Vandrad the Viking Part 5

"I am known as Vandrad, the son of a n.o.ble landowner in Norway."

The old man looked for a moment as though he would have questioned him further on his family. Instead, he asked,--

"And why came you to these islands?"

"For that, the wind and not I is answerable. Orkney was the last place I had thought of visiting."

"You were wrecked?"

"Wrecked, and wellnigh drowned."

In a more courteous tone the old man said, "While you are here you are welcome to such cheer as we can give you. This cell is all my dwelling, but since you have come to this island, enter and rest you in peace."

Stooping low in the doorway, Estein entered the abode of Andreas the hermit. Lit only by a small window and the gleam of a driftwood fire, the rude apartment was dusky and dim; yet there seemed nothing there that should make the sea-king pause at the threshold. Was it but a smoke wreath that he saw, and did the wind rise with a sudden gust out of the stillness of the evening? It seemed to him a face that appeared and then vanished, and a far- off voice that whispered a warning in his ear.

"Be not dismayed at our poverty; there is no worse foeman within,"

said Osla, with a touch of raillery, as he stood for a moment irresolute.

Estein made no answer, but stepped quickly into the room. Had he indeed heard a voice from beyond the grave, or was it but the fancy of a wounded head? The impression lingered so vividly that he stood in a reverie, and the words of his hosts fell unheeded on his ears. He knew the face, he had heard the voice of old, but in the kaleidoscope of memory he could see no name to fit them, no incident wherewith they might be linked.

He was aroused by the voice of Osla.

"Let us give him food and drink quickly, father. He is faint, and hears us not."

The tumultuous stir of battle was forgotten as they brought him supper and gently bound his wounds. A kettle sang a drowsy song and seemed to lay a languid spell upon him, and, as in a dream, he heard the hermit offer up an evening prayer. The pet.i.tions, eloquent and brief in his northern tongue, rose above the throbbing of the roost outside, and died away into a prayerful silence; and then, in the pleasant nicker of the firelight, they parted till the morrow.

Estein and the hermit stepped out into the cool night.

"They who visit the Holy Isle must rest content with hard pillows," said Andreas. "Here in this cell you will find a blanket and a couch of stone. May Christ be with you through the night;"

and as he spoke he turned into his own bare apartment.

Estein looked upward at the stars shining as calmly on him here as on the sea-king who lately paced his long ship's deck; he listened for a moment to the roost rising higher and moaning more uneasily; and then above both he saw a pair of dark blue eyes, and heard a voice with just a touch of raillery in it. As he bent his head and entered his cell, he smiled to himself at the pleasantness of the vision.

CHAPTER IV.

THE ISLAND SPELL.

The Holy Isle was bathed in morning sunshine, shadows of light clouds chased each other over the hills across the sound, and out beyond the headlands the blue sea glimmered restfully.

On a bank of turf sloping to the rocks Estein sat with Osla, drinking in the freshness of the air. She had milked their solitary cow, baked cakes enough for the day's fare, and now, her simple housekeeping over, she was free to entertain her guest.

"My father, I fear, is in a black mood," she said. "His moods come and go, I know not why or when. To-day and perhaps to-morrow, and it may be for four days or more, he will sit in his cell or on the gra.s.s before the door, speaking never a word, and hardly answering when I talk to him. Pay no heed to him; he means no inhospitality."

"I fear he likes me not," said Estein. "He came here to escape men, you say, and now he has to entertain a stranger and a Viking."

"It is not that," she said. "The black moods come when we are alone; they come sometimes with the rising storm, sometimes when the sun shines brightest. I cannot tell when the gloom will fall, nor when he will be himself again. When his mind is well, he will talk to me for hours, and instruct me in many things."

"Has he instructed you in this religion he professes? Know you what G.o.ds he worships?"

Osla opened her eyes in perplexed surprise; she hardly felt herself equal to the task of converting this pagan, and yet it were a pity not to try. So she told him, with a woman's enthusiastic inaccuracy, of this new creed of love, then being so strikingly ill.u.s.trated in troubled, warlike Christian Europe.

"And what of the G.o.ds I and my ancestors have worshipped for so long? What place have they in the Valhalla of the white Christ?"

"There are no other G.o.ds."

"No Odin, no Thor, no Freya of the fair seasons, no Valhalla for the souls of the brave? Nay, Osla, leave me my G.o.ds, and I will leave you yours. Mine is the religion of my kinsmen, of my father, of my ancestors. And," he continued, "would you say that Christian men are better than worshippers of Odin? Are they braver, are their swords keener, are they more faithful to their friends?"

"We want not keen swords. Warfare is your only thought. You live but to pillage and to fight. Have you known what it is to lose home and brothers all in one battle? Have you fled from a smoking roof-tree? Have you had mercy refused you? Have you had wife or child borne away to slavery? That is your creed--tell me, is it not?"

"I have thought of these things, Osla," said Estein gravely. "I have thought of them at night when the stars shone and the wind sighed in the trees. When I look upon my home and see the reapers in the fields, and hear the maidens singing at their work, I would sometimes be willing to turn hermit like your father, and sit in the sun for ever.

"But," he went on, and his voice rose to a clear, stirring note, "I could not rest long so. The sea calls us Northmen, and we cannot bide at home. Unrest seizes us like a giant and hurls us forth. We must be men; we must seek adventure on sea or on sh.o.r.e; there are foemen to be met, and we long to meet them; and if we bear us bravely, never striking sail though the wind blow high, and never flinching from the greatest odds, we know that the G.o.ds will smile, and, if they will, we die happy. We are not all bairn- slayers. I have been taught to spare where there was nothing worthy of my steel, and no maid or mother has yet suffered wrong at my hands. Yet must I sail the seas, Osla, and fight where I find a foe; for I feel that the G.o.ds bid me, and a man cannot struggle with his fate."

While he spoke Osla's gaze was fixed on the turning tide, but her eyes, had he seen them, were lit by the fire of his words. She sprang to her feet as he finished, and said,--

"I, too, have the Norse blood in me; the sea calls me as it calls you; and if I were a man, I fear I should make a bad hermit. Yet"- -and she held up a warning finger to stay the impetuous words on Estein's tongue--"yet I know I should be wrong. What is this feeling but the hunger of wolves, and what are your G.o.ds but names for it? Wolves, too, go out to slay; and if they had speech, doubtless they would say that Thor called them."

"Is a Viking not different from a wolf, then, in your eyes?"

"By too little," she answered, "if they hold the same creed."

"A wolf, then, I am," he replied; "and I can but try to keep my lips drawn over my fangs and bit on my hind legs, and practise manliness as best I may."

"A very hungry manliness," she retorted. But despite herself she smiled, and then lightly turned the talk to other things.

From day to day the quiet island life went on with few incidents and pleasant monotony. With only one family was there any intercourse, and that almost entirely on Osla's part. On the sh.o.r.e of the great island to the west, which men called Hrossey, dwelt a large farmer, named Margad, and from his household such supplies as they needed were obtained. He was an honest, peaceable man, as the times went, with a kindly wife, Gudrun by name, and they both took a friendly interest in the hermit's daughter. Estein would fain have lived in her society all day, listening to her talk and watching the wind play with her hair, and every day he noticed, with a sense of growing disappointment, that he saw her more seldom. Sometimes they would have long talks, and then, abruptly as it seemed to him, she would have to leave him, and he would spend his time in fishing from a boat, or would cross with her to Hrossey, and while she went to see Dame Gudrun he pursued the roe- deer and moor-fowl.

With bow and arrow, and by dint of long and arduous stalks, he brought home scanty but well-earned spoil, and then, either by himself, or more often with Osla in the stern, he would cross the sound as the day faded, to a welcome supper and an evening spent in the firelit cell, or to a peaceful night beside the swirl of the tideway under a sky so pale and clear that only the brightest stars were ever seen.

He knew that he was in love, hopelessly in love. Why else should he stay in the Holy Isle after his wounds were healed, and when nothing bade him remain? Far away and faint sounded the echoes of war and the shouts of revelry. Like memories of another life, thoughts of his father, of Helgi, of friends and kinsmen, came to him, p.r.i.c.ked him for a moment, and faded into a pair of dark-blue eyes and a tall and slender figure. He still talked to Osla of voyages and battles, and caught her sometimes taking more interest than she would own in some old tale of derring-do, or a story of his own adventures. Yet the actual memories of these things grew fainter, and he talked like an old man telling of his youth.

"I am under a spell," he would say to himself, and stride more quickly over the heather, and then catch himself smiling at the thought of some word or look of Osla's.

The hermit's black mood pa.s.sed away, and was followed by an att.i.tude of grave distance towards his guest. He spoke little, but always courteously, and seemed to treat him at first merely as an addition to the live stock of the island.

One night Estein, after the manner of the skalds, sang a poem of his own as they sat round the fire. He called it the "King's War Song."

"On high the raven banner Invites the hungry kites, Red glares the sun at noon-tide, Wild gleam the Northern lights; The war-horn brays its summons, And from each rock-bound fiord Come the sea-kings of Norway, To follow Norway's lord.

"The cloven arrow speeding, Fraught with war's alarms, Calls the ravens to their feast, The Udallers to arms.

See that your helms be burnished, See that your blades be ground, When he of Yngve's kindred Sends the war token round!"

"Skoal, [Footnote: The Norse drinking salutation.] Vandrad!

skoal!" cried the hermit.