When the sound of the horses’ hoofs had died away in the distance, Sappho laid her head on her grandmother’s shoulder and wept uncontrollably.  Rhodopis remonstrated and blamed, but all in vain, she could not stop her tears.

CHAPTER XV.

On the morning after the trial of the bow, Cambyses was seized by such a violent attack of his old illness, that he was forced to keep his room for two days and nights, ill in mind and body; at times raging like a madman, at others weak and powerless as a little child.

On the third day he recovered consciousness and remembered the awful charge he had laid on Prexaspes, and that it was only too possible he might have executed it already.  At this thought he trembled, as he had never trembled in his life before.  He sent at once for the envoy’s eldest son, who was one of the royal cup-bearers.  The boy said his father had left Memphis, without taking leave of his family.  He then sent for Darius, Zopyrus and Gyges, knowing how tenderly they loved Bartja, and enquired after their friend.  On hearing from them that he was at Sais, he sent the three youths thither at once, charging them, if they met Prexaspes on the way, to send him back to Memphis without delay.  This haste and the king’s strange behavior were quite incomprehensible to the young Achaemenidae; nevertheless they set out on their journey with all speed, fearing that something must be wrong.

Cambyses, meanwhile, was miserably restless, inwardly cursed his habit of drinking and tasted no wine the whole of that clay.  Seeing his mother in the palace-gardens, he avoided her; he durst not meet her eye.

The next eight days passed without any sign of Prexaspes’ return; they seemed to the king like a year.  A hundred times he sent for the young cup-bearer and asked if his father had returned; a hundred times he received the same disappointing answer.

At sunset on the thirteenth day, Kassandane sent to beg a visit from him.  The king went at once, for now he longed to look on the face of his mother; he fancied it might give him back his lost sleep.

After he had greeted her with a tenderness so rare from him, that it astonished her, he asked for what reason she had desired his presence.  She answered, that Bartja’s wife had arrived at Memphis under singular circumstances and had said she wished to present a gift to Cambyses.  He gave Sappho an audience at once, and heard from her that Prexaspes had brought her husband an order to start for Arabia, and herself a summons to Memphis from the queen-mother.  At these words the king turned very pale, and his features were agitated with pain as he looked at his brother’s lovely young wife.  She felt that something unusual was passing in his mind, and such dreadful forebodings arose in her own, that she could only offer him the gift in silence and with trembling hands.

“My husband sends you this,” she said, pointing to the ingeniously-wrought box, which contained the wax likeness of Nitetis.  Rhodopis had advised her to take this to the king in Bartja’s name, as a propitiatory offering.