XIII
“Mix hops with honey when thou mead wilt brew”—Northern saying.
“Mix hops with honey when thou mead wilt brew”—Northern saying.
“Mix hops with honey when thou mead wilt brew”—Northern saying.
“Mix hops with honey when thou mead wilt brew”
—Northern saying.
Stirring before the great awakening, the southern slopes had thrown off their coverings of snow, and bared their brown bosoms to the fresh wind. The pools of the muddy road gave back unclouded blue, and blithe as the call of the robins in the sunny meadows were the voices of the young courtmen who had met at a crossing of the ways. Winter maintained its hold only on the face of Mord the Grim, as looking back from the crest of the hill he was riding over, he saw that the centre of the group was the Jarl’s tall song-maker.
Some of the young nobles had set forth to shoot ducks from the broken ice of the river, and were unfolding their plans to the forester’s sympathetic ear. Some were seeking ground for a horse-race, when the sod should be firm enough, and were demanding of the favorite that he use his influence with the Jarl to have a feast given in honor of thesport. And others, who knew that Rolf’s son was now on his way home to the Tower to take part in the wedding-feast of his foster-sister, were chaffing him about the effect his fine clothes of buff leather would have upon such Skraellings as he might encounter. The chatter came to an end only when the hoof-beat of two horses was heard on a road near by; and one youth surmised that it must be the bridegroom and the priest, whom Randvar was waiting to join; and another stepped out to look around the curve, vowing that if Bolverk’s dress was too fine it should be subdued by a rain of mud. The youth stepped back, however, with a shrug.
“Only Brynhild’s pet page; and behind him, Olaf the French. Tighten the peace-bands on your sword, Songsmith!”
A third gave Randvar’s ribs a nudge with his elbow.
“No better than wasted breath is that warning!” he laughed. “As though the Songsmith had any cause now to be jealous of Olaf, Thorgrim’s son!” So the laughter and chaff went up boisterously.
The Songsmith who had stood quietly listening, save for an occasional word of comment or banter, became yet more silent, and gave his entire attention to remedying a mistake in the lacing of one of his high Cordovan boots.
On his bent head, half the hail of jests continuedto fall; and the other half flew on to meet the boy just turning into the road, fresh as a sprouting grass blade in his green livery.
“Lucky Bolverk, to be allying himself with such splendor!”
“Picture the cub doing the honors from the high-seat!”
“Are you going to give the bride away, young one?”
“Oh, why give your sister to an every-day body like a guardsman, Eric?”
“Nobody less than the Jarl himself—”
“Ay, the Jarl, by all means! Has it not been proved that jarls’ sisters take well to forest-bred men?” Again a shout of laughter went up, and the song-maker gravely addressed himself to the relacing of his other boot.
Because Randvar remained stooping, the page on his arrival did not notice him; disdainfully he answered the merry group before which he had drawn rein.
“No intention have I to break through the brush to any wedding-feast. My errand hither is to tell the Songsmith that my mind has changed about going,—only I shall tell him that it is because Brynhild cannot spare me. He is to meet Bolverk here and go with him; but they must get along without me. It is to be seen that he left the Towertoo late to outgrow his fondness for moose-hump! Much better would you save your banter for his backwoods’ ways.”
Like the impudent red-breasted bird now strutting on a stone wall across the road, Eric thrust out his chest with an air. Laughing and nudging, the young courtmen made a semicircle around him.
“Oh, a well-bred man is what you are, that is clear as day!”
“Small wonder you have no admiration for that lout of a song-maker!”
“Tell us what you think of the showy clothes he has begun to—”
“Yes, give us your opinion of his habits!” they chorussed.
Still like the bright-eyed bird on the wall, Eric cocked his handsome little head knowingly; but even as they waited in laughing expectation, Olaf the French came cantering around the bend, and Eric’s censure gave way to eulogy as he turned and recognized the new-comer.
“I will tell you a man I have got admiration for, and that is the one who comes riding hither! When I have my growth, I shall be as near like him as possible; and I am going to France with him whenever he goes back,—am I not, Olaf?”
“So it shall be,” Thorgrim’s son assented benignly,as he returned with inimitable grace the rather careless greetings of the group.
Importance swelled in Eric’s chest until it burst out of his lips as ecstatically as the red-breasted bird’s song.
“That will be the finest part of my life! I shall wipe this little town of cabins off my mind as completely as I have wiped off that old Tower,—and that is as much gone from remembrance as though it had never been. Do you know, masters, it looks to me sometimes as though I could never have been born there? What seems likeliest is that some great chief of Norumbega had one child too many, so that he gave it to thralls to carry into the forest; and then Erna came along and found it and called it hers, so much nobler is my nature than my moth—” He left the word unfinished as his rapt gaze came down for the first time to the Songsmith, where he had risen and stood beside Gunnar the Merry. “By that I do not mean that she is not a worthy woman,” he added hastily.
His foster-brother answered not a word. Stepping to the head of Eric’s horse, he said briefly:
“Get down.”
It did not appear that the page liked the tone overmuch, but neither did he seem willing to trifle with it. He made a parade of stretching in his saddle.
“You need not say it as though I meant to keep on,” he retorted. “I have been waiting until you came, as every one here knows, to get down and talk to you.” Slowly he dismounted, taking great pains to keep his bright spurs out of the puddles.
“Give me now that chain off your neck, as a gift for your sister.”
The page muttered something about meaning to give her a better gift, when he should have had time to visit the trading-booth; but his foster-brother’s hand remained before him, immovable as a stone cup. He dropped the chain into it at last, and watched ruefully the stowing away of the trinket in the pouch of buff leather. Then the owner of the pouch made another demand:
“Now give me a message to go with it. Say, ‘I send therewith my hearty greeting.’”
At that, Eric so far forgot his finery as to stamp and spatter it with mud. But after a second look from under the heavy brows, he said the words, rebelling only when the circle of grinning courtmen sent up a roar of laughter at the contrast between the sentiment and the tone in which it was uttered.
“In meddling in private affairs you show bad manners,” he told them, and sent Rolf’s son a glance that was half sulky, half coaxing. “Nor do I think you have any right to scold me after I have made atonement.”
Far from scolding, his foster-brother turned to one of the courtmen who had come from a horse-fight and borrowed his riding-rod of twisted leather.
“You have made atonement for slighting Snowfrid,” he said, “but for the way you behaved about Erna, you cannot redeem yourself from stripes. Pluck off your kirtle and stand forth.”
“Foster-brother! If you will listen while I explain—”
“Already you have talked enough. Stand forth.”
“Foster-brother—”
“In a word, you will take it or run.”
“That is a good hint, young one,” laughed Gunnar the Merry. “Pick up your heels.” Then he laughed again at the glare that Eric turned on him.
“Will you keep your nose out of this?” the small Viking demanded. “If you think I am afraid to bear a flogging—!”
The end of the sentence was that his gay tunic lay on the ground and he stood forth in his shirt of fine linen, his arms locked upon his sturdy chest. From that attitude he did not flinch when the lashes fell, though they were neither light nor few. When it was over, the young men gave him good-humored applause.
Gratification pulled at his mouth-corners as helooked at them out of the corner of his eye; but enough vanity had been taken out of him so that when his gaze passed on to his stern foster-kinsman, he showed only as a shamefaced little boy, now humbly desirous of being restored to favor.
“If you think it will give my kinswomen a great deal of pleasure, I will go to the feast with you,” he offered, when he was clothed again and lingered shaping mud-balls with the toe of his boot.
“If I have my way, you will not be allowed to go back until it will give you so much pleasure that you cannot stay away,” the Songsmith returned severely, rejecting utterly the blandishments of the rosy coaxing face. The culprit gave up the attempt, after a while. Climbing into his saddle he rode back up the highway—his sleeve in suspicious proximity to his eyes—and vanished into a brush-walled lane.
Watching the dejected withdrawal seemed to suggest to Olaf the French a welcome thought. He moved his horse a step forward, and broke in upon the scattered chatter.
“Surely,” he said, “if you, Rolf’s son, choose to attack a young friend of mine, and I choose to avenge the boy on you, that should be sufficient to excuse me in challenging you?”
Over his shoulder, Randvar looked at him with his short laugh,—he had stepped aside to whistleback his horse from the meadow in which it had strayed to browse.
“Surely! If you, Thorgrim’s son, believe that you could get that excuse accepted,—in case you were alive to offer it!” he consented.
But three of the young courtmen spoke in the same breath: “Far from it, Olaf! Unless you were the boy’s master.”
Rolf’s son said nothing, only stood waiting with his bridle in his hand.
But gradually Olaf settled back in his saddle, and sat thoughtfully stroking his short mustaches. “Ill might it be, then, since I lack a lawful claim. I should kill you, and then if I could not save myself from outlawry, I should get no good from your death.”
“This I take the ring-oath on, that I would do my best to keep you from being put in that unsatisfying position,” Randvar retorted.
It seemed to Gunnar the Merry that the conversation had gone as far as was advisable; and he said so, good-naturedly, several others seconding him. And while they debated, their cause drew strength from another source.
Standing farthest out in the road, where he could see around the curve, a youth named Aslak called out that the bridegroom and the priest were coming at last. With that announcement, all seriousnesswas put to rout; it was not even noticed that on a sudden impulse, Thorgrim’s son wheeled and galloped back up the highway and disappeared into the lane whose bush-whiskered mouth had already swallowed up the crestfallen page.
Around the bend bowled the wedding party, the gorgeous bridegroom explaining at the top of his lungs how mistakes in the coming home of his marriage clothes had detained him. At sight of him, such cheers and chaff arose that he shouted himself hoarse with trying to repay a quarter of it, gave it up finally and set spurs to his horse and fled, followed by the ruddy-cheeked priest, cursing genially at the unwonted jolting of his fat sides. After them galloped the laughing song-maker, dividing his gibes between the group behind and the pair before.
What could have suited his wild blood better than to wander through the wonder-world of awakening forest? What could taste sweeter than a wedding-feast to a man who was watching his own hope grow with every day of spring shine and spring storm?