Half A Hundred Hero Tales Part 20

How could he disobey the voice of the G.o.d? How could he bring himself to desert the Queen whose heart he had won, and break his troth?

But what were the closest of human ties when the G.o.d had spoken? So he called to him his comrades and bade them in secret make ready the s.h.i.+ps for departure. But lovers' ears are keen, and rumors of the preparation reached the Queen in her palace. She raved like a madwoman, and called down curses on the perjured traitor. Grown calmer, she sought aeneas and, with mingled reproaches and appeals to his pity, besought him at least to delay his departure. The lover's heart was touched, but the hero was unmoved; and with the gentlest words he could frame, he told the Queen that he had no choice but to follow his weird as Heaven ordained. He could never forget her lovingkindness, and would cherish her memory to his dying day.

Then the Queen knew that she was betrayed, and flatteries and soft words served but to rekindle her rage. She bade the perjured wretch begone; she cursed his false G.o.ds and their lying message, and swore that she would pursue him with black flames, and that after death her ghost would haunt him in every place. This said, she turned and left him, and he saw her nevermore.

aeneas would fain have stayed to calm her grief and soothe her rage, but duty bade him go, and he urged on his men to equip the fleet for departure. They, nothing loath, set to, and the harbor was like an ant-hill, with the sailors shaping new oars and loading the beached vessels. Soon the black keels rode the waters all along the sh.o.r.e.

Dido, perceiving this from her tower, sent her sister Anna with a last message imploring aeneas yet a little to delay. But aeneas, steadfast as a rock, turned to her a deaf ear, and into the heart of the unhappy Dido came despair and thoughts of death.

To death, indeed, dark omens turned her mind. For when she offered sacrifice, the wine which she poured upon the smoking incense turned to blood; and at night, when kneeling before the shrine of her dead husband, she heard his voice bidding her arise and come to him.

So the Queen, interpreting these dark signs as her sick heart dictated, made ready to die.

Calling her sister Anna, she declared that she would now make use of a magic charm given to her by a priestess to bring back faithless lovers or make the love-sick whole. To work this spell it was necessary to collect and burn all tokens of the light of love.

"Do you, therefore," said Dido to Anna, "gather together the arms and garments which aeneas in his haste to be gone has left behind him, and lay these upon a vast funeral pile, which I beseech you to erect secretly in the inner court of the palace, under the open sky."

As she spoke, a deadly pallor overspread the face of Dido. But her sister Anna, suspecting nothing, made haste to obey the Queen. The great pile was quickly erected, with torches and f.a.gots of oak, and crowned with funeral boughs. On it were placed the weapons and raiment of aeneas, while the Queen offered sacrifices, and herbs cut by moonlight with brazen sickles.

Next morning, before daybreak, aeneas called upon his comrades to set sail. With his own sword he cut the hawsers, and his men, pus.h.i.+ng off, smote the sounding waves with their oars, and the wind filling their unfurled sails, they swept out into the open sea as the sun rose over the waters.

From the tower of her palace Queen Dido saw them depart. And lifting up her voice she laid a curse upon them, prophesying that for ages to come dire enmity should rage between the race of aeneas and the Carthaginian people.

Then, very pale, she entered the inner court and mounted the funeral pile. A little while she paused, musing and shedding her last tears.

Anon she spoke, and bade farewell to the light of the sun: "I have lived my life; I have finished the course ordained to me by Fate. I have raised a glorious city. I descend ill.u.s.trious to the shades below."

She paused, and her voice fell to a low wail as she added: "Happy, ah, too happy, my lot had the Trojan s.h.i.+ps never touched my sh.o.r.es!"

Then, unsheathing the sword, she plunged it into her bosom and fell down upon the pyre.

Her handmaidens, seeing her fall, rent the air with their cries. And Anna, rus.h.i.+ng in, raised her dying sister in her arms, striving in vain to stanch the flowing blood, and crying with tears: "Oh, sister, was it for this that you bade me raise the pyre? Ah, would that you had let me be your companion in death!"

But the last words of Dido, Queen of Carthage, had been spoken.

Far out at sea, aeneas saw a great smoke rising from Carthage, as it were from a funeral pyre. And a sore pang smote him, and bitterly he divined what had pa.s.sed. But he held upon his destined way, nor looked he back again, but turned his eyes towards the promised land of Latium.

aeNEAS IN HADES

BY V. C. TURNBULL

"The journey down to the abyss Is prosperous and light; The palace gates of gloomy Dis Stand open day and night; But upward to retrace the way, And pa.s.s into the light of day,-- There comes the stress of labor--this May task a hero's might."

VIRGIL.--_Conington's Translation._

aeneas, in the course of his wanderings, landed on the sh.o.r.es of c.u.mae in Italy. Here he sought out the Sibyl, the inspired prophetess who dwelt in a cave behind the temple of Apollo, and gave forth to inquirers the answers of the G.o.d. High destinies she promised aeneas, but not without many further trials.

aeneas, undismayed, besought the Sibyl to guide him on his way: "O Priestess, it has been told that here are the gates of the lower world. Open for me, I beg of you, that portal, for I long greatly to speak once more with my dear father. I bore him on my shoulders from flaming Troy, and in all my voyages he accompanied me, facing, though infirm, the terrors of sea and sky. Nay, more, it was at his bidding that I came a suppliant to thy temple. Have pity upon us both, O Sybil, and enable us to meet once more."

Then the Sibyl, in reply, warned aeneas that though many went down with ease into the Abode of the Dead, few--very few, and they the specially favored of the G.o.ds--returned therefrom. "But if," she went on, "you are determined to dare the desperate enterprise, seek out in this dark wood a tree that hides one branch all golden. This bough is sacred to Proserpine, Queen of the Lower World, and to her must you bear it as a gift. Without it no living being may enter the Lower World. Pluck it, and if the Fates have willed it so, it will yield at a touch, else no mortal force can wrest it from its parent stem."

So aeneas and Achates plunged into the primeval forest near which the Sibyl dwelt. They had not gone far when two doves alighted on the sward hard by. Then aeneas was glad, for he knew them to be the birds of his mother Venus, and he besought his mother that her messengers might guide him on his way. And the doves flitted on before them till they lighted at last on a lofty tree, amid the boughs of which aeneas discerned the gleam of gold. This was the Golden Bough, growing like mistletoe from the oak, and there was a tinkle in the air as the breeze rustled the golden foil. Joyfully aeneas broke it from the trunk, and bore it back to the dwelling of the Sibyl.

Then the priestess led the way back into the gloomy wood, halting before a cavern, vast and hideous with its yawning black mouth, from which exhaled so poisonous a breath that no bird could cross it unhurt. Here aeneas and the Sibyl offered sacrifices to the G.o.ds of the Lower World. At sunrise the ground began to rumble beneath their feet, and a baying of h.e.l.l-dogs rolled up from the chasm.

"Avaunt, ye profane!" cried the priestess, "and, aeneas, do thou draw thy sword and march boldly forward; now is the hour to try thy mettle."

So saying, she plunged into the dark cavern, and aeneas, following, entered the world of the dead.

In a desolate country on the outskirts of the spirit-world they saw the forms of Grief and vengeful Cares; here dwelt disconsolate Old Age, Fear, Famine, Death, and Toil. Murderous War was here, and frantic Discord, whose viperous locks are bound with b.l.o.o.d.y fillets.

All these they pa.s.sed, coming to the turbid flood Acheron, on which the ferryman Charon, a grisly, unkempt graybeard, with eyes of flame, plied to and fro.

On the banks of the river stood a great company of ghosts, matrons and men, boys and maidens, numerous as swallows flying south, or leaves before the autumn wind. They stood praying to be taken into the boat, and stretching their hands towards the farther sh.o.r.e; but the sullen boatman would take only a few, choosing whom he would. Then, in reply to his questions, the priestess told aeneas that the bodies of those whom the boatman refused had been left unburied upon earth, wherefore these ghosts were doomed to flutter for a hundred years along the sh.o.r.es of Acheron before Charon would consent to ferry them across.

By this time they had reached the landing-stage, and the priestess beckoned to Charon; he refusing at first to carry a mortal across that river till she showed him the Golden Bough. At the sight of this Charon came at once with his boat, pus.h.i.+ng out the ghosts that sat therein to make room for aeneas. Groaning beneath the weight of a mortal the boat was well-nigh swamped, but at length the priestess and the hero were safely landed on the farther sh.o.r.e.

But now at the gate stood Cerberus, the three-headed dog, making those realms resound with his barking. To him the priestess threw an opiate of honey-cakes, and he, s.n.a.t.c.hing at it with his three mouths, lay down to sleep, thus permitting them to pa.s.s.

Now to their ears came the wails of infants, ghosts of those who had been bereft of sweet life even at their mother's breast. Next came those who had been condemned to death unheard or falsely charged. Full justice they now received; Minos the judge metes out to each his proper sentence.

After these aeneas came upon a group of those unhappy ones who with their own hands had destroyed their lives. Ah, gladly now would they endure poverty and toil could they but revisit the kindly light of the sun!

Now aeneas entered a region named the Fields of Mourning, inhabited by the ghosts of those who had died for love. And among them, in a wood, aeneas saw, or deemed he saw, dim as the new moon in a cloudy sky, the form of Dido, still pale from her death-wound. Tears in his eyes, he addressed her sad ghost with loving words as of old: "So, as I feared, it was true, the message of those funeral fires. And was I, alas! the cause of your death? O Queen, believe that it was against my will that I left thy coasts! Unwilling, I swear, by the behest of the G.o.ds did I leave thee, even as now, by the same behest, I tread the land of darkness and despair. Ah, tarry but a little! 'Tis our last farewell."

[Ill.u.s.tration: aeNEAS IN HADES]

So he spoke, seeking to soothe the injured shade. But she, with averted eyes, stood still as a statue of stone. Then in silent scorn she fled to seek her first lord, Sichaeus, who answers sorrow with sorrow.

Thence to the farthest fields they pa.s.sed the haunts of heroes slain in battle; and here aeneas greeted many comrades of early days. But when the ghosts of Agamemnon's Greek army beheld the mighty hero, his arms gleaming through the shades, they quaked, and many fled as erstwhile before to their s.h.i.+ps, while others, trying to raise the war-cry, could utter only "the bat-like shrilling of the dead."

A pitiful shade, with marred visage and mangled body, approached them, and aeneas recognized the ghost of Deiphobus, son of Priam, and asked of his cruel fate; and Deiphobus poured forth the long tale of his wife's treachery, and how he had been foully slaughtered in his sleep.

Long had they thus conversed, but the Sibyl plucked aeneas by the robe and warned him: "Night falls apace; 'tis time to go. Thou hast come to the parting of the ways. Here lie Elysium and the fields of the blessed, and there, to the left, Tartarus and the tortures of the d.a.m.ned." And even now aeneas descried vast prisons inclosed with a triple wall, round which the river Phlegethon rolled its threefold floods of flame, while rocks whirled roaring down the stream. Over against the stream stood a ma.s.sive gateway, whose adamantine columns defied all force of men or G.o.ds, and above the gate rose a tower of iron. Here sat the Fury Tisiphone, watching all who entered. And from within the gate came groans and the whistling of scourges and the clanking of chains.

aeneas asked what meant this woful wailing, and the Sibyl replied: "None innocent may cross that threshold. There Rhadamanthus judges the dead, and avenging Tisiphone scourges the guilty. Within the gate rages the Hydra with fifty gaping mouths. Downward sinks the pit, twice as deep as the heavens are high. In it groan the t.i.tans, hurled down with thunderbolts, and the giants, Otus and Ephialtes, who strove to overturn the throne of Jupiter himself. There lies t.i.tyus, o'er nine roods outstretched, and eternally does a vulture tear his liver with her beak. Over some hangs a rock threatening ever to fall; before others a bounteous banquet is continually spread, but the hands that they stretch to take the food are evermore struck back by the Furies.

Some roll a huge stone, others are bound to the revolving wheel. Here lie they who heaped up riches for themselves, an unnumbered mult.i.tude; here also they who hated their brothers or lifted cruel hands against their parents. Take warning by their fate, and ask no further concerning their awful doom."

Thus warned, aeneas went forward in silence, and at the direction of the Sibyl he offered the Golden Bough at the gate.

Now came they at length to the regions of joy, the green retreats and happy groves of Elysium. An ampler ether and a purer light invest these fields, for the blessed have their own sun and stars. In jousts and races, in dance and song, they fleet the golden hours, a blessed company of bards and patriots, paladins and victors in the races.

Among them aeneas marked Ilus, a former king of Troy, and Darda.n.u.s, that city's founder. Their chariots were empty, their spears stood fixed in the ground, their horses fed at large throughout the plain, for the ruling purpose in life survives the grave.

There, in a sequestered dale, stood Anchises surveying the souls that were to revisit earth once more, among them his own offspring yet unborn. But when he saw aeneas moving to meet him, with outstretched arms and tearful eyes he cried: "O my son, my son, hast thou come to me indeed? Am I permitted to see thy face and hear thy well-known voice once more?" And aeneas answered, weeping also: "Give me thy hand, my father, and take me to thy breast." Thrice he strove to throw his arm round his father, thrice the phantom slipped from his embrace, thin as the fluttering breeze or like a dream of the night. Gazing around him he saw in a wooded glade numberless peoples and tribes, hovering above the brakes like bees in summer-time, and he inquired of his sire what these might be.