Chapter I: Part 1

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.