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.