SIMON BLOWS OUT HIS LANTERN
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
McCarthy, Justin H. (Justin Huntly)
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.