The Sentimental Vikings Part 4

My lord sat black, in the moonlight. After a while he got up and returned toward the shadowy hall.

He went in and took a great tankard of beer from my hand and drank, then turned toward me.

"The beer is warm-too warm," he said. "What a beautiful night. The beer is too warm." He waved his hand with one of his old indifferent gestures, his mouth trembling. I filled him another tankard of beer; he drank it at a drink and then asked for another, this he also drank and threw himself down on a bench. "Drink!" he said, "drink!" laughing loud.

I drink with him again and again. He leans back on his bench laughing.

"Ah, old war-follower!" he cries, his voice ringing strange in the empty moonlit hall. "Dost thou remember our first cruise? We took the battleship! and that other; where we were caught in the ice. Dost thou remember Lord Raud? Ah! that was a grand time. And when we chased the bears in Lord Snore's forest. Through all our cruises; that old ship off Norway that we chased and frightened so? See the moonlight!" he said, suddenly, and stopped laughing. Then, with a wave of his long arm, he leaned back and called out again. "Jolly war-dog! Ah!-another tankard; Skaal! Skaal! to our old times! Skaal! Ah! Old war-dog! It is not good for men to put their hearts on women. They find them empty; there is no water in an unfilled pitcher-better the old sea-sh.e.l.ls, like us, that are always filled. Do you know," and he started up and shook his beer-tankard in the moonlight, a tall figure, "that, since I was a young man, I have loved that woman! She was a little -- Be silent! A ghost comes!" He grasped my arm.

There, gliding in all in white through the door at the side of the hall came Hildur like a spirit in the moonlight. She spoke from where she stood, and our delusion of a spirit was scattered. For she spoke cross, empty words, as she stood by the disorderly hearth complaining of neglect.

I stood by my lord's bench, and I saw the old excitement come into his eyes. She went on complaining; beautiful in the moonlight. My lord raised his tankard and took a long drink, then with the same old cynical laugh, he stood there; and she stopped. Then my hands gripped the back of the bench, for my lord, still laughing, threw the empty tankard at her with all his force. I saw her lie white in the moonlight. So that is ended.

The next day we buried her, who had died from a fall from the hall-terrace to the rocks beneath. And in the after-mid-day, we sailed in our ship, past the green woods. We sailed north to young Lord Erik's town, and found him married, and happy with kisses and things. So we sailed away again laughing at this easy consolement, and my lord was very gay at the pleasure of the sea.

Soon the men were brown, and the sun shone above level waters, and we sailed lazily past dense woods.

Thus one day, as we landed to cook our meat under the trees, one of the men thought he saw a glance of armour away off in the forest. But thinking it was only the sunlight on one of the beech-trunks, we cooked and sat down to our meat.

They came running out of the forest, trying to break past us to get to the ship. There was clank of swords on armour, and the smoke from the fire wavered from its straight column; then, they drew back. Their chief came from the beach-reaches now, and laughing said they had lost their ship, so, seeing ours, had tried to rush into it, and get away before we could beat them off.

So we asked them to sit and have meat with us, and they sat down; though we were careful of our arms till they had eaten.

And the next day we landed them at a town, where they might build another ship.

This is the tale of the marriage of my lord just as it happened.

WHERE THE WOLVES DANCE

Three years before, in the winter time, I had brought my wife Elsa from her father's, loving her as fools and lonely men love dogs and women. So I kept ever near her, but was shy of her. Now this is the tale of a very strange thing, and it begins from her. Though my hall stood far to the west on the main, where even the sight of the sand-hills could be found from the highest tower, yet there were trees and gardens on the other side, and paths ran down to little ponds, and cattle browsed over rich uplands and sheep grew fat. There were sixty men in my hall; heavy men and slow, but slow to change, and as their fathers leant before them, so they leant also from the worn castle windows, and the window-sills were smooth with the rubbing of their elbows. As to the hall and its build, there is little need be said. It was square and large, and partly of stone, with a banqueting-hall, and enough of small rooms and of cellars for the storage of meat and milk and beer. In the summer sometimes I would go down to the coast, and crossing in my ship over to Foen, buy cattle or grain or go to the south ports for some strange rare thing for my lady; thus it was for three years, and contentment had grown round me like a woof.

So one day a horseman came riding slowly. He bore to me a message that three of the priests of the Lord-Bishop of Lund demanded shelter that night under my roof. I was standing dressed in my best leather suit and with my handsomest sword-belt by my chair at the head of the table, when the door swung open and they entered. They came slowly up the hall into the light, and lifting their heads when they came to the bottom steps at the top of which I stood, they showed the faces of three old worldly men, fed on the follies and the agonies of man. They were all pale and stooping, but the one to the right, a tall man with one shoulder higher than the other, bent the most, and leant upon the shortest priest, who was in the middle.

"Greeting," I said; "you are most welcome."

They advanced up the steps and the tall old priest stepped towards me and blessed me in a low voice, and then asked to be shown to his room. I conducted him myself, leading the way to the apartment with a candle, and the two others followed, their arms crossed over their chests. Thus came the learned Father Cefron into my house. Next morning the two other priests departed in haste, the way they had come, to inform the Lord Bishop of Lund that the learned Father Cefron was ill and like to die, which indeed seemed to be true. I sat by his bedside as he lay with his face to the wall, his shaven head looking dark against the bed-clothes.

"When will he come? When will he come?" he would murmur; then clenching his hands and turning towards me and sticking both fists out, "I want the boy," he said; then flinging his face to the wall impatiently. This kept on for two days, till I sent a messenger to the one of the two priests whom I had liked most (the fat one), asking who he, "the boy,"

was, and telling him how the learned Father Cefron lay calling for him and would not be quiet. In eight days there came back my messenger, saying that he, the boy, would follow on, and would probably be at the hall to-morrow morning early. So it was. While I was yet in bed I heard the barking of dogs in the courtyard, and the cracking of whips, and the voices of the men calling to one another, and the clatter of their wooden shoes on the stones. I sent word that he should at once be taken to Father Cefron if so be that Father Cefron was awake; and he went quickly and I did not see him at all till after noon that day. Then, as I rose from my meat-the men had already trooped out of the hall, their dinner over-there entered through the tapestried door a tall, broad-backed, narrow hipped, slim-limbed, youth, who held his head high, and bore eyes full of laughter under his wild light hair.

"My Lord Olaf," he said, extending his hand, "I ask your pardon for coming late to my meat; but good Father Cefron has wanted me with him. I have been much with him since a child, you know."

I welcomed him as a guest should be welcomed, and called for more meat to be placed before him and some ale; but the ale he only sipped and I sent to the back of my cellars for some bottles of Southern wine, which he liked much better and thanked me for, and which I liked him the less for liking better than the ale. When we had drank and eaten, we rose, and taking my arm, he walked with me up and down the end of the hall.

"Old Father Cefron," he began, "is a learned man, but a man who has kept too strictly within the rules of his order; he lacks blood, therefore he lacks heart; he has only a head, but that head is one whose like will not be seen in Skandinavia again in this century"; and the youth's voice was touched with enthusiasm. "Now why it is I do not know, but having killed the man in him over ponderous books, he feels he must have me to put some laughter in his life, and give him something human to think of for the moment when he is tired of the battles and treaties and that of dead kings; therefore it is, my lord and host, that I would venture to ask of you as Father Cefron has asked me to ask of you-indeed has commanded-that you let me stay with him here in the castle till the term of his life is ended, which seems not very long."

So young Heinrick became one of my household, and though I never liked him for his dainty ways and foreign prettinesses, yet I became used to him, and his figure was familiar on the edges of my fish-ponds, in the corridors of my hall, and was seldom absent when the time for eating came. He seemed to be much with Father Cefron in the early evening, and I could hear Father Cefron's groans come from his chamber sometimes when I pa.s.sed by the door; and he was good at wrestling tricks, and quick to a wonder at southern fence, yet I liked him none the better, and I could see that the men liked him neither, for they would not learn his wrestling tricks till pressed almost to command, and I could see them whispering and glancing after him as he pa.s.sed by. By this time my Lady Elsa and myself lived as most loving people. I would take her to the fish-ponds, and she would scream and find delight in the excitement; or sometimes she would come to meet me through the wood with some of her women and some men to follow, and I would come making the wood hoa.r.s.ely musical through my curved horn, and bring her deer from the uplands and great hares shot with cross-bow, and sometimes little birds, very hard to come near, which dwell among the sand-hills to the westward; then she would always have flowers in her room; in the winter evergreens and the mystical, bunched, mistletoe, and ever my favourite meats and green things, cooked or wild, all the year were before me.

It was as the winter came on that I fell ill and the fever came into me; and after lying for three days I tried to get up out of my bed. I can remember them carrying me back there, and I can remember them saying, "He has gone mad with the fever." Then I think that in the night I did go mad with the fever, for they told me afterwards that I howled and yelled and screamed for my sword to fight the gnomes and hobgoblins, and the things of h.e.l.l and air; but, as I say, this I only learned long afterwards. I strove with death hard-handed, and I held him in my grasp, and he could not throw me; and at last the wrestle came to an end, for he slipped from me and disappeared, and I lay on the bed with wide-open eyes, my white face making the rough men who were in the room use words of which they were ashamed after, to me. Then came my wife, and her hand pulled the last of the fever from me; but the wrestle had left me very tired, and I lay many days knowing little. At last I could sit in the great chair by the window on sunny days, and look forth over the snows that covered my uplands and count the familiar trees which stuck up black out of the snow-drifts. Then they wrapped me in many coats, and with a man on each side of me I came down into the hall again, my wife behind me. It was the time of noonday meat, and the men rose with a hoa.r.s.e shout as they saw me and pressed forward with outspread hands; but my Lady Elsa was before them in a moment, and her green robe shone strangely against their skin-clad bodies. She stopped them with gentle, firm words, asking them to let me get to the great chair that I might sit down, for I was come to eat a bite with them and drink a sup of ale; and the men sat down with a sigh, such as dogs give of contentment after full feeding. So I sat me down, and they brought me a tiny bird on a little plate and I could only eat half of it. Then they brought me a great tankard of ale, and I raised it to my lips and drank the half of it, and I felt the manhood rush to my feet, and then to my head again, and through my arms as I put the mug back on the table, and the men nodded to one another as saying, "It is well done for a sick man." Then slowly I finished the rest of the ale, then walked feebly to the fire and stood there warming myself. Then the two men who stood by me led me back to my chamber, and my wife followed, laying cool cloths on my head. Now every day I walked feebly to my meat in the hall, but it was not till the third day that I began to notice something strange about the men. They would look at me with a great curiosity, and some of them with seeming contempt, at which I said nothing; and one of the two men who had been my nurses in the sick chamber would follow me even through the gardens, as I walked slowly abroad with a staff for the keen frosty air; so that after some weeks I spoke to my lady about it, but she answered me, shaking her hair about her shoulders, that she knew not these western peasants as I did, and that in her father's hall there had been no suspicions and no glances of double meaning. Then spoke I to the man who followed me so faithfully as I have said, but he would answer nothing save that he thought that something was in the air, and that the spring would bring new flowers. Then asked I of young Heinrick, who still awaited the death of Father Cefron, with those laughing eyes under the wild light hair; but he laughed at me again, and told me that I was a sick man on one side of my head now and suspected everybody, and that I should send for a physician to plaster me-if he could find the side.

Now old Father Cefron seemed to have dried into one of his own parchments, and his hide wrinkled, and almost rattled, as he walked.

Though he came to eat with us in the hall on holy days, and said long prayers with somewhat worldly warnings after, yet he would on most days eat in his own chamber, and that of the least and coa.r.s.est, and would drink only of the ice-cold water from the well. I went to him at last and questioned him, and asked him if he had noticed the glances cast upon me, and the whispering and the sudden ceasing of the women's tongues when I came into the room, but he answered "No!" that he had noticed none of these things, for he was too much taken up in battles and kings and the histories of nations, to see aught that pa.s.sed about him; and then he told me of the ancient days, and of the mighty, warm, strange, empires of the south and east, and spoke a hundred names of battles and knew every half-month of the history of the Church; and so I left him, comforted with learning, and went and sat and looked out on the snow, and thought of all that he had said.

The acts of the night that broke my life were short and quick, yet they are too long for the telling; still I will try, for without them you will not understand the strange end of this tale by the grey wolves.

It was the next night after this, and I had sat late in the hall, just beginning now to find strength enough to think of what I should do with my lands and cattle when the soft weather and spring-time came at last.

Sighing and putting these thoughts away from me as something too far off to be yet of use, I rose and through the darkened hall pa.s.sed through the tapestried doorway and up the dimly-lighted stair, where the candles were distant, to my wife's room, before which hung a curtain that I had bought her in the Port of Swenborg from a ship that had come from the east countries, and as I raised the curtain in my hand, seeing by the faint light of one candle high on the wall behind me the great oak panels of her familiar door, I stopped. I stood still, the curtain in my hand, and the light flickered over the saints' heads carved on the oaken panels, and over my head. At the arch of the doorway stood an oak figure of a saint only the projecting edges of whose robe and face could be seen in the candle-light. I stood there while the candle blew and flamed; I heard its dripping on the floor; I glanced once toward the staircase, where the descending uncertain lights led down into the dusk and darkness. Somewhere in the distance outside the hall I heard a man singing in a coa.r.s.e voice, then his comrades joined in the chorus, and I heard their "skaals." I stood there holding the curtain while the stairs creaked mysteriously as to the ears of a weary and sick man, and while, through the window near me, curtaining clouds flitted past the face of the moon as she looked down on the infinite purity of the untrod white below.

Then I dropped the curtain, and stealing down the stairs like a thief in my own house, I came again into the great hall, and I went and took down my sword from its place, and I sat me down in the great arm-chair piling the cushions around me, with my sword across the arms and my hands resting on its sheath. At last the dawn came faintly; then a long stain of yellow light struck across the ribbed and worn floor; then for a moment, a glorious red glowed through the windows, and then this faded and the ashes of the dead fire, and the broken meats that strewed the table, and the tankards that lay on the floor, sprang out under the truthful day. Then began to come in the women to carry out the things of last night, and when they saw me sitting there alone, they curtseyed and looked frightened and would have turned back, but I spoke to them quietly to clear the floor and build up the fire, for it was a cold morning and the men must have good meat; and after a while came in some ragged boys carrying bunches of branches and some hauling great bundles of logs with roots, and these they rolled into the fireplace piling the branches above them. Then one of the women, bringing a sack of dry leaves arranged them carefully among the branches and under the places where the bark of the logs was rough. Then, with a flint and steel, an old woman knelt and touched the dry leaves into a flame that was dull in a moment. The branches caught, and crackling, sent ends of flaming twigs wild up the chimney. Then at last the great logs at the back began to smoke, and soon their bark caught fire, and their chopped ends played with the eager flame, so all the hall was warmed and a thin smoke sailing up about the rafters. Then came they with great hooks that were made fast to turning cranes driven in the fireplace wall, and on these hooks were sides of deer and legs of sheep, with pans below and ladles that no richness might be lost, and thick brown cakes were piled along the table-centre in a row; and now four men came rolling in two casks of unbroached beer, and these they set below the table's edge down at the end. The women lifted a great cauldron on to the fire, that glowed like some sprites' cauldron of black-art; it held fowls and green things floating in the midst, the gravy sizzling at the sides. Then the old woman who had lit the fire went to the doorway and took down a great sea-sh.e.l.l that hung there and she blew a hateful blast that broke the very air, and all the men came trooping to their meat.

That morn was the holy morn of Easter, and Cefron came to share our meat, his elbow sideways over Heinrick's shoulder. My wife came later, and was blessed and sat. When Father Cefron had done his prayers, and given his pious warnings to the men, the food went from the table in a turn of the hand, for the morning was very cold and the men were hungry and the ale warm from the fire, where the men placed it. It flowed down thirsty throats like strong streams into caverns. When all had eaten and turned their stools apart from the board and leant their backs thereon or stretched their legs and arms in full content, I rose from my great chair at the head of all the table of my house, and with no word to her who was my wife, I pointed and I spoke to Heinrick quietly:

"You will meet me in holmgang, in the cleared snow, before the hall's great door, when the sun is even overhead, and you will fight me till you are dead, or I am dead."

He rose slowly to his feet, his face grew a dark red and his eyes seemed to go back under his brows in his anger. He said no word but stood there steadily looking at me. I seemed to feel his question how much I knew, and with one glance at Father Cefron's lifted claw-like hand, and one glance at the white face of Elsa, who was my wife, I answered in a low voice:

"I stood outside the door of Elsa, my wife, last night, after the moon had risen, and I held the curtain, and I listened to the voices, and I listened for a long time, and then I came away."

There was a sudden tearing of cloth, and a flutter behind me, and looking I saw Elsa, who was my wife, fall through the doorway which led from the banqueting-hall. Then young Heinrick turned the broadness of his back to me and stood a moment his right hand to his chin. Then he came to his place at the board again and sat down and began to eat; but as he raised the first mouthful of meat to his lips, he nodded to me, as to a horse-cleaner. I sat down and drank, for I would eat no more, while Father Cefron wept the tears of a very old man in a corner, laughing sometimes, and then raising his hand and seeming to curse us in laughing. The men sat silent with their brows drawn down. Only there was a smile on some of their faces when they looked at me-a heavy smile of kindness.

As the shades grew shorter and we could hear the sound of the swish of the brooms in the snow outside the door, Father Cefron regained his senses, and rising, and tottering toward me, and grasping each shoulder with a clutching hand, he tried to shake me, murmuring curses on the old G.o.ds meanwhile and sending them all to h.e.l.l in Latin and Danish. Then he began to blame me, and though he did not curse me as he had done the G.o.ds, yet he so poured out words that I had need to stop my ears to get away from their cold reasoning. Then he spoke for a long time on the hereafter, and told me the stories of the saints, and then he cursed the devil and his works, and then he prayed for me. Then rising, he commanded us both by name, his hands raised in the air and his white sleeves falling back from his bony forearms, to leave this holmgang or else we were cursed. He sank upon his knees and prayed to us, and then the shadow from a tall, gaunt tree that I was watching from the window touched its foot, and lifting my sword I turned to where young Heinrick sat, his deep brows wrinkled and his hair pulled down, and walked to where he stood. He did not move. I reached and touched him with my sheathed sword. Slowly he got up, and turning from me he went to the wall where his fair rapier hung. Then he came back to where I stood, and stopped. We stood so for a little while; then calling to one of the men who stood near, I cried hoa.r.s.ely, "Touch him with the spit," and I could see the red of the back of his neck fail into whiteness as he went before me striding fast down the hall. I turned when we got to the doorway. Far away, by my great chair, knelt old Father Cefron, his head covered with the sleeves of his robe, and by the fireplace three or four women were crying with their faces in the corner.

It was a short holmgang. When we were ready I rushed him quickly, for I had my old heavy sword and his thing was light; but he sprang aside from me, and my sword whizzed past his shoulder. Then I turned and rushed him again, and again he sprang aside, his sword brushing my hair; and again I rushed him, and again he jumped aside, this time he struck me through the right forearm. So it went on till the shadows began to creep a little way from the trees, and I was very b.l.o.o.d.y and he had but one hurt; and then as I drew back to hit him, caring little for myself, his sword was through me, and I fell and kicked up the snow, then turned on my back. Then suddenly I was still and men pressed around me, saying, "He is dead"; but, I saw with my open eyes, Heinrick leap upon the ice-crust, and with his naked sword cutting the air as he ran in rage or wantonness, he fled, and was so far away that my men stood there staring. Then they carried me back to the banqueting-hall and through into my own chamber, and as we pa.s.sed the kneeling figure of Father Cefron, I heard the men who carried me answer to the women by the fire, who whispered to them, "Dead on Easter morning, 'tis an awful day; but old men die, and so has Father Cefron-though he was a learned man."

Late that day the women came and washed me in my chamber and swathed me in white folds, and they pulled down my eyes so that I could not see, and they pushed up my jaws, but it seemed I needed not to breathe; and that night three women and a man sat with me all night, and the next night after that two women, and the next night after that one man, he who had followed me through the gardens before I had found about Elsa, who was my wife; and on the fourth morning, late after the sunrise, they lifted me and carried me forth upon their shoulders, a great white cloth with fringes hanging over me; and then I heard the tramp of many feet, and women crying, and the consoling tones of men, and I heard the pipe of children in the distance, and the crackling of the snow beneath the feet of the four men who bore me; and at last they laid me down upon the stones and they pulled down the cloth from my face and then I heard a voice speaking very low-the voice of Elsa, who had been my wife, "Peace be to thee where thou art"; and I tried to turn from the cold breath-for I could feel the cold as I could feel the warmth of that breath-but I could not, for my flesh was dead but my spirit lived within me. Then they carried me into some dank-smelling place; I knew they had to stoop, for I could hear their shoulders scrump along the pa.s.sage, they laid me down on a shelf of stone and took the white thing quite away, and then they left me, and then I heard a sound of labouring at the door, and then a crash.

Slowly in the darkness I fell away, but the life that runs through the body gathered itself away from the fallen parts, and when I was brown and thin my self burnt strong, and then I heard a note of freedom in the dark. It was like music, as my body went, and as my legs and arms became slim sticks, and as the years made my hands and feet not like human hands and feet, and as the inside of my body dried and fell; and one spring and summer pa.s.sed and my spirit grew ever nearer its birth, I heard the soundless music breathing freedom night and day. At last my brain grew hard as my heart had grown years before, and all the parts of me decayed and shrivelled up until I was a brown, slim, wrinkled, hide that held some bones: no more. At last a great storm shook the place one night, and snow came in and wind and rain, and then my spirit was freed at last; for, sagging from its place, a rock fell inwards where I lay, and my brown bones were crushed and scattered.

Then I rose through the storm of the night, and I held to the tops of the trees, and I dropped and the water drenched me as it rushed past the banks of the streams, and I seized branches in the moonlight and threw them aloft and had joy to see the wind carry them. Then I came to myself again, and coming to the earth, tramped through the wood, to give me customs as live mortals have; for I was alive, having been killed, and though my body was dead and myself invisible but potent with hard grasp of hand, and flight in air, and strength of foot, I walked on the earth a thing that no G.o.d surely ever wished to make in his creation. I was a man with all a man's forces and all a man's heat, but I was as air to everything, and I held myself as I pleased. Soon I came to the old hall, and entering through the great door-for doors were nothing to me, yet I could open and shut them with my hands-I found the banqueting hall most desolate and only some few seats now near the fire; and pa.s.sing on into the upper rooms I heard deep snoring coming from one of them, and looking in, I saw a young man that I did not know, who lay and slept beside a great wolf-dog. The wolf-dog turned and raised its head and howled, and I crept down the stairs again and out and on.

So all that night I journeyed toward the sh.o.r.e, and as the morning broke the far blue ice stretched before me and I travelled on. I travelled on over the ice-cakes, shoving on with my rusty sword where water was; and so from crack to crack and block to block, I crept until I was half-way across; then I sat down and laughed and nearly fell back into the water, for the ice-block tipped. I had forgotten that the air was mine, and that as the birds, or as the winged men and women that the priests have in pictures, I could go where I would; so I rose from the ice, and the wind sang across my rusty sword-hilt, and the air was keen, so that I opened wide my mouth and crossed the ice to land. So in three days I saw a great smoke rising, and a low stone hill that lay between the last snow and the bend of the sky. This I pa.s.sed over in the night time, and the lights shone there for miles from the city and then I went on through the moonless night, until a great hall stood against the sea there. This I knew was Elsinore, and so I stopped and rested in a pack of straw that lay in a stable near the castle's rearward gate. The tempest howled around me and the straw whistled as if for fear, but I lay quiet, for all long cares had quite dropped away.

The next day and the next night too, I lay and rested there in a strange content that hurt me sometimes when I felt it most; but on the third night, having gained great strength, and ground my sword-when lights gleamed down from the castle windows and Elsinore was gay for some king's whim-I went across the moat and through the gates, and by the side-door of the castle to where a sleeping soldier stood, his lantern flaring. I entered into a long corridor, and pa.s.sed down to a door that just shone at the other end. I opened it, and came into a small, gay room where three young pages sat, who cried out at the draught from the opened door: they did not see me, and I kept my sword away from them, though I remembered that, I being invisible, they could see as well on whichever side of me I held it. Then opened I the other door: at once the full lights blazed upon me, and the hum and sweet wail of dance-music came, with smell of flowers, and I wondered as the old flowers sent me their greetings if he was here, as I thought he would be. Then stealing through the room, through the dancers, I pa.s.sed into a corner where sat some young tired men who looked like sleeping. He was not there. I pa.s.sed between the dancers once again, and came into a corner where there sat some foreign-looking men with light-haired dames-bowing and paying them compliments, I think. I pa.s.sed between the dancers then again, and pa.s.sed before where sat the king and queen both weary-looking; yet with quick eyes, I could not find him. Then the music ceased and the dancers went back to their seats once more. Then pa.s.sed I down the middle of the hall into the farthest corner, where there sat a group of ladies speaking in low voice, and men who leaned and talked and laughed and grinned, and as I pa.s.sed through the crowd I saw the face of Him, and all the floor trembled. He sat back in the corner, very old: his long white hair fell on his sloping shoulders; his thin white hands were clasped upon his knees and his thin legs were thrust in velvet boots from which the fur stuck out. He had strange gold things on his chest and front, and a short beard that straggled round the chin, but his long hair fell over it; and every moment he would lean forward and mutter to the women near him some tale of woman's talk forgotten when half finished. I stood looking, in a corner where the stair ran up to the musician's gallery, I stood beneath the stair where I could see his face from out the shadow and where no one could see the sword, and there I stood and I hated him until there was a sound of rustling in the hall and of men's feet upon the smooth wood floor; and as I turned to look I saw the king and queen rise and go out, and then after a little time the others also went, and nearly last, he rose. A man had come to him from the pages' room and now held him under one arm as he tottered across the floor. I followed slowly, my old sword tight grasped. At last we reached the little gay-draped door. The pages' room was empty, and the corridors laughed to our heel taps as if mocking the dancers. And so we went out. There was a great chair there held by two men; into this he went; but I had my own mind of where to go so my old rusty sword was through the back of the hind chairman in a moment's time, and as he fell, the forward man ran round to try the door again, crying out; but I swung my sword and hit him in the side, and the old blade grided in so that the stuff came out, and he fell down dead on the steps. When the noise these men were making had stopped, I went and opened the door and sat me down inside with Him, and in a very few soft words told Him who I was; but being so old He could not understand though He was very frightened and knelt down trembling in the bottom of the chair. Then I asked Him where were horses, and He told me, mumbling, and I went to a farmer's stable and took a horse out, first feeding him well and giving him drink; then on this horse I put Him and wrapped Him in the horse-cleaner's old rugs and cloths. Then mounting up behind him, I guided the beast to the main road that runs along the water, and for many hours we travelled, jolting, in the darkness. Then the moon rose, and all the world was silver, and the sea lay black except where the sword-blade from the moon was laid across it. The moon was high. It was as light as day when I turned inland from the sea at last, and underneath great trees, and past small hills that rose and left dark hollows where drifts lay, we went. It was as light as the light of day, when all the hills seemed to rise up about us in their whiteness, and the trees stood black on the summits, white on their tops, and casting huge shadows that moved.

"Here," I said; and getting down from the horse, I turned to Him and lifted Him down also. "This is the place," I said; and taking Him under the arms as I had seen the serving-man do, I led Him down into the valley where the snow did not break to our tread, and standing there in the valley, holding Him under the arms, I called aloud three times the cry of a wolf. For a long time we stood there in silence till the cry had long echoed away; then from the right of me there slid a white wolf from the hill-top. He slid to the bottom of the hill a little way from me, and then sat on his haunches and looked at us with his red eyes.

Then came three more wolves, slowly, over the snow; they came down from under the beech trees that were in front of us, and these also sat down on their haunches and stayed looking at us with their eyes. Then came one wolf more from in front of me, who did as the others had done. Then others came, till there were almost thirty of them, and they sat and stared at us; but whether they could see me I know not. The moon was just over us, and neither He nor the wolves cast any shadow. I turned and took Him in my arms, and holding Him to me, I whispered in a low voice, "You will fight holmgang here with me to-night." He did not understand, and His fine white hair lifted a little in the breeze. From above on the hill-top looked the horse that we had ridden, stupidly; I had tied him to a branch of beech, and the wolves sat round making no noise except the whispering and the brushing of their tails in the snow-glaze. I still held Him in my arms. "You will fight now," I said, "before the moon casts its shadow, and then I will leave You"; and he shuddered a little, and shook his head, this time half-understanding. I held Him close, pressing the horse-cleaner's cloths about Him. "You must take out your sword, and you must fight with me-you must fight with me here, now."

"Why?" He murmured feebly, His head sinking on my shoulder.

"Because I say it!" I answered in the same low voice; and with that I held Him from me and began to untie the cloths. When He was free, I drew myself apart and unsheathed my old sword, leaving the belt and scabbard lying on the snow by one of the wolves. Now I went up and whispered to the trembling figure again, "You shall fight!" I whispered, still in a low voice.

"I will not fight!" He said.

"You will fight for your honour!"

"I will not fight!" He replied.