Part 7

"You do not understand us," she said. "If it were for his welfare to leave me I would not hinder him. If it made for his happiness, now and hereafter, to dwell with this woman I would not hurt his life. But I have looked into his eyes and I know that he loves me as I love him."

Simon resented sharply this harping on a single string. The Athenian prince was not the only man in the world, nor the only man in Greece. There was a stout fellow at that moment, hailing lately from Corinth and earlier from Rouen, well worthy of any maid's eye.

"Be wise," he counselled, jovially, slapping his broad chest. "The boy has gone and there is an end of the adventure. Let by-gones be by-gones, and look more favorably upon one whom war and the world have mellowed to a ripe prime. A green goose makes a sour sweetheart. Here is a trained hawk to your hand. I will abide with you in the woodland cheerfully if you give me the wink of a lid."

Simon felt that he was acting most handsomely, and he beamed. But Argathona surveyed him with very much that show of scorn which an armed and haughty amazon might have vouchsafed to some woosome, presuming satyr who dared to waylay her on a hunting morning.

"I am glad the world you serve is not all made up of men like you," she said, quietly, and then she turned her calm eyes again upon the white highway.

Simon laughed dryly, but he felt that he grinned on the wrong side of his visage, for it vexed him sorely to find the maid so stubborn.

"Alack the day, no," he answered, gruffly. "Believe me, pretty mistress, I show better than the bulk. I am but quarter bad, like a clipped coin, and such as I am it is no offence for me to cherish you."

Argathona answered him more gently.

"You are well enough when you do not fret me with foolish words. But you do not speak of a cheerful world."

Simon was perplexed.

"What a saint's name does it matter to you how the world is compassed?"

Argathona understood the drift of his question.

"I am going into the world," she said, with decision.

Simon stared into her fine face. If one of the trees round about him had taken unto itself a vegetable voice, and told him as much of its intended travels in speech familiar to his French ears, he could scarcely have been more gravelled.

"You are going into the world," he growled, and the growl in his voice was meant to make it very plain to the girl that he thought she was talking nonsense.

But the girl answered his growling with the same unchangeable voice flowing from the same unchangeable countenance.

"I am going into the world to save my lover."

Simon was now one part diverted and three parts vexed at the girl's pertinacity. It was aggressively plain to him that she made far too much of one man at the expense of another, with nothing that he could see to warrant the partisanship.

"How will you find your way?" he questioned, drolly, mocking with eyes and tongue, and he thought he had posed her. But the girl's blithe face remained untroubled in its tranquillity of resolve.

"I shall find my way to my lover," she cried, and her voice rang in his hearing like the hunter's horn at the find of the deer. "My lover needs me; my lover is in danger; wherever he is my lover is alone without me as I am alone without him. I know that it were better for both of us not to be than to exist apart."

Simon laughed lustily, venting his spleen so, and the false thunder in his lungs shook his bulk as a sudden breeze shakes the flag-iris in the sedges. When he had done crowing and could speak like a Christian again:

"I have never known any lad to speak so for the loss of a lass," he assured her.

The dryad turned her unfathomable eyes on her jeering companion, and somehow, all of a sudden, his jesting seemed to lose its savor.

"There cannot be many men like my lover," she said, with clean assurance. "You have tramped so much through a muddy world and taken such stain in your travels that you have lost the thoughts of the solitudes and the sacred places. But here is the greenwood way of it. We have changed loves, he and I; we have changed hearts, he and I; where one is the other must be, though all the seas and all the mountains lie between us. If he be kept from me by guile I must win my way to him by craft, for that I know is what he would have me do."

Simon nursed his nose thoughtfully with his finger and thumb, eying the valiant lass and pondering as to whether she really meant what she said or whether all this ecstasy were only plain proof of the madness he shrewdly suspected.

"I wish you were a more reasonable rusticity," he grumbled. "The Duchess of Thebes is a very great, dangerous lady. I heard tell of her in Corinth that she dabbled in sorcery and was so skilled in the distillation of philtres that if ever a man drank a draught of her brewing he became her slave soul and body. What can your country-side courage do against her?"

Argathona's eyes radiated pity on his ignorance.

"I am of kin with the gods," she reminded him, austerely proud.

Simon twisted his features with a whimsical grimace that meant compassion for her madness and mirth at her earnestness.

"The gods will be of no use to you in the world beyond this wood. I do not know where they have gone, and in this regard you seem no morsel wiser than I, for all your phrases; but we seem to be both agreed in this, that they have gone, and in my world men raise shrines and altars to unite other powers."

"I think I shall still find love honored in the world," the dryad replied, confidently.

Simon whistled softly the fag end of a friendly drinking-song before he spoke. He was thinking grimly of what he and others like him honored as love in the world below the wood.

"I doubt if you would know the God of Love in some of his changes," he said at last. Then he went on, remembering and correcting: "Yet, as I am told, they hold pretty parliaments of love in Athens where jolly lords and dainty ladies wrangle to infinity over touches and phrases and prove very finical in discrimination."

Argathona was not disturbed by his doubts; she sang the same song of Olympian assurance to his unwilling ears.

"My lover bears my heart in his body and I bear his in mine. I will follow him to Athens; if needs must, I will follow him to the ends of the earth."

Simon tickled at his beard, looking at her with a dismal pity while he strove to light love's candles in the windows of his eyes and to speak to her wooingly, for he still cherished a desperate, dwindling hope for himself in the venture. So he again hazarded discouragement.

"You will spare yourself many pains and aches if you stay in the forest. Why can you not listen to me?" Even as he entreated he read in her face that his wooing was vanity, and he ended angrily in a challenge.

"I believe you would listen to me if I wore a silk coat and carried a smooth face."

The dryad smiled, divinely patient of his peevish speech.

"I would not listen to you," she said, "if you wore the robe of Zeus or showed like Apollo."

She turned away from him and stretched out her white arms towards the dark wood.

"Dear forest, where I have lived so long, the time has come when we must part. Dear birds and beasts, I must say you farewell. For I follow the forest law and I go to seek my mate."

Simon looked at her with a new wonder and a new approbation in his eyes.

"You are resolved?" he asked, and the girl answered him irrevocably:

"I am resolved."

"Then," said Simon, "I think I may blow out my lantern," and on the word he swung his lantern to the height of his face and drew back its door. Pursing his lips he whistled a curfew call, and his breath puffed out the feeble light of the candle.

"Why do you do that?" Argathona asked, with the naïve curiosity of a child.

Simon turned his head to Argathona, and the look on his face was at once roguish and reverential.

"I carry this lantern," he said, "daytime and nighttime, like my old-time pattern, looking for an honest fellow-being, a thing I could not find in Corinth and doubted to find in Athens. But now I believe I have found a true woman, for I call you a woman, by your leave, though you choose to call yourself immortal. Wherefore, out goes my sceptical glimmer, and if you are willing I will go with you to Athens as your honest friend and true servant; and, indeed, I think I may prove of service, for I know something of the rough edge of the world."

"You may come if you choose," Argathona answered, "and you shall give me advice, for I am strange to men and cities."

"Faith," said Simon, bluntly, "to begin with, you cannot go as you now are. Women wear other gear in these years of grace. I cannot say that they look better than you do, but truly they look very different."

"I shall not go as a woman," Argathona answered. "I shall go as a man."

Then, seeing that Simon stared at her with the greatest amazement his face had yet worn, she went on:

"Is not a man's life a good life still to live in Greece, as it was in the ancient days?"

Had Simon been blessed with a graver temper he could not choose but laugh.

"By the rood," he swore, "a man's life is as round a dish and as full of meat as ever, but 'tis never a dish for a maid to nibble at. Why, a man's life is a bustling, brawling business, noisy and jocund. Your true man is ever eating, drinking, loving, fighting. When there be no real wars for him to break heads in, he betters the heavy peace with a tournament."

The dryad's eyes looked inquiry, and Simon, guessing what she would know, expanded his matter.

"Your tournament," he explained, "is a brave game by which knights who are weary of idleness and quiet times put on their armor and take up their arms, and bang each other lustily in an appointed place just as if they were enemies, though for the most part they are honest friends and bear no malice for thrustings and thwackings."

Argathona's eyes widened and brightened as if she desired to win a prize in such kind of diversion, and her words showed her thoughts.

"If there be such jolly sports to share yonder," she cried, "then I must play my part in them."

Simon really hardly knew whether he ought to laugh or to cry at the simplicity of the witch.

"What a devil should a slim maid, be she woman or warlock, do at a tourney?" he gaped.

Argathona laughed a little at his bewilderment, and her laughter was pleasant as the piping of summer wind among summer thickets.

"Friend," she said, "you have seen that I am no weakling. Truly I have the strength of the strongest amazon that ever drew bow, and the amazons were as strong as the companions of Theseus. And I doubt if the men of to-day have the strength of the fellowship of Theseus."

Simon was inclined to resent the imputation cast upon an age that he adorned, but, remembering betimes that the girl who faced him had made so little ado with his strength, he grinned weakly and held his peace on that matter. Argathona continued:

"While I play a man's part in Athens I will find a way to save my lover, if he be ensnared as you say. For if I go as a man this woman of Thebes will welcome me as a friend."

Simon wagged his red head approvingly.

"By my faith," he said, "you seem strong enough and wise enough to wander the world alone; but I will go with you and serve you, because I love you, and I can teach you something of the world's ways that may help you, a stranger. But you are wise to go as a man if you think you will look like one."

"Friend," replied Argathona, "we of the woodland can use the woodland glamour, and what we strongly wish men to see us and think us I believe you will find that they so see and think. To-night we will rest in the forest; to-morrow we will make for Athens."

"Where is your male attire?" Simon questioned, dubiously. "For my part I have nothing but the rags I stand in."

Argathona laughed blithely.

"Let not that vex you. There are shepherds in the valley, and you shall go to these shepherds and buy for me a sheepskin suit and a shepherd's pipe and crook." Seeing a frown on Simon's face, she went on: "It may be that you have no coin in your scrip." Simon nodded bashfully. "That need not trouble you neither, for this wood holds many hidden treasures whose lurking-places are known to me, so I will find you a piece of gold for the shepherds. Then as a shepherd I will pass to Athens."

"Nay," Simon commented, gravely, "it will never do for you and me to trip into Athens at all adventure, stout man and slim maid, with no tellable tale to back them. Here is my rede, that we rest a full day in the forest while I tell you so much of the ways of us who live at the end of time as will serve you to play your part with persuasion."

Argathona nodded, wise enough to read the wisdom in his words.

"It shall be as you say," she agreed. "We will abide a day in the woodland and you shall lesson me in the ways of men of the Iron Age."

So said, so done. From the dawn of the next day to the same day's dusk Argathona sat at the feet of the soldier of fortune and listened while he spoke. He told her of the world as he knew it, a fair world made for Frenchmen to rule. He told her of its kings and its captains, and of the names and lineages and lives of those who now lorded it in Greece. Because he had a shrewd wit, with caustic words to lackey it, he made his tongue's puppets live more human than they always showed in knightly histories and monkish scripts. He painted frank pictures of great ladies, too; told truths of the customs of men with women and of women with men, and little doubting that he was doing aught to distinguish with praise, proved himself an excellent chronicler. But of the great faith of the world he spoke scantly and dully, caring for it little, understanding it less, and taking it for granted tranquilly as him seemed a soldier should. On her side, Argathona, keen to learn much about the living things she had to play with and strive against, eager to teach her age-long ignorance the game of the gray world, she had very little curiosity about the faith that had banished the gods of her infancy. And so she listened and learned much and learned little, and one more Attic day of all her wealth of days waxed and waned and left her as it found her, divinely young.

XI

THE CATALAN GRAND COMPANY

From the days when the Christian faith was born in Galilee of Judea, from the days when Hellas became portion and parcel of the Roman empire, the glory of Athens dwindled and withered through the centuries for more than a thousand years. Paul preached. Nero plundered. Philopappus patronized. Hadrian adorned. Herodes commemorated the loved and lost Regilla. Neo-Platonism persuaded its followers that the lamp of the Academy was still alight. The terror of the north swept upon the city as Spartan and Persian had swept upon her, only more bloody and more merciless than both, to be beaten back for a season by the waning strength of the Roman arms. The gleaming image of Athena stayed the rage of the triumphant Alaric, but could not stay the envy of Constantinople. Byzantium stripped Athens of her riches; Byzantium silenced the voices of her philosophers. Gloom of night settled upon the sacred place for generations till, after the fourth crusade and the fall of Constantinople, Boniface of Montserrat came to turn the Parthenon from a Greek church to a Roman Catholic cathedral, and the city of Theseus into a Frankish duchy. In the dawn of the thirteenth century Otho of the Rock became grand sire of Athens, and he and the descendants of his house ruled for a century, till the time came for Baldwin to take the throne.

The French nobles who throned in Hellas in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of Christendom knew nothing, or next to nothing, of the old-time glories of their home. The lions of Mycenæ told the occupants of Peloponnesus nothing of the king of men and his murderous queen, and the vengeance of Orestes leaping like a bright star to his aim. The chiefs in Attica viewed with indifferent eyes the masterpieces of antiquity still standing intact or almost blank of ravage upon the Attic plain and on the Attic hill. But the French lords of Peloponnesus and the French lords of Athens had a very liberal and deep affection for the civilization which they carried with them from their sweet land of France, and for those chivalrous institutions which made life one high delight to them. The best dream of the French gentlemen was to make the land of Greece as like the land of France as might be in all the grace and all the gayeties of life. To this end they lived in Attica as they lived in Languedoc, in Lacedæmon as in Limousin, and their greatest pleasure in their Hellenic empery was to make believe that they were in Paris or Provence. In the land where the Grecian gods had been hymned by Pindar, moulded by Phidias, painted by Apelles, and caricatured by Aristophanes, the adventurous French knights, who tricked themselves out with the titles of cities of Sparta and cities of Attica, bore to the golden land they governed all the pride and pomp and color that made their France so lovely in their eyes. They strove to make their lives as luxurious and as sumptuous as if they were kings of France and not lords of Grecian duchies, and they succeeded greatly in their purpose. French of Paris, French of Provence, French of Picardy, sang of love or commanded for battle in places where Socrates had died yesterday and Atreus the day before yesterday. All the parament of chivalry paraded, a riot of color and luxury, where Lycurgus had fed a strenuous people on bitter bread and brackish water, or played its games of mimic war and held its tribunals of fantastic love in the pale presence of the theatre of Dionysos.

The narrowness of the environment made these efforts after magnificence more conspicuous than they would have been in the country they had quitted. Gorgeous garments and splendid armor adorned and defended bodies cherished with pompous banquets and royal wines. But the ease of their condition did not weaken the limbs or the spirit of the French lords. Their passion for the tournament kept them hardy for their wars with each other, stiffening their voluptuousness with that desire to shine in strife which forbade pleasure to degenerate into effeminacy. Their passion for ballads and the ballad-maker's arts refined their wild, bright life with tales of ancient days and heroic ideals. Their passion for women, growing apace in the magical atmosphere of that enchanted land where the winds seemed to whisper the songs and lisp the names of old-time lovers, was saved by their persistent chivalry, artificial perhaps in form, but with a heart behind its artificiality, from lowering into the Oriental grossness that was the weakness of Byzantium. The history of the ages has no stranger as it has no more bravely painted page than that which records the rule of the French dukes in Athens and Peloponnesus.

If Athens in the dawn of the fourteenth century was strangely unlike the Athens of the Periclean age, the contrast was rather of one kind of splendor against another than of a present squalor with a splendid past. The capital of the French dukes of Athens surpassed in luxury and comfort any European capital of the time. Their commerce flourished, their port was populous with ships, their influence was felt, and their strength unquestioned all along the Greek littoral. Many of the other French princes in Greece had pomp and power, but Baldwin, Duke of Athens, overcrowned them all for wealth and power and magnificence. He delighted to beautify after the fashion of his time the spot that once had been the loveliest in the world, and if the shade of some great Athenian could have returned for an hour to the city of Cecrops, he must have regretted, indeed, the glories of the past; but, at the same time, he must have recognized that the barbarian who held by a strong hand the land of Deucalion was not denied some measure of the intelligence that goes to the making of a fair town and a great state. Duke Baldwin was always hospitable to strangers visiting Athens, and delighted to send them away brimmed with admiration of the civilization of Athens and the generosity of Athens's duke. If he did not set a kingly crown upon his helmet, he lived like a king, and could have entertained the monarch of France or the sovereign of England with an opulence not to be outdone in Paris or in London.

There was a policy in all this opulence and hospitality to strangers. Duke Baldwin owed much of his first supremacy in Athens to the presence in Thessaly of a band of free lances. When he arrived, hissing hot with haste, in his new duchy he found that his hold over his dominion was not to be unthreatened nor his rule untroubled. A prince of Epirus here, a prince of Vlachia there, menaced his unsteady empire. Even Duke Baldwin's bull-dog courage recognized that he was not strong enough to compete with his enemies single-handed. But Duke Baldwin was a man of resource, and he saw that there was a valuable alliance at hand. The Catalan Grand Company, having fought its fierce way through Macedonia, had planted itself upon the soil of Thessaly eager for more conquests. The Catalan Grand Company was a remarkable association of rascals, assassins, ragamuffins, blackguards, and admirable captains. It was originally formed in Spain with the avowed purpose of selling the arms and the bodies of the brotherhood to any one needing them and willing to pay the price. The Catalans had gone hither and thither serving this master and that, till at last their baleful star had led them, maugre the teeth of the Byzantine tyrant, to the land of Greece.