won and lost, four of the duchess's favorite women, delicate dissolute
minions, waited for their lady's coming in her dimly lit dwelling room.
Amicia and Hildeletha, Yelette and Aveline, were huddled together
in the alcove of the window, looking out upon the moonlit plain and
listening to the sounds of revelry in the rooms below. They had left
those rooms, they had left that revelry a little while agone, daintily
flushed with wine, daintily prodigal of love-promises, that they might
be sure that all was ready for their mistress when she rose from the
royal feast. Now they were busy disentangling the imbroglio of their
assignations, pitting lover against lover, and trying to remember times
and places of meeting, lightly agreed to, and no less lightly forgotten
or confused with other trysts.
It had been a wonderful day for the merry girls. There was the
tournament in the morning with its unexpected end. Then there was the
solemn ceremonial of marriage in the afternoon, when the Archbishop
of Athens pronounced his benediction on the heir to the dukedom of
Athens and the wondrous widow of Thebes. Then came the splendid banquet
stretching through the hours. Now in a little while the bridal pair
would be conducted in triumph to the duchess's apartments, and speedily
thereafter Amicia and Hildeletha, Yelette and Aveline, would be free
to pick their paths in pursuit of love. Meanwhile they babbled with
bated breath of the duchess, and her old lord, and her many lovers,
and of her fire-new groom who seemed to dwell in a dream even while he
knelt at the altar. But they marvelled most over the stranger knight,
the Prince of Eleusis, the victor of the lists, who came to the banquet
habited in white and gold and sat between two of the fairest ladies
of Duke Baldwin's court, and while he himself spoke little, listened
to their chatter with a bright, indefinable smile. All the women, it
seemed, thought him handsome as the day, and the men swore that he was
a comely youth, and those that were nigh enough to see noted that he
ate no food but fruit and drank no drink but water, and wondered how
such meat could feed such vigor. Each of the gossip girls would have
been glad to see the conqueror at still closer quarters, for their
places at table were far from where he sat. They were experts in the
points of men, and would fain have compared him with their immediate
lovers. But they watched him closely, and thought that he seemed both
merry and sad at the prattle of his companions, and they agreed that
if Sir Rainouart kept his eyes ever upon the face of his bride, their
Lady Esclaramonde shot many a glance of an admiration they knew well
how to interpret at the grave face of the stranger. And therewith the
talk swayed lightly back to their lady, the duchess, and the fair heads
pressed together and the sweet voices chuckled over the echoes of many
scandals.
Suddenly the sounds of revelry beneath them dwindled, and the minxes
heard the swell of joyous music and the tread of marching feet. They
sprang to their feet in haste, ready for obeisance, ready for service.
The mirthful music and the marching feet came nearer and yet nearer,
filling all the stairways and corridors with joyous noise. Then the
great entrance door swung open, and a little cluster of golden pages
entered bearing scented torches that flooded the room with yellow
light. These in turn were followed by a train of fair maidens in white
robes, who scattered white roses on the floor and sang to the music of
a band of lutanists, the epithalamium which Sir Guy of Hainault had
composed in honor of the bride and bridegroom. And this was the song
they sang:
"Lo, the lovely pair are wed,
Making one
Gallantry and goodlihead,
Moon and Sun:
Now we bring the bride to bed,
Wedding done;
Flesh to flesh divinely led,
Bone to bone.
From the pillows where her head
Lay alone
Weary solitude has fled,
Wisely flown.
She must share her wine and bread,
Share her throne,
With the lover, dear and dread,
All her own,
Till the one for other dead
Maketh moan.
All is sung and all is said:
Loose her zone!"
As the last words of the song, the last notes of the music, sobbed away
into silence, the singing maidens made a lane from the door like two
lines of tall white lilies, and through the doorway adown the lane came
Duke Baldwin in his bravery holding the Duchess Esclaramonde by the
hand, while beneath the heavy tramp of the knight and the light tread
of the lady the crushed white petals of the scattered roses suspired
a haunting perfume sickly sweet. Even to the familiar cynical eyes of
her women, Esclaramonde at that moment showed radiantly fair. Flattery
had fanned her cheeks to their loveliest color; triumph had lighted
her eyes with their brightest fire; passion mantled her body with its
atmosphere of flame.
In an instant Rainouart followed, escorted by Count Ernault, and it
seemed to the keen eyes of the dainty waiting-women that his bearing
showed less mazed than of late, and that his look was keener than it
had seemed since his misadventure in the wood. "Marriage will make a
new man of our moon-calf," Yelette whispered into the ears of Aveline,
with a sauciness that was partly resentful, for she remembered with a
sting how, in spite of her allegiance to her mistress, she had wasted
her witcheries on his indifference on the morrow of their arrival at
his father's court. "We may have our turn yet," Aveline answered,
mockingly, for she, too, was one of the tempters who had failed to
tempt, in which particular the two girls from Thebes wore the same kind
of shoes that were worn by every delectable dame of Duke Baldwin's
court. Then "Hush," cried Hildeletha, as through the doorway thronged
those who interested the damsels more than their predecessors.
These were the knights of the court and the knightly visitors--Sir
Guy of Hainault, Sir Jaufre de Brabant, Sir Raymond of Provence, Sir
Ambrose of Blois, and the rest of Duke Baldwin's chivalry; Andronicus
Palæologus, Prince Demetrius of Epirus, and the other noble visitors,
squiring and gallanting smiling women. After these came the leaders
of the Catalan Grand Company, with Fernand Ximenes at their head,
gravely insolent to the ladies they attended, watching the vivid scene
with impassive faces, indifferent to the merrymaking of the man who
owed them their pay, but not indifferent, with the keen eye of your
practised bandit, to the delightful possibilities from the bandit's
point of view, if only Athens were to sack. And so the great room
filled with light and color and laughter, and through all and over all,
immeshing all in slender threads of melody, ran the tender wailing of
the lutes.
Duke Baldwin bowed the Duchess of Thebes to the high seat on the
dais, and paid her some compliments at once florid and full blooded,
which must have embarrassed a maiden, and at which the duchess,
with no little difficulty recalling far earlier memories, affected
embarrassment. Then the lord of Athens, suggesting that the young
couple had liefer be left alone, reminded the assembly of brilliant
men and beautiful women that supper was still towards, and so with
many smiles and salutations and good wishes the bright company faded
in music from the room. A glance and a gesture from Esclaramonde sent
Amicia and Hildeletha, Yelette and Aveline, tripping at their heels,
and so the bride and groom were left alone together, face to face in
the place that swooned with the scent of trampled roses.
The man and woman stood opposite to each other for a while in silence,
Esclaramonde thinking inscrutable thoughts, Rainouart gazing at her
like a man who wakes from sleep-walking and wonders why he has come to
such a spot and how. Esclaramonde was habited in a robe of many reds,
subtly blended, for she wished through the richness of these shifting
tints to recall some royal rose imperial in its wealth of crimson
petals, yet still a tender pink at the core. Indeed, Rainouart thought
of a rose as he looked at her: his thoughts had been all of roses since
he saw her so clad at the ducal banquet, and because of the rose his
heart was full of care and travail. While his senses spurred him to woo
such voluptuous beauty, enigmatical memories cried out to him strange
forest cries; it was as if soft voices were calling at his ears,
asking, "Is this the rose of the guarded garden, is this the noble rose
of the world?" But her witchery was potent over his wits; his spirit
seemed tugged this way and that inexplicably; he was bewildered; he
would and he would not. At last he found voice under the spell of those
lamping eyes that lured his pulses, and he stretched out his hands to
the wonderful woman.
"To my arms, fair wife!" he cried, and though his voice sounded
unreal in his ears, as if it were an echo of speech whispered to him
by other lips, it rang real enough in the ears of Esclaramonde, and
almost she regretted for the space of half a second that she could not
answer promptly to the call. But swiftly she thought of the golden
apple, swiftly she remembered that her lord would be no less loving
when the night was a little older, and his senses had rekindled from
unremembered sleep. She lifted her hand for a moment as if to stay his
vehement advance; then she moved to the table, where a golden beaker
stood circled with golden goblets, and she saw that the beaker was
brimmed with wine. Dexterously and unseen of Rainouart she drew from
her girdle a tiny golden phial, jerked the contents into one of the
goblets and slipped the phial out of sight. Then she poured two full
cups of wine, and held out the treasonable cup in her white hand to her
lover.
"Pledge our health and happiness," she said, and her voice and eyes
commanded, though voice and eyes seemed only to entreat.
As a shaft of sunlight suddenly pierces a mist, so suddenly did
Rainouart's promise to the Prince of Eleusis drive its dart through the
dark web of desire that enveloped his mind. Through all the wedding
ceremony, through all the later festival, overcrowed by the magic of
Esclaramonde, he had forgotten that pledge to the knight who had
conquered him. Now it lived again with the duchess's proffer and beat
furiously at his heart. He took the cup from his bride's hands and
looked eagerly into her eyes, luminous and cryptic as the eyes of a
sphinx.
"To your health, Fidelity," he murmured, half in idolatry, half in
irony, as he lifted the cup to his lips.
The words "feign to drink" now buzzed in his ears imperative, and he
seemed to see that in the glance of Esclaramonde which accentuated
their meaning. He carried the cup to the open window and looked out
over the wide plain of Attica. He was conscious that the duchess was
watching him curiously, and the words of the stranger knight seemed
to scourge his numbed intelligence into vitality. Looking steadily at
Esclaramonde, he tilted the cup, but no drop of the red wine rippled
over his lips. Then he set down the cup on the window-ledge and moved
towards his consort. "Feign to sleep" hummed in his ears, and he moved
sluggishly, obedient to a will that proved stronger than the will of
Thebes.
"Is not the night warm and heavy?" he asked, and his lips and his
lids seemed drawn with desire of sleep. Turning towards the casement
he pointed at the Athenian sky blazing with its myriad eyes. "The
stars swoon and fall from heaven!" he cried. He moved towards her with
a reeling gait. "Shall I catch you a handful," he gasped, and so,
struggling towards her with out-stretched palms, he stumbled to the
table and fell across it with his face between his arms, a seeming heap
of sleeping flesh.
The duchess, who had sipped prettily at her cup while she watched
him, now set the vessel down upon the table, and bending softly over
Rainouart, touched him on the shoulder, and whispered his name to him,
wooing. But Rainouart of Athens lay inanimate, making no sign, and the
lady of Thebes smiled malignly.
"Sleep sound, my prince," she muttered, "and dream content, and wake
fresh and credulous. My boy-lover is fairer than you, and he woos with
a golden apple."
She turned away from her motionless lord, and took up a little golden
lamp that stood burning on the table hard by the beaker of wine. Going
to the open window, she leaned out into the blueness of the night, and
held the lamp high above her head, and its tiny flame burned steadily
in the still air. The enchanting beauty of the Athenian plain, steeped
in moonlight and starlight, haunted by a million divine memories, said
nothing to Esclaramonde. She was thinking only of a golden toy which
she desired to own, and of a youth with golden hair whom she desired
to kiss. After a little while she came back to the room and set down
the lamp, and walked about slowly hither and thither as a cat walks,
crooning to herself the burden of an ancient song:
"Dwelt a queen in Nineveh
(_Take my heart, Semiramis_),
Fairer than the dawn of day
In the strength of summer is;
Falser than the Moon of May
Mirrored in the black abyss
Of the stream by Nineveh,
Where the bodies drift and sway
Of the lords who loved amiss,
Of the drowned who died for this--
Once to hold a queen at play,
Once her crimson mouth to kiss;
Tigris bears them to the bay,
Far away from Nineveh
(_Take my heart, Semiramis_)."
XXII
REMEMBER THE GREENWOOD
She had scarcely finished the verse when the arras at the side of the
window was drawn back, the little door of the turret-stair closed,
and Argathona came into the room. She was habited in white, with a
silken tunic girdled with a golden belt, and she looked like a noble
youth. She entered so quietly that Esclaramonde did not know of her
coming till she turned in her pacing of the floor and saw the slender,
beautiful figure facing her.
Esclaramonde moved eagerly to the new-comer, with out-stretched hands
and eyes bright with cupidity.
"You are welcome," she said, quickly, and indeed she was pleased to
greet the radiant youth, but her hottest thought was for the promised
toy, and she added, "Give me my gift."
Argathona came a little way down the room, looking steadfastly at the
man who lay across the table with his head between his extended arms.
"Is your lord asleep?" she asked, and the duchess made a grimace as she
answered:
"He is never my lord, though I be ever his lady. Where is your toy of
the gods?"
Argathona was still looking at the recumbent figure, and she questioned
again:
"You are sure he is asleep?"
Esclaramonde clasped and unclasped her fine fingers impatiently.
"You tease like a peevish child," she protested. "I blended his drink
with such syrups that the trump of Jove would not wake him for an hour
to come. Quick, my gift."
Argathona slipped her hand into the pouch that hung from her girdle,
and let her fingers rest on the golden apple that lay there. She felt
that she trembled as she touched it, and that her heart was beating to
a most unfamiliar time. For now she was face to face with her enemy,
now or never she must prevail upon her enemy to unspell the spell that
had been cast upon her lover. She spoke again, while she still kept the
apple hidden.
"You remember the terms of our bargain? If I give you the golden apple
you give me your love."
"Yes," Esclaramonde cried, angrily, "yes, fretful. Why do you waste
time thus?"
Now Argathona drew out the golden apple from her pouch and showed
it in the hollow of her hand. That golden apple was a wonderful
toy, for while it had all the shape and semblance of the living
fruit, it glowed on the white palm of the dryad as if its precious
metal had been steeped in the essential sunlight, in the essential
starlight, and forever gave off something of the glory of the sun
and stars. The duchess glowed a lively red as she saw the splendid
idol, and instinctively, for an instant, shielded with her fingers
her eyes against its brightness, while she gave a little animal cry
of admiration. But she swiftly lowered her fingers from her face and
made a clutch at the marvellous image, but Argathona avoided her, and
Argathona's hand shut over the apple.
"What will you tell your lord when he wakes?" she asked, still gazing
at young Athens where he lay.
The duchess banged her hands together, and her eyes blazed with
frustrated covetousness.
"If you call him my lord again," she cried, "I shall hate you. He is my
servant, my slave, my puppet; he shall believe what I please when he
wakes. Why, he will not know that he has slept at all, and as for this
trinket, how can he know what riches I hold in my treasury at Thebes?
Give me my gift, sweet minion."
Argathona looked straight into the face of Esclaramonde, and her eyes
were bright and stern.
"Do you love this man?" she asked, and she pointed with the hand that
held the desirable apple to where Rainouart lay huddled on the table.
Esclaramonde made a face of disdain.
"Love is a word of many meanings. He is a prince and he is rich; he is
young and he is comely. He is different from the others I have loved,
and for the time he pleases me."
Argathona's face was set and her voice was cold as she spoke again,
asking the fateful question,
"How did you come to care for this man?"
The duchess gave a little laugh that brimmed with malicious memories.
"I knew him first a while ago in France, when he was counted a cold
monster, and indeed I failed to melt his ice, though I tried my
liveliest. Then fate flung him at my feet the other day in the haunted
wood."
"And he loved you at once," Argathona asked, "loved you with all his
heart and soul?"
Esclaramonde flung back her crowned head and laughed mockingly at her
questioner.
"Am I not comely enough to be so loved?" she retorted, and Argathona,
seizing sudden chance, bent her head in acquiescence.
"If he love you so well," she sighed, "were it not shame for us to do
him wrong? Let us part now in honor, and when he wakes you will rejoice
to be worthy of his loyal love."
And Argathona made as if she would go from the room, but she was
cunning, and the golden apple gleamed through the net of her fingers.
Rage flamed hotly in the eyes and cheeks of Esclaramonde.
"You question like a cold priest," she complained, "when you should
clasp like a warm lover. But you can go if you please when you give me
the trinket."
And she held out her hand imperiously, but Argathona still kept the
apple. Now Esclaramonde was very loath to lose her lover though she
professed indifference, and she was firmly determined to gain the apple.
"Nay," said Argathona, craftily, "I am a Greek and give nothing for
nothing. But I would your lord were not so single-hearted a lover, for
my vows deny me to wrong him."
Esclaramonde clinched her hands so tightly that the nails of her
fingers hurt her palms.
"You are a precise fool," she raged; "but you can send your fastidious
conscience to sleep. For though my husband loves me now and thinks he
never loved other woman, he gave his great heart like a baby to some
country girl in the woods."
Argathona held out the globe of gold alluringly, just out of reach of
the duchess, while she asked, "Are you sure of this?" and Esclaramonde,
her hungry eyes fixed on the apple and her hungry senses fixed upon the
youth, answered vehemently:
"Most sure, for in truth it was not I who saved him from the robbers.
When I came he was senseless on the grass, and a tall fellow that stood
by told me a tale of some forest girl who scared away the thieves, and
to whom my love-calf promptly gave his heart. Indeed, when he came to
his senses I had much ado to persuade him that this girl was the trick
of a fevered dream, and that I was his rescuer, I his promised wife."
The dryad watched her with firm, unchanging eyes. So, long ago, her
mother in the woodland might have watched unfearing the dangerous
presence of a snake.
"Why did you do this?" Argathona asked. "Did you love him so very
dearly?"
The duchess laughed impatiently, for the apple proved harder to win
than she had deemed, and the telling of the tale vexed her a little.
"I love very dearly the gift that he can give. Though I be a great lady
he makes me a greater. It is much to be Duchess of Thebes to-day; it is
more to be Duchess of Athens to-morrow."
There was a little pause, and Argathona's eyes travelled from the
duchess to the man at the table and back again.
"Come," cried Esclaramonde, "are you content? Think nothing of him. I
will wear him as the rich cloak of my loves."
The duchess was looking eagerly at Argathona, and Argathona, glancing
aside, saw that the man at the table stirred and seemed about to move,
and she saw that the prince's fingers were gripping the hilt of his
dagger.
"I am content," Argathona answered, and tossed the golden apple to
Esclaramonde, who caught it in the cup of her joined hands joyously.
"Yet I think there were a better gift for you."
"What is that?" Esclaramonde questioned, greedily, and as she spoke the
young Prince of Athens sprang to his feet, and came towards her with
his drawn dagger in his hand.
"A true blade in your false heart," Rainouart said, and raised his
weapon on high.
Esclaramonde fell at his feet and grovelled on the floor, letting the
apple roll away. It was as horridly amazing to her that her bridegroom
could rise from the cup she had qualified as it would have been
horridly amazing if her old spouse had risen from the dead. Both were
catastrophes of nature too appalling to understand, and her courage
went from her in a breath and her blood was as water. She could do
nothing but crouch upon the ground and moan to her master not to kill
her.
Rainouart looked down upon her abjection with a sick spirit, and slowly
lowered his weapon.
"You have a woman's body that must be pitied," he said, in sorrowful
scorn, "but the devil it shelters must be hid. We will find cloisters
for you. But you must give me back my ring."
He bent and caught at her up-stretched, appealing hands, and drew from
her finger the ring that had been his mother's. He plucked from his
finger the ruby that Esclaramonde had set there and cast it at her
feet, while he set his own ring in its old place. Then he turned from
her sprawling to Argathona, where she stood impassive with folded arms.
He was all himself again; the woman's confession had unspelled him;
his spirit seemed like a clean mirror waiting to reflect the face of a
liberated memory. He would see the face soon, he was sure of it, the
face of his beloved, but in the meanwhile there was knightly work to do.
"You are a man," he said. "You have unsealed my soul, but you have
snared a woman to her shame. We fought to-day in sport; we fight
to-night in earnest."
Argathona moved a pace nearer to the angry prince, looking straight
into his eyes.
"Oh, Phœnix of knighthood," she said, smiling, and tenderly
reproachful, "where is your fidelity? Think of the greenwood, knight;
think of your vows of love, and tell me where is the maid who heard
them. Think of your proffered ring, and tell me where it should be now."
Rainouart looked at her in amazement. Though he knew now that he had
been deceived, the shadow of that deception still lay heavy upon him
and he saw as in a mist. The woman on the ground, freed for the instant
from her fear of death, lifted her head unheeded by the others and
listened intently with a growing hope in her eyes. But even while she
cowered and listened she snatched greedily at her ruby and put it
quickly on her finger. The apple lay out of her reach.
"Who are you?" the prince cried, in a great wonder, and let the dagger
fall clattering from his hand upon the floor. Argathona came near to
him and put her face close to his.
"Look in my eyes, lover, my lover. Though I wear a boy's coat, it
covers a girl's heart that was given to you in the greenwood the night
you fell among thieves."
She caught both his hands in hers as she spoke and pressed them fondly
upon her bosom, and so he was very sure that it was a woman who spoke
to him.
"Remember my face," Argathona chanted. "Remember the song of the
forest. Remember the greenwood dappled with the moonlight. Remember my
face bending over you."
It was to Rainouart as if a curtain had been drawn aside and he looked
through an open window on the rose-garden of his dreams.
"I remember the greenwood," he cried; "I remember you. I thank God for
my memory. My eyes were sealed so that I could not see, but the spell
is lifted from my spirit and my vision is clear. Can you forgive me, my
love?"