Foes | Page 7

of his body to and fro over the difficult lesson. "I never understood just what were the Erinnys, sir?"
"The Erinnys?" Strickland laid down the pen and turned in his chair. "I'll have to think a moment, to get it straight for you, Jamie.... The Erinnys are the Fates as avengers. They are the vengeance-demanding part of ourselves objectified, supernaturalized, and named. Of old, where injury was done, the Erinnys were at hand to pull the roof down upon the head of the injurer. Their office was to provide unerringly sword for sword, bitter cup for bitter cup. They never forgot, they always avenged, though sometimes they took years to do it. They esteemed themselves, and were esteemed, essential to the moral order. They are the dark and bitter extreme of justice, given power by the imagination.... Do you think that you know the chapter now?"
Jamie achieved his recitation, and then was set to mathematics. The tutor's quill drove on across the page. He looked up.
"Mr. Touris has come to Black Hill?"
Jamie and Alice worshiped interruptions.
"He has twenty carriers bringing fine things all the time--"
"Mother is going to take me when she goes to see Mrs. Alison, his sister--"
"He is going to spend money and make friends--"
"Mother says Mrs. Alison was most bonny when she was young, but England may have spoiled her--"
"The minister told the laird that Mr. Touris put fifty pounds in the plate--"
Strickland held up his hand, and the scholars, sighing, returned to work. Buzz, buzz! went the bees outside the window. The sun climbed high. Alexander shut his geometry and came through the break in the wall and across the span of green to the school-room.
"That's done, Mr. Strickland."
Strickland looked at the paper that his eldest pupil put before him. "Yes, that is correct. Do you want, this morning, to take up the reading?"
"I had as well, I suppose."
"If you go to Edinburgh--if you do as your father wishes and apply yourself to the law--you will need to read well and to speak well. You do not do badly, but not well enough. So, let's begin!" He put out his hand and drew from the bookshelf a volume bearing the title, The Treasury of Orators. "Try what you please."
Alexander took the book and moved to the unoccupied window. Here he half sat, half stood, the morning light flowing in upon him. He opened the volume and read, with a questioning inflection, the title beneath his eyes, "'The Cranes of Ibycus'?"
"Yes," assented Strickland. "That is a short, graphic thing."
Alexander read:
"Ibycus, who sang of love, material and divine, in Rhegium and in Samos, would wander forth in the world and make his lyre sound now by the sea and now in the mountain. Wheresoever he went he was clad in the favor of all who loved song. He became a wandering minstrel-poet. The shepherd loved him, and the fisher; the trader and the mechanic sighed when he sang; the soldier and the king felt him at their hearts. The old returned in their thoughts to youth, young men and maidens trembled in heavenly sound and light. You would think that all the world loved Ibycus.
"Corinth, the jeweled city, planned her chariot-races and her festival of song. The strong, the star-eyed young men, traveled to Corinth from mainland and from island, and those inner athletes and starry ones, the poets, traveled. Great feasting was to be in Corinth, and contests of strength and flights of song, and in the theater, representation of gods and men. Ibycus, the wandering poet, would go to Corinth, there perhaps to receive a crown.
"Ibycus, loved of all who love song, traveled alone, but not alone. Yet shepherds, or women with their pitchers at the spring, saw but a poet with a staff and a lyre. Now he was found upon the highroad, and now the country paths drew him, and the solemn woods where men most easily find God. And so he approached Corinth.
"The day was calm and bright, with a lofty, blue, and stainless sky. The heart of Ibycus grew warm, and there seemed a brighter light within the light cast by the sun. Flower and plant and tree and all living things seemed to him to be glistening and singing, and to have for him, as he for them, a loving friendship. And, looking up to the sky, he saw, drawn out stringwise, a flight of cranes, addressed to Egypt. And between his heart and them ran, like a rippling path that the sun sends across the sea, a stream of good-will and understanding. They seemed a part of himself, winged in the blue heaven, and aware of the part of him that trod earth, that was entering the grave and shadowy wood that neighbored Corinth.
"The cranes vanished from overhead, the sky arched