Part 5

Chroniclers of the age do not seek to deny, though they strive to attenuate, the fact that the meeting of father and son was not wholly felicitous. The young soldier who read poetry on all days and even wrote poetry on some days, and who venerated the memory of a fair and unhappy lady, found his inherited delicacy something offended by the boisterous joviality of Baldwin, the huge eater and drinker, the furious fighter, the promiscuous wooer, quarrelsome when sober, quadruply quarrelsome in his cups. Duke Baldwin, for his part, thought his son's native delicacy of taste effeminate, sneered patently at his sobriety, ramped like a madman at his passion for books, and was flagrantly disgusted by the indifference with which a son of his blood viewed the genial and yielding lemans of the paternal court. But if the young man failed to satisfy his father's wishes in all things, if he failed to explain his tastes for reading and luting, at least he proved satisfactory in other matters. His physical strength was an abiding joy. When Duke Baldwin grasped his son's hand in greeting he strove to crush it to pulp between his merciless fingers, but young Rainouart gave him back grip for grip and squeeze for squeeze till the blood came from the finger-nails of both, and Duke Baldwin was glad in two fashions to unclinch that clasp.

Thereafter it something consoled Duke Baldwin to reflect that if the lad from Paris had a womanish weakness for books and music, at least he could ride as straight and wield lance and sword and axe as well as any youthful paladin of Greece. And if the youth disdained the snares spread for him by the amorous damsels of Athens, he soon made himself friends with the gallantest of the young swaggerers, who learned to love him more for his sinews of steel than for his heirship to the duchy. Duke Baldwin was as volubly proud of his son's skill in arms as he was bitterly ashamed of his skill in arts, and he would have been willing enough in his rough-and-tumble way to let his pride of the one blot out his contempt of the other. But the son would have found it hard in any case to forget Duke Baldwin's neglect of his mother, and he saw nothing to his credit to commend in the man whom he knew to be his father. So it came about that the duke and his son did not see very much of each other, and that while the duke was holding prolonged revels with rollicking swashbucklers and frolicsome, complaisant ladies, the young prince mostly chose to ride abroad, a solitary explorer of the lovely Attic land, dreaming his dreams. He knew little more than honest Simon or than any other French adventurer, gentle or simple, then in Greece, of the ancient days and the ancient fame. When his horse carried him abroad to Colonos or Marathon, or, as it had carried him this day, to the farthermost edge of the Eleusinian wood, his memory was neither pleased nor troubled by thoughts of Œdipus or Miltiades or the rites of Demeter. All he asked when he took the road was to pass through pleasant champaigns and presently to dismount and lie at ease in shady places and read unceasing in the Romance of the Rose, and wonder unceasing if ever Good-Greeting would take him by the hand and lead him through the thicket to the place where the Holy Rose-bud awaited him. For Rainouart dreamed day and night of the rose that he had never found. He had sailed across the seas to Athens with a whole and lonely heart. Whole and lonely his heart had remained at the court of the Duke of Athens, though there, too, as at the court of Philip the Fair, beautiful women swarmed like butterflies, spreading out their colored wings in the ceaseless sunlight, and ever ready to smile their brightest when the young prince came a-nigh. But Rainouart paid them no heed. He was courteous to them because they were women; he disliked them because they were light women; he dreamed of a star. Not yet had he loved the loveliest or wooed the worthiest.

III

ARGATHONA

Simon sat up and rubbed his eyes while he stared back at the damsel. At first he thought that he must unawares have slipped into sleep and that he was still dreaming. Primarily he had heard no sound of footsteps through the wood; further, the girl who faced him was radiantly unlike any woman he had ever seen--and Simon in his time had seen many women. To begin with, she was taller than is the wont of womanhood, seeming tall even to him, who carried four inches over six feet. This was the first thought in Simon's drowsy mind, surprise at the stranger's height; the next, as his brain escaped from the nets and snares of sleep, was conviction that the stranger's face was fairer than any woman's face he had ever seen awake or dreaming. It was beautiful with an unfamiliar type of beauty, though he remembered dimly some ancient statues once seen and little heeded in the garden of a house of pleasure in Byzantium whose features were like the features of this woman. Her head was nobly set upon her neck; her yellow hair was gathered into a knot above the nape; her eyes shone with the most wonderful, changeful blue--they were like the sea, they were like the sky, they were like the waters of forest fountains, the floods of mountain streams. Her comely, upright body was clothed in a kind of smock of white stuff girdled about her middle with a golden girdle of ancient handicraft; her arms were bare from the shoulder; her legs were bare from the knees; her feet were shod with sandals of leather. From the smoothness of her cheeks, from the soft color of her lips, from the slimness of her limbs, from the firm swell of her breasts beneath the fine garment, Simon would have guessed her age to be eighteen or thereabouts. Yet she seemed at once child, girl, and woman, with something boyish, too, in the firmness of her forms, in her balanced carriage, supple as an athlete's, in her air of alert repose. Never had he seen anything so vividly young; the very spirit of youth and joyousness seemed to shine in her glance, to hover on her lips, to quiver about her body as summer air quivers with the heat. Her naked arms, her naked legs were neither tanned by the sun nor stained with forest-travel; on the strong fingers of her fine hands the nails were clear-pink as sea-shells; through the candor of her skin he could see the blue veins wander. She held a bough of myrtle in her right hand, and played with it as she gazed at the man on the grass, and a childlike mirth danced in her kind, wise eyes. Her sweet mouth smiled at his awakening senses, and then she spoke--and here was a marvel! He knew what she said as well as if she were his countrywoman, and yet--it was odd--and yet she did not seem to speak as folk spoke any French that he had ever heard from salt Normandy to the Spanish hills.

"Good-evening, traveller," the girl said, and at the sound of her salutation Simon knew that he was not dreaming but wide awake, and he scrambled clumsily to his feet.

"Saints and angels!" he ejaculated, crossing himself.

The girl laughed, and her laughter was as pleasant as the tinkling of sheep-bells in a meadow.

"Do not be fearful, friend," she said, in that same flowing, unfamiliar, appreciable speech; "I will do you no harm."

Hearing this astonishing promise, Simon was quite himself again. That a lass should pledge her word not to hurt him was hugely amusing.

"No, I should guess not, prettykin," he guffawed. "But what does a fair maid in this forest?"

The girl's forehead wrinkled a little in displeasure as the bray of his laughter jarred the serenity of the cloistered trees.

"I live in the forest," she answered.

Simon stared anew at her white arms, her white legs, her unscorched face and unstained raiment.

"I live here all alone, too, save for the birds and the beasts and the trees and the flowers. The foolish Athenians are so fearful of the forest that they never come near its kindly shelter. You are not an Athenian?"

Simon shook his head stoutly.

"No, I thank Heaven," he said; "I am a Frenchman from Rouen." He spoke with a proper pride.

"I thought you could not be," the girl said, gravely, "when I saw you lying so at your ease on the grass and heard you snoring. No Athenian would do that."

Simon reddened a little. Frenchman of Rouen though he was, he had this in common with lesser men: he resented the imputation of snoring.

"Do no Athenians snore?" he questioned, grumpily. The girl laughed again.

"Nay," she said, demurely, "I meant that no Athenian would lie here in the twilight. I have seen no one sleeping in these shades for ages, though I have lived in the forest all my life."

"No great slice of time, I take it," Simon suggested, gallantly. His slow mind was much puzzled by the maid, but his quick flesh was enamoured and he was much the body-servant. The girl looked at him thoughtfully.

"Longer than you think. I cannot tell how often I have seen spring swell into summer, mellow into autumn, and descend into winter, for the years in their seasons are alike to me; but, I suppose, more than a thousand times."

Simon stared agape.

"More than a thousand times? Pray, how old may you be, young woman?"

"I cannot tell," the girl answered, thoughtfully. "I do not think of time. Why should I, being come to my full growth? Time will change me no more. I shall be as I am for always."

Simon frowned in dubiety.

"What is your name, young woman, and where do you belong?"