IV
“Where I see the ears, I expect the wolf”—Northern saying.
“Where I see the ears, I expect the wolf”—Northern saying.
“Where I see the ears, I expect the wolf”—Northern saying.
“Where I see the ears, I expect the wolf”
—Northern saying.
Neither of them paid any attention to Snowfrid on her return, and the girl on her side seemed to find her thoughts quite as interesting as conversation. After a few minutes, she said that she was going to bed, and lighted a splinter at the embers. The firelight, as she bent, showed her bashful mouth to be smiling with the memory of kisses. She seemed to be walking in a blissful dream as she went lightly up the stairs.
What aroused Randvar, finally, was the consciousness that his foster-mother was moving with unnatural deliberation. Sitting up to look at her, he found that her gaze had become fixed upon the space beyond the fire, and she was lifting her arm from her knee to stretch it out in that direction.
“Look at that wolf yonder,” she said.
“A wolf?” He rose to his feet, bent to pick up a brand. Then as his gaze followed her finger,he dropped the wood impatiently. “It is the fire dazzling you. There is no wolf there.”
Yawning, Erna lifted both her arms to stretch them above her head. “I forgot that I was seeing with the eyes of my mind, instead of with the eyes of my body,” she said. “It stood yonder, where the moonlight ends and the firelight begins. There was a goldlike glow to its fur, and its eyes were as bright embers. It must have been the Other Shape of Helvin Jarl.”
The voice in which he repeated the name was in such contrast to her monotone that it startled himself; he went on with stern restraint: “Do you intend to tell me that Helvin Jarl’s wanderings will lead him here, where I shall have to face him and explain what ailed me to-day?”
She would not curtail the yawn that was stretching her jaws, but she nodded.
Randvar made no attempt to hide his impulse, snatching his coat down from the antler-rack for instant flight.
“It is a good thing that you can do the honors without me,” he said. “I shall spend the night with the birds in Fenrir’s Jaws.”
But Erna’s mouth was again practicable for talking, and she was using it drowsily. “Yes, I know for certain that he will come by here. And I am altogether too sleepy to remember anything aboutmanners. I will lose no time in getting out of your way.” Rubbing her eyes with one hand, she gathered up her knitting with the other, as oblivious to his position as though she had never understood it.
It came back to her foster-son, then, that mental numbness follows as well as precedes the use of double sight. There was nothing to do but throw the cloak upon the floor and himself into a sulk, while she moved through the routine of her nightly tasks, making sure that Snowfrid had covered the jar of venison broth, letting down against the fresh night wind two or three of the bearskin curtains with which the arches were provided.
“If I should ever get so dulled by wine as she by this,” he fumed inwardly, “I should smart for it while her tongue could wag; yet how much better is she than drunk?”
When she had climbed stiffly up the stairs, and the light of her torch-splinter had been swallowed by the upper darkness, his resentment overflowed his lips.
“Again I declare my belief that weird powers are an accursed hindrance. What avail is it to warn a man of coming evil if no way is shown him to ward it off?” He emphasized his words by a kick at the great log just before him.
The sudden flare of flames and flight of sparksand jarring of charred parts asunder seemed to afford him some relief; while regarding them, he bethought him of a loop-hole.
“After all, I do not know how we make it out that the visitor must be Helvin! A wolf is the animal-spirit that runs before many a valiant man. Nine chances to one, it will be no more than the French Olaf in search of him.”
The possibility made his alarm seem senseless. Snapping his fingers at the world beyond the bright ring, he gave the log a second kick, this time of friendly correction.
“Comes the Devil himself, he must have no fault to find with the hospitality of Freya’s Tower,” he said, and set to work to replenish the fire.
Tearing the great saplings free from the pile and breaking them resoundingly under his heel, he worked too vigorously for a while to leave any space for brooding, and he had no opportunity to take it up again when the task was finished. Even as he rose from laying on the last bough and turned again to the outer dusk, he saw the grape-vine thrust aside from the head of the path—saw a man appear in the opening and stand there—a peculiarly proportioned man whose breadth of shoulder and length of arm suggested that he had been formed for towering tallness, and that it wasblasting mischance which had stopped him at medium height.
Randvar’s panic took the form of obstinate unbelief. Even when the apparition quitted its hold on the vine and came slowly towards him over the grass, he doggedly refused to believe that the Fates would be so contrary.
But on the spot where the moonlight ended and the firelight began, the visitor came to a stand-still; the red glow meeting him eagerly illumined him from head to foot. There was no mistaking the gray garments, blood-drenched and torn; there was no mistaking the mass of blood-red hair; and looking at the haggard face in the sinister frame, the Songsmith’s own figure came back to him, “fire cased in flesh.” In the ash-gray eyes, live embers were glowing. Suddenly something else came to Randvar,—a consciousness that murderous hatred was looking at him out of those eyes.
Scorn he had been prepared for, but this—this amazed him. It was instinct that acted to stiffen him alertly as he made salute, saying, “I give you welcome, Helvin Jarl.”
Whatever his temper, Starkad’s son had a Jarl’s dignity of bearing. He answered grimly:
“I hold that welcome for true which is told by the face as well as by the tongue. I think you did not expect to see me so soon?”
That seemed so easy to answer that Randvar had said “No,” before he recollected the truth, when he amended it with “Yes,” and stopped short in angry confusion. His embarrassment was not lessened by the inevitable next question:
“Why did you run away when I called to you?”
He said desperately, at last: “Jarl, I do not know how to put it into words. You can believe that I went mad.”
He had braced himself to meet jeering laughter, to endure it without strangling the jeerer. It took him a breath’s space to realize that Helvin’s mind was no longer on him. The arm by which he had been steadying himself against the pillar had doubled under him like a broken reed; now he swung forward against the stone, and would have pitched into the fire if Randvar had not leaped the flames and caught him.
When he had lowered him upon a bench with his back against a support, the next move was naturally to fill a horn at the wine-cask and bring it to him. Remembering only his old feeling towards the Jarl’s son, Rolf’s son performed the service with swift good-will. He was recalled to their present relations by Helvin’s lifting a hand in refusal of his hospitality.
It obliged him to fall back a step and hesitate,balancing the rejected cup, but it emboldened him presently to protest.
“Jarl, it does not seem to me that this matter is going according to good sense. That I have done nothing to earn friendship, I own; but I deny that I have done aught to call for ill will. If you think me a milksop, I cannot come to words with you about that; but it is the truth that I would have been eager in joining you.”
Leaning back with closed eyes, Helvin’s face was yet drawn awry by mocking laughter.
“Eager!” he murmured. “Eager!” Then, “It may be that if I had not come here to-night, your eagerness would have urged you to seek me out in the Town?”
“Surely not. I did not say that I had the wish to be thrown out of your hall.”
“More likely would you have been carried out,” Helvin answered dryly.
Despite his resentment, Randvar had a feeling of admiration for a man who dared say such a thing to him,—a man whose exhausted body would have been a rag in the forester’s hands. He said, as he turned and threw the untasted wine into the fire:
“If you have set your heart on hating me, have it your own way. It must be because your temper has been tried to-day. I will only say that Iam sorry, for I have always felt a liking towards you.”
Though his head continued to lean heavily against the pillar, the Jarl’s eyes opened to flash at him. “Excepting once to-day and once last season, when you sang in a hunter’s cabin, I do not know that I have ever seen you.”
“I mean that I have been so told about you—” Randvar was beginning, but was checked as much by his own sense of intrusion as by a flame from the smouldering eyes.
The young Jarl went on haughtily: “It had come to my mind, before, that my affairs must be a juicy mouthful for gabblers to chew over the fire; but I did not know that the things they said were the kind to attract friends to me, and there will be much awanting before I believe it.”
Randvar gave up then; shrugging, he said only: “Believe whatever you like about it; yet I wish I had a chance to prove my good-will.”
Again he expected the jeering laughter, and again he missed his foretelling. A long time Starkad’s son sat staring out at the darkness, strange expressions playing over his white face like flickerings of his inner fire; then, at last, his thoughts formed themselves into slow-spoken words:
“Never could it happen that my look encountered you without recalling how I saw you thismorning,—yet what else is to be done? To hold enmity against a man who offers me good-will—This, at least, you have never heard of me, Songsmith, that I am low-minded! Only one way is open to me.” He stretched out his hand for the horn. “I will accept it from you now,” he said, and drained gratefully the second draught his host brought him, the rich juice imparting some of its own warm life to his ghastly face. He drew himself erect as he gave back the cup. “There shall be peace between us, only I make it a condition that you shall enter my following.”
Once or twice before the conversation had taken turns unexpected to Randvar, but nothing to compare with this.
“You make that acondition!” he repeated.
Helvin’s finely marked brows drew nearer together. “You should not take it ill, if you have as much mind to serve me as you said a while ago. You shall have the honorable post of my song-maker,—my father’s skald is years overdue in Valhalla.”
To imagine such an offer in his day-dreams had seemed to the Songsmith as natural as eating; but hearing it now in his waking ears, he wondered if he were not asleep. He said, “I give you thanks,” but so dazedly that like lightning playing over a distant peak, a flash of that devil-mockery flickered over Helvin’s face.
“What now! Does your brisk friendship get weak in the knees when it comes to trusting yourself in my power?”
Flushing, Rolf’s son swallowed a boast and answered only: “Why should I be afraid, Jarl? You have given me your word that this happening shall not weigh against me.”
Again it struck him as odd the way Helvin leaned forward and scrutinized him, long and incredulously.
“I did not mean because of this matter,” he said, at last. “I meant because you might feel some doubts about the turn of temper I have.” The strange mockery of the smile in which his lips drew away from his white teeth, as he said that, was made stranger still by the awful intentness of his eyes.
So much strangeness began to tell upon Randvar’s stock of patience. He said bluntly:
“Jarl, if the truth must be told, I have no doubts whatever about your temper, for I have seen plainly that you have a very bad one. But neither have I been used to lamblike men. Willingly will I strike a bargain on these terms, if I have the choice.”
After they were out, the words struck him as being a trifle unceremonious; he did not wonder much that Starkad’s son should sit staring likeone dumfounded. But that scorn should gradually grow up in his face!
“Behold, I believe you!” the young Jarl said with biting slowness. “I believe you have the Devil’s boldness to match against my Devil’s nature,—and at the back of that, the ambition of Lucifer! Now, it is told that the closeness of a court breeds rottenness; but what shall be said of such foulness as this, out in the forest’s untainted air? When such as I go before, a worse is not to be looked for behind; and this man knows it; and still is he willing to sell his manhood for my miserable gifts!”
It was not only his voice and his words that bit, but his look as well. Rolf’s son winced under the smart, and spoke between his teeth.
“Such wrong you do me, Helvin, Jarl’s son, that it will be hard work for you to atone for it. If I had been willing to sell my manhood for gifts, would I not have put on your father’s yoke? That I want to become your man is because I expect that you will make following you an honor. The evil I know of you I think no more your fault than I think it blame to an oak that a poison vine is thrown around its branches. Now, as things stand, I believe you will shake it off, and the oak strength in your breast will send your mind up oak-high and oak-broad to be a strong pillar to other men.”
He had got his temper back by the time he finished. From under his level brows, his eyes looked steadfast as sunlight into the face of his lord. As the sun draws a tree upward, so the young Jarl was drawn upright by the look.
“All my life,” he breathed, “have I believed that of myself, but never did I think to find another who would believe it—who could believe it! Does not some troll mock me?”
The Songsmith answered: “I think you know that I speak the truth.”
Looking into his eyes, it seemed that Helvin did know it. It seemed that he was opening his lips to say so, when into the stillness was dropped a sound like the distant clink of spur against stone. In the beat of a pulse, his face had become distorted by that hatred which springs from fear. He dropped back upon the bench, his words slipping out disjointedly.
“Let us see who has dared to follow me—who has dared! Mind this—that you make it appear as if I lingered to hear you sing. Go yonder to your harp, if that be a harp!”
Though of home-make and rude shape, it was a harp that hung on the pillar above the bed of fox-skins. Laying it on his breast, the Songsmith played as he was bidden,—random chords that fell absently from the ends of his fingers. Standingthere in the shelter of the bearskin that had been drawn across the arch, he could not longer see the head of the path; but he knew when the pursuer emerged from the bushes by Helvin’s smothered cry:
“Olaf!”
Gripping the edge of the seat, the Jarl leaned there gazing out with distended eyes. “He is the likeliest man to find it out and follow.... Since the day of my birth he has hounded me.... He followed me into the world by an hour, but I think he will go out of it before me.”... His voice died away in murmur,—ceased at last so that between the harp-chords could be heard the soft rustle of footsteps through grass. Soon after that, the imposing form of Olaf the French came into the range of the Songsmith’s vision.
Not to Randvar either had it occurred that Olaf could be seeking any but the Jarl. It amazed him, also, that at sight of the gray-clad figure leaning on the bench Thorgrim’s son showed unmistakable surprise.
“Lord!” he said. Then, with the suavest gesture in his stock of French graces: “Lord, I would give much if I had not this appearance of having so little regard for your orders as to come prying upon your grief. Believe me—”
“My grief!” Helvin repeated. “My—” A quiverof terrible laughter undermined his voice and it fell; then, in the drawing of a breath it rose defiantly. “Since this matter has been spoken of, let me make it plain to you that you may make it plain to others, and tongue need never be laid to it again.I have no grief.Nor to save any one’s feelings will I make pretence of any. Let no man urge it on me, if his ears would go unscathed!”
Olaf made no attempt to urge it, certainly. As in toleration of some noble whim, he smiled blandly and bowed acquiescence. After a moment the Jarl resumed curtly:
“If it was not to seek me that you came hither, what may it be that you want?”
That it might be to finish their interrupted duel had already occurred to Randvar; but if he imagined that Olaf would have any difficulty in presenting their quarrel in a light favorable to himself, his estimate fell short. The French One answered without hesitation:
“It so happens that I am in this neighborhood, Jarl, because your men have made a night-camp near the head of the Island. And I am come to the Tower to fulfil a task I have set myself, which is to avenge on this fellow his insolence towards your sister.”
“My sister!” the young noble repeated, sitting erect.
“In this wise will I answer you, lord, as is the very truth. This morning the gold-adorned maiden chanced upon him in the forest; and after the fashion of damsels with things that are new to them, she showed interest in his jingling accomplishments. Word followed word until, on discovering that there was gentle blood in him, she had gone so far as to honor him with an invitation to join her following. You would say that if he had one good strain in him he would have shown thankfulness for her favor. Instead of that, however, he answered her even with ill-temper, jeered at the life she offered him, ended the talk by informing her that he did not think her service good enough for him. If you think I am making it out worse than it is, I shall not blame you,—only ask him to deny it.”
It is strange how different one’s own sentiments can seem when echoed by another’s mouth, and after time has allayed the irritation from which they sprang. The song-maker had enough gentle blood to dye his face at the recollection of his quarrel with the beautiful Brynhild; nor could he meet the glance the Jarl bent on him, but stood grinding the cedar twigs under his heel and wishing that they were some portion of the French One’s comely body.
But Helvin Jarl spoke tranquilly. With thepassing of his belief that Olaf was in pursuit of him, fierceness like a storm wind had passed from his bearing and left him jarlfully poised.
“That is to be said of his fault, beausire, that it needs mending; but hardly are you the man to do it. This one thing is enough to hinder it, that you are known to be the most jealous of all my sister’s suitors. Think only how spiteful tongues might slander you, and say that instead of resenting rudeness you were in truth avenging it on the Songsmith that Starkad’s daughter showed him such great kindness! Better that you hand it over to me, beausire, since, besides being her brother, I am also answerable for this man. For I may as well take this time to make it known that the Songsmith has consented to enter my household, and make for me the songs which, even before I strayed here to-night, I found pleasure in. What needs be said, I will say, beausire, and overtake you shortly.”
Rising, he made a gesture of dismissal which, if it lacked French grace, had at least Norse decision. Before it Thorgrim’s bland son was forced to bow, and, bowing, to back out of the circle of the firelight. When he had become a dark shape in the moonshine, the Jarl turned to where his new follower was waiting in keen discomfort.
“Do not imagine,” he said, “that I am goingto pretend to be surprised that you lost your temper with my sister. So has her haughtiness grown, that what I wonder at is that some man is not driven to slay her. Only for your own sake do I remind you—as so often I have been reminded—that good manners are like a coat of mail in that every breach of them opens a hole for the thrust of your enemies.”
Of reproof it was the mildest. In his self-dissatisfaction, the song-maker was even moved to outdo it, and muttered with another kick at the log in front of him:
“You say less than you might if you wanted to push the matter. It is seen that your sister thinks me no better than a boor.”
“I should be two-faced to say more,” Helvin returned, “for to me the happening is even of service. Now, when I no longer have before me the honestness of your face to make me believe in you, it will stand me in some stead to be able to tell myself that I know you spoke the truth about scorning court ways and preferring my service over that of another, as has not been the case before. Do not take it ill that I need proof. This happens to me for the first time that I trust any one. Yet I wish it were possible for you to fare back with me to-night.”
Remembering the crops that must be talkedover with Erna, the traps that must be explained to the old Vikings, the young master of the Tower hesitated; but the instant the Jarl read his difficulty, he ended it courteously.
“I see, however, that you have needful business to arrange. Take two days to attend to it, and join me on the third day at sunset. Only assure me that you will not fail me on that day.”
Rather an appeal than a command did it become in the gentleness of his voice, the friendliness of the hand he stretched out. Taking the hand in both of his, the Songsmith answered from the sincerity of his heart:
“May my luck fail me if I fail you either in this or in greater things! For all it is worth you have my loyalty, I take oath on it.”
Returning the pressure of the Songsmith’s warm clasp, the Jarl’s gaze held him long and strangely.
“I believe you,” he said. “For whatever it is worth, I swear you my friendship—for whatever it is worth!”
On that they parted.