The dryad a novel
unhappy lovers in the world seemed to flow mournful through her lips.
He nodded his head and spoke soberly, gently, weighing his words:
"In your absence there came a great lady riding by, the duchess she of
Thebes, no less, with a large escort. She saw your young gentleman
sprawling on his back in the moonlight, and, seeing him, seemed to know
him and to show a fancy for his fair face. So when she had tickled him
out of his swoon she persuaded him, as I take it, for her voice carried
far and I could catch snatches of her speech in the stillness, that you
were no more than the doll of a dream and that it was she, the duchess,
who had tended him in his time of peril, she who had changed troth
with him, she who had taken his ring which indeed lay on the grass for
any chance-by to handle, she who had given him a ring in exchange,
for indeed she did thrust a ring on his finger while he slumbered. I
suppose in the end he gobbled her story, which seemed, on the face of
it, plain and specious. Anyway, she gave him wine to drink which sent
him to sleep like a baby, and so without more ado she bundled him off
to Athens."
Simon paused after this patter of narrative. To his surprise the girl
had mastered her instant grief, and her countenance carried its former
air of sweet serenity. The tears had dried from her eyes; the fear had
faded from her cheeks; only she seemed to regard Simon now with cold,
accusing mien.
"Did you do nothing to stay her?" she asked, and there was that
stroke of reproach in her voice which made Simon feel, he knew not
exactly why, as if he had betrayed a friend. But he answered bluffly
enough, putting a bold face on his conduct, for, after all, maugre her
strength, she was only a slip of a she-wizard and he a bearded man
little accountable to such jills.
"I am a soldier of fortune," he blustered, "and it is not the way of
my trade to take sides in a squabble unless I be paid for it. But if I
had been fool enough to thrust my nose into another's quarrel, there
was nothing of any purpose to do, for my high-mighty lady the duchess
had fifty or so stout fellows with her, more than I could tackle. I was
in a kind my lady's prisoner, and if I had not contrived to slip aside
into the wood while she was plying him with the wine it is like she
would have carried me, too, to Athens, and indeed it was not part of my
plans to travel thither in such fashion."
Argathona seemed to be listening to Simon, but in truth she was paying
little heed to his surly speech. She was looking steadfastly at the
white ribbon of road which skirted the glade and ran, a highway, to
Athens, and her face showed only the composure of a noble hope.
"He does not love her," she murmured to herself, and her words flowed
with the motion of some proud and ancient song. "It is I whom he loves,
I who love him."
Simon hoisted his shoulders to his ears. These amatory flights were
not to his mind, for he took himself to be in a free field, and he was
mulishly set to push his own case.
"He may live content enough with his bargain," he asserted. "Lady
Esclaramonde of Thebes is a great lady and a wealthy and a fair, with
broad lands for her dower--a better match, saving your presence, for
young Athens than a wood-wench in a wood."
Argathona looked at him now with the same air of triumphant patience.
"You do not understand us," she said. "If it were for his welfare to
leave me I would not hinder him. If it made for his happiness, now and
hereafter, to dwell with this woman I would not hurt his life. But I
have looked into his eyes and I know that he loves me as I love him."
Simon resented sharply this harping on a single string. The Athenian
prince was not the only man in the world, nor the only man in Greece.
There was a stout fellow at that moment, hailing lately from Corinth
and earlier from Rouen, well worthy of any maid's eye.
"Be wise," he counselled, jovially, slapping his broad chest. "The
boy has gone and there is an end of the adventure. Let by-gones be
by-gones, and look more favorably upon one whom war and the world have
mellowed to a ripe prime. A green goose makes a sour sweetheart. Here
is a trained hawk to your hand. I will abide with you in the woodland
cheerfully if you give me the wink of a lid."
Simon felt that he was acting most handsomely, and he beamed. But
Argathona surveyed him with very much that show of scorn which an armed
and haughty amazon might have vouchsafed to some woosome, presuming
satyr who dared to waylay her on a hunting morning.
"I am glad the world you serve is not all made up of men like you," she
said, quietly, and then she turned her calm eyes again upon the white
highway.
Simon laughed dryly, but he felt that he grinned on the wrong side of
his visage, for it vexed him sorely to find the maid so stubborn.
"Alack the day, no," he answered, gruffly. "Believe me, pretty
mistress, I show better than the bulk. I am but quarter bad, like a
clipped coin, and such as I am it is no offence for me to cherish you."
Argathona answered him more gently.
"You are well enough when you do not fret me with foolish words. But
you do not speak of a cheerful world."
Simon was perplexed.
"What a saint's name does it matter to you how the world is compassed?"
Argathona understood the drift of his question.
"I am going into the world," she said, with decision.
Simon stared into her fine face. If one of the trees round about him
had taken unto itself a vegetable voice, and told him as much of its
intended travels in speech familiar to his French ears, he could
scarcely have been more gravelled.
"You are going into the world," he growled, and the growl in his voice
was meant to make it very plain to the girl that he thought she was
talking nonsense.
But the girl answered his growling with the same unchangeable voice
flowing from the same unchangeable countenance.
"I am going into the world to save my lover."
Simon was now one part diverted and three parts vexed at the girl's
pertinacity. It was aggressively plain to him that she made far too
much of one man at the expense of another, with nothing that he could
see to warrant the partisanship.
"How will you find your way?" he questioned, drolly, mocking with eyes
and tongue, and he thought he had posed her. But the girl's blithe face
remained untroubled in its tranquillity of resolve.
"I shall find my way to my lover," she cried, and her voice rang in his
hearing like the hunter's horn at the find of the deer. "My lover needs
me; my lover is in danger; wherever he is my lover is alone without me
as I am alone without him. I know that it were better for both of us
not to be than to exist apart."
Simon laughed lustily, venting his spleen so, and the false thunder in
his lungs shook his bulk as a sudden breeze shakes the flag-iris in the
sedges. When he had done crowing and could speak like a Christian again:
"I have never known any lad to speak so for the loss of a lass," he
assured her.
The dryad turned her unfathomable eyes on her jeering companion, and
somehow, all of a sudden, his jesting seemed to lose its savor.
"There cannot be many men like my lover," she said, with clean
assurance. "You have tramped so much through a muddy world and taken
such stain in your travels that you have lost the thoughts of the
solitudes and the sacred places. But here is the greenwood way of
it. We have changed loves, he and I; we have changed hearts, he and
I; where one is the other must be, though all the seas and all the
mountains lie between us. If he be kept from me by guile I must win my
way to him by craft, for that I know is what he would have me do."
Simon nursed his nose thoughtfully with his finger and thumb, eying the
valiant lass and pondering as to whether she really meant what she said
or whether all this ecstasy were only plain proof of the madness he
shrewdly suspected.
"I wish you were a more reasonable rusticity," he grumbled. "The
Duchess of Thebes is a very great, dangerous lady. I heard tell of
her in Corinth that she dabbled in sorcery and was so skilled in the
distillation of philtres that if ever a man drank a draught of her
brewing he became her slave soul and body. What can your country-side
courage do against her?"
Argathona's eyes radiated pity on his ignorance.
"I am of kin with the gods," she reminded him, austerely proud.
Simon twisted his features with a whimsical grimace that meant
compassion for her madness and mirth at her earnestness.
"The gods will be of no use to you in the world beyond this wood. I do
not know where they have gone, and in this regard you seem no morsel
wiser than I, for all your phrases; but we seem to be both agreed in
this, that they have gone, and in my world men raise shrines and altars
to unite other powers."
"I think I shall still find love honored in the world," the dryad
replied, confidently.
Simon whistled softly the fag end of a friendly drinking-song before he
spoke. He was thinking grimly of what he and others like him honored as
love in the world below the wood.
"I doubt if you would know the God of Love in some of his changes," he
said at last. Then he went on, remembering and correcting: "Yet, as I
am told, they hold pretty parliaments of love in Athens where jolly
lords and dainty ladies wrangle to infinity over touches and phrases
and prove very finical in discrimination."
Argathona was not disturbed by his doubts; she sang the same song of
Olympian assurance to his unwilling ears.
"My lover bears my heart in his body and I bear his in mine. I will
follow him to Athens; if needs must, I will follow him to the ends of
the earth."
Simon tickled at his beard, looking at her with a dismal pity while he
strove to light love's candles in the windows of his eyes and to speak
to her wooingly, for he still cherished a desperate, dwindling hope for
himself in the venture. So he again hazarded discouragement.
"You will spare yourself many pains and aches if you stay in the
forest. Why can you not listen to me?" Even as he entreated he read
in her face that his wooing was vanity, and he ended angrily in a
challenge.
"I believe you would listen to me if I wore a silk coat and carried a
smooth face."
The dryad smiled, divinely patient of his peevish speech.
"I would not listen to you," she said, "if you wore the robe of Zeus or
showed like Apollo."
She turned away from him and stretched out her white arms towards the
dark wood.
"Dear forest, where I have lived so long, the time has come when we
must part. Dear birds and beasts, I must say you farewell. For I follow
the forest law and I go to seek my mate."
Simon looked at her with a new wonder and a new approbation in his eyes.
"You are resolved?" he asked, and the girl answered him irrevocably:
"I am resolved."
"Then," said Simon, "I think I may blow out my lantern," and on the
word he swung his lantern to the height of his face and drew back its
door. Pursing his lips he whistled a curfew call, and his breath puffed
out the feeble light of the candle.
"Why do you do that?" Argathona asked, with the naïve curiosity of a
child.
Simon turned his head to Argathona, and the look on his face was at
once roguish and reverential.
"I carry this lantern," he said, "daytime and nighttime, like my
old-time pattern, looking for an honest fellow-being, a thing I could
not find in Corinth and doubted to find in Athens. But now I believe I
have found a true woman, for I call you a woman, by your leave, though
you choose to call yourself immortal. Wherefore, out goes my sceptical
glimmer, and if you are willing I will go with you to Athens as your
honest friend and true servant; and, indeed, I think I may prove of