On this she came down from her
upper room, and while doing so she considered whether she should keep
at a distance from her husband and question him, or whether she
should at once go up to him and embrace him. When, however, she had
crossed the stone floor of the room, she sat down opposite Odysseus
by the fire, against the wall at right angles to that by which she
had entered, while Odysseus sat near one of the bearing-posts,
looking upon the ground, and waiting to see what his wife would say
to him when she saw him. For a long time she sat silent and as one
lost in amazement. At one moment she looked him full in the face, but
then again directly, she was misled by his shabby clothes and failed
to recognize him, till Telemakhos began to reproach her and
said:
"Mother - but you are so hard that
I cannot call you by such a name - why do you keep away from my
father in this way? Why do you not sit by his side and begin talking
to him and asking him questions? No other woman could bear to keep
away from her husband when he had come back to her after twenty years
of absence, and after having gone through so much; but your heart
always was as hard as a stone."
Penelope answered, "My son, I am
so lost in astonishment that I can find no words in which either to
ask questions or to answer them. I cannot even look him straight in
the face. Still, if he really is Odysseus come back to his own home
again, we shall get to understand one another better by and by, for
there are tokens [sêmata] with which we two are
alone acquainted, and which are hidden from all others."
Odysseus smiled at this, and said
to Telemakhos, "Let your mother put me to any proof she likes; she
will make up her mind about it presently. She rejects me for the
moment and believes me to be somebody else, because I am covered with
dirt and have such bad clothes on; let us, however, consider what we
had better do next. When one man has killed another in a
dêmos, even though he was not one who would leave many
friends to take up his quarrel, the man who has killed him must still
say good bye to his friends and flee the country; whereas we have
been killing the stay of a whole city, and all the picked youth of
Ithaca. I would have you consider this matter."
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