The dryad a novel
service, for I know something of the rough edge of the world."
"You may come if you choose," Argathona answered, "and you shall give
me advice, for I am strange to men and cities."
"Faith," said Simon, bluntly, "to begin with, you cannot go as you now
are. Women wear other gear in these years of grace. I cannot say that
they look better than you do, but truly they look very different."
"I shall not go as a woman," Argathona answered. "I shall go as a man."
Then, seeing that Simon stared at her with the greatest amazement his
face had yet worn, she went on:
"Is not a man's life a good life still to live in Greece, as it was in
the ancient days?"
Had Simon been blessed with a graver temper he could not choose but
laugh.
"By the rood," he swore, "a man's life is as round a dish and as full
of meat as ever, but 'tis never a dish for a maid to nibble at. Why,
a man's life is a bustling, brawling business, noisy and jocund. Your
true man is ever eating, drinking, loving, fighting. When there be no
real wars for him to break heads in, he betters the heavy peace with a
tournament."
The dryad's eyes looked inquiry, and Simon, guessing what she would
know, expanded his matter.
"Your tournament," he explained, "is a brave game by which knights who
are weary of idleness and quiet times put on their armor and take up
their arms, and bang each other lustily in an appointed place just as
if they were enemies, though for the most part they are honest friends
and bear no malice for thrustings and thwackings."
Argathona's eyes widened and brightened as if she desired to win a
prize in such kind of diversion, and her words showed her thoughts.
"If there be such jolly sports to share yonder," she cried, "then I
must play my part in them."
Simon really hardly knew whether he ought to laugh or to cry at the
simplicity of the witch.
"What a devil should a slim maid, be she woman or warlock, do at a
tourney?" he gaped.
Argathona laughed a little at his bewilderment, and her laughter was
pleasant as the piping of summer wind among summer thickets.
"Friend," she said, "you have seen that I am no weakling. Truly I have
the strength of the strongest amazon that ever drew bow, and the
amazons were as strong as the companions of Theseus. And I doubt if the
men of to-day have the strength of the fellowship of Theseus."
Simon was inclined to resent the imputation cast upon an age that he
adorned, but, remembering betimes that the girl who faced him had made
so little ado with his strength, he grinned weakly and held his peace
on that matter. Argathona continued:
"While I play a man's part in Athens I will find a way to save my
lover, if he be ensnared as you say. For if I go as a man this woman of
Thebes will welcome me as a friend."
Simon wagged his red head approvingly.
"By my faith," he said, "you seem strong enough and wise enough to
wander the world alone; but I will go with you and serve you, because
I love you, and I can teach you something of the world's ways that may
help you, a stranger. But you are wise to go as a man if you think you
will look like one."
"Friend," replied Argathona, "we of the woodland can use the woodland
glamour, and what we strongly wish men to see us and think us I believe
you will find that they so see and think. To-night we will rest in the
forest; to-morrow we will make for Athens."
"Where is your male attire?" Simon questioned, dubiously. "For my part
I have nothing but the rags I stand in."
Argathona laughed blithely.
"Let not that vex you. There are shepherds in the valley, and you shall
go to these shepherds and buy for me a sheepskin suit and a shepherd's
pipe and crook." Seeing a frown on Simon's face, she went on: "It may
be that you have no coin in your scrip." Simon nodded bashfully. "That
need not trouble you neither, for this wood holds many hidden treasures
whose lurking-places are known to me, so I will find you a piece of
gold for the shepherds. Then as a shepherd I will pass to Athens."
"Nay," Simon commented, gravely, "it will never do for you and me to
trip into Athens at all adventure, stout man and slim maid, with no
tellable tale to back them. Here is my rede, that we rest a full day in
the forest while I tell you so much of the ways of us who live at the
end of time as will serve you to play your part with persuasion."
Argathona nodded, wise enough to read the wisdom in his words.
"It shall be as you say," she agreed. "We will abide a day in the
woodland and you shall lesson me in the ways of men of the Iron Age."
So said, so done. From the dawn of the next day to the same day's
dusk Argathona sat at the feet of the soldier of fortune and listened
while he spoke. He told her of the world as he knew it, a fair world
made for Frenchmen to rule. He told her of its kings and its captains,
and of the names and lineages and lives of those who now lorded it in
Greece. Because he had a shrewd wit, with caustic words to lackey it,
he made his tongue's puppets live more human than they always showed
in knightly histories and monkish scripts. He painted frank pictures
of great ladies, too; told truths of the customs of men with women
and of women with men, and little doubting that he was doing aught to
distinguish with praise, proved himself an excellent chronicler. But of
the great faith of the world he spoke scantly and dully, caring for it
little, understanding it less, and taking it for granted tranquilly as
him seemed a soldier should. On her side, Argathona, keen to learn much
about the living things she had to play with and strive against, eager
to teach her age-long ignorance the game of the gray world, she had
very little curiosity about the faith that had banished the gods of her
infancy. And so she listened and learned much and learned little, and
one more Attic day of all her wealth of days waxed and waned and left
her as it found her, divinely young.
XI
THE CATALAN GRAND COMPANY
From the days when the Christian faith was born in Galilee of Judea,
from the days when Hellas became portion and parcel of the Roman
empire, the glory of Athens dwindled and withered through the centuries
for more than a thousand years. Paul preached. Nero plundered.
Philopappus patronized. Hadrian adorned. Herodes commemorated the
loved and lost Regilla. Neo-Platonism persuaded its followers that the
lamp of the Academy was still alight. The terror of the north swept
upon the city as Spartan and Persian had swept upon her, only more
bloody and more merciless than both, to be beaten back for a season by
the waning strength of the Roman arms. The gleaming image of Athena
stayed the rage of the triumphant Alaric, but could not stay the envy
of Constantinople. Byzantium stripped Athens of her riches; Byzantium
silenced the voices of her philosophers. Gloom of night settled upon
the sacred place for generations till, after the fourth crusade and
the fall of Constantinople, Boniface of Montserrat came to turn the
Parthenon from a Greek church to a Roman Catholic cathedral, and the
city of Theseus into a Frankish duchy. In the dawn of the thirteenth
century Otho of the Rock became grand sire of Athens, and he and the
descendants of his house ruled for a century, till the time came for
Baldwin to take the throne.
The French nobles who throned in Hellas in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries of Christendom knew nothing, or next to nothing,
of the old-time glories of their home. The lions of Mycenæ told the
occupants of Peloponnesus nothing of the king of men and his murderous
queen, and the vengeance of Orestes leaping like a bright star to his
aim. The chiefs in Attica viewed with indifferent eyes the masterpieces
of antiquity still standing intact or almost blank of ravage upon the
Attic plain and on the Attic hill. But the French lords of Peloponnesus
and the French lords of Athens had a very liberal and deep affection
for the civilization which they carried with them from their sweet
land of France, and for those chivalrous institutions which made life
one high delight to them. The best dream of the French gentlemen was
to make the land of Greece as like the land of France as might be in
all the grace and all the gayeties of life. To this end they lived in
Attica as they lived in Languedoc, in Lacedæmon as in Limousin, and
their greatest pleasure in their Hellenic empery was to make believe
that they were in Paris or Provence. In the land where the Grecian gods
had been hymned by Pindar, moulded by Phidias, painted by Apelles,
and caricatured by Aristophanes, the adventurous French knights, who
tricked themselves out with the titles of cities of Sparta and cities
of Attica, bore to the golden land they governed all the pride and pomp
and color that made their France so lovely in their eyes. They strove
to make their lives as luxurious and as sumptuous as if they were
kings of France and not lords of Grecian duchies, and they succeeded
greatly in their purpose. French of Paris, French of Provence, French
of Picardy, sang of love or commanded for battle in places where
Socrates had died yesterday and Atreus the day before yesterday. All
the parament of chivalry paraded, a riot of color and luxury, where
Lycurgus had fed a strenuous people on bitter bread and brackish water,
or played its games of mimic war and held its tribunals of fantastic
love in the pale presence of the theatre of Dionysos.
The narrowness of the environment made these efforts after magnificence
more conspicuous than they would have been in the country they had
quitted. Gorgeous garments and splendid armor adorned and defended
bodies cherished with pompous banquets and royal wines. But the ease of
their condition did not weaken the limbs or the spirit of the French
lords. Their passion for the tournament kept them hardy for their wars
with each other, stiffening their voluptuousness with that desire to
shine in strife which forbade pleasure to degenerate into effeminacy.
Their passion for ballads and the ballad-maker's arts refined their
wild, bright life with tales of ancient days and heroic ideals. Their
passion for women, growing apace in the magical atmosphere of that
enchanted land where the winds seemed to whisper the songs and lisp
the names of old-time lovers, was saved by their persistent chivalry,
artificial perhaps in form, but with a heart behind its artificiality,
from lowering into the Oriental grossness that was the weakness of
Byzantium. The history of the ages has no stranger as it has no more
bravely painted page than that which records the rule of the French
dukes in Athens and Peloponnesus.
If Athens in the dawn of the fourteenth century was strangely unlike
the Athens of the Periclean age, the contrast was rather of one kind
of splendor against another than of a present squalor with a splendid
past. The capital of the French dukes of Athens surpassed in luxury and
comfort any European capital of the time. Their commerce flourished,
their port was populous with ships, their influence was felt, and
their strength unquestioned all along the Greek littoral. Many of the
other French princes in Greece had pomp and power, but Baldwin, Duke
of Athens, overcrowned them all for wealth and power and magnificence.
He delighted to beautify after the fashion of his time the spot that
once had been the loveliest in the world, and if the shade of some
great Athenian could have returned for an hour to the city of Cecrops,
he must have regretted, indeed, the glories of the past; but, at the
same time, he must have recognized that the barbarian who held by a
strong hand the land of Deucalion was not denied some measure of the