XXII
“Those live long who are slain by words alone”—Northern saying.
“Those live long who are slain by words alone”—Northern saying.
“Those live long who are slain by words alone”—Northern saying.
“Those live long who are slain by words alone”
—Northern saying.
In a black tide night had risen, submerging the farther windowless end of the great loft, blotting out the sides and corners of this end. Like a raft of light afloat upon a sea of darkness was the bright square which the moon let fall from the window under the eaves; and now and again, like a shipwrecked mariner, the song-maker rose out of the engulfing blackness and stood in the light, reviving himself with the sight of the infinite wind-swept sky. Deeper and deeper into his spirit cut the thongs of the trap that had caught him. Ranging his prison up and down—up and down—his step was the ceaseless hurried tread of a caged tiger. Higher and higher rose the frenzy of impulse to hurl himself against the walls and batter them with hands and feet and head till they or he gave way.
It bent him at last to a thing he scorned, drovehim against his will to the door, wrung from him a hoarse appeal.
“Visbur! I cannot meet death like a fox in his earth! Let me fight my way out against your sword. It will come to the same in the end!”
At first it was only the clang of a spear on the landing outside that answered, so slow was the old guard’s voice of irony.
“Why do you talk of dying, Rolf’s son? Surely you heard the Jarl say that you are only held here to appease the lawmen who want your punishment for challenging Olaf.”
Upon the cross-bar of the door, Randvar’s hand clinched. He had forgotten that the Jarl would cloak his purpose in that excuse. After a moment Visbur spoke again, this time with biting contempt:
“You need not think, however, that I put more belief than you do in that reason. A witless thing would Helvin’s justice be, to forgive you two attacks upon his life and then imprison you only for challenging your foe or loosing a worthless cub. Likely he is afraid to take open vengeance because so many people are fooled by you as to stand your friends; and therefore—even to me—he makes this poor excuse, and adds an order that no others of his household shall even know that you are here, but believe that it is still Eric that I hold prisoner.He might make himself easy that no guardsman who saw you as you stood over your chief’s wounded body, with a bloody sword in your grip, would lift a finger to save you from torture.”
The song-maker’s voice sounded strange to himself as it came out of the darkness in which he stood: “Only grant me to die a man’s death! You can say that you looked in to see how it went with me, and I tried to force my way out, and you slew me. Only that, as you were Rolf’s friend!”
The force with which Visbur’s spear came down upon the landing made up for the low key in which he was obliged to pitch his voice.
“Do you know how I could find it in my heart to behave because I was Rolf’s friend? Because you have stained an honorable name with traitor’s deeds, I could see you hanged like a dog. Never make so bold as to speak my name again.” Suddenly his feet went thundering down the steps, and his spear could be heard striking against the side of the house as he took up a new post below.
As suddenly, Randvar moved away from the door; and with his coming into the moonlight it could be seen that he held his sword naked in his hand. When he had stood awhile looking down at it, he set its point against his heart; and then he stood for another space with musing eyes fixed on the gleaming blade.
To slay one’s self, to run away from the fight—how could that be aught but the act of a coward? And yet to die in a fit of mad terror—with shaking limbs and blanched cheeks and reason overthrown—was that a death for a brave man? Muscle by muscle, his grip on his sword tightened; and then muscle by muscle it relaxed; and he stood arguing it over and over.
Deaf to all but that inner strife, he heard neither voices at the foot of the steps nor the tread of feet ascending. The sound which he had been dreading came at last and even that he did not know. Like the rattling of the casement in some wandering breeze it befell at first, and then slowly it revealed itself for the fumbling of unsteady fingers upon a bolt. Only when a river of moonlight streamed across the floor at his feet did he start awake and turn his head.
On the threshold, dark against the silver night, stood the man who had drawn the bolts. A hood concealed his face, but massive shoulders showed under his cloak; and over one of them could be seen the mailed form of Visbur drawn up in respectful salute. Though it was but a flash of time before the door had closed behind the muffled figure, merging its dark drapery into the darkness of the wall, the song-maker felt no doubt of the visitor’s identity. Indeed, almost the only thinghe felt—amid the sudden stiffening of his muscles and chilling of his blood—was wild relief that for once his wits stood firm. Pitched to utter recklessness, he flung his sword from him as at sight of the bare blade a smothered cry came from the other’s wrappings.
“Have no fear that that was meant for you!” he said, and his strained voice vibrated as with discordant laughter. “Easier were it to be slain by you than to bear the burden of being your slayer. Have your will with—”
Like over-strained wire his voice snapped, and he did not gather up the ends. Only in passing through that strip of shadow, the man had become another man; and it was the Shepherd Priest who stood revealed in the moonlight.
“I bring you life and not death, my son,” he said gently. “Nor was it in my head that Helvin meant to push the matter so far, even though his sister told me that it had stirred his unreasoning wrath against you that you set the boy free. God is to be twice thanked that I can at once save my lord a crime and you a wrong! Yet no long space is given me to do it in.”
Moving on up the room, he bent and swept the straw away from the middle of the floor. Across the long cracks of the boarding showed dimly the lines of the wooden hatch that had been set inthe hole through which—in the days when the prison loft had been a store-chamber—the huge vat below had been refilled each brewing season. Easily as one pries the head out of a barrel, he pried up the clumsy door and laid it back from the opening.
Like a half-hanged man whose body has been cut down in time but whose emotions have gone on out of the world of the living, the Songsmith remained gazing at him.
“Even if it had happened to me to remember that place,” he said slowly, “I should have been so sure that it was fastened on the under side that I would not have thought it worth while to try it.”
“It was fastened by bolts on every corner until I drew them,” the Shepherd Priest answered.
Dusting his hands upon his cloak in an unconscious habit from his youth, he came back to the moonlight and began to give further directions for the carrying out of the plan he had made, his quiet tones as well-fitted to seem the voice of a priest preparing a sinner for death as the voice of a man guiding a brother man to life.
“For much talking I have now no time, but everything lies on your understanding this much. Listen then, my son! So soon as the door closes upon me, let yourself down through the opening,—I will keep the guard in talk to cover any noiseyou may make. The door at the back you will find ajar, and an oak’s shadow screens the entrance from without. That oak clump, and the shadow of the wall, will make it easy for you to reach the western gate, where a man stands guard whose love for you has got in his eyes so that he will not be able to see you as you pass. When you reach the lane outside—But it will turn out that I reach that before you do, since my road need not be so roundabout—”
Upon his speech fell the sound of Visbur’s great fist on the door. He broke off to lay hands upon the song-maker’s shoulders and press him down upon his knees. It was a benediction that he was saying over the prisoner when the door opened and the brass-bound head was thrust in. Its owner said gruffly:
“Good luck go with your prayers, since for love of my soul I let you up to him! But I love my body also, father; and the risk to that gets greater the longer you stay.”
“I was even now coming,” the priest answered, turning; and Visbur lost no time in fastening up behind him.
As one trying to rouse himself out of a stupor, Randvar arose and stood shaking back his hair and opening and shutting his hands. As one in a dream, he heard the old man’s unsteady stepsfollowing the guard’s rapid descent, heard the gentle voice pleading with the gruff one. Then of a sudden his wandering glance fell upon the black gap in the floor—the loop-hole in what had seemed a dead wall. Like the leap of flame through smoke leapt his blood through his dulness, parching his throat, roaring in his ears. Now it was to restrain frantic eagerness that he crushed his lip between his teeth as he swung himself swiftly through the opening.
A fur-bale that had been placed at the bottom of the now empty vat received him without noise. Drawing himself up to the top of the wall which the vat’s side made, he balanced there until on the darkness shrouding him he had found the thread of silver light. Using hands, then, in place of eyes, he climbed out and groped his way between bales and boxes and barrels to the door that had been set ajar, drew it open and stepped through it into the moonlight, and then stepped aside into the shadow of a giant oak that grew there.
Lifting the damp hair on his forehead, the night wind met him freshly. As to meet the lips of a woman, he lifted his burning face and spread wide his arms. For that long a space, his heart sang a song of wild exulting.
For that long—but for no longer. Around thegreat bole of the oak, looming dark beyond a silver sea, he glimpsed the silent mass of Brynhild’s bower. Brynhild! And this should have been their wedding-day!
His hands tearing at his collar to relieve the swelling agony of his throat, he had taken a dozen blind steps towards the silent pile before his senses came back to him, before he thought to ask himself what good would come of it even should he succeed in making his way to her. She armored in pride, and he an outlawed man! Like a sail which the breeze has deserted, his head sank; he stood becalmed.
When he looked up again, the lines of his white face had hardened as iron settling in a mould.
“Once in his lifetime it is well for a man to tell himself the truth,” he said. “To lose me will strike as near her heart as though she had lost a jewel from her ring—no nearer. Once she might look for it, once frown over the loss, once speak regretfully of it,—and that is soon over! The memory of my arms around her, the fire of her lips on mine, the dream of possessing her—what more could I hope for? For the dreamer, a dream-bride! It is well-befitting!”
A smile curled his lips that was new and ill to see, as he looked his last upon the shrine of her he loved. Then he turned and walked on rapidlyover the tree-guarded path that led eventually to the shadow of the wall and the western gate.
From a distance he glimpsed again the gray-cloaked beggar, outstretched as if in slumber; but he saw no other living thing until he saw the black-robed priest move across the bright court and pass out of the gate ahead, the sentinel making him reverent salute. Even though it had been foretold him, it deepened his sense of belonging no more to the living world that when he himself reached the exit the man remained gazing fixedly at the sky, and he dared neither greet nor touch him as he passed.
The gate gained and left behind, his instructions were exhausted; and he would have halted to plan further but that out in the radiant lane he found the Shepherd Priest awaiting him, his heavy shock of hair turned into a silver glory around his swarthy face. Moving down the dewy path beside him, the old man began at once to speak:
“One thing I think needful to say, my son; and that is that I should not be less afraid of taking this second step than of taking the first one, if God had not given me to see most plainly what His will is. I want you to know that one week ago He moved the Jarl’s heart to speak and call me as witness that he had solemnly consented in your espousal of his sister.”
Randvar could not have replied if he would.
His gaze had gone ahead to a blossoming crab-tree that leaned over the low stone wall and canopied half the lane. Masses of snowy bloom were its branches, and snowed over with petals was the earth beneath it, but that white shape moving before it—was that only another branch blowing in the soft night wind? Coming to meet them, it looked like a girl in a thrall’s robe of white wool; but the queenful poise of the head—the glint of red-gold hair as the light fell upon it—He put out a hand and gripped the old priest’s shoulder.
“Tell me how much this means?” he demanded.
She answered for herself, the girl in the bondmaid’s kirtle, as she stopped before them; and in voice as well as face she was Brynhild, the Jarl’s sister.
“I should have thought there was more risk of a man’s forgetting anything than his wedding-day,” she said with lips that smiled through trembling.
Even then he dared not believe it, but stood gazing from her to the pair of saddled horses tethered in the shelter of a spreading tree. Drawing yet nearer, she held out her hands, her gray eyes meeting his as steadfast as the gray North star.
“It means,” she said, “that even as Freya followed Rolf, your wife follows you into banishment—Love, what is it?”
For he had flung himself on his knees before her and was kissing the hem of her coarse robe.