THE DRYAD
A Novel
BY JUSTIN HUNTLY McCARTHY
AUTHOR OF "THE LADY OF LOYALTY HOUSE"
"THE PROUD PRINCE" "MARJORIE" ETC.
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS
PUBLISHERS :: MCMV
Copyright, 1905, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published March, 1905.
ΕΙΣ ΤΗΝ ΦΙΛΗΝ ΚΑΛΛΙΣΤΗΝ
Most dear, most fair, these pages go
To you, who watched this story grow
Through days of sun and days of snow,
A legend of the Long Ago.
Where Wonder-Wood is all aglow
With godlike forms, and far below
The bland Athenian breezes blow,
The faint Athenian fountains flow.
Take up and read, and reading know
How much to you these pages owe
Since first we bandied to and fro
Sweet fancies, swift to come and go.
J. H. McC.
IX. II. MCMV.
CONTENTS
I. IN THE WONDER-WOOD
II. RAINOUART
III. ARGATHONA
IV. THE MYSTIC ROSE
V. THE SONG OF THE FOREST
VI. LIKE UNTO ADONIS
VII. LOVE IS ENOUGH
VIII. SIMON SPIES
IX. THE DUCHESS OF THEBES
X. SIMON BLOWS OUT HIS LANTERN
XI. THE CATALAN GRAND COMPANY
XII. THE WINDING OF THE HORN
XIII. THE KNIGHT OF ELEUSIS
XIV. THE TRIUMPH OF THEBES
XV. THE CHALLENGE OF RAINOUART
XVI. THE TOURNAMENT
XVII. THE ROSE OF THE WORLD
XVIII. AN APPLE OF GOLD
XIX. SIMON THE STALWART
XX. THE PROMISE OF RAINOUART
XXI. THE WINE OF ESCLARAMONDE
XXII. REMEMBER THE GREENWOOD
XXIII. SIMON'S CHARGE
XXIV. THE HONOR OF THE ROCK
XXV. CEPHISSUS
XXVI. THE ANCHORITE
XXVII. THE DREAM OF ARGATHONA
XXVIII. LOVER AND LASS
XXIX. WHAT SIMON FOUND IN THE FOREST
XXX. RENUNCIATION
THE DRYAD
I
IN THE WONDER-WOOD
Simon of Rouen--Simon, the soldier of fortune--trampled the grass of
the Eleusinian wood with a heart as light as his wallet. His garments
were wrecks of former splendor, degraded now by the tramping of
high-road by day and the sleeping beneath hedge by night; but Simon
carried himself as if he bobbed on the high tide of prosperity. A great
sword clung to his thigh; his right hand brandished a massive oaken
cudgel; a rusty iron lantern hung from his girdle, incongruous enough.
He whistled as he went a tripping tune, and now and then he shouted
some words to it:
"When I was no more than a span,
Honey and gingerbread pleased me highly."
That was the beginning of it, and, for much of the journey, was the
middle of it and the end of it as well, for it was Simon's own song,
and Simon's first adventure in the lyrical, and Simon was but a child
at rhyming. He had a grudge against the world, and he wanted to sing
his grievance the better to blow it abroad, but he would have given any
man his fist in the face who dared to call him poetical.
It was naught to him that the ground he covered was sown with splendid
memories. Truly he knew nothing about them, but he would have cared as
little for the condition of his journey had he been wiser. To the mind
fanciful those memories might seem as many as the leaves that year by
year had greened and withered and fattened the forest soil through long
generations of men. Greek gods, Greek kings, Greek heroes, beautiful
Greek women, had been the children of that magic land. But Simon, the
soldier of fortune, whistling as he fared, cared no jot for his lack
of knowledge. Though he had left behind him the land of Agamemnon, and
was setting his face steadily towards the city of Theseus, for him
Peloponnesus was the place where the French noble dwelt who called
himself Duke of Corinth, against whom he nursed his grudge; for him
the capital of Attica was the city where the French noble reigned who
called himself Duke of Athens, from whom he hoped to gain favor. For
Simon, the soldier of fortune, flourished in the dusk of the thirteenth
and the dawn of the fourteenth centuries of the world's age since the
birth of the world's Saviour; and Simon, the soldier of fortune, took
it for granted contentedly that from all time titled French adventurers
had held by the hard hand the pleasant land of Greece.
The time of the year was May-time; the time of the day was hard on to
sunset. Simon had tramped sturdily since morning and had not broken his
fast since noon--his stomach was crying cupboard. There were onions in
his wallet, there was nothing in his gourd; he must hope for a spring
in the forest to moisten his provender--little cheer. This was why he
looked about him so closely as he followed the dubious way between the
trees, for his thoughts paid no reverence to the evening glories of the
ancient wood.
The young knight whom he had passed on the road an hour or two before
saw the forest with other eyes, being a poet and a reader of poets.
When Simon, tramping the white highway, had come up with him he was
reclining beside his tethered horse in the shade of the trees on
the edge of the little wood, reading in a little book. Simon first
questioned the young knight if there might be a short cut for him if
he quitted the highway and went through the wood. The young knight,
laying down his book, answered him that there very well might be such
a short cut. But he added that he could not tell him for sure, as he
was himself but newly come to Greece. Simon thanked him and decided to
try for the short cut. But he saw that the book which the knight held
had little painted pictures in it. Simon, ever curious, asked him what
he read. The youth answered him civilly that he read what a rhymer
had written of a dreamer who became a lover because of his great love
for the mystic rose. Whereat Simon grunted his disgust that any one
should be fool enough to waste his life in reading of other folk's
love-affairs when he might be making love for himself briskly.
"'Tis all one," he averred, "with thinking of tables spread with
dainties while the hunger-belt nips your middle."
He had spoken feelingly, for he fasted, and, fasting, fretted. But the
young knight carried no provant to temper Simon's edge of appetite,
and the young knight smiled at Simon's view of life, and returned to
his reading of _Good-Greeting and Sweet-Looking_ and the kiss given to
the mystic rose-bud. Whereat Simon rattled angrily the lantern that
hung at his girdle and took to his journey again, climbing up the slope
into the fringe of the forest, and telling himself as he did so that
no man deserved to be called honest who squandered his manhood over
love-tales. And so, hot with his scorn, Simon strode into the coolness
and the twilight of the wood. If Simon had been travelling from Athens
instead of travelling towards Athens he might not have chosen to
journey through the wood, at least when night was near. The Athenians
believed the wood to be haunted. They knew not why they believed this;
they had the tale from their mothers, who had it from their mothers
before them; and so the Athenians skirted the forest by day and shunned
it by night. The French masters of Attica, taking everything they could
take from their Athenian subjects, took their superstitions as well
and gave the wood a wide berth. Simon did not know that the forest
was haunted; he did think that it made a short cut to go through its
avenues instead of following the main road that wound in a great loop
below. Others before him that day, ignorant as he, had done as he
did--gentles of an ancient guild, devotees of St. Nicholas. If Simon
had known of his predecessors it would not have changed his purpose; he
still would have chosen to travel by the woodland way.
If Simon had been a poet, like his disdained acquaintance of the
road-side, he would have been delighted with the May-day graces of the
place--with the new-green livery of the ancient trees; with the deep
glades and dim aisles, down which the dying sunlight lingered; with
the fantastic shapes that bole and bough put on under the enchantment
of the waning day; with all the mystery and piety of the wood. But
to Simon a wood, in the main, was a place where enemies love to lurk
in ambush, and though Greece was for the hour at peace, custom made
Simon look about him as warily as if he walked in time of war. Custom,
to his surprise though no whit to his alarm, was justified of her
pains. Something glittered in that clump of bushes; something stirred
behind that mighty tree. Simon swung his staff to his right hand, and
those who waited, guessing themselves detected, came leaping from
concealment, left and right, and faced him--two men with drawn swords,
ruffians of the kind that follow camps, soldiers in name, robbers in
fact and act, never fighters unless the odds were hot on their party.
Simon knew the kind well enough and despised them highly, not because
they were plunderers, but because they were skulkers, shufflers,
fluffers, mean moths in a rich coat. The jack-rascals were clad in
habits fitted to their forest play of trap and catch--dull greens and
sullen tawnies, good for lurking in, easily commingled, for the unwary,
with the green and tawny of a wood. The rogues would have rushed
Simon, but he stood so steady and made so mighty a mill-wheel with his
monstrous cudgel that they were daunted, and bayed at him.
"Stand and deliver," cried one. "Deliver and stand," the other varied.
Simon eyed them composedly, plainly unperturbed. He felt that he was
master of the match, and made merry in the sense of his strength.
"Good-evening, crimps." Thus he greeted them cheerfully. "Why should I
stand and what should I deliver?"
"The contents of thy wallet, fat rascal," made answer the man who
seemed to hold a kind of chieftainship in the little league of two.
Simon grounded his cudgel.
"Fellow," he said, "I am not a rascal, neither am I fat. What you call
fat is brawn, solid brawn. For the other matter, I am as poor as the
ancient patriarch."
"We will not take thy word for that," the second robber grumbled, and
the brace of knaves moved a little ways nearer to their quarry. Simon
guessed that their game was to get at him, one on each side, and to
counter their purpose the hunted became the hunter. He moved up on
them whirling his baton, so valiant a piece of anger that the robbers
yielded ground and their hearts were as water. He thundered at them as
he moved:
"Also, I am a little less strong than Samson, the gate-snatcher, and
will tackle twenty such as you."
One faintheart called to the other faintheart:
"I like not the looks of this Christopher," and the other faintheart,
at one with his comrade, lowered his blade and cried at Simon, to
placate him:
"If you be indeed penniless, there is no use in molesting you."
Simon's staff lay at ease again, balanced in his big fist. He was
good-humored with the rogues, being tickled at the thought of their
possible plunder--the brace of onions in his bag.
"Well reasoned, lads," he laughed. "No logical doctor in Byzantium
could have come to a better conclusion. Are you very hot to pick
pockets?"
He who seemed the leader of the pair seemed surprised at the simplicity
of the question.
"Every honest man is anxious to push his trade," he affirmed,
sagaciously.
Simon grinned.
"Is this forest your playground?" he pursued.
The robber shook his head.
"No, no," he said; "we come from Corinth, where we have plied our craft
blithely this many a day. Among the light-fingered of that bright city
I am Captain Fox, at your service," and the lean, leather-faced rascal
made Simon a bow; "and this my comrade goes as Captain Gander," and he
pointed to the fat rogue, his companion, who had seated himself on a
tree-trunk to await the result of the negotiations.
Simon nodded, and queried:
"Where are you going, good Captain Fox and good Captain Gander?"
"We make for Athens," Captain Fox replied. "There are great doings
in Athens--jousts, feasts, dances, banquets, pageants. We should do
famously in Athens."
The other ruffian took up the tale.
"Every knight's purse will leak gold pieces, and the lovely ladies will
rain pearls from their petticoats. 'Twill be but stooping to pick them
up."
Simon leered at the pair maliciously, and his misanthropy hatched a
plan.
"Though you take no toll of me, yet the devil is your friend to-night,
for yonder on the highway at my heels comes, by-and-by, a young
gentleman riding all alone, and one that is sure to carry gold in poke."
Captain Gander rubbed his plump hands.
"St. Nicholas be praised for sending us game," he chuckled.
Simon, in malice, dashed the rascals' hopes with a grin.
"It may be," he suggested, "that it will prove too proud a quarry for
two such gibbet-kites as you to pike at. The featherhead in the fine
clothes may be a fool, but I do not think such a brace of barn-filchers
would show very fearsome even in a fool's eyes."
He that called himself Captain Fox snarled with lips that were as
leathern and teeth that were as yellow as his jerkin.
"Do not vex your liver for that," he answered. "We have comrades
otherwhere in the wood that we will call to our comfort: Captain
Rat and Captain Badger, Captain Bat and Captain Chanticleer, no
less--valiant captains all."
Simon laughed heartily as the fantastic catalogue swelled.
"Here is an army out of Noah's ark," he applauded, "with as many
generals to it as ever followed Alexander. Ye lack only the leader and
the led. Well, go your ways. I give you Golden Jacket for a guerdon."
Again Captain Gander chuckled, but Captain Fox looked at Simon with
some show of suspicion.
"Why do you tell us this?" he asked.
Simon answered him in the honesty of his malevolence.
"To help you to the gallows and him to his hurt, for he is a
book-reading noodle. Go your ways, I am tired of you," and he pointed
with his staff in the direction in which he knew the highway ran,
though he could see no sign of it through the clustering trees. "You
cannot miss him, for I have seen no other rider this eve, and he
shines like a star, for his coat is of cloth of gold and he has jewels
in his cap."
The rogues licked their lips. Captain Fox saw himself already in the
coat of cloth of gold. Captain Gander, in imagination, pocketed some of
those jewels.
"We thank you," Fox cried; and--
"Good-night," cried his fellow. And the pair made off at a pace between
a walk and a trot in the direction indicated. Simon looked after them
till they disappeared in the deepening dusk.
"I misdoubt me much," he meditated, "if reading of romances of roses
will help that lad to tackle these grab-alls." Then he dismissed the
matter from his mind and resumed his journey.
A little way farther he came upon a quiet glade which seemed very
reposeful in the dying light, and here, in default of water, he decided
to rest and munch his onions dryly. He sprawled at his ease on the
soft grass and bit thoughtfully at his vegetable, pricking his wits
for verses. This ballad was to be his biography, but so far it had not
travelled beyond the nursery. The sharpness of his root stimulated
fancy:
When I was no more than a span,
Honey and gingerbread pleased me highly;
When I came to the height of a man,
Women and vintages used me vilely.
This quick flow of inspiration fascinated him. The rhymes were as true
as they were beautiful. He must needs try again while the fit was on
him:
When I went to lovemonger school,
Poppets and fopperies killed my credit;
All my sweethearts thought me a fool
While I had pence; but when poor they said it.
He was hugely amused at this fruition. A man might read verses and
yet prove no fool, if the verses were of such stuff as this ballad he
fashioned. Here was no nonsense about a rose, but a plain tale of a
brave man's life, bravely told, meat for heroes. Thinking it over, he
felt that it had gone far enough. It said with a noble simplicity all
that he wanted to say; there lay his life by and large. Love of women,
love of wine; and for result, your penniless misanthrope yawning in a
forest. For Simon was yawning noisily. The unwonted intellectual effort
had overmastered his activity; he ought to be up and doing, but sloth
pawed at his eyelids and the dusk was all a-humming with lullabies.
"Well, thanks be," he murmured, as he chewed on the last bite of his
onion, "there is no woman-thing in this wood to worry me if I choose to
slumber."
Even as he spoke he closed his eyes, and, as it seemed to him, had
scarcely closed them when he opened them again, suddenly conscious that
a woman was standing before him and staring at him.
II
RAINOUART
The studious young knight lay for some little while in the pleasing
shadow where Simon had left him, busy with his book. In the enchantment
of its pages he had soon forgotten Simon and his lantern and his angry
face. In that warm May evening it was very agreeable to lie stretched
at his ease there in the green shade and to read the wonderful story of
the _Romance of the Rose_. The little volume was very neatly written
on vellum in a clear, clerkly hand, and a hand that was more than
clerkly had enriched it with many agreeable pictures in which wonderful
attenuated youths and slender maidens with yellow hair, all in garments
of vivid green and blue and red and yellow, wandered over enamelled
fields that were studded with daisies, and in pleasances of fantastic
trees. The book was not new to Europe, but it was always new to the
youth. He had brought it with him from the court of Philip the Fair,
who had given it to the young knight on the occasion of his departure
from Greece. Now because Philip the Fair, a shrewd discerner of
humanity, knew his man, his gift contained only that early part, which
was written by William of Lorris, and which exalted love and ladies,
and not that later part, from the hand of John of Meung, which treated
ladies with scant ceremony and would have spelled love after another
fashion. For the youth who lay in the shadow and read the _Romance of
the Rose_ was, in the first place, a youth of a high mind and gentle
heart, whose spirit swam in the clearest ether of chivalry; and, in the
second place, he was son and heir of the reigning Duke of Athens, Duke
Baldwin of the Rock.
In all the stormy stories of the conquest of Greece by the Frankish
princes, few histories were more stormy or more splendid than those
of the Princes of the Rock and of their connection with the city of
the Violet Crown. For long enough the Princes of the Rock had ruled in
Athens in the direct line, but in the year 1308 the torch was blown out
by the death of Guy II., who died childless, and the title swerved off
to a cousin of the dead duke, Count Baldwin of the Rock, who at that
time was living a brisk, piratical, and filibustering life in the East,
much to the discomfort of those with whom his turbulent, truculent
nature brought him at loggerheads. Baldwin was a whole-hearted soldier
of fortune who loved the bustle of battle, the sacking of cities, the
filling of his pockets with other people's money, and the cheering of
his occasional solitude with other people's wives. Baldwin had been
married himself years before in France to the Lady Isabeau of Hainault.
She had loved him much, having been deceived, as sweet women sometimes
will be deceived, into the belief that the manners of a savage were
truly the manners of a man. He had loved her a little just because her
pale graces were new to him, and of her and her pale graces he soon
heartily wearied. It was not Count Baldwin's way to trouble himself
long about anything that wearied him, and he flung himself headlong
into a life of fierce adventure in the scrimmage-ground of the East,
leaving his lady, who by that time was not broken-hearted to lose him,
in France, with his infant son to take care of.
It was not unnatural that Isabeau of Hainault, having known what it
meant to be companion for a season to Duke Baldwin, was honestly and
honorably determined to bring up her son to be as unlike his father
as, God willing, might be accomplished. Melancholy, heart-sick Isabeau
worked out her purpose well. For all her pale grace and fragile person,
the Lady Isabeau of Hainault was a strong woman with strong thoughts.
She recognized very frankly and very fully from the first how she had
been deceived in Count Baldwin, and she made it her whole purpose and
endeavor that no other woman should be so deceived by Count Baldwin's
son. She had a kind of clear seeing that many such women have, and as
she rocked the cradle of the sleeping boy she believed that his days
and his ways might prove beautiful. Over the child she prayed one
strange prayer morning and night--"I pray that you may never love till
you find the loveliest, nor woo till you find the worthiest," and
because she knew in her soul that the child would be strong of limb,
and because she loved all the old tales of chivalry, she named the
child Rainouart, after the noble youth with the giant's strength in the
ancient tale of Aliscans.
As the new Rainouart grew from infancy to boyhood, day by day he
redeemed his mother's prayers and fulfilled his mother's wishes. He
showed from the first an extraordinary strength of body. His physical
frame had in it nothing of the bull-bulk of Count Baldwin, but inside
his slender form and smooth skin he seemed to be compact with steel.
The Lady Isabeau was too brave a lady to forget that a man's first
business is to be a man, wherefore the young prince was well trained
in arms and skilled in all bodily exercises. As he grew into years
and proficiency in martial arts, the contrast between his slender
juvenility and his extraordinary vigor and power grew more remarkable.
It was curious to find this amazing heritance of the paternal strength
so intimately allied with, and subject to, the spirituality of his
mother. Rainouart was never quarrelsome, and could scarcely be provoked
into a brawl save by some deed of injustice or dishonor; but if ever
he were forced to fisticuffs it always went hard with his adversaries,
though the odds were heavy against him, as they always were in such
cases. Youths of his own age, but youths of greater breadth of body
and show of muscle, taken unawares by his appearance, would often
challenge him to feats of strength, confident of easy victory, only to
be amazed and discomfited by the gentle serenity with which he overcame
their sturdiest efforts.
The boy's mind was not neglected at the charge of his body. The tastes
of the Lady Isabeau were lettered for an age which did not overprize
letters, and she saw to it that her son had a breeding more scholarly
than would have pleased the mind of Count Baldwin, who lustily despised
and damned all clerks and cared for nothing in manhood but big-boned
fighting-engines. The boy was early trained to read and write, to
taste some tincture of Latinity, and to find his inspiration and his
ideal in the chivalrous epics of France and Britain. When he came to
young manhood and entered the service of the King of France, he was
soon recognized as one of the most promising knights of the king's
following, and the friendship of many men was given to him and the
friendship of many women offered to him. The friendship of the men he
took amiably and modestly, though no man was his superior of all the
king's men in strength or skill. The friendship of the women he let go
by him, also very modestly but always with decision. There were many
that longed to knock at the door of his heart and enter in, and there
were some that showed their longing, most notably of all the beautiful
Esclaramonde of Bayonne, whom most men worshipped for her dark,
imperious loveliness, and whom all the women, her rivals, hated for a
witch, and upbraided beneath their breaths for her skill in philtres.
But Esclaramonde, who had won many hearts, and was said to have shown
herself generous in reward for her victories, gained no greater favor
in Rainouart's eyes than any other lady of the many dainty ladies
in the court of Philip the Fair. It would seem as if the prayer his
mother had prayed over his cradle had acted on his nature like a
charm. Consciously or unconsciously, those words were the governance
of his life--"Never love till you find the loveliest, nor woo till you
find the worthiest." Truly the Lady Isabeau so loved her son that she
thought no woman born of woman worthy to be his wife, and truly she was
pleased to believe that in this, as in all other thoughts, Rainouart
was of her mind. Moreover, the Lady Isabeau was, as became her rank,
familiar with the family histories of the great houses of which the
fine court ladies were the fairest flowers, and what she chose to tell
or suggest to her son had its service in steeling his spirit against
temptations. Anyway, Rainouart served all the fine court ladies with
the high-bred homage of an equal and even courtesy, but no pretty face
out of all those pretty faces had ever blotted the sun from his mind's
firmament, and no white hand of all those white hands had ever held
his spirit its prisoner. Esclaramonde of Bayonne, in chagrin, it was
whispered, married the ancient, doting Lord of Nemours, who had gained
a duchy in Greece, where he reigned as Duke of Thebes, and whither he
carried his passionate, magical, dangerous lady. Rainouart paid no
heed to her passing; he knew only three services in life--his service
to God, his service to his king, and his service to his mother. And
from two of these services he was, to his sorrow, soon to be set free.
A little while before destiny called upon him to quit the service of
Philip the Fair destiny denied him the present service of his mother.
The Lady Isabeau passed away from a world of which, had it not been for
her son, her pale and gracious presence had long been weary. When the
time came to leave him, the last words she said to him were:
"It is good to be brave, it is better to be good; strive to be both,"
and so she passed away and left him very lonely.
The young Rainouart deeply mourned his mother's memory, for she had
ever been his ideal of gentle womanhood, and he made it a mighty
resolve in all his life so to act as if she were still with him and her
approbation still to be won. Losing thus his best friend, he would have
been well content to remain in the service of the adventurous French
king, but the death of Guy II. changed his fortune. When the Duchy
of Athens came to Count Baldwin, and that jovial freebooter hurried
hot-foot to Greece and found himself in unquestioned possession of
his duchy, he remembered, belated, that he was a family man. His wife
was dead, indeed, but his son lived, and a son was an advantageous
possession for the holder of a great title and the ruler of a great
state. So messengers were sent speeding across seas to the court of
King Philip the Fair, summoning the young man by his filial allegiance
to Athens and to the father whom he had never seen. It is by no means
overlikely that Rainouart would have thriven at the court of Philip
the Fair. For though that astute and unscrupulous monarch had a high
regard for the strength, the courage, and the scholarship of the
young knight, Rainouart had other qualities which Philip disliked
exceedingly, chiefly, indeed, the candor of his mind and the frankness
of his speech. He would never consent to condone King Philip's savage
treatment of Pope Boniface VII., which had ended, as it seemed, in the
pontiff's death at the hands of Philip's men. He held his peace about
it, as was meet in the servant of a king, but once when Philip plied
him for his opinion, and would take no denial, Rainouart said what he
thought, simply and straightly, and the king never plied him for his
opinion again, deciding that he was better as a king's fighter than
as a king's councillor. Yet he liked the lad for his comeliness, and
Rainouart liked the king as his lord. So the young man regretfully said
farewell to the king, his master, and his master gave him the beautiful
painted manuscript of William of Lorris's romance as a farewell gift,
and the young man journeyed over-seas to his father's duchy.
Chroniclers of the age do not seek to deny, though they strive to
attenuate, the fact that the meeting of father and son was not wholly
felicitous. The young soldier who read poetry on all days and even
wrote poetry on some days, and who venerated the memory of a fair
and unhappy lady, found his inherited delicacy something offended
by the boisterous joviality of Baldwin, the huge eater and drinker,
the furious fighter, the promiscuous wooer, quarrelsome when sober,
quadruply quarrelsome in his cups. Duke Baldwin, for his part, thought
his son's native delicacy of taste effeminate, sneered patently at
his sobriety, ramped like a madman at his passion for books, and was
flagrantly disgusted by the indifference with which a son of his blood
viewed the genial and yielding lemans of the paternal court. But if the
young man failed to satisfy his father's wishes in all things, if he
failed to explain his tastes for reading and luting, at least he proved
satisfactory in other matters. His physical strength was an abiding
joy. When Duke Baldwin grasped his son's hand in greeting he strove to
crush it to pulp between his merciless fingers, but young Rainouart
gave him back grip for grip and squeeze for squeeze till the blood
came from the finger-nails of both, and Duke Baldwin was glad in two
fashions to unclinch that clasp.
Thereafter it something consoled Duke Baldwin to reflect that if the
lad from Paris had a womanish weakness for books and music, at least
he could ride as straight and wield lance and sword and axe as well as
any youthful paladin of Greece. And if the youth disdained the snares
spread for him by the amorous damsels of Athens, he soon made himself
friends with the gallantest of the young swaggerers, who learned to
love him more for his sinews of steel than for his heirship to the
duchy. Duke Baldwin was as volubly proud of his son's skill in arms as
he was bitterly ashamed of his skill in arts, and he would have been
willing enough in his rough-and-tumble way to let his pride of the one
blot out his contempt of the other. But the son would have found it
hard in any case to forget Duke Baldwin's neglect of his mother, and
he saw nothing to his credit to commend in the man whom he knew to be
his father. So it came about that the duke and his son did not see
very much of each other, and that while the duke was holding prolonged
revels with rollicking swashbucklers and frolicsome, complaisant
ladies, the young prince mostly chose to ride abroad, a solitary
explorer of the lovely Attic land, dreaming his dreams. He knew little
more than honest Simon or than any other French adventurer, gentle or
simple, then in Greece, of the ancient days and the ancient fame. When
his horse carried him abroad to Colonos or Marathon, or, as it had
carried him this day, to the farthermost edge of the Eleusinian wood,
his memory was neither pleased nor troubled by thoughts of Œdipus or
Miltiades or the rites of Demeter. All he asked when he took the road
was to pass through pleasant champaigns and presently to dismount and
lie at ease in shady places and read unceasing in the _Romance of the
Rose_, and wonder unceasing if ever Good-Greeting would take him by
the hand and lead him through the thicket to the place where the Holy
Rose-bud awaited him. For Rainouart dreamed day and night of the rose
that he had never found. He had sailed across the seas to Athens with
a whole and lonely heart. Whole and lonely his heart had remained at
the court of the Duke of Athens, though there, too, as at the court of
Philip the Fair, beautiful women swarmed like butterflies, spreading
out their colored wings in the ceaseless sunlight, and ever ready to
smile their brightest when the young prince came a-nigh. But Rainouart
paid them no heed. He was courteous to them because they were women; he
disliked them because they were light women; he dreamed of a star. Not
yet had he loved the loveliest or wooed the worthiest.
III
ARGATHONA
Simon sat up and rubbed his eyes while he stared back at the damsel.
At first he thought that he must unawares have slipped into sleep
and that he was still dreaming. Primarily he had heard no sound of
footsteps through the wood; further, the girl who faced him was
radiantly unlike any woman he had ever seen--and Simon in his time
had seen many women. To begin with, she was taller than is the wont
of womanhood, seeming tall even to him, who carried four inches over
six feet. This was the first thought in Simon's drowsy mind, surprise
at the stranger's height; the next, as his brain escaped from the
nets and snares of sleep, was conviction that the stranger's face was
fairer than any woman's face he had ever seen awake or dreaming. It
was beautiful with an unfamiliar type of beauty, though he remembered
dimly some ancient statues once seen and little heeded in the garden
of a house of pleasure in Byzantium whose features were like the
features of this woman. Her head was nobly set upon her neck; her
yellow hair was gathered into a knot above the nape; her eyes shone
with the most wonderful, changeful blue--they were like the sea, they
were like the sky, they were like the waters of forest fountains, the
floods of mountain streams. Her comely, upright body was clothed in a
kind of smock of white stuff girdled about her middle with a golden
girdle of ancient handicraft; her arms were bare from the shoulder;
her legs were bare from the knees; her feet were shod with sandals of
leather. From the smoothness of her cheeks, from the soft color of
her lips, from the slimness of her limbs, from the firm swell of her
breasts beneath the fine garment, Simon would have guessed her age to
be eighteen or thereabouts. Yet she seemed at once child, girl, and
woman, with something boyish, too, in the firmness of her forms, in
her balanced carriage, supple as an athlete's, in her air of alert
repose. Never had he seen anything so vividly young; the very spirit
of youth and joyousness seemed to shine in her glance, to hover on her
lips, to quiver about her body as summer air quivers with the heat. Her
naked arms, her naked legs were neither tanned by the sun nor stained
with forest-travel; on the strong fingers of her fine hands the nails
were clear-pink as sea-shells; through the candor of her skin he could
see the blue veins wander. She held a bough of myrtle in her right
hand, and played with it as she gazed at the man on the grass, and a
childlike mirth danced in her kind, wise eyes. Her sweet mouth smiled
at his awakening senses, and then she spoke--and here was a marvel!
He knew what she said as well as if she were his countrywoman, and
yet--it was odd--and yet she did not seem to speak as folk spoke any
French that he had ever heard from salt Normandy to the Spanish hills.
"Good-evening, traveller," the girl said, and at the sound of her
salutation Simon knew that he was not dreaming but wide awake, and he
scrambled clumsily to his feet.
"Saints and angels!" he ejaculated, crossing himself.
The girl laughed, and her laughter was as pleasant as the tinkling of
sheep-bells in a meadow.
"Do not be fearful, friend," she said, in that same flowing,
unfamiliar, appreciable speech; "I will do you no harm."
Hearing this astonishing promise, Simon was quite himself again. That a
lass should pledge her word not to hurt him was hugely amusing.
"No, I should guess not, prettykin," he guffawed. "But what does a fair
maid in this forest?"
The girl's forehead wrinkled a little in displeasure as the bray of his
laughter jarred the serenity of the cloistered trees.
"I live in the forest," she answered.
Simon stared anew at her white arms, her white legs, her unscorched
face and unstained raiment.
"I live here all alone, too, save for the birds and the beasts and the
trees and the flowers. The foolish Athenians are so fearful of the
forest that they never come near its kindly shelter. You are not an
Athenian?"
Simon shook his head stoutly.
"No, I thank Heaven," he said; "I am a Frenchman from Rouen." He spoke
with a proper pride.
"I thought you could not be," the girl said, gravely, "when I saw you
lying so at your ease on the grass and heard you snoring. No Athenian
would do that."
Simon reddened a little. Frenchman of Rouen though he was, he had this
in common with lesser men: he resented the imputation of snoring.
"Do no Athenians snore?" he questioned, grumpily. The girl laughed
again.
"Nay," she said, demurely, "I meant that no Athenian would lie here in
the twilight. I have seen no one sleeping in these shades for ages,
though I have lived in the forest all my life."
"No great slice of time, I take it," Simon suggested, gallantly.
His slow mind was much puzzled by the maid, but his quick flesh was
enamoured and he was much the body-servant. The girl looked at him
thoughtfully.
"Longer than you think. I cannot tell how often I have seen spring
swell into summer, mellow into autumn, and descend into winter, for the
years in their seasons are alike to me; but, I suppose, more than a
thousand times."
Simon stared agape.
"More than a thousand times? Pray, how old may you be, young woman?"
"I cannot tell," the girl answered, thoughtfully. "I do not think of
time. Why should I, being come to my full growth? Time will change me
no more. I shall be as I am for always."
Simon frowned in dubiety.
"What is your name, young woman, and where do you belong?"
"My name is Argathona. I belong to the forest. I am a dryad."
Simon's education had been something neglected, and he had no idea what
a dryad might be. But he was always superstitious, and now suddenly
suspicious.
"Are you a fairy?" he gasped, fearfully.
Argathona shook her head, and waved the myrtle-bough as if to dissipate
his fears.
"I have naught to do with the fairies, nor they with me. I am the
daughter of a dryad, but my father was a mortal man."
"Like me," Simon suggested. Simon plumed himself on his good looks, but
the dryad disagreed.
"I do not think he can have been like you, for my mother said he was
beautiful."
Simplicity's frank arrow quivered in vanity's ample target. Simon
swallowed an oath.
"Oh, oh," he thought, "this is some rustic minx who is making game of
me. Well, I'll humor her whimsy; perhaps we may end with a kiss." He
went on aloud, "When were you born, bonnie lassie?"
"Long ago," the girl answered, gravely, "when the old gods still dwelt
in Hellas."
Simon's bulk was as full of stifled laughter as a pillow is full of
feathers.
"Perhaps you remember the old gods," he hinted, with a grin. The girl's
calm eyes widened with wonder at his folly.
"Assuredly I do. How could I forget my earliest friends? They loved me
so dearly that though I was the child of a mortal they gave me the gift
of immortal youth."
Simon gave a long whistle.
"So you are immortal?"
"My mother was a true dryad," Argathona answered, "born in a tree,
living the tree's life, and dying when the tree died. But she loved an
Athenian and bore me, and as there was no tree in all the woodland that
I could call my own, Zeus gave me this gift to live forever so long as
a tree should grow in Greece."
"And your parents?" Simon inquired, politely. He was so taken with the
girl that he would not quarrel with her crazy tale.
"My father died long ages ago," Argathona said, "when I was a baby. He
died in fight upon the plain of Troy, died by the hand of Paris, the
lover of Helena. Hermes brought the news to my mother here in the wood,
and my mother wept sorely and sighed in vain to die. This was long ago,
long before the time came for the gods to go."
She sighed as she spoke, as one who lingers with tender, pathetic
memories. Simon continued his humoring, though the girl was flagrantly
insane.
"When was that, pray you?"
"I cannot truly tell you. I was but a child, and had seen no more than
some few hundred summers. They were banished, all the beautiful gods,
into the twilight, into the Hollow Land. They came to say us farewell,
the great gods, the Cloud-Compeller and his queen, and the Lord of the
Sun and the Lady of the Moon and sea-born Aphrodite and Virgin Athena
and all the Olympians with them. They rode away in a noble company, and
I stood with my mother under the shade of my mother's oak and watched
them as they went."
This was more than Simon could patiently stomach, and he let some
laughter slip.
"Of course you expect me to believe all this?" he chuckled,
irreverently. The dryad answered him tranquilly.
"Why should I deceive you, mortal? My mother could not leave her oak,
so the gods would have taken me to dwell in the Twilight Land, but I
would not leave my mother, and we lost the adorable gods and lingered
here in the greenwood. Here my mother taught me all the woodland arts,
woodcraft, and glamour, and the speech of the beasts and the meaning of
what the birds sing and the trees whisper, and the properties of the
plants for heal and for hurt, and how to weave and spin and be familiar
with the stars--and all the things that it is needful for a dryad to
know. But soon my mother vanished as a mist of the morning, for the oak
grew old and withered, and its time had come and hers. I have lived
here all alone ever since."
"All alone!" Simon echoed, sceptically, and "All alone!" the white
child repeated simply. There was no sound of sadness in her voice, no
shadow of sadness in her eyes. She spoke of strange things as naturally
as Simon would have talked of his breakfast or his boots or any other
workaday matter. Cunning leered in Simon's eyes, cunning lurked in
Simon's voice as he chuckled his next question:
"No mortal lover?"
Argathona answered him with a grave simplicity that took the sting out
of his sneer.
"I have never left this greenwood; I have never longed to leave it.
What use were it for me to make friends with your race who die in a
day?"
"Excuse me," Simon interpolated; for Simon was thirty years old, and
hoped to live to ninety, but the dryad took no heed of his interruption.
"For many generations few mortals have come to this forest; none, I
think, since Alexander died."
"That was not the day before yesterday, neither," Simon commented.
He was wondering if the maid were truly mad or merely a piece of
mystification. Anyway, she was very fair, the grass was soft, the night
air kindly, a rising moon smiled through the trees, and Simon was
always ripe for love-making.
"Sweeting," he began, jovially, "if you have never loved mortal man it
is high time that you quarrel with this continence, and though I do not
greatly credit your tale, I am ready to woo you merrily."
It is always disconcerting to a swain, be he sentimentalist or
sensualist, to find that his proposals of passion are entertained with
hilarity. So it was with Simon when the girl greeted him with a peal of
the cheerfulest laughter that ever had rattled about his ears, while
she swayed on her shapely legs like a bell-flower to a breeze. So
children laugh at their play; so gods laugh at the muddles of mortals,
bright, sweet, whole-hearted laughter, brilliant as the songs of birds.
"You foolish Bœotian," she said, when a pause in her laughter left
her breath to speak, "you do not think I would welcome your wooing?"
And once again the musical gusts of merriment shook her, and her eyes
danced and her whole body trembled with delight.
Simon glowered at her, very red-faced, very sulky, very hot on his
purpose. He had overcrowed coy reluctance ere this.
"Welcome or no welcome," he cried, "I mean to clip you in my arms. The
forest is silent, you are my prize, you shall follow your mother's
example."
He made a step towards the girl as he spoke, with his face as red as
a peony, and stretched out his big, brown hands to seize her white
body. To his surprise she made no effort to evade him, and for one
wild moment it was pleasure to clasp her soft body close to his; but
before he had time to turn his clasp into an embrace he found himself,
to his bewilderment, plucked from the ground as if he had been caught
in the clutch of a whirlwind, and then in another astonishing instant
he realized that the maiden had flung him from her as if his mighty
mass of manhood had been no bulkier than a cradled doll, and that he
was travelling rapidly through the air towards his mother earth. Then
he countered the ground with a prodigious thump that seemed to squelch
the breath out of his lungs and to shake every bone and strain every
sinew of his body. Sick and dizzy and all of an ache he lay on his back
on the grass, rigid as a man in a catalepsy, and staring in unfamiliar
terror at the maiden, whose beautiful face was suddenly fierce with
anger.
"You fool," she cried, "learn that I rule in this forest. I have dealt
thus gently with you for this once"--Simon groaned inwardly as she said
this, and wondered if he had a whole bone left in his body--"but if you
vex me again I shall be tempted to do you some hurt."
Simon made an effort to move, and the effort hurt him sorely, and he
marvelled at the girl's ideas of gentleness and hurting. The Olympian
sternness of Argathona's brow softened a little at the sight of that
supine image of misery.
"Will you promise to offend no more?" she asked, and Simon cried back
at her, speaking from the very core of his heart:
"I promise."
The dryad's frown faded, her serene calm rekindled.
"You will do well to keep your word," she said, merrily, "for my sinews
are knit with the vigor of the Age of Gold, and I have no need to fear
the children of men."
"As to that," Simon protested, as stoutly as he could under the
somewhat undignified conditions, "I have my failings, it may be, but I
am an honest soldier, and I never broke my word in my life."
"Then get on your feet again," said Argathona, gently, and she reached
out her hands to his, extended, and lifted him up standing as easily
as if he had been a baby; and at the touch of her fingers Simon felt
instantly that his blood was running anew and that the chill which
gripped at his heart dissolved before the flame of life revived. He
made to stretch his stiff arms, and found to his joy that he succeeded.
He moved his legs this way and that with a painful relish in their
obedience. It was good to find himself still all of a piece.
"Ah," he sighed, "how stiff I be! It is tedious to feel like a tree."
Argathona's brows knitted slightly, and Simon saw that he had bungled,
and tried to gloss his blunder. He had no doubt now as to his
companion's powers if he still questioned her narrative, and he thought
it well to show respect to her alleged sylvan kinship.
"Of course, there are trees and trees--" he began to stammer, but the
dryad with a whisk of her myrtle twig warned him to keep his peace,
and he shut his mouth tightly. She sat comfortably down upon the turf,
crossing her legs under her as a lad might, and motioned to him to take
his ease. Simon gingerly lowered himself to the ground with his chin
in his hand. He was not a little afraid of the amazing maid, for which
he was scarcely to be blamed; but he was also heartily her admirer, for
which he was wholly to be commended. She stared at him and smiled, and
Simon stared at her and rubbed his head wistfully.
"Here is a wonder out of a wood," he said. "May the devil fly away with
me if I know what to make of you."
"There is nothing to wonder at," Argathona answered, gravely. "I
belong to the old, strong race, the kin of the gods, and the strength
of the gods runs in my body though my sire was a mortal man. Also I
know something of the secrets of the ancient wood. Otherwise I am like
yourself, thinking the same thoughts, living the same life, sharing the
same pleasures of hunger and thirst, sleep and waking, and the change
of the seasons. The only difference is that there will come a time when
none of these things can live for you, and that time will never come
for me. I shall go on with the dawn and the sunset and the wheeling
stars and the changing seasons and the perpetual years."
"The difference is a pretty big one," Simon grunted; "but let that
pass."
He looked at the girl curiously; he was now quite prepared to be
devoted to her, though he was also quite prepared to believe her a
witch. There were witches and witches, and this seemed an honest
one. But her claim to endless existence bewildered him. He admitted
to himself that it would sound very pleasant if applied to his own
case. It must be agreeable, he thought, to go on cheerfully eating and
drinking and making love, and fighting and sleeping and gaming and
riding a-horseback and experiencing all the other enjoyable processes
appertaining to a strong man's life, day in and day out, year in and
year out through the centuries, with never any fear of finding wine and
love and pastime uninteresting or condemned to end. At least, the maid
was not making game of him; she was fixed in her strange story; and,
anyway, he was pledged her friend.
"There is one thing that puzzles me," he said, bluntly--"how does it
happen that you, who have lived in this wood since your old friends
the gods decamped from paradise, and who talk, as I should think, the
jargon of ancient days, can converse with me, who remember no more than
thirty summers and was born over-seas in France?"
Argathona smiled amiably at his quandary.