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Do you not remember hearing, when we were midshipmen in the West Indies, of a lieutenant of the Sappho's striking a senior officer, ashore; and of his having been probably saved from the sentence of death, by the loss of the ship?" "As well as if it were yesterday, now you name the vessel. And this you suppose to have been the late Sir Wycherly's brother. Did he belong to the Sappho?"
Bartja, whose cheeks were really glowing from agitation, bent his head close to his brother's ear, and whispered shortly the story of his love. Sappho's father had helped to defend his native town Phocaea against the hosts of Cyrus, and this fact the boy cleverly brought forward, speaking of the girl he loved as the daughter of a Greek warrior of noble birth.
"If I had allowed Oroetes' little daughter Parysatis, my youngest favorite, to come out alone with me to-night, this wonderful sight would have been my last; tomorrow there would have been one pair of eyes less in the world." Bartja took Sappho's hand and held it fast, saying, "I fancy one wife will content me as long as I live."
It was so small and dainty that King Hophra scoured Egypt for the owner, and when he found her at last, according to Strabo, made her his queen." "If Strabo was right, she lived long before Sappho's day!" interpolated the colonel's voice. "Of course, Strabo was right. There were two of Rhodopis. Everybody knows that.
The serious side of life, and three sad years passed with her ungovernable husband and brother, had been first-rate masters in the school of patience, but they had not been able to alienate her heart from her first love. Sappho's friendship had made up to her in some measure for the loss of Darius. The young Greek had become another creature, since the mysterious departure of her husband.
If it be true, as is asserted by medical writers, that the above root contains an essential oil of peculiarly stimulating qualities, the fact would account, not only for Sappho's passion for Phaon, but also for the high value set upon it by the rival wives of Jacob.
She died, at a patriarchal age, in her bed, after writing a scholarly pamphlet to prove that the tale of Sappho's leap over her famous silvery crag was a myth, the "purest sensationalism," a fable of the grammarians "hopelessly irreconcilable with what we know of that great woman's character." This much the bishop had learnt from Mr. Keith.
He had come to his mother, believing that the visit would comfort and calm his troubled mind, but Sappho's words had destroyed his last hope, and with that his last possibility of rest or peace. By this time either Prexaspes would already have committed the murder, or perhaps at that very moment might be raising his dagger to plunge it into Bartja's heart.
"Once when she was sitting dreaming at her wheel, I heard him singing softly Sappho's little love-song to her: "I cannot, my sweet mother, Throw shuttle any more; My heart is full of longing, My spirit troubled sore, All for a love of yesterday A boy not seen before." "She turned pale and asked him: 'Is that your own song? "'No, said he, 'Sappho wrote it fifty years ago.
The lively, cheerful Athenian had just come back from his native country, and, as an old and tried friend, was not only received by Rhodopis, but made acquainted with the secret of Sappho's marriage.
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