II
“No tree falls at the first stroke”—Northern saying.
“No tree falls at the first stroke”—Northern saying.
“No tree falls at the first stroke”—Northern saying.
“No tree falls at the first stroke”
—Northern saying.
“One touch of a certain three-cornered leaf,” the forester reasoned as he moved along the winding trail, “is able to make a man’s flesh change color and swell over his eyes like a wild hog’s fat. More power lies in the earth than simpletons think of. What would be wonderful about it if such water should breed a vapor befogging to the wits? Not the wits of all men, perhaps—it was seen that the courtman had his about him—but those of all who have not Sigmund’s strength against poison.” Reasoning relapsed into mortification. “It goes hard to be taught that I am one of the weaklings. Troll take the Pool!” For a while his track over the soft leaf-mould showed that his heels ground deeply.
Presently he made an effort to crowd the incident out of his thoughts by taking up the broken thread of his song, and reeling it off with a dogged energy that sent the words far through the silentforest and set its echo-heart athrob. They were brave words, telling the brave old tale of the wooing of Fridtjof the Bold; perhaps they would have charmed away his ill-humor if they had not been cut short.
Parting like gold-embroidered tapestries, two yellow-leaved bushes a little way ahead disclosed another courtman from the hunting train, a young man magnificent in scarlet leather clothes of distinctly un-Norse make. After a critical survey of the figure in deerskin, he lifted the forefinger of one gloved hand,—a gesture that had upon the forester the effect which the scarlet dress would have had upon a bull.
“Fellow,” he said blandly, “I have to tell you that your voice has had the good luck to please a noble maiden’s ears. Follow me that she may gratify her curiosity.”
Akin to the motion of his finger was a perpetual slight smile moulding his thin lips. The forester took note of that also, and felt antagonism become a deep satisfying force within him. Coming slowly to a halt, he picked his answer with drawling deliberation.
“Fellow, if you had not the good luck to be foreign to the forest, I would make you unpleasing to a noble maiden’s eyes. As it is, I have to say that to see me following you would be more aptto provoke curiosity than to gratify it,—and you may take that as best suits you!”
The stranger took it with the utmost quietness, observing as though to himself that it was surprising there should still be places where a churl thought he had the right to choose when he was commanded; but while he was saying it he was stepping from the bushes. Now he drew his sword from its jewelled sheath.
The gleam which the steel sent through the glade was reflected in the forester’s face. He made cordial haste to pluck forth his hunting-knife.
Glancing from that short blade to his own long one, the courtman hesitated an instant; then he laughed softly at himself.
“It is no lie about Norse habits that they stick to one like iron in frosty weather!” he murmured. “Almost I was in danger of treating the matter as a combat between equals.”
Having escaped that danger, he wasted no more time on preliminaries, but delivered his first thrust. If his opponent had stood upon ceremony, he would have been disabled by a pierced right arm.
Luckily it was the school of emergency that had given the forester his training. Though a smothered word betokened surprise, his instant leap backward carried him lightly out of range, and yet not so far out of reach but that his knife wasable to strike up the other’s point and take advantage of the opening to land a stroke upon the tasselled breast. A buckle turned the blade away, but the profanity of the contact could not be denied. The courtman lowered his weapon for the purpose of removing his gold-stitched gloves.
“I see now that I shall have to let off more of your hot blood than I thought,” he remarked as he tucked the gloves under his belt. “Since youwillhave it—”
Driving suddenly past the other’s guard, he drove his sword into the deerskin shoulder,—would have driven it through, indeed, if the bite of the knife into his wrist had not momentarily relaxed his grasp.
The forester recovered his balance coolly.
“It will then be a fair bargain if I let off some of your breath,” he returned, and straightway asserted the one advantage he had foreseen to offset the difference in blade-lengths by leading his adversary a round of gnarled roots and hidden hollows and tangles of creeping things.
As a trout knows the rapids, his feet knew the snares; but to the stranger it was like walking in fetters. What with the distraction of watching his footing and the difficulty of aiming, two out of every three thrusts went astray; while for every lunge that went home he got a wound in return.Twice his foot twisted on a hidden stone and he measured his length on the ground, plastering pineneedles and earth to every blood-stain. Twice he tripped over a root and fell headlong and almost into the arms of his jeering opponent. That the combat was between equals, there could now be no question.
That there could be any doubt of his ultimate victory, however, did not appear to enter into the courtman’s reckoning. After each fall he merely became a little more quietly determined, came on with a little more glitter in his ice-blue eyes. His unshaken assurance exasperated the forester at last; when he saw a chance to end it, he seized the opportunity promptly.
At the next lunge, instead of springing aside he took advantage of a hollow behind him to duck suddenly, so that the blade hissed like an outleaping flame above his head. Then, before the other could recover, he sprang upon him. Seizing his sword-wrist in an iron grip, he forced it aside, tore his own right arm free from the clutching fingers, and raised it to strike.
His arm rose,—but it did not fall. In the very instant of aiming, a cloak flew between him and his mark, enveloping him head and shoulders, smothering him head and face. Muscular hands followed the cloak, pinioning his elbows and dragginghim backward. Through the folds he caught a babel of exclamations; above them a girl’s anxious voice calling, “Is he wounded?” and a man’s rough tones answering dryly, “Only enough to spot his clothes, Jarl’s daughter.”
Jarl’s daughter! The forester had left off struggling—he understood that it would be foolishness in that grasp—now his wrath gave place to disgust. This was a pretty trick of the Fates, who had already snatched the fruit of victory from between his teeth, to follow it up by delivering him over to the upbraidings of an hysterical girl! Sullenly he gazed before him when at last they plucked off the cloak.
The first thing he saw was his little foster-brother in his gay page’s livery, just picking up the courtman’s plumed cap; but the sight did not improve his temper for he found that the boy avoided his glance of greeting. His brows drawing together, his gaze moved on over the picture.
It was a maiden’s following, certainly. The rugged men-at-arms surrounding him were far outnumbered by the slim pages who made a green hedge around the wounded favorite. Bright against the dark background, groups of maids and matrons rustled and fluttered. Only one figure in thescene had composure, a girl standing a few paces ahead of the others, erect and motionless as a stone column against tossing trees. It was her stillness that drew the forester’s attention to her curiously; then, looking, he forgot curiosity, forgot his recognition of her for the Jarl’s daughter, felt only the thrill of her beauty.
Long of limb, long of throat, she was nobly tall, her eyes but little below the level of his own. The habit fitting close the flowing curves of her body trailed heavily behind her, and a velvet mantle dragged from jewelled clasps; but her broad sloping shoulders bore their weight as lightly as her proudly poised head held up its great braids, hanging far down the purple folds like cables of red gold. No power had the sight of bared blades and struggling men to deepen or pale the exquisite color of her face, or shake the pride of her beautiful mouth. In their high spirit, her clear gray eyes were Valkyria’s eyes. Gazing at her, his heart leaped in his breast; he understood, for the first time, why a sea-wolf of a Viking might lie quiet in the net of a woman.
For the first time, also, he knew envy of his foe. Brushing aside the pages, the courtman advanced now, the long end of his mantle drawn up gracefully over his shoulder to hide the stains of his tunic. It was maddening to see how fit he lookedto bend before Brynhild the Proud and set to his lips the hand she gave him.
“I should be glad to know, madam, that I am pardoned for thus marring your pleasure with alarm,” he said. “Scarcely can I be easy in my mind until I hear that.”
To see such favor as hers squandered on such as he was worse than maddening. She answered most kindly:
“No man should have a better right to mar my pleasure than you who have so often made it. And it was bearing my message that became a misfortune to you! Will you receive my necklace for weregeld?” Reminded by the law-term, she glanced for the first time towards the prisoner, her white lids drooping coldly. “Let Visbur lay bonds on the fellow and take him where the lawmen can deal with him.”
It was not the tightening grip of the men that wrung words from the forester’s silence; it was the pang of standing ill with her that caused him to speak earnestly.
“One thing I wish, Jarl’s daughter, and that is that you yourself would hear how little I am to blame.”
Again she looked at him, this time squarely.
“You will have no cause to complain of the lawmen’s justice,” she said.
“Then will they judge me innocent, and howshall it be made up to me that I have endured the disgrace of bonds, and been a gazing-stock for your followers? Be as fair in your actions as you are fair in your face, noble one.”
The guards around gasped, but she did not belie her Valkyria eyes. As steel answers steel with a spark they answered the demand, even while her proud mouth resented his boldness in every curve. After a moment she turned back where a tree had fallen across the glade, and seated herself upon the mossy trunk.
“Will you lay it upon Norse custom and not upon me, my friend Olaf, if I think it necessary to grant the forester’s request?” she asked. “And will you support me further by feigning that this is a law-place and telling me here what he did that you disliked?”
“Is it true that Norse custom is so childish?” Olaf queried, with rising shoulders. Then as she continued to look at him entreatingly, he yielded, smiling, to come forward with playful ceremony and take up his stand before her.
While he was bowing, however, one of the guards—a burly ruddy-faced fellow—entered into the conversation, after the off-hand manner of Northern retainers. Hemming loudly, he held up the horn-handled knife which he had taken from the forester’s unresisting hold.
“This can be told about the youth, Jarl’s daughter,” he said, “that he is no better than a crazy Berserker. Behold with what a cheese-cutter he met the flail of Thorgrim’s son!”
“And not alone met, but also mastered the flail!” a second guard chuckled; while a third, their grizzled old leader, vented a gruff laugh and openly patted his prisoner on the back.
“I will hang you if Starkad’s daughter decides that way,” he declared, “but you may hang me if I do not tell afterwards that you were a young hawk!” Whereupon a rumble of acquiescence came from every point where a brass helmet gleamed amid the russet leaves.
At any other time the forester might have shown appreciation of their friendliness, but just now it was the favor of the purple-robed judge upon which his heart was set. The silver-trunked birches behind her were not more impassive than her finely chiselled face, as she ignored all but the man she had addressed.
When quiet was entirely restored, Olaf spoke lightly: “Most gentle law-giver, if it is through Norse eyes that we must look, I have to tell you that the churl is in no way to blame. That he should show rudeness is a result to be expected from the barbarity in the land. That I who am French-bred should have a wish to civilize himwas no less to be expected. As has been pointed out, he had no more than a hunting-knife; while my feet are more used to paved roads than to fox-trails. It made a merry game, altogether too merry to fall to the ground here. But for Norse law, fairest law-woman, there is no handle to take hold of. Turn him loose, and forget that so unworthy a happening ever quickened your fragrant breath.” He ended with another bow, his last words almost lost amid the applauding murmurs of the women and the pages.
With an unconscious gesture of relief, the Jarl’s daughter rose quickly.
“Now as always, your broad-mindedness puts all other Norsemen to shame,” she said. “For taking it in this way and making my task easy, I thank you much.” A second time she extended her hand to him, while over her shoulder she spoke coldly to the prisoner: “I give you peace, woodsman. Go your way.”
“Come behind the bushes and tell us more news about this fight,” the burly man-at-arms muttered in the forester’s ear as he gave him back his hunting-knife.
Pretending to hustle him along, they accompanied him eagerly, the gentlewomen making a great show of getting out of his path as out of the way of a bear unchained. But after he had madea dozen paces, the forester stopped, shook them off and turned back to Brynhild the Proud.
“This I will beg of you, Jarl’s daughter,” he said, “that you will tell me why you wanted to see me.”
The guards gave him admonishing nudges. The prettiest of the veil-bound matrons uttered a little scream of derisive laughter. The Jarl’s daughter turned haughtily.
Of her alone he seemed to be conscious as he advanced. “You admit that I am not blameworthy, yet I see that I have your dislike. Is it because I appear to you no better than a savage? I beg you to believe that I am not one. I beg you to believe that if I had known it was you who wanted me, I would have been as glad in coming to you as the lark in rising to the sun.”
Her gaze moving up and down between his moccasins and his mane of sun-burnished hair, she studied him wonderingly; but she was bred too high to flout him. She said, at last, with an inclination of her head:
“I owe you thanks for good-will. I will also confess that I was made curious by the Song of Fridtjof you were singing. You are the forester—are you not—whom men call the Songsmith? I have heard my brother tell of hearing you sing once, as he happened to be passing a hunter’s cabin. Iwished to ask why you sang words about Fridtjof that my father’s minstrels do not sing.”
“That, and more, I will tell you,” he answered. “The end of the song, I made out of my own imaginings. In the unsettled places where I live, one hears only those verses which the old people brought over the ocean under the hatches of memory. I got a habit of finishing out such fragments in the way I thought likeliest to be right. From that my nickname sprang. My foster-father, who had worked at a forge in his youth, said that all the skalds he had met with were like traders, who do no more than pass on what other men have made; but that a singer who melts scraps together and hammers them out in new shapes is a songsmith.”
The figure appealed to the guardsmen, drawing forth laughter and compliment; but that to the Songsmith was nothing beside the fact that in the expression of their mistress curiosity had deepened to interest.
“Why, that is no small thing to do!” she said. “Times out of number, when I have been listening to my father’s skald, I have wished that he could make an ending which would be new even if it were untrue, so that there might be something to keep awake for.”
Calmly oblivious to maidens’ frowns and matrons’murmurs, she let herself sink again upon the tree-trunk, and made him a sign to come nearer.
“I want to know why you have not brought such an accomplishment to market?” she inquired. “Where is your home?”
“It is not so easy to tell that, Jarl’s daughter, since it is unlikely that you have ever heard of Freya’s Tower. But it stands south of here, on an island which a bridge links to this—”
For the first time, one of the court-maidens drew near,—a slender spray of a girl, whose face was a pink bud peeping from a wood of brown hair.
“Ihave heard of it!” she cried, eagerly. “The skalds are not so bold as to sing songs about it; but no maiden but knows how the Swedish Viking Rolf stole King Hildebrand’s daughter out of her father’s court in Norway, and brought her to these shores and built her a bower and—”
Her impulse would have carried her still further if the Jarl’s daughter had not laid a light hand on her arm.
“I also know of the place,” Brynhild said. “Is it there you live? A band of Rolf’s comrades still live there, I have been told—Yet are you too young to have place among them! Will you tell me your name and kin?”
As he started to reply, the Songsmith’s glancefell upon the handsome little page who had refused to recognize him, and who had now taken advantage of the delay to approach Olaf the French and set about removing the débris of dead leaves from his gold fringes. The forester’s dark eyes gave out a glint of mischief.
“Willingly—and more than that—Jarl’s daughter,” he answered. “I will have one of your own train name me to you, so that you may know it is well done.” Stepping aside, he touched the boy on the shoulder. “Eric, look up here and tell your mistress my name and kin.”
In a panic the youngster whirled, denial trembling on his tongue. Then he met the unswerving gaze from under the level brows; his eyes fell and his color rose. Seemingly without his consent, his lips formed the words:
“Randvar is his name; and he is the son of Rolf and Freya, King Hildebrand’s daughter.”
Brynhild rose from her seat. “The son of King Hildebrand’s daughter!” she repeated, and all her gentlewomen breathed it after her.
But it was Rolf’s name that the guardsmen echoed, closing in upon Rolf’s son to shake his hand and his shoulder.
“Rolf the Viking! A well-known name have you!”
“Now he was my shipmate for five years!”
“My father harried England with him—”
“A better warrior never fed the ravens!”
“Small wonder his son measured a knife against—”
“I take credit upon myself that I was the first to clap you on the shoulder!”
But between the brass helmets Rolf’s son caught a glimpse of the Jarl’s daughter, and made the discovery that in turning his low rank into a high one he had but turned the cheek of his offence. She said, when she could make herself heard:
“There seems to me to be two sides to this matter. For a churl to bear such a bold look beneath his brows would be bad enough, but I find it far worse that a man of high birth should form himself after the manner of savages. Have you no regard for your King’s blood?” Again her glance took stock of his deerskin husk and his untrimmed hair.
That she could not also take stock of the brand of temper with which the King and the Viking had bequested him, was shown by the fact that, even more than her words, her look was a challenge. In the fillip of a finger perversity possessed him, and moved him to answer:
“If my King’s blood cannot show itself through a layer of deerskin, daughter of jarls, I hold it for a spring that is run dry.”
A wrinkle of displeasure marred the satin smoothness of her forehead. “That speech would make your fortune with my brother. Pray keep such word-flourishes for him. I would show you honor if I might. This empty forest life is unbecoming a man of your birth. You are welcome to join my following and make new song-endings in my household, if you like.”
His voice was more indifferent than formality prescribed, his bow less deep.
“With all thankfulness, I should not like it,” he answered.
Her frown was more than a wrinkle as she asked him, “Why not?”
“I do not lack reasons. One is that I think my life more full than yours, that is laid out in straight lines like an old woman’s herb-garden and weeded of all excitement. Another is that I do not think a man adds any honor to himself by following a woman.”
Again she was the only quiet figure amid a hubbub, the women crying out, the guards themselves growling remonstrance. She stood queenfully quiet, though her face blazed.
“Even churls are apt to behave with respect towards me,” she said, and the contempt in her voice was keen enough to draw blood in his cheeks. He answered in kind.
“I behave with respect when I give you the truth. Are lies more to your mind?”
The tumult passed into the more alarming accompaniment of silence. The flash of her steelgray eyes was as though they had drawn swords. From weapon-play Rolf’s son had never turned back; he faced her readily, his look giving back whatever it received.
So they fronted each other until there was kindled in Brynhild’s face a kind of fury, the rage of a Valkyria upon encountering her match. Just in time, the words on her lips were checked. Like a pebble into a pool, a page’s voice fell upon the pause.
“Ingolf comes seeking you, Jarl’s daughter.”
The spell was shattered. In less time than it took the Songsmith to shift his weight, Brynhild had shifted her expression, recalled to her wonted world. Women and pages started up like a covey of impatient birds. With his blandest smile, Olaf stepped forward and claimed his own.
“In all likelihood, madam, the messenger brings word that your noble father is ready to take his meal, and seeks you at the spot where he left you. Will you allow me so much happiness?” Baring his head, he extended his hand.
She laid hers upon it immediately, motioning Eric to take up the grape-purple train. All atonce she seemed to the forester to have withdrawn herself an immeasurable distance beyond his ken. Across the space her voice came to him coldly.
“I would have shown you friendliness, Freya’s son, but it may be that this way is better. The truth grows in me that you would hardly know how to behave in a court. It is likely you have chosen your life wisely. I wish you good luck in it, and bid you farewell.”
She bent her head; her women dropped him awe-struck courtesies. Under cover of a salute, Olaf’s hard blue eyes held him long enough to remind him that their quarrel was by no means at an end. Then, leaning on the courtman’s arm, the Jarl’s daughter turned and left, nor looked back, though Rolf’s son watched as long as he could catch any gleam of her bright hair.
When the band had crossed the glade and gained the trees, they met the helmeted figure; and following the instant of meeting, it seemed to the forester that the breeze brought him a sound of shrieks. But whatever their cause, it did not delay the departure. Soon the many-colored troop had become blended with the many-colored leaves, and forest solitude closed again around him.