Part 8

She took her hands from her bosom to wring them. “How can you be certain of that? Your mind is shapen altogether like a dream-spinner’s, that believes good of every one—of savages whom others hold no better than beasts—of Helvin, whom every one else thinks—Ah!” A sudden thought seemed to arrest her. “Now is that likely? That Helvin would be so foolish as to let them dance when he knows what lies upon it for you? As easily believe that he wishes your death! I must find out what is happening now.” Heedless of her trailing skirts, she was gone over stubble and stone, her step more light and free than the tread of Odin’s shield-maidens in the high halls of his chosen, as she climbed farther up the hill to a ledge of rock which had pushed through the soil and risen in a watch-tower.

When he could no longer catch any gleam of her glowing robes, the song-maker stood with his head leaning back against the tree as if his hope would mount to the sky. He wandered among singing stars until his attention was gradually drawn earthward by a stealthy crackling of the brush on his left.

Between the interlacing twigs, he made out presently a patch of such blue fabric as Thorgrim’s son’s cloak was fashioned of; but it did not seem reasonable to him that the French One should have strayed so far from the scene of excitement. He could not understand it until Olaf glided into the open and moved towards him, an unsheathed knife glittering against his blue sleeve.

No impulse to call for help came to Randvar—that instinct his life of solitude had blunted—but he put forth all his strength against his bonds, swelling out his chest, hardening the sinews of his limbs, until the thongs that withstood him were as iron sawing the flesh. When he found that they would not yield, he became as motionless as the tree behind him; his mouth twisted sardonically as he wondered in what way Erna’s proving of his heart against steel was going to serve him now.

As their eyes held each other it is unlikely that either man realized that any but his foe was in the world. Upon their tense nerves it vibrated like a blow when the voice of the Jarl’s sister rang out behind them:

“Stand!”

The surprise of it seemed to paralyze Olaf so that for an instant he did stand, remaining poised in the air. Then the curve of his parted lips lost all resemblance to a smile.

“Bright Brynhild, this hand shall show you Helvin avenged!” he said, and cleared the remaining space at a stride, his arm uplifted.

In the draught of a breath she was before him, her slim hands locked about his wrist in the effort to pull it down.

“I bid you stop! Helvin is safe! Do you hear me?”

Perhaps his mind really did not hear her. With each word, his eyes froze faster to the Songsmith. Without so much as glancing at her, he put up his sinewy left hand and pried loose her grasp. The bound man cried out to her to give way and leave them,—so little even he knew her Valkyria spirit.

Thunder-strong it gathered in her, lightning-swift it struck. Swooping on the sword which Olaf’s move left exposed at his side, she tore it free. With its upward sweep, she struck the knife from his hold. With its downward stroke she levelled at his breast. He leaped back just in time to save his life, if the rigidness of her arm told the truth.

“Do you think I am as poor-spirited as you are dastardly?” she said.

At a bound his mind was brought back to her, then; and once back, it would have been a dull mind not to see that his suit was in even greater danger than his body. In a trice he had doffed passion, donned reproach.

“Brynhild! Is it really as it seems, that because my loyalty runs away with my manners, you speak so to me?”

“I know not why you will talk of manners,” she retorted, “when what your passion ran away with was your honor, that ought to have taught even a thrall better than to fall upon a fettered man.”

“A thrall?” He spread out his hands in indignant protest. “Little shall a thrall know of a high-born man’s wrath over the slaying of his chief! Am I not, before all else, a free Norseman? Only this morning, maiden, did you upbraid me because my French rearing had underlaid my Norse temper! Now, behold, when my Northern blood breaks out in its native wildness you stab me with eyes, words!—oh, use the sword! The steel would be more kind.”

Gracefully he sank on his knee before her, making as though he would bare his breast for the stroke. Perhaps a maid of France would have shrunk or swooned. Perhaps it took him by surprise that she stood with unshaken hand, studying him as one studies an unfamiliar object.

“I do not know that I have the wish to be kind to you,” she said slowly. “I do not know how I feel towards you, for you are not the man I thought I knew. Perhaps you should not have blame, since you believed Helvin slain, yet—”

Her voice quickened as a chorus sounding through the trees heralded the old counsellors’ return. She shifted the sword with an imperious gesture.

“Rise up! It will happen to you to be seen in that foolish position! I cannot tell whether I shall ever have liking towards you again or not. Rise up, and go away from me until I find out.”

He had risen while she was speaking, but whether he would obey her last command was for an instant uncertain. Turning from her, his eyes rested again on the Songsmith; his empty hands began to open and shut at his sides. Only the grim voice of Mord, falling on the pause, seemed to catch and hold him. Even as he gave way step by step, his vulture eyes clung to the song-maker until the bushes rose like walls between them.

While the branches that closed behind Olaf were still aquiver, the hemlock boughs opened upon Mord and his associates. Filing in stiffly, they sat them down heavily upon bowlder and hummock.

“A man of my years,” Mord panted, “does not take it lightly to have his heart turned over in him because some red apes choose to hop around in mock warfare. Get what enjoyment you can out of it, Rolf’s son, that so far your savages have not belied you. When their foolishness was over, the Jarl let so much news out as to send a messenger over to tell us that he was safe and getting all the favors he asked for,—after we had spent that much time in doubt and endangered as many lives as there are bodies among us! May Hel take fools and leave knaves, if she have not room for both! Jarl’s sister, even you seem to have lost your wits, to go about flourishing a sword, with cheeks as red to look at as your kirtle. I thought you made it your boast to take things coldly.”

_Coldly!_ For the first time Randvar recalled their dispute of the morning, looked at the firebreathing Valkyria, and smiled in spite of himself.

At the same breath, she darted him a glance that was half startled and half menacing. The flaming of her color was not more marked than the stiffening of her spine as she caught his expression.

He sobered in haste. “Jarl’s sister, no faintest intention had I of making mockery!”

She deigned him no answer whatever. With awful precision she planted the sword in the earth beside her, with awful deliberation gathered up her silken skirts, without a backward glance swept from the prison-chamber. Twice he called after her without avail,—so disastrous may a victory be!

Like a fog, sullen rage settled upon him then. When the old chiefs asked him what Starkad’s daughter was doing with the sword, he clipped his answer as close as might be:

“Olaf, Thorgrim’s son, lent it to her to cut his luck-thread with.”

When they questioned him about her displeasure, he conceded no more than an ungracious movement of his shoulders. Old Mord was impelled at last to scowl at him over the cloak-end with which he was mopping his face.

“Olaf the French,” he observed, “was fostered in a land where they have the good custom of teaching manners as well as courage. Sure am I that such a training would have bettered you, Rolf’s son, more than you think. I have, however, a good hope that even as autumn thunder ripens the grain, this tempest may have ripened your green judgment; so that hereafter you will be less quick to sneer at the caution of old men, and more slow to stake your all on any belief. Though the Skraellings keep faith with you, remember this—that you came near losing your life through your lord’s folly, who accepted such entertainment without any regard to the effect it might have upon your state. If you had offended him so that he had the wish to murder you, he could not have gone about it better.”

Mopping his face, he continued to speak at intervals in praise of discretion; but Rolf’s son lost what followed by reason of the ringing of that one sentence in his ears—“If you had offended him so that he had the wish to murder you, he could not have gone about it better.” ... It seemed that Helvin had thought himself offended ... that murder had looked out of his eyes....

His head falling forward upon his breast, Randvar stood as one listening to an evil voice within him.

IX

“_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 into a 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 caused a 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, “and there 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 sound of 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 presently on 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 prostrate body, 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 turned and 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 of _you_! 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 his lips. 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 when _I_ cannot 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 had made 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.”

X

“_It must be worse before it gets better_” —Northern saying.