Part 5

"Then I will dwell with you in the ancient wood," he answered. "The world is a fine place, full of color and music and honorable strife, but true love is better than all things, and if you love me I will dwell with you in the ancient wood."

The dryad sighed. She longed with all her heart to say yes, longed and dared not. She knew now how her mother felt when the Greek youth wooed her in the days before the heroes sailed to Troy.

"It may not be," she said, but she said it half-heartedly, petitioning secretly if, after all, it might not be. Perhaps she might keep his spirit alive within him with her immortal lips, perhaps she might hold death off with her immortal arms as the demi-god Herakles did when he brought back Alkestis.

The impetuous Rainouart, lip-deep in love, made light of her denial. Heaven had been very gracious to him and he would not lose the rose. What was there to weep for in his father's court? Could its drunken chief and dissolute women and debauched princes restrain him from the religious quiet of the wood? What was there in all Athens to be set against a moment of Argathona's love?

"It must be," he persisted; "we are troth-plighted, you and I. We have exchanged loves and hearts and cannot deny it."

He drew a ring from his finger as he spoke, a heavy gold ring cunningly carved with the image of our Lord upon the tree, and set about with little studs of gold wherewith to say the rosary.

"This is my Master and thine," he whispered. "Wear it and be mine."

She put the ring and his hand away from her, troubled by his words and by the unknown image on the ring. Rainouart misunderstood her gesture.

"Dear," he protested, "I mean all honor and honesty with you. With this ring I will wed you. Hear, my dear lady. A little way beyond the wood between here and Athens there lives apart a holy man; let us go to him hand-in-hand that he may make us man and wife."

The dryad tried painfully and vainly to understand his meaning. What had their loves to do with the little hermitage at the foot of the hill and the lonely man who lived there? To wed meant to her to give herself hand and heart and all to the lover whom she loved, and if ever she dreamed on summer days and nights of what love could be it was as of something that might come to pass when the gods returned, as they surely would one day return from the twilight land. Now she knew that she loved this mortal wholly, now she knew that this mortal loved her wholly, and now, looking at her mortal lover, she knew that he was in peril of the melancholy disease, the ceasing, which mortals call death. For since she had unclasped her hands from his hands his face had grown pale again which had warmed at her touch, and his energies had ebbed with the warmth of his wooing, and his senses sickened with the dizziness in his head. She clasped him again, but her touch could no longer quicken his vitality as keenly as before, for her powers were weaker through love of a mortal. He slipped from her arms upon the grass and his face was grown suddenly gray.

"What has happened," he moaned, "that a scratch can so unman me?"

Argathona bent over him, consoling, comforting, loving.

"I must find the herb of healing," she said. "It hides in the heart of the wood. Sleep here for a little till I return."

She breathed softly upon his forehead willing him to sleep, and the youth's drawn face softened, his limbs relaxed, and he lay motionless upon the turf. A stranger would have guessed that he was dead, but Argathona knew better; she knew that the youth lay drowned in a dreamless, soothing slumber.

"Sleep," she murmured--"sleep till I return with the herb of healing."

Tears flooded her eyes making the moonlight dim, and she beat at her breasts.

"Alas! I cannot deny to love him. My mother's fate is mine, for I love a mortal, and my lover will die in a day and I shall live unhappy till the gods ride back from the twilight land."

She turned from her sleeping lover and ran swifter than a stag across the moonlit space and dived into the darkness of the wood.

VIII

SIMON SPIES

When the wonderful lovers were speaking together, unstained youth and stainless maid, neither of them dreamed that human eyes were watching them from the thicket; but it was so. Simon, twisting and twiddling the myrtle-bough between his big fingers, had picked his way through the forest till the twig began to spin of itself, and then he found the clear fountain and filled his gourd, after satisfying that private thirst of his own which an unmoistened supper of onions had done much to stimulate. He was in no great heat of enthusiasm about the book-reading youth whom the dryad had rescued. He admitted him a brave fellow, but that was nothing; it was no more than a man's business to be brave, and if the wood-girl must like a brave fellow, why could not Simon serve her turn? He grumbled to himself as he went and returned that he believed the minx had sent him to the water-pool on purpose that she might be left alone with the lad; and he reflected cynically, with a cynicism worthy of such a lickerish lantern-bearer, that a woman is a woman though she be a thousand years old and is pleased to call herself immortal.

Such an aggrieved, sour humor is apt to grow with much dandling and patting, and Simon was in a simmering bad temper with destiny and the sisters three when he reached the fringe of the glade and saw the youth and the maiden standing together. He paused, unseen, unheeded, on the farther side of darkness, rubbing his bristling chin. They looked to be of very good accord together, and his blood boiled at their amity. "It were a shame to spoil sport," he said to himself, apologetically, for what he was about to do, as he drew back a little deeper into the wood, still unseen and unheard. Then, "it were a shame to lose sport," he added, more truthfully to his itching curiosity, and dropping noiselessly on his hands and knees he proceeded to crawl very quietly towards a part of the wood nearer to the pair from which he might certainly oversee their deeds better, and also possibly overhear their words.

He moved quite stealthily and swiftly for his volume of body, for he had learned the primals of forest strategy when he served his apprenticeship to war under Philip the Fair, and his celerity of passage was accompanied by little rustling. At another time, though he did not know this, he could not have hoped to scramble so through the brushwood unperceived by the woodland sense of Argathona, but contact with a mortal sometimes dulls the immortal wit, and Argathona was absorbed by other than woodland thoughts. Indeed, if some faint sound of his patient progress had troubled the night, it would have fallen unheeded on the ears of those two who were wading straight from the shallows into the deeps of love.

At last Simon found his profitable lair and lay hunched up in the darkness with his chin propped on his fists, watching the boy and girl. He interpreted their gestures with a raging heart, hearing now and then something of the words they spoke, for the night was very still. His torpid sense of honor was untroubled by this playing of the spy, for he felt now a very personal sense of enmity to the stranger knight who, as he was inclined to phrase it, had taken his wood-girl away from him. It was Simon's simple creed that if he cast his eyes upon a girl in favor, that girl was his by right; wherefore he watched the mutual wooing with hot eyes of wrath, and there were wild moments when he longed to leap out upon the pair, slay the man, and seize the girl--and perhaps he would have done so had he not been mortally afraid of the maid. But when he saw the youth reclining upon the grass and Argathona bending so tenderly over him, pity began to pull at his heartstrings sorely against his will--pity for the maid, naturally, not pity for the man.

When the dryad, after breathing sleep on the face of her lover, disappeared into the forest Simon groped cautiously from his cover and moved stealthily over the moonlit space to the side of the sleeping man. He looked down upon the young, still face of Rainouart, rubbing his russet chin thoughtfully as he shrugged his shoulders in astonishment.

"What does she see," he asked himself, "in that smooth, unmeaning face that she prefers him to me--to me who know what love means, and war, and how to love women, and carry my liquor, and who never wasted time over a silly, painted book?"

That same painted book was still in the pouch of the young man's girdle, where he had thrust it when he had come from his reverie. There was a corner sticking out and it caught Simon's eye. He stooped and pulled the book from its concealment, a little square of vellum pages, scribed in a fine, clerkly hand, craftily enriched with pictures, and he balanced it curiously on his palm.

"What was there," he asked himself, "in such a lump of ink-stained, pigmented parchment to make a man forget that he was alive?"

Then, after a moment's hesitation, he slipped the volume into his own pouch as a lawful prize, resolving at some future time to see what he could make of its pages. The glimpse of the little, painted book fiercely rekindled his old resentment, which had withered a little at the sight of his enemy lying helpless on the grass. His fingers slipped to the horn handle of the knife that nestled in his girdle, and he moved it up and down from its sheath, enjoying grimly the slipperiness of the steel in the leather. Presently he plucked the blade bare and contemplated its brightness.

"It is but jamming this to the hilt," he thought, "in that quiet, white flesh, and the Duchy of Athens were sadly lacking an heir, and my white witch were sadly in want of a lover."

It was an alluring thought for a very unscrupulous fellow, but he pushed it aside at last, ramming the knife home with an oath, although he made a wry face at his abnegation. "The pretty witch would weep and her tears would grieve me," he thought; "and, besides, the fool is asleep and at my advantage, and belike he has not the blood left to fight with if I kicked him into waking and challenged him to fair battle."

As he thus reluctantly refused murder, he noticed that something glittered on the grass by the side of the sleeping man. Simon stooped and picked it up, and examined it carefully in the moonlight. It was a big, gold ring admirably wrought with the image of the Saviour of the world upon the tree, and set with little studs about the circle for the saying of the rosary.

"By the mass!" said Simon to the surrounding silence, "this is the ring he offered her." But even as he spoke thus, and as he weighed the ring in his palm, he was made aware that he might speak to silence no longer.

IX

THE DUCHESS OF THEBES

Through the regal quiet of the night Simon could hear, no great way off, the muffled sound of the tramping of many feet. Turning his watchful face to the white roadway, after a little while he beheld a number of gleaming specks scarcely bigger than so many glow-worms. Then came what seemed like a dark, rolling cloud starred with points of fire, and this presently resolved itself into a mass of armed men, some of them on horseback, some of them bearing torches whose light flowed ruddy over shields and helms and spears. With the help of these earthly lights and of the light of the moon in heaven he saw that the torch-bearers and the armed men formed two bodies, one preceding and one following a number of litters of which the most sumptuous was drawn by four small black horses.

As this procession moved beneath his wondering gaze along the highway, those who led the van suddenly halted and seemed to look in Simon's direction and hold conference together. Instantly Simon remembered that he stood conspicuous enough against the moonlight in the open, and that his presence in that lonely place had naturally attracted the attention of the travellers. But he did not know the meaning of fear, and, though he was ever of a prudent disposition, he felt no need for flight, easy though flight would have been into the concealment of the wood. For he was conscious that he was doing no harm, and he entertained no expectation of harm from a company so numerous, so well armed, and travelling with so many lights by night in a time of peace. In no such fashion did marauders go abroad, so Simon resolved with little self-discussion to stand where he would and see out the adventure.

The new-comers were such a little way off, and so plainly to be observed in the quavering pool of torch-light spilled on the white path, that he could see how first the leaders of van and rear left their ranks and consulted together, and how next the curtains of the leading litter were plucked aside and a woman's head thrust forth, while a woman's imperious voice said something in question which he could not catch. Then the curtains of the other litters were pulled aside and other women thrust their heads into the night, squealing out many questions with sleepy voices. Then he heard the same imperious voice speak again, and the speaker railed at the others, rating them roundly for silly fools, and telling them to hold their peace, at which the pages about the litters tittered, and the women's heads were swiftly withdrawn and their voices silent. Then she who spoke so haughtily gave a command, and immediately the pages who led the four black horses turned them from the roadway and guided them carefully across the grass in his direction. A few of the escort remained on the highway with the other litters, but most of the knights a-horseback, and the men-at-arms and the torch-bearers, accompanied the litter and formed a great circle of steel and flame around Simon, where he stood placidly guarding the sleeping body of the young Lord of Athens, and gazing into the set faces of the strangers, and wondering what was going to happen next.

What did happen was that the four black horses halted a few yards from him, that the silken curtains of the litter were sharply pulled apart, and that a very beautiful face revealed itself to him in the mingled moonlight and torch-light. It was a splendid, sensual face, of the kind that appealed to Simon's directness, skin the color of fine ivory, hair the color of smooth ebony, eyes that seemed to change with every change of light, with every mood of mind, with every phase of desire, like a cat's, and a mouth as ripely red as the berries of the rowan-tree. Such a face might Semiramis have shown nightly to her nightly changing lovers ere they glided into Tigris; such a face might Clytemnestra have shown to her impatient paramour when she had newly butchered the king of men. Simon's simple, straightforward thought was that he wished the lady were for instant sale, and that he possessed the opulence which might purchase her. Simon's reflections in such matters were always direct.

The woman's eyes were fixed on Simon's stalwart body with a cold commendation of its proportions, but she spoke not to Simon but to a page in cloth of gold who stood obedient by her litter side.

"What is the matter, Bohemond?" she asked, in a voice that was wont to govern those who heard it with the sensuous charm of strange music chanted at sunset. Her eyes were still fixed on Simon, and Simon, nothing daunted, gave her back her gaze as boldly as if she had been a staring kitchen-wench, while the knights and men-at-arms stood about as fixed and rigid as armored effigies in audience halls.

"Grace," the golden page answered, "here lies a man dead or sleeping on the grass, and here stands a sturdy fellow with a club that keeps watch over him."

The lady whom the page hailed as "Grace" pushed aside the curtains of her litter impatiently and stepped into the moonlight. She was no more than common tall, but she carried her head high and commandingly, and Simon, still eying her steadfastly, thought that she walked like some old-time empress. Swiftly she stepped to where Rainouart lay, bent over him, and recognized him as the gallant youth whose face and form had stirred her facile pulses when he rode victorious down the lists in Paris, and who denied her as decidedly as he denied all the ladies at the court of Philip the Fair. She swung on Simon like a cat about to scratch.

"This is the young Lord Rainouart of Athens," she cried. "How comes he here and in this case? Have you injured him, villain?"

"I have neither hurt him nor helped him," Simon answered, composedly, "nor, for the matter of that, am I a villain, nor other than an honest soldier; but I can tell you all there is to tell when I know to whom I speak."

The little gilded page stepped a pace forward and addressed Simon sharply.

"It is the Duchess Esclaramonde of Thebes, fellow, who honors you with her speech."

Simon shrugged his shoulders; the woman was a fine piece of flesh were she duchess or no duchess, and his gaze was blatant admiration. The duchess, appraising his bulk, did not resent his possessive gaze.

"Who are you, sir?" she asked, in a voice more amiable, while she motioned to her attendant to rein his zeal.

Simon made her a leg.

"Lady, I am a soldier of fortune voyaging to Athens to seek for service under the bully duke, but your concern is not with me but with his countship yonder."

The Duchess of Thebes looked down again upon the fair sleeping body on the sward.

"How did Sir Rainouart come here?" she demanded, and Simon answered:

"Being foolish enough to overstay sunset near these woods in the reading of silly verses, he was set upon by footpads who thought to kill and strip him, but a girl who lives in these woods scared them away. The rascals took her for a witch, tumbling plump on them from the thicket, and gave leg-bail. It was the devil take the hindermost, I promise you; you would have laughed to see them scamper. The maid tended his wounds, that were little enough save for an ugly clip on the crown, and what should my young gentleman do but fall in love with his sweet nurse and she with him. I think they have plighted their troth, for he has proffered her a ring, and this daughter of the forest bids fair to end her days as Duchess of Athens."

The red blood raged in the woman's face, staining its ivory. "That she shall never be," she said in her heart. "I love this youth, and will not yield him." For, indeed, she had loved him with what Esclaramonde called love, in those painted days in Paris, before in despite she had taken Nemours for her husband, the old Duke of Thebes, who had lately left her an eager widow. What she spoke aloud was:

"A likely tale that Duke Baldwin's son should woo to mate a peasant."

"She is no peasant, I promise you," Simon answered, doggedly. He did not choose to tell what the girl had told him, for he was very far from sure that he believed it himself, and he was very sure, indeed, that no one else would believe it. "She is no peasant, whatever she be. These ears heard him ask her in marriage, and here lies the ring he proffered her."

Simon held out the rosary ring on his brown palm. The duchess's white hand dived at it as a peregrine dives on his prey, and caught it before he could guess or prevent her purpose. He had ever been used to dealing with damsels ready to snatch any trifles they might spy from their chance companions, and, being of a business-like humor in such matters, he made now as if to clutch the ring back again, just as if he were toying with a Corinthian doxy. But the duchess gave a sidelong glance at her escort, and in an instant a dozen swords were naked and aimed at Simon's breast, and Simon, being a sensible man, gave up the idea of further argument or expostulation. The duchess moved nearer to one of the torch-bearers, and in the orange light she looked at the ring covetously, much for its own rich beauty, for she loved all costly toys, and more because it seemed to mean a man's love for another woman, a man's love that should be, might be, hers. For the sanctity of the symbolism of the ring she had no thought at all.

"I will take better care of it," she said, with a queer smile, as she came near again to Simon and the youth at Simon's feet. Her evil wits, shuttles in the loom of deadly sins, were nimbly weaving a web of guile. Rainouart stirred uneasily as she came near, for the sleep that the woodland creatures can give may be molested by the coming of a hostile presence. The duchess looked down into his twitching face.

"See, he begins to wake," she said. "Give place all of you, and keep the tall soldier in ward."

At her command the duchess's people, knights and men-at-arms and torch-bearers, taking Simon, very reluctant, with them, drew away a little distance to the edge of the forest. He could see how, on the high-road eager heads peeped again from between the curtains of the litters of the duchess's women, and he grinned to think how little they could see of the business. But he was heartily wishing himself well out of the whole bother, and was casting about for a means of escape from it.

Meanwhile the Duchess Esclaramonde kneeled down on the grass beside Rainouart, watching him with malign eyes. The ring that she had taken from Simon she placed deliberately on her left hand. Then she drew from her right a ring set with a royal ruby, and, taking Rainouart's limp hand in hers, thrust it onto the finger where the red mark showed her that he had been wont to wear the ring she now wore. At her touch the youth turned his head once or twice like a man who dreams bad dreams, and then opened his eyes heavily. He groped with his arms as if seeking some dear presence.

"Where are you, love?" he asked, faintly.

Instantly Esclaramonde answered him.

"Here, my dear lord," she whispered, passionately, and she bowed her dark head tenderly over him.