The dryad a novel
"You are mad," he screamed. "We can ride and die with our fellows," and
he gave a heavy groan.
"You can do nothing," Simon answered. "Come with me if you would ever
see the greenwood again and the face of your girl."
"A coward's call," Rainouart shouted. "Good-bye, love. Athens, Athens!"
and again he strove to urge his horse a little farther in the sucking
sludge. But the horse could scarce stir for all his plunging, and
though Simon's hand was still on the bridle, it was not Simon's hand
that stayed advance.
"Few men have called me coward with comfort to themselves," Simon
grumbled, inwardly. "Yet I will take it from this man for the maid's
sake, and save him if I may. This quarrel is none of mine, and I
care not a rap for Athens, and it argues me no dastard to fly from a
hopeless fight."
Nimbly the thoughts skipped through his brainpan, but now Rainouart,
seeing Simon's hand still on his bridle, menaced him with his sword,
and shrieked at him through the din that he would kill him if he did
not let go his hold. Simon's thoughts were still furiously busy,
furiously swift, and they ran to this intent: "Since you think it a
coward's part to fly, then you were a coward in flight. But if I,
that feel no shame in escaping from such a shambles, pluck you hence
willy-nilly, all is well."
By now Rainouart, beside himself with wrath at sight of such a
massacre, had lifted up his sword to strike at Simon, but Simon did
not give him time to strike. Swift as an arrow Simon's right arm
straightened, and heavy as a blacksmith's hammer Simon's right hand,
a huge and cruel fist in steel, delivered the young prince a giant's
blow upon his helmed head. Under that mighty stroke Rainouart's head
rattled in its iron case as a kernel rattles in a nut. Courage and
consciousness alike were silenced, and Simon caught in his arms a
senseless man as Rainouart reeled helpless from his saddle.
"It was high time to be making up our minds," Simon grunted, as he
addressed himself to the terrible attempt to extricate his companion
and himself from their desperate peril.
He leaped off his horse on to the squashy earth, and, though his great
weight drew him deep over ankles into the loathsome slush, he was
nearer to the edge of the terror than the main of the cavalry, and
better able to move and act. With carnage raging ahead of him, Simon,
as coolly as if he had been in a tent at a tournament, stripped most of
the mail from the body of his unresisting lord, taking care to leave
him his sword girded about his middle. Then, with a like composure and
a like rapidity, he ripped the armor from his own limbs, and, picking
up Rainouart from the slough where he lay senseless, flung him on to
his shoulder as easily as he might have lifted a woman. Even in that
moment, however, he showed his campaigning spirit. Knight or no knight,
Simon had a fine appreciation for the merits of a ripe old wine, and,
as fighting was ever hungry work, he had not thought it beneath his new
dignity to make a filled wallet and a leather bottle of red wine part
of his equipment. Now he snatched both from his saddle-bow and hooked
them to his belt before beginning on his desperate enterprise of escape
from the mouth of the pit.
The mouth of the pit was like the mouth of hell. There were little
lanes of oozy earth running in all directions behind him, green with
trampled corn and red with Frankish blood. In front of him the bog
he had crossed spluttered and gurgled, and across its treacherous
surface he essayed, at all adventure, to reach some firmer soil. Up to
this time Simon's doings had passed unchallenged. All around him the
morning was made hideous by the screams of the dying and the shrieks
of the triumphant Catalans as they drove home their pitiless knives,
and knight after knight of those that had been the glories of Duke
Baldwin's court went unprepared on the path to paradise. If any of the
enemy noticed Simon at his work they may, seeing one man stripping the
armor from another, have taken him heedlessly for one of themselves,
who, having slain, was prompt to plunder. But now some five or six of
the Catalan stabbing rabble, having worked ahead of their fellows, and
seeing a man with another man on his shoulders wading through blood
and mud towards the dry land, where the main strength of the Athenian
army was still standing, came rapidly to head him off, running quickly
and securely on the ridges familiar to them that divided the different
fields of wheat and barley, or wading through the bog itself with ease
in their nearly naked condition.
They chose their prey unwisely, for Simon had his great sword bare
in his hand, and, as the rascals came at him, Simon, wielding his
terrible weapon, struck off head after head of his assailants till
none were left to face him, and then made use of their bodies as
convenient stepping-stones to help him a little farther to his desired
haven, while such others as were tempted to join in the chase, seeing
the havoc he wrought upon their comrades, turned with alacrity to
less-resisting victims.
Little by little, inch by inch, through what seemed an eternity of
effort, Simon struggled with his burden, every muscle of his great
body strained, every vein in his great body throbbing as he strove
inch by inch to gain a firmer foothold. At last, with the shrieks of
the dying and the cries of the triumphant well behind him, he felt his
heels tread upon a firmer foothold. A little more, and, with the sweat
raining off him like a deluge, he staggered to sound earth, and stood
dripping and stained and aching, but free. He paused for a moment to
draw breath and to see what lay before and behind him. The view either
way was disastrous for the future of Athens. Behind him, as it seemed,
every man of the gorgeous company that had ridden with Duke Baldwin
from Athens that morning had fallen a victim to the cunning and the
fury of the Catalans. Before him the bulk of the Athenian army was by
now in ignoble flight towards the city. Dismayed by what it saw, puffed
by a panic terror and spurred by a conviction that the Catalans must
be irresistible, the war-used army of Duke Baldwin fell asunder like
a pack of frightened children. The road to Athens was free for the
Catalans to march on; the city itself was free for the Catalans to deal
with as they pleased.
Not far from where Simon now stood, a great war-charger wandered
quietly and bit unconcernedly at the sweet grass. Doubtless it had
unhorsed its rider in the first struggle in the concealed wash, and
had made its way back again instinctively to the firm soil it had just
quitted. Simon, still carrying his unconscious load, advanced towards
the horse, holding out his hand, and trying to speak to it caressingly,
and it startled him as he did so to find what a thin thread of a voice
came from between his burning lips.
The horse did not start or shy, but went on cropping the grass
unconcernedly until Simon was close beside it, and then, with no show
of fear, it allowed Simon to seize its bridle. In another moment
Simon was astride the saddle with the young prince lying limp on the
saddle-bow. In yet another he had turned the great horse's head to
the west, and was making at the best speed he could compel for the
woodlands.
XXVI
THE ANCHORITE
In a waste and desolate place of the Eleusinian wood, aloof alike
from highway and byway, there stood a little shrine, with a little
hut hard by it. The shrine was rudely shaped of heavy stones, piled
one upon another with scant skill but with great pains, evidently the
handiwork of an untrained but persistent artificer. All day the shrine
enclosed a goodly image in wrought silver of our Lord upon the tree,
the which image was always carried reverently at nightfall within the
shelter of the hut. This hut was the habitation of an anchorite who had
dwelled there for many years in little less than absolute solitude,
and the place where he abode so lonely was reputed of great sanctity.
The travellers were rare who passed that way by mischance, for it
neighbored no pathway leading directly anywhere, and was far from the
beaten path of trade or travel or use. But such as, passing, paused and
prayed before the shrine that sheltered the silver image were wont to
aver that they renewed their journey with a strange exaltation of the
spirit and exhilaration of the flesh.
The beauty and the value of the image had, according to country-side
gossip, on more than one occasion tempted the cupidity of thieves, but
each essay to steal the sacred emblem had resulted in the discomfiture
of the would-be plunderers. For on each occasion the hermit, whom
the robbers hoped to take unawares abed and asleep, issued from his
dwelling as the enemies came creeping up, and made such strange
manifestations of physical strength and spiritual influence as
effectually scared the sacrilegious rascals into flight. Now there was
no thief in Athens bold enough to renew the enterprise, and the holy
man was left to his loneliness, while weeks and even months passed
without a living human creature passing by his hut. This loneliness
seemed to be to the liking of the ancient man.
No one knew who the hermit was, and those few who ever had speech with
him and sought to question him gained little by their pains. Even Duke
Baldwin fared no better than the rest. For Duke Baldwin once rode that
way by chance, a-hawking on a summer day, and some one of his company
telling him of the recluse, the duke condescended to halt for a moment
and hold speech with the holy man. But he found that his questions won
him answers unsatisfactory and enigmatical, and that even the pompous
announcement of his title and state had no more effect than to bring a
faint smile to the thin lips of the hermit. So Duke Baldwin rode away
in something of a huff, and spoke severely of recluses for some time
afterwards.
It was believed that the hermit came from abroad; it was believed that
he was exceedingly aged; it was believed, no one quite knew why or
wherefore, that in a distant past he had been neither hermit nor holy;
and it was whispered by a few beneath their breath on winter evenings,
when there was leisure to loll by the fire and talk gossip, that the
stranger had practised in his youth the black art and had been an
accomplished sorcerer. Whatever the old man had been, and whencesoever
he had come, there could at least be no doubt of his present sanctity.
He fasted, vigilled, prayed, macerated his nature, lacerated his
flesh, read on the Great Book till far into the night, and was at his
devotions in the open at the earliest coming of the day, be the weather
fair or be the weather foul. The few who ever saw him found in his
reverent features no trace of dissatisfaction with his lot, and Sir
Jaufre de Brabant, who rode with Duke Baldwin on the occasion when Duke
Baldwin spoke with the hermit, declared that the anchorite had the
peacefullest face for an old man that he had ever beheld.
On the morning of the day when slaughter reigned in the distant
Theban plain, the hermit was sitting in the open air after his first
devotions, quietly conscious of the freshness of the air and the color
of the hour. He was busy in scattering the larger part of his scanty
meal as a pasture for a multitude of birds that fluttered and hopped
around him, and chirped and twittered, and sometimes, to his pathetic
consternation, battled among themselves as they scrambled for the
spoil. "My little brothers," he began, the phrase of St. Francis in his
mind, as he observed with sorrow the contest of one large bird with
three smaller ones for the solace of a single crumb. But even as he