IX
“Gift always looks to recompense”—Northern saying.
“Gift always looks to recompense”—Northern saying.
“Gift always looks to recompense”—Northern saying.
“Gift always looks to recompense”
—Northern saying.
Through the dusk, the Skraelling fires across the river made no more showing than a cluster of glowworms on a log; but—true to the saying that “Famine-pinched stomachs are the greatest gluttons”—the Norse fire-builders had heaped wood on blaze until their forest guest-house revelled in a brightness as of noonday.
The peace party had been back for the space of three candle-burnings, long enough for the first tumult of greeting to have subsided, and yet not so long but that the aroma of the new interest still flavored the air. In complacent beard-stroking groups, the old chiefs stood about the bank, congratulating one another upon the advantages which the alliance would secure to the fur-traffic and the trade in massur-wood. Trying on shell necklaces and quill-embroidered shoes, Brynhild’s women were turning the leaf-carpeted slope intoa bower. In the hemlock nook which had been the prison-chamber, two guardsmen were giving an imitation of an Indian war-dance which sent the pages rolling on the earth in convulsions of merriment; and near by, another gathering watched with breathless interest while Gunnar the Merry experimented with the trophy which he had brought back,—a strange smoke-producing implement made up of a long reed, a big stone thimble, and a pinch of strangely smelling leaves.
Of none of these groups, however, was the Jarl or his song-maker a part. Still farther up the rising ground, on the very edge of the shadow-breeding wood, a mighty pine had toppled over and lay head downward, its huge clod of roots and soil upturned like a dead giant’s feet. There, skulking wolf-like in the shade, Helvin leaned against the writhen mass, bending and tearing the tough fibres with his restless hands; while along the huge trunk below him, as a panther along a bough, the deerskin-clad figure of Rolf’s son lay stretched out.
Now and again, from the fireside groups came up snatches of song or a merry outburst of voices. But none of it moved the Jarl to speech, and for once the Songsmith chose to remain under cover of custom and wait until he was addressed.
Now and again, a largess of dead leaves causeda grateful dancing of the flames that stretched the circle of ruddy light even to the timber’s edge. Gazing upward, Randvar had a fleeting glimpse of the brooding white face on which that strange, evil expression had deepened to a stain. But always before he had a chance to study it, the light failed.
Convinced at last that he fronted the unknown, he waited tense as a bowstring, alert as an arrow. Almost he shot from his place when low laughter burst from Starkad’s son,—laughter so devil-like that a wave of coldness started at his neck and rippled down to his heels.
“You think yourself a sly fox as you lie there watching me!” Helvin said, “but you need not take so much trouble. I have got over the wish to kill you.”
It seemed to Randvar as if the rippling wave must have frozen, so rigid did he become.
“Is it even so, then, that you tried to betray me?” he asked slowly.
“I hope you did not look for anything better from me,” Helvin returned, and laughed again.
So unbearable was the low sound that Randvar sat up sharply, and spoke with anger: “I did though! I expected that even if your wrath rose like a sea-wall against me, you would vent it in some honorable way.”
“You know better now,” Helvin answered grimly.
“That is certain,” Randvar assented with equal curtness; and for a space there was silence between them, save for the sound of Helvin’s hands tearing the root-fibres.
In the low choked voice of one holding under a fearful force, Helvin broke out at last. “I never saw a greater blockhead! and I treated you better than you deserved. It mattered not that you were quick to mark the change in my manner,—still you could not guess that from the time the trees closed around me, I saw nothing but the old troll’s twisted face in every shadow, heard nothing but his cursed ghost gibbering vengeance in my ear! Never did I so need that you should closely stand by me with your fearless mind; and what did you do, instead, but bungle it so that I had to leave you behind! I can tell you that death was likelier than life as you stood then. I wonder I did not become the fiend you saw at the Pool.”
“The fiend I saw at the Pool!” Randvar repeated, and the impulse to face standing whatever might lie before him made him start to rise to his feet. But at the first motion, Helvin’s hand fell upon his shoulder with the weight of a lion’s paw and crushed him back upon his seat.
“Now are you hot-headed,” he snarled, “andthere is rashness in your actions, and that is foolish in a cool-witted man like you. It is not enough that you have made the bargain to go through Torment with me; you have got to go quietly. Quietly! do you understand that or not?Ah!You are not going to be so great a fool as to struggle.—Bear in mind what it means to thwart me!”
But it was not the gripping hand that Randvar was struggling against, though the fingers had sunk into his flesh like iron hooks. It was against that awful dizzy madness that had come again upon him at the touch of Starkad’s son. In the same flash of time he knew two things—that his “gift” was making him aware of a terrible presence, and that he resented that gift with every fibre of his forest-bred body. Doubly racked, he battled for the space of a heart-beat, then reached instinctively for the sharp medicine of his blade.
Even as his flesh tasted it and his disorder passed, the fire leaped redly, revealing the blazing eyes of rage above him, disclosing his horror-twisted mouth to the Jarl. With a stifled cry, Starkad’s son quitted his hold.
“Why do you look at me like that? Oh God, do the marks show on me? I thought I should escape—escape—”
His voice lost the semblance of a voice, became an inarticulate wail; and to it was added the soundof rending cloth as he started up in his lair. In frantic haste he strove to disentangle his cloak and draw it up over his breast and around him in a hood; but he only tangled it harder and pulled the folds awry and lost the end from between his numb fingers. Giving up the attempt, finally, he cast it over his head and flung himself down upon the earth, moaning a single word over and over like a wounded bird of one note.
More like was it to a sound of bird or beast than to human speech. Every nerve strained in the endeavor to comprehend, every sense baffled, the song-maker stood staring down at him. At last he bent, speaking desperately:
“Either you are dumb or I am deaf! Make me a sign.”
Plunging and reeling, the black shape reared itself from the ground; though even in the shadow it would not uncover its face. From the cloak-folds came forth a shaking hand, which fell on the Songsmith’s arm and groped its way to his shoulder. Brushing his cheek, it left the skin wet, though its touch was the touch of fire. From his shoulder, it passed over to the harp at his back and put all its force into smiting the strings into one discordant cry, before it fell back into the cloak-folds, and the cloaked form fell prone upon the earth.
Randvar understood then that he was to sing; and before he was erect, the harp was off his back. Like the voice of a night-bird pouring out its soul to the listening forest, his voice rang from the shadow.
Down on the firelit slope, the merry groups ceased their sports and gave him joyous hearing; and the echoes in the hills across the splashing river awoke and answered him sleepily; but of what he sang he had no consciousness, nor ever afterwards could recall it. Like a dead thing lay the mound at his feet; and as flies around the dead, his thoughts buzzed around its secret.
Slowly understanding came.... The troll-temper of the father had descended upon the son.... Denied the vent of battle-fury, it had taken some uglier shape, some monstrous shape that galled the Jarl’s pride to own!... It had possessed him that day at the Pool, and he believed that the forester had seen its degrading marks.... Its marks! Shrinking, Randvar’s memory groped among the myriad tales he had heard of men accursed ... yelping teeth-gnashing Berserkers with frothing distorted mouths ... souls doomed to raven in brutes’ bodies ... wits to sleep in the bestial forms of swinish cinder-biters....
Like a strain falling from Valhalla to the World of the Dead, the voice of Yrsa the Lovely fell presentlyon his ear, calling out a merry good-night as she went away with the rustling train of women to the booths that had been erected for them. A moment his gaze wandered to follow out of sight the head of fiery gold that moved before them, but still he sang on.
Above the trees, presently, Night raised her silver bow and shot bright arrows through the leafless branches. Watching the shafts strike and melt into pools of moonshine at his feet, his eyes lost their alertness; his song grew dreamy, slackened and sank low as the note of a dreaming bird. But still he kept on.
Breathing the melody rather than singing it, he saw unheeding how the bright beams reached to the cloak-wrapped form and groped like hands along it; he was slow in realizing that one of the pale spots in the shadow was not moonlight, but a wan face upturned. His song ended in a gasp, when the truth did come home to him. Sometime he stood motionless before he dared speak and ask:
“Lord, how is it with you?”
The answer came out of the shadow, “It is well with me,” but no minor chord ever made the song-maker’s heart swell in his breast as did the voice in which the words were spoken. It became nothing to him what mask the tortured face might be wearing. Kneeling beside the prostratebody, he raised it up until the mass of blood-red hair rested even on his shoulder.
As a drowned man rises out of the deeps, so the Jarl seemed to rise out of the shadow into the moonlight. And as the face of one who has known the agony of buffeting waves, so was his face blanched and drawn; but no other mark was upon him. Only infinite weariness was on the finely cut mouth; in the sea-gray eyes, only infinite sadness. The swelling of the song-maker’s heart became a sharp pain in his throat.
But the Jarl said gently: “Once when I had fallen into such a strait as this, I would not accept your help. See now how I lean on you! There will ever be most help in you when there is most need of it. My true friend, for this—this!—what shall requite you?” He put up his hand; and because Randvar could not speak, he wrung it in silence.
Then gradually Helvin’s strength came back to him, so that he put out his other hand and taking hold of a branch, drew himself to his feet, and stood supported half by the tree, half by the shoulder of the Songsmith.
“Soon are my powers renewed in me,” he said. “Even as David did for Saul, you cast the devil out; and before he had gone his length—God! the length he goes! Can you raise before your mind what my state was that day, when I turnedand espied a man watching me from the bushes? When my arrow missed him, and I knew that my secret was loose in the world? Ah! I do not want to remember that! Wine! Give me wine!”
Randvar’s hand unfastened the flask from his neck without the knowledge of his wits, that were like thunder in his ears, roaring explanation of all that had puzzled him. Out of the tumult, he spoke earnestly:
“Jarl, I am five weeks too slow in telling you that a great mistake has been made. It is the truth that horror drove me mad that day, but not horror of you,—never ofyou! Listen! Even as I stepped from the bushes and saw the Pool and saw you—”
On the Songsmith’s lips, Helvin’s hand fell lightly. Wincing, he had turned away.
“Let not that be put into words which in thought alone is more than I can bear!” he said. “Besides, to what end is it? I know that it was not from me that you shrank, but from the devil that uses my body; and for any hatred you feel towards that, or harm you do it—if ever you come together, which God avert!—you need have no remorse. Though all your power were bent upon it, you could never hate it—abhor—”
A shuddering fit shook him, so that words became but bubbles of sound bursting idly on hislips. When he spoke again, his voice was very low.
“Bitter is it to speak of! For love’s sake, spare me the need. I know now that—even with that vision before your eyes—your song-maker’s spirit was able to separate me from the Thing which Fate has linked me to. Had not myself experienced it, I would not have believed any man brave enough to make that separation. Times there are whenIcannot make it; when I loathe myself as Satan never loathed himself, else would his heart change and the world be sinless! I call your help no more than it is when I tell you that I should die of self-horror if I could not look at you and say, ‘I am not beyond the pale, for here is a man who gives me friendship and honor even while knowing the worst of me!’” His voice, which had sunk to an unsteady breath, was smothered out as he pressed his face against the rough bark of the tree.
The Songsmith did not use the opportunity, however, to finish the explanation he had begun. Instead, he stood staring down at the sleeping camp and weighing the possibility of seeming to have this knowledge, foreseeing the blind maze he should enter on, the sword he should hang over his life, the horror to which he should bind himself.
It was Helvin who ended the pause, as he hadmade it. Turning, he laid both hands on Randvar’s shoulders, and as he spoke, looked lovingly into his face.
“Good is your singing and your service, but your friendship is worth still more! Such it is, that no reward can match it,—the joy of giving must be its own reward. Only can I tell you what it has meant to me that never hoped to know the support of a friend. When my dreams were brightest, I dreamed only of getting good-will by hiding the truth. What makeshift would that have been! What peace is this! Greater loss to me than to you would it have been if you had lost your life to-day. My friend, I do not ask that this may be forgiven me, for that would be to own that it was I who sought to work you harm, and that fiend was not I. Yet this I will say, that I should think it the best gift I ever got if you could tell me with a whole heart that this has not caused any breach to rise in our friendship.”
After a little, the Songsmith raised his bowed head and met the gray eyes steadily.
“My love is great, lord, towards many men,” he said, “but towards none so much as you. Till my death-day, I will hold to my faithfulness to you.”