The Ward of King Canute Part 27

Stung with fear, she tried to s.n.a.t.c.h the lines from him. "I am not going to a monastery! I am going to the Palace."

As a cliff stands against the fretting of waves, his grasp stood against hers; and his voice was as immovable as his hand. "Certainly you are going to a palace, you did not let me carry out my meaning. Adjoining the Monastery there is a dwelling-place which was once a house for travellers, that King Edgar himself has slept in--"

"It is a prison you are taking me to!" Her voice rose in a shriek. "It is a prison! You are mocking me I will scream for help!"

His smile mocked her openly then. "By all means,"--he a.s.sented,--"and see how much it will profit you."

She realized then that walls were for shutting people in as well as for shutting people out, and she could have screamed for very temper. Yet she made one more attempt before giving way. Abandoning her struggle for the lines, she let her little gloved hands alight like fluttering birds upon his mailed arm, and summoned all the eloquence of her beauty into her heavenly eyes.

"No, sooner would I trust to you," she murmured. "You could not mistreat me so! I beseech it of you, take me to the Palace where the King is."

On what she based her belief that he was incapable of thwarting her is not quite clear, for he had never taken the trouble to hide the fact that he considered her a nuisance, and her civil marriage with the King a piece of youthful folly on Canute's part. Sinister satisfaction was in his tone when he answered her.

"The Palace where the King is," he said, "is the Palace for a Queen."

At first, it seemed that she would either scratch out his eyes or throw herself from her saddle. But in the end she did neither, for a sense of her helplessness turned her faint. To one who has always ruled undisputed, there is something benumbing in the first collision with the pitiless hand of Force. "If I had the good luck to see a bee caught in a brier, I should wish your death," she threatened. But she said it under her breath; and after that, rode with drooping head and eyes that saw nothing of the scene before her.

When the road had left the fens, it climbed a low hill, beyond which it entered a wood. A brook was the further boundary of the wood, and across its brawling brown water a rude stone bridge continued their path, and linked the bank with the little Isle of Thorns. Nature must have had a prison in mind when she constructed this island, Elfgiva thought with a shiver. A low sandy hillock rising amid three streams or water, the high tide would have cut it off completely but for the friendly arm which the Watling Street extended to it from the Tot Hill, while a thicket of brambles and briers edged it like a natural prison wall. Nor had man forgotten such defences, she found when they had pa.s.sed a gap in the th.o.r.n.y hedge; a fence of stone rose sheer before them and extended on either hand as far as eye could reach. In the fence was a great gate of black oak, which a black-robed Benedictine presently opened to their summons.

Now for the first time, Thorkel took his hand from her rein. "I will go no farther," he said. "You are expected, and one of the monks will be your guide. It lies only across the court and through one more door."

His lips curled in their cruel smile as he motioned her forward. "Go in and take possession. It is not sure how soon the King will get time to come to you. His mood has not been very playful lately. Rothgar's sword has scarcely had time to go to bed in its sheath--"

"The King is occupied with great matters," Rothgar's heavy voice bore down the old man's thinner tones. "It is not only that he has to be crowned and make laws. He has many Englishmen to dispose of, and much land to divide up among his following."

While Elfgiva's glance pa.s.sed him uncomprehendingly, Randalin lifted startled eyes. When she saw that he was looking directly at her, she knew that it was no chance shaft, but an arrow aimed at her heart. The time had come that he had looked forward to, when Canute should get the kingship over the English, and Ivarsdale should come back to the race that had built it. And it was all fair, quite fair, quite within the rules of the game at which she herself had played. She had not a word to offer as she lowered her eyes and let her horse follow the others as it would. There was satisfaction on the lips of each of the King's deputies as they rode cityward that day.

Chapter XXV. The King's Wife

Long is and indirect the way To a bad friend's, Though by the road he dwell.

Ha'vama'l.

The fact that King Edgar had slept under its uneven on some visit to Dunstan's monkish colony, was scarcely sufficient to make a palace of the rambling rookery which a wall separated from the West Minster. It was an irregular one-storied building,--or, rather, group of buildings connected by covered pa.s.sages,--and every kind of material had been used in its construction,--brick and stone and wood,--while some of the smaller offices were even straw-thatched and wattled.

"It is the waste-place of ruins," Elfgiva said on the day of their arrival, when the monk who guided them proudly identified the brick portions as fragments of the old Roman Temple to Apollo, the wooden door-posts as beams from the Saxon Seberht's refectory, and the stone walls as contributions from Dunstan's chapel, which the Danes of the year one thousand and twelve had reduced to a crumbling pile.

To-day, a fortnight later, Randalin repeated the comment with a despondent addition: "It is the waste-place of ruins, and ruins have come to dwell in it. I can believe that it is no lie about the Fates to call them women, when they put like with like in so housewifely a manner."

She was alone in one of the bare mouldering rooms, leaning against the deep-set small-paned window which had become her accustomed post. It offered no pleasanter outlook than the snow-powdered thicket beyond the wall and a glimpse of the Thames, spreading silently over the surrounding marshes; but from it her fancy's eye could follow the mighty stream around its eastern bend to the point where the City walls began, and Saint Paul's shingled steeple reared itself in lofty pride. The Palace stood in the shade of that steeple,--the real Palace, where the King sat deciding over the fate of his new subjects, taking their lands from them, when he did not take their lives, and banishing them across the sea to live and die in beggary. Her fingers tapped the gla.s.s in desperation as she realized her helplessness even to get news of his judgments.

"The King will never come to this rubbish heap," she told herself despairingly. "Here we are buried no less than if we lay in a mound. It is not likely that we shall get news by an easier way than by going to him."

Straining her eyes out over the mist-robed river, she tried for the thousandth time to think of some bait alluring enough to tempt Elfgiva to that point of daring. Hope the Lady of Northampton had every morning when she awoke and looked in her mirror, and Wrath lay down with her every night, but the rashness which had prompted her first attempt, Thorkel must have taken away with him, a trophy tied to his saddle-bow.

She made big plans and she talked big words,--but always she put off their fulfilment until the morrow.

"At this gait, he could be dead and in his grave without my knowing it!"

Randalin cried in despair, and her voice made it quite clear that "he"

no longer meant the King. Since there was no one to see it, she even allowed her head to fall forward on her arms, and let the ache in her throat ease itself in a little sob. "Now it is open to me that I was foolish to let what happened in the garden, that day, cause so much sadness in my heart," she sighed. "It should have been a great joy to me that he was still safe and happy... and I should have found some hope in it, also, for as long as he is in England there would always be the chance that I might see him again... And perhaps, after a long while, when he had quite forgotten how I looked as Fridtjof... if I should be able to learn many graceful woman's ways from Elfgiva... and if he should come upon me when I had on a very beautiful kirtle... so long as he likes my hair..."

But even as the smile budded on her lips, she plucked it from them, trembling. "How dare I think of such things, when already they may have driven him across the sea! It would be quite enough if I could know that the same land is to hold us both, if I could have the hope of seeing him again to make it seem worth while for me to go on living. Oh, I did not dream how much I leaned on that, until it was taken from me!" In the utter loneliness of her despair, she crushed her face against her arm, pressing back the burning tears, and her heart rose in a prayer to the Englishman's G.o.d, since her own no longer answered her: "Oh, Thou G.o.d, if Thou art kind and helpful as he says, it is easy for Thee to let him remain here where I can sometimes see him! Leave me this one hope, and I also will believe in Thee." With her face hidden, she stood there praying it until it rang so strong through her soul that it seemed to her the Power could not but hear. And after He had heard, it would be so simple,--if He was as helpful as Sebert said.

There was new resolution in her movements when at last she left the window and went toward Elfgiva's bower. "I will try once more to entice her to the Palace, so that I can get tidings," she determined. "Perhaps it will be easier if at first I suggest no more than a ride, and after that allure her by degrees. I wonder what kind of humor she is in."

It was not necessary to go far to obtain a hint as to that. Even as she entered the pa.s.sage, she heard from the bower-chamber the crash of a chair overturned, the scramble of scurrying feet, and then screams and the thud of blows.

"Now it is heard that she is not sulking among her cushions," Randalin observed. "When her temper is up she is little afraid of doing things which she else would not dare do."

According to that her expectations should have mounted high, as she drew aside the door curtain, for the Lady of Northampton was far from sulking. Partially disrobed, as she had sprung up from before her mirror, she was holding the luckless Dearwyn with one hand while with the other she administered pitiless punishment from a long club-like candle which she had s.n.a.t.c.hed from its holder. Between her entreaties for mercy, the little maid was shrieking with pain; now, at sight of Randalin, she redoubled her struggles so that the belt by which her mistress grasped her burst and left her free to dart forward and fling herself behind the Danish girl.

"Help me, help me!" she gasped; as Elfgiva swooped upon both of them, her streaming hair taking on a resemblance to bristling fur, her eyes showing more of opal's fire than of heaven's blue.

"Come not betwixt, or I will treat you in a like manner," the mistress panted. "Do you understand the evil she has wrought? She has broken the wing off my gold fly, besides tearing the hair half out of my head. It is not to be borne with!"

But the Valkyria's fear of Elfgiva's tongue did not extend to Elfgiva's hands. Catching the dimpled wrists, she held them off with perfect coolness, as she said soothingly, "Now you tire yourself much, lady; and you will tire yourself more if you consent to the entertainment I came hither to propose." She laughed, a little excitedly, as a thought struck her. "It may even be that you will not blame her for this, but rather take it as a sign that my advice is good."

To say "sign" to Elfgiva was something like saying "cream" to a cat.

Gradually she ceased trying to free her hands, to gaze at her captor.

"What do you mean by that? Or have you any meaning except only trying for an excuse to get this hussy off from punishment?"

"No, in truth, for I thought of it before I knew that trouble had happened to her," Randalin answered; and now she knew that it was safe to release the wrists. "I will show you. I was thinking how it might cause amus.e.m.e.nt to us to ride into the City and see what the goldsmiths have in their booths. And then I came in here and found you in need of goldsmiths' mending! Does not that look like a sign that my thought is good?"

Elfgiva threw aside the candle to come close and lay her hands upon the girl's breast. "Good for what?" she demanded. "Do you think it likely that I might fall in with the King somewhere in the City?"

This was going a bit faster than Randalin had planned, and her breath came quickly, but she took the risk and admitted it. "I did hope that it might happen that we would see the King," she said, "and--what is more important to us--that the King might see you."

Slowly, the King's wife went back to her seat before the mirror, and sat there fingering and turning the jewelled rouge-pots in a deep study.

"Deliver me your opinion of this, Teboen?" she said, at last, to the big raw-boned British woman who was her nurse and also the female majordomo of her household.

Teboen was enough mistress of the magic art to give anything like an omen its due weight,--and perhaps she was also human enough to be weary of a fortnight's imprisonment with a porcupine. After becoming deliberation, she replied that she thought rather favorably of the plan, that certainly it could do no harm, since a visit to the booths had never been forbidden to them, while it would be almost as sure to do good if the King could be reminded of how beautiful a woman he was neglecting.

Elfgiva's laughter was like returning sunshine. "How! You say so? Then will we make ready without delay! Leonorine, come hither and finish clothing me,--Dearwyn would shake too much. Lay aside your whimpering, child; the scourging is forgiven you. Tata, I could find it in my mind to scold you for not thinking of this before. You must mouth the order for the horses, though," she added as an afterthought. "I should expect it would be told me that I am a prisoner, whereat I should weep for rage."

Another flash of daring lighted Randalin's eyes, though her mouth remained quiet. "A good way to keep them from thinking you a prisoner, lady, is to act like a free woman," she said. "I shall tell them that you are going to the Palace to see your husband." Sowing her seed, she left it to take root, and went away to convince the head of the grooms.

As she had foretold, he was too uncertain regarding their position to dare contest their order, little as he liked it. In something less than an hour, the five women, fur-wrapped and flanked by pages and soldiers, were riding across the little stone bridge and up the wooded slope of the Tot Hill. In something more than an hour after that, they were pa.s.sing under the deep arch of the New Gate into the great City itself.

"Do you purpose to visit the Palace first, n.o.ble one?" the leader of the guards inquired with a respectful if uneasy salute.

The seed had rooted so far that Elfgiva did not disclaim the intention; but she hesitated a long time, pulling nervously at the embroidered top of her riding glove. "In what direction lie the goldsmiths?" she asked at last.

"Straight ahead, lady. Nothing very pleasant is at the beginning; neither the shambles which lie across the way, nor the wax chandler's which is opposite; but when you get beyond Saint Martin's to the Commons, you will find--"

The lady's nose wrinkled disdainfully. "Which way lies the Palace?"