The dryad a novel
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