The dryad a novel
intent was when he suddenly found himself stricken from his horse by
a brace of the knaves, while the rest of the malefactors set upon the
duchess and snatched her from her saddle though she raged at them
like a fury. Two of the miscreants dragged the screaming, struggling
woman--whose clamor was now the more horrid in contrast with her former
silence--into the wood, while Captain Fox gave the horses in charge of
another, and bade the two that had hold of Bohemond to treat him in
the fashion in which Simon had found him. "For," quoth the rogue, "I
would not have the lad's blood on my hands, since he helped us to this
booty, but if it pleases Heaven to hang him by spurring his horse to
stir, why then let him swing for me." So Bohemond had remained there,
for how long he knew not, standing on his steed that by the bounty of
Providence was content to keep still until Simon came through the trees
to save his rider.
All this amazing tale was blurted and stuttered out in gasps and spasms
of speech, its hearer grasping at half words and interpreting much from
little. Now when Simon had heard it, and it took but a few hot seconds
in the telling, he saw one thing plain for him to do, which was to try
to rescue the duchess, much as he hated her. Simon would willingly have
left Bohemond behind, thinking him too pretty a stripling to be of
grave use in a scuffle. But Bohemond would by no means be persuaded to
stay, seeing which Simon liked his mettle and clapped him on the back.
Then noting that the rogues had stolen the lad's sword, he lent him his
great dagger. "For," said Simon, "if we find the fly-by-nights, you may
busy yourself in putting out of their pain any that I chance to leave
unfinished."
Now as they started on their search, which did not prove a long one, as
you shall hear, Bohemond, babbling at his companion very incoherently,
for he was weeping himself sick for his wicked mistress, told all that
had chanced in Athens after the slaughter in the marsh. How of Duke
Baldwin's knights only two came off with their lives that were made
prisoners by special charge of Fernand Ximenes, and these twain were
Count Ernault of Toulouse and Sir Jaufre de Brabant. How the Catalan
Grand Company, marching on the track of the scattered army, entered the
city of Athens unopposed and unimpeded. How the estates of the slain
knights were divided among the followers of Ximenes and their women
distributed among the victors, so that many a sturdy Catalan mercenary
received for wife some noble lady for whom the day before the battle
he would have counted it an honor to carry a basin for her washing of
the hands. How Ximenes compelled the archbishop of Athens to wed him
in state to Esclaramonde, insisting that she was a widow, which was,
indeed, the common belief. Simon already knew how, on the morning
after her latest marriage, Esclaramonde had left the city to seek for
Argathona in the forest with the intent to slay her.
While Bohemond was moaning out his story Simon was using his eyes
as well as his feet. Indeed, there was little difficulty for a keen
campaigner in getting on the track of the duchess and her abductors.
A scrap of silk clinging to a twig, and recognized by the page as
being of the color of his lady's gown, first set them on a trail that
thereafter proved easy to follow. Simon's keen glances could read the
record of the journey in snapped branches and trampled grasses, even
if his guesses had not been confirmed again and again by bits of silk
and bits of lace and once a fallen pearl. So, going warily, Simon and
Bohemond came by-and-by to the edge of a little hollow place in the
thick of the trees, and there, looking down, saw that which would have
made the boy cry aloud in rage but that Simon clapped his great hand
over his loyal mouth and silenced him.
There was a single tree in the little hollow, and to that tree
Esclaramonde was bound, quite naked, with her hair about her face. The
six bandits were huddled together a little way from her, kneeling on
their leader's mantle which was spread upon the grass, and all were
intently absorbed in playing at dice. Simon was an old battle-hand, and
such ugly sights were familiar enough, yet he could not help raging
to think of that beautiful evil being as the prey of those filthy
fingers. The boy's fury was not to be restrained, and, drawing his
dagger, he began to spring down the slope regardless of odds. In a
moment Simon was after him, and the astonished robbers, looking up from
their sport, beheld a giant and a lad come thundering towards them.
As they scrambled to their feet and snatched at their weapons their
foes were close at hand. Simon was first in the field, his long legs
outstripping Bohemond, and he was upon the desperadoes with his great
sword sweeping and swinging like the sails of a windmill.
The caitiffs were six to one, or, at best, six to one and a quarter.
For a lad with no more than a dagger was no match for the meanest
of that gang, but for all their advantage they could make no head
against the whirlwind assault of Simon. Two of the felons were headless
before the band could rally, and now they were but four to two, for
Bohemond had caught up a sword that had fallen from one of the dead
scoundrels and showed that he knew how to handle it. Simon's mighty
weapon rose and fell, and another of the rapscallions was despatched,
while Bohemond wounded a fourth. Then, while the woman tied to the tree
lifted her head and stared through her black hair at the battle, the
three recreants turned and fled in different directions.
Captain Fox as he ran made for where the prisoner was pinioned, and
before Simon could reach him he passed his sword through her body.
Then, with his weapon red with the woman's blood, he turned on Simon,
his face all warped and white, hideous with lust and hate and fear, and
he began to scream out something to the effect that Simon should not
have her; but he never finished the sentence, for Simon sliced him like
a pear, and the sword bit to the breastbone. Wrenching his weapon free,
Simon turned to where Bohemond was being pressed by the two remaining
rogues, who, finding only a lad at their heels, had turned to tackle
him. Again they fled, but Simon was swifter than they and slew them as
they ran. Thus in a little pinch of time there were six dead men and
one dying woman in that dismal hollow, where still the white dice shone
ironically, scattered over the black mantle on the grass.
Simon unbound the duchess, for Bohemond, now that the fight was over,
could do nothing but bite at his hands to keep himself from crying, and
indeed she was a tragic sight with the blood dabbling her whiteness.
Simon wrapped her decently and tenderly in a mantle, for, after all,
she was a woman, and a dying woman, and he laid her gently on the
grass. The simplest knowledge of wounds was sufficent to assure him
that her hurt was mortal, and, indeed, in a few seconds she expired
without having spoken a word. To the end of his days Simon, when he
remembered that time, wondered what were the thoughts of the duchess as
she peered through her hair at the battle.
XXX
RENUNCIATION
This was what Simon had to tell to Argathona and to Rainouart when he
came upon them side by side in the forest. This and the order he had
taken thereafter. For he had found the horses of the robbers with the
horse of the duchess tethered in a glen, and he had bound the body
of the dead woman decorously upon her horse's back and intrusted the
corpse to Bohemond's care, charging him to ride at a walking pace
to Athens and tell the tale to Ximenes. With the aid of the other
horses, Argathona and Rainouart and he could make their way quickly to
Peloponnesus and safety before any pursuit could reach them if pursuit
were attempted.
When the maid and the man heard Simon's story they were silent for a
while, troubled alike with sad thoughts and glad thoughts. To Rainouart
the news meant that he was free to marry his true-love, but to his
true-love it brought fiercely the knowledge of mortality, and her
spirit shivered in its house, and suddenly she snatched at her lover's
hand, and in the clasp caught back strength and comfort that had
threatened for a moment to abandon her. And so in silence they turned
and went their way with Simon after them till they came in sight of the
hermit's hut, and they halted before the shrine with its glory of the
silver image of the Redeemer pierced upon the tree.
Then Argathona turned to her lover and begged him to let her approach
the holy man alone, and Rainouart, who would not have said her nay
in anything, granted her prayer. Then she bade him wait where he
stood, and he and Simon knelt before the shrine and prayed, while
Argathona quitted him, and coursed fleetly over the grass and came to
the hermit's door and knocked at it for admittance. The anchorite was
within, and he opened his door, and he welcomed the maiden as if he
had been awaiting her, and he took her by the hand and drew her within
the hut and saluted her with, "Peace be with you, daughter." Argathona
surveyed the palace of the anchorite with its mean walls and its naked
floor, and its wooden table laden with a great book and a vessel of
water and a crucifix of ivory.
Argathona said to the ancient, "Father, I have slept and dreamed and
wakened, and I return to you to pray you to take me into your faith and
to change me, immortal, into a mortal maid."
The hermit bade her kneel before the table, and he knelt by her side
and prayed awhile in a great agony of beseeching, after which he said
certain sacred words to the girl for her to repeat to him; he then
arose and blessed her and sprinkled holy-water upon her, and baptized
her into the rites of Christ. When he had done Argathona was still
Argathona in all her outward seeming, but from her mind all memory of
her gift of immortality had vanished, and she thought of herself and of
her life as a shepherd girl might think of herself, and of the eighteen
years that she had laughed and danced through since her mother, that
died in her childhood, had borne her to the sire that she had never
seen. As for the old gods, there was no more memory of them in her mind
than if no man had ever paid them praise in Greece, and the old speech
of the gods was no longer upon her lips, but, instead, the speech of
her mortal lover. All things else she remembered clearly: the finding
of Simon and the coming of Rainouart to the wood, and the treason that
took him from her and her journey to Athens to save him, with all that
followed thereupon. All these things she remembered just as a girl
of eighteen to whom they had happened would remember them, just in
that way and no other way. For Argathona was now no more than a girl
of eighteen years that had lived unwittingly without religion till
she had met the holy man who had welcomed her into the faith of her
fellow-mortals. But the thing that she remembered clearest and best of
all things was that the lover she loved so dearly was waiting for her
outside in the sunlight.
Outside in the sunlight she found him, she walking with the hermit
hand-in-hand. And outside in the sunlight the old pope blessed
Rainouart and Argathona in wedlock, man and maid kneeling before the
shrine. Then Simon brought horses and the three made their escape into
Peloponnesus.
THE END