's studio; but before they reached it smoke and flames poured out so densely that it was impossible even to gain the door. "Destroyed a prey to the flames!" he groaned. "And he he he " Then like a madman he asked if no one had seen Myrtilus, and where he was; but in vain, always in vain.
At a slight shake of the head, which Hermon interpreted as disapproval, he clinched his teeth; but soon his lips relaxed and his breast heaved with a sigh of relief, for the sunny glance that Myrtilus bent upon the face of the goddess seemed to show Hermon that it aroused his approval, and, as if relieved from an oppressive nightmare, he approached his friend.
And in the middle of the gable is a statue of Zeus; and on the right hand of Zeus is OEnomaus with a helmet on his head; and beside him his wife Sterope, one of the daughters of Atlas. And Myrtilus, who was the charioteer of OEnomaus, is seated behind the four horses.
Daphne thinks that the two will model her in different ways: Myrtilus, as mistress in the weaving room, showing with proud delight a piece just completed to the nymphs from the Pactolus and other rivers, who sought her at Colophon to admire her work; but Hermon, after she aroused the wrath of Athene because she dared to weave into the hangings the love adventures of the gods with mortal women."
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