Читать книгу The Story of Greece: Told to Boys and Girls онлайн

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Then the king feared lest his old nurse should know him, and he turned his face from the hearth. But she, as she tended him, saw a scar on the spot where a boar had wounded him long years before, and she knew her master had come home.

Tears well-nigh choked her, yet she touched his chin lightly and said, ‘Yea, verily, thou art Odysseus, my dear child.’

But when she would have told the queen, Odysseus bade her be silent, until he had taken revenge on the princes who were feasting in his palace.

As she dismissed the stranger, Penelope told him that on the morrow the suitors held a feast, when they were to contend for her hand. ‘Him who shall most easily bend the bow of Odysseus I have promised to wed,’ she said. ‘Then will I go and forsake this house, this house of my wedlock, so fair and filled with all livelihood, which methinks I shall yet remember, aye, in a dream.’

Then Odysseus answered, ‘Wife revered of Odysseus, no longer delay this contest in thy halls; for lo, Odysseus will be here before these men, for all their handling of this polished bow, shall have strung it and shot the arrow to the mark.’