Part 17

"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."