The Ward of King Canute Part 29

Sebert sustained the look with proud steadiness. "Nothing that would be of use to me," he said; "and I do not choose to pleasure you by setting up a weak plea for you to knock down again. The right which gave Britain to the Saxons has given England to the Danes, and it is not by words that such a right can be disputed. If your messengers had not taken me by surprise--" He paused, with an odd curl to his lips that could hardly be called a smile; but Canute gave him grim command to finish, and he obeyed with rising color. "If your messengers had not come upon me as I was riding on the Watling Street and brought me here, a prisoner, I would have argued the matter with arrows, and you would needs have battered down the defence of stone walls to convince me."

Mutters of mingled admiration and censure buzzed around; and one English n.o.ble, more daring and also more friendly than the others, drew near and spoke a word of friendly warning in Sebert's ear. Through it all, Canute sat motionless, studying the Etheling with his bright colorless eyes.

At last he said unexpectedly, "If you would not obey my summons until my men had dealt with you by force, it cannot be said that you have much respect for my authority. Do you not then acknowledge me as King of the English?"

Rothgar betrayed impatience at this branching aside. Sebert himself showed surprise.

He said hesitatingly, "I--I cannot deny that. You have the same right that Cerdic had over the Britons. Nay, you have more, for you are the formal choice of the Witan. I cannot rightly deny that you are King of the Angles."

"If you acknowledge me to be that," Canute said, "I do not see why you have not an argument for your defence."

While all stared at him, he rose slowly and stood before them, a dazzling figure as the light caught the steel of his ring-mail and turned his polished helm to a fiery dome.

"Sebert Oswaldsson," he said slowly, "I did not feel much love toward you the first time I saw you, and it is hard for me not to hate you now, when I see what you are going to be the cause of. If your case had come before Canute the man, you would have received the answer you expect.

But it is your luck that Canute the man is dead, and you stand before Canute the King. Hear then my answer: By all the laws of war, the land belongs to Ivar's son; and had he regained it while war ruled, I had not taken it from him, though the Witan itself commanded me. But instead of regaining it, he lost it." He stretched a forbidding hand toward Rothgar, feeling without seeing his angry impulse. "By what means matters not; battles have turned on a smaller thing, and the loyalty of those we have protected is a lawful weapon to defend ourselves with. The kinsman of Ivar a second time lost his inheritance, and the opportunity pa.s.sed--forever. For now it is time to remember that this is not war, but peace; and in times of peace it is not allowed to take a man's land from him unless he has broken the law or offended honor, which no one can say this Englishman has done. What concerns war-time is a thing by itself; as ruler over laws and land-rights, I cannot give one man's lands to another, though the one be a man I care little for, and the other is my foster-brother. Go back therefore, unhindered, Lord of Ivarsdale, and live in peace henceforth. I do not think it probable that I shall ever call you to my friendship, but when the time comes that there is need of a brave and honest man to serve the English people in serving me, I shall send for you. Beware you that you do not neglect the summons of one whom you have acknowledged to be your rightful King!

Orvar, I want you to restore to him his weapon and see him on his way in safety. Your life shall answer for any harm that comes to him."

With one hand, he struck down the murmur that was rising; with the other he made an urgent gesture of haste, which Orvar seemed to understand.

Even while he was returning to the Lord of Ivarsdale his sword, he seized him by the arm and hurried him down the room, the Etheling walking like a man in a dream.

From the dusk of the rafters, the girl who loved him stretched out her hands to him in tender fare-well, but there was no more of anguish in the gesture. Gazing after him, the tears rose slowly to her eyes and rolled slowly down her cheeks, but on her mouth was a little smile whose wondering joy mounted to exaltation.

No need was there for her to hide either tear or smile, for no one of the women about her was so much as conscious of her existence. The murmur below was growing, despite the King's restraining hand; and now, crashing through it in hideous discord, came a burst of jeering laughter from the Jotun. What words he also spoke they could not catch, but they heard the Danish cries sink and die, aghast, and they saw a score of English thanes spring upon him and drag him backwards. Above the noise of their scuffling, the King's voice sounded stern and cold.

"While I act as law-man in my judgment hall, I will hear no disputing of my judgments. Whoso comes to me in my private chamber, as friend to friend, may tell his mind; but now I speak as King, and what I have spoken shall stand."

Struggling with those who would have forced him from the room, Rothgar had no breath to retort with, but the words did not go unsaid because of that. Wherever scarlet cloaks made a bright patch, the human arras swayed and shook violently, and then fell apart into groups of angry men whose voices rose in resentful chorus:

"Such judgment by a Danish King is unexampled!" "King, are we all to expect this treatment?... This is the third time you have ruled against your own men--" "Sven you punished for the murder of an Englishman--"

"Because you forced Gorm to pay his debt to an Englishman, he has lost all the property he owns." "Now, as before, we want to know what this means." "You are our chief, whose kingship we have held up with our lives--" "What are these English to you?"... "They are the thralls your sword has laid-under, while we are of your own blood--" "It is the strong will of us warriors to know what you mean--" "Yes, tell it plainly!"... "We speak as we have a right." Snarling more and more openly, they surged forward, closing around the dais in a fiery ma.s.s.

In the cushions of the balcony, Leonorine hid her face with a cry; "They will murder him!" And Elfgiva rose slowly from her chair, her eyes dark with horror yet unable to tear themselves from the scene below. The mail-clad King no longer looked to her like a man of flesh and blood but like a figure of iron and steel, that the firelight was wrapping in unendurable brightness. His sword was no more brilliantly hard than his face, and his eyes were glittering points. The ring of steel was in his voice as he answered:

"You speak as you have a right,--but you speak as men who have swines'

memories. Was it your support or your courage that won me the English crown? It may be that if I had waited until pyre and fire you would have done so, but it happened that before that time the English Witan gave it to me as a gift, in return for my pledge to rule them justly. My meaning in this judgment, and the others you dislike, is that I am going to keep that pledge. You are my men, and as my men you have supported me, and as my men I have rewarded you,--no chief was ever more open-handed with property toward his following,--but if you think that on that account I will endure from you trouble and lawlessness, you would better part from me and get into your boats and go back to my other kingdom. For I tell you now, openly and without deceit, that here henceforth there is to be but one rule for Angle and Dane alike; and I shall be as much their King as yours; and they shall share equally in my justice. You may like it or not, but that is what will take place."

How they liked it was suggested by a bursting roar, and the scuffling of many feet as the English leaped forward to protect their new King and the Danes whirled to meet them, but the women in the gallery did not wait to see the outcome. In a frenzy of terror, Elfgiva dragged up the kneeling maids and herded them through the door.

"Go,--before they get into the ante-room!" she gasped. "Do you not see that he is no longer human? We should be pleading with iron. Go! Before they tear down the walls!"

Chapter XXVII. Pixie-led

To a good friend's The paths lie direct, Though he be far away.

Ha'vama'l.

So Sebert of Ivarsdale went to his tower unhindered; and the rest of the winter nights, while the winds of the Wolf Month howled about the palisades, he listened undisturbed to his harper; and the rest of the winter days he trod in peace the homely routine of his lordship,--in peace and in absent-eyed silence.

"The old ways are clean fallen out of England, and it becomes a man to consider diligently how he will order his future," he told Hildelitha and the old cniht when they inquired the reason for his abstraction.

Perhaps it was the future that was engrossing his mind, but sometimes it came to him dimly as a strange thing how so small a matter as a slip of a girl in a page's dress could loom so large that there was no corner of manor or tower but recalled some trick of her tossing curls, some echo of her ringing laughter. The platform whereon they had walked in the moonlight, facing death together, he shunned as he would have shunned a grave; and the postern where they had parted was haunted ground. Did he tramp across the snow-crusted fields, memory clothed them again in nodding grain, and between the golden walls a figure in elfin green flitted like a will o' the wisp. Did he outsit the maids and men around his hearth and watch the dying fire with no other companions than his sleeping dogs, fancy placed a scar-let-cloaked figure on the cushion at his feet and raised at his knee a face of sweetest friendliness, whose flower-blue eyes brightened or gloomed in response to his lightest mood... Once more he heard the harp-notes that told of the wood-nymph's sorrow;... once more he heard his laughing denunciation;... again there looked back at him the wounded eyes... Whenever this vision rose before him, he stirred in his chair and turned his face from the light.

"May heaven grant that she is not remembering it!" he would murmur. And for a while he would see her as he had left her in the garden, holding herself so bravely erect in her shining robes, her white cheeks mocking at her smiling lips. A great well of pity would spring in his breast, drowning his heart with its pent-up gushing, and the waters would rise, rise, until they had touched his eyes. But always before they brimmed over, another change would come. Slowly, the rigid figure before him would relax into an att.i.tude of idle grace, the white cheeks would regain their color, the eyes their brightness, and--presto! she stood before him as he had seen her from the pa.s.sage, a high-born maid among her kind, favored by the King, guarded by her lover. When he reached this point, he always rose with an abruptness that swept his goblet to the floor and awakened the sleeping dogs.

"Fool!" he would spurn himself. "Mad puffed-up fool! Keep in mind that she has her consolers, while you have only your wound. If she could stake her all upon the son of Lodbrok and then give him up at the turn of the wheel, is it in any way likely that she is dead with tears for you? What? It may easily be that she has had a new love for every month that has pa.s.sed."

As the winter wore on, he grew restless in his solitude, restless and sullen as the waters of the little stream in their prison of ice. He told himself that when the spring came he would feel more settled; but when on one of his morning rides he came upon the first crocus, lifting its golden cup toward the sun, it only gave to his pointless restlessness a poisoned barb. Involuntarily his first thought was, "It would look like a spark of fire in the dusk of her hair." When he realized what he had said, he planted the great fore-foot of his horse squarely on the innocent thing and crushed it back into the earth; but it had done its work, for after that he knew that neither the promise of the springtime nor the fullness of the harvest would bring him any pleasure, since his eyes must see them alone.

"The next time they sing the 'Romance of King Offa,' before me, I will not hold back my sympathy," he scorned himself, "for at last I understand how it is possible for an elf to lure a man's reason off its seat and leave him a dreaming dolt."

Like a new lease of life it came to him when the last of the April days brought the long-delayed summons to the King. The old cniht, who considered that a command to military service could be justified only by imminent national destruction, was deeply incensed when he learned that the call was to no more than an officership in the new body of Royal Guards, but the young lord checked him with even a touch of impatience.

"What a throng of many words, my friend Morcard, have you spoken! Did you learn naught from the palisade that gave way because churls paid me their service when and how they would?" he demanded. "Now let me inform you that I have got that lesson by heart, and hereafter no king shall have that trouble about me. At sunrise, I ride back with the messenger."

And he maintained this view so firmly that his face was rather stern as he spent the night settling matters of ploughing and planting and pasturage with the indignant old servitor.

But the next morning, after he had set forth and found how every mile lengthening behind him lightened the burden of his depression, a kind of joy rose phoenix-like out of the gray ashes of duty.

"If I had continued there, I should have become feeble in mind," he said. "Now, since I have got out of that tomb that she haunts, it may be that I can follow my art more l.u.s.tily." And suddenly his sternness melted into a great warmth, toward the strapping soldier riding beside him, toward the pannier-laden venders swinging along in their tireless dog-trot, even toward the beggar that hobbled out of the ditch to waylay him. "To live out in the world, where you are pulled into others' lives whether you will or no, is the best thing to teach people to forget,"

he said. "Solitude has comfort only for those who have no sorrows, for Solitude is the mother of remembrance."

He got genuine enjoyment out of the hour that he was obliged to sit in the ante-room, waiting to be admitted to the King. On one side of him, a group was discussing a Danish rebellion that seemed to be somewhere in progress; on the other, men were speculating on the chances of a Norman invasion,--news of keenest interest was flying thick as bees in June; and the coming and going of the red-cloaked warriors, the occasional pa.s.sing of some great n.o.ble through the throng, stimulated him like wine.

"Praise to the Saint who has brought me into a life where there are no women!" he told himself. "Yes! Oh, yes! Here once more I shall rule my thoughts like a man." When a page finally came to summon him, he followed with buoyant step and so gallant a bearing that more than one turned to look at him as he pa.s.sed.

"Yonder goes the new Marshal," he heard one say to another, and gave the words a fleeting wonder.

The bare stone hall into which the boy ushered him was the same room in which he had had his last audience, and now as then the King sat in the great carved chair by the chimney-piece, but other things were so changed that inside the threshold the Etheling checked his swinging stride to gaze incredulously. No soldiers were to be seen but the sentinels that had been placed beside the doorways, stiff as their gilded pikes, and they counted strictly in the cla.s.s with the ebony footstools and other furnishings. The knots of men, scattered here and there in buzzing discussion, were all dark-robed merchants and white-bearded judges, while around the table under the window a dozen shaven-headed monks were working busily with writing tools. The King himself was no longer armored, but weapon-less and clad in velvet.

Stopping uncertainly, Sebert took from his head the helmet which he had worn, soldier fashion, into the presence of his chief, and into his salutation crept some of the awe that he had felt for Edmund's kingship, before he knew how weak a man held up the crown.

Certainly Edmund had never received a greeting with more of formal dignity than the young Dane did now, while Edmund could never have spoken what followed with this grim directness which sent every word home like an arrow to its mark.

"Lord of Ivarsdale, before I speak further I think it wise that we should make plain our minds to each other. Some say that you are apt to be a hard man to deal with because you bend to obedience only when the command is to your liking. I want to know if this is true of you?"

Half in surprise, half in embarra.s.sment, the Etheling colored high, and his words were some time coming; but when at last they reached his lips, they were as frank as Canute's own. "Lord King," he made answer, "that some truth is in what you have heard cannot be gainsaid; for a king's thane I shall never be, to crouch at a frown and caper according to his pleasure. What service I pay to you, I pay as an odal-man to the State for which you stand. Yet I will say this,--that I think men will find me less unruly than formerly, for, as I have accepted you for my chief, so am I willing to render you obedience in any manner soever you think right to demand it. This I am ready to swear to."

Canute's fist struck his chair-arm lightly. "Nothing more to my mind has occurred for a long time, and I welcome it! Better will both of us succeed if we declare openly that friendship between us must always be rather shallow. I love not men of your nature, neither is it possible for me to forget what you have cost me. Hatred would come much easier to me,--and I will not deny that you will feel it if ever you give me fair cause for anger." For an instant an edge of his Viking savagery made itself felt through his voice; then faded as quickly into cold courtesy.

"As to this which I now offer you, however, I think few are proud enough to find fault about it, for I have called you hither to be a Marshal of the kingdom and to have the rule over my Guards. Men from many lands will be among them, and it is a great necessity that I have at their head a man I can trust, while it is also pleasing to the English that that man be an Englishman. Concerning the laws which I shall make to govern them, Eric Jarl will tell you later."

"Marshal!" That then was what the mutter in the ante-room had meant.

Sebert would not have been young and a soldier if he had not felt keen delight tingle through every nerve. Indeed, his pleasure was so great that he dared say little in acknowledgment, lest it betray him into too great cordiality toward this stern young ruler who, though in reality a year younger than he, seemed to have become many years his senior.

He said shortly, "If I betray your trust, King Canute, let me have no favor! Is it your intention to have me make ready now against this incursion of the Normans, of which men are--"

He did not finish his question, for the King raised his hand impatiently.

"It is not likely that swords will have any part in that matter, Lord Marshal. There is another task in store for you than to fight Normans,--and it may be that you will think it beneath your rank, for instead of the State, it concerns me and my life, which someone has tried to take. Yet I expect you will see that my death would be little gainful to England." A second curt gesture cut short Sebert's rather embarra.s.sed protest. "Here are no fine words needed. Listen to the manner in which the deed was committed. Shortly before the end of the winter, it happened that Ulf Jarl saw the cook's scullion pour something into a broth that was intended for me to eat. Suspecting evil, he forced the fellow instead to swallow it, and the result was that, that night, the boy died."