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There is no reality which holds him when the heart is young; there is no oak so gnarled that it may not give birth to a dryad; and if one had a hundred arms one need not fear to open them; one has but to clasp his mistress and all is well. As for me I did not understand what else there was to do besides love, and when any one spoke to me of another occupation I did not reply.
Like the Latins, the Greeks at first saw a mystery, a spirit, in every part of life; each fountain had its nymph, each forest glade its dryad; and they felt the gods to be returning to fresh life when spring came with its flowers. Each of their own activities also had its unseen genius.
It was only big and low and ponderous, as always, as he went back and told the old man, who sat drinking it in, every detail of that night before, when he had stooped and risen and sent the stone jug crashing through the window when he had turned, with blood dripping from his chin, to find Dryad Anderson there in the doorway, eyes wide with horror and loathing.
I should not be at all surprised if one of these days some savant does not discover a papyrus containing a missing page of Holy Writ, which will ascribe the reason of the first bloodshed to a love affair. Perhaps there were wood nymphs in those days, as we are assured there were giants, and some dainty Dryad might have driven the first pair of human brothers to desperation by her charms!
He conceives the delusion that beneath the bark lives a wood nymph, and he would feel with his hands the palpitant flesh of the goddess, he would trucidate the Dryad, violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men. "He is jealous of the woodman who can murder, can massacre, the trees, and he raves. Tensely he listens and hears in the soughing wind a response to his cries of desire.
The Dryad had seen it; she knew, thus it will be repeated tomorrow. The Dryad stood among the fragrant roses, and thought she knew them, and had seen them in her own home. She also saw red pomegranate flowers, like those that little Mary had worn in her dark hair.
One morning a cutter from the fleet was reported from the mast-head, and we expected that we should soon have our letters from England, when the Dryad threw out the signal for six sail of praams in shore. The two frigates made all sail in chase, leaving the cutter to follow us how she could.
It would have been hard for her to have explained just why it was so, but Dryad Anderson had been sitting there in the unlighted front room of the little once-white cottage before Judge Maynard's boxlike place on the hill, watching hour after hour for that light to blink out at her from the dark window of Denny Bolton's house on the opposite slope.
She thought of Mary, poor Mary, the ragged merry child, who wore the red flowers in her black hair. Mary was now here, in the world-city, rich and magnificent as in that day when she drove past the house of the old clergyman, and past the tree of the Dryad, the old oak. Here she was certainly living, in the deafening tumult.
I did not know this until to-night; but now that I know it, I cannot keep the money, and so I send it back." And, handing the little bag to the Dryad, he bade her good-night, and turned toward his cottage. "Good-night," said the Dryad. "And I thank you over, and over, and over again, you good old man!"
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