Part 20

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