“_Those live long who are slain by words alone_”
—Northern saying.
In a black tide night had risen, submerging the farther windowless end
of the great loft, blotting out the sides and corners of this end. Like
a raft of light afloat upon a sea of darkness was the bright square
which the moon let fall from the window under the eaves; and now and
again, like a shipwrecked mariner, the song-maker rose out of the
engulfing blackness and stood in the light, reviving himself with the
sight of the infinite wind-swept sky. Deeper and deeper into his spirit
cut the thongs of the trap that had caught him. Ranging his prison up
and down—up and down—his step was the ceaseless hurried tread of a caged
tiger. Higher and higher rose the frenzy of impulse to hurl himself
against the walls and batter them with hands and feet and head till they
or he gave way.
It bent him at last to a thing he scorned, drove him against his will to
the door, wrung from him a hoarse appeal.
“Visbur! I cannot meet death like a fox in his earth! Let me fight my
way out against your sword. It will come to the same in the end!”
At first it was only the clang of a spear on the landing outside that
answered, so slow was the old guard’s voice of irony.
“Why do you talk of dying, Rolf’s son? Surely you heard the Jarl say
that you are only held here to appease the lawmen who want your
punishment for challenging Olaf.”
Upon the cross-bar of the door, Randvar’s hand clinched. He had
forgotten that the Jarl would cloak his purpose in that excuse. After a
moment Visbur spoke again, this time with biting contempt:
“You need not think, however, that I put more belief than you do in that
reason. A witless thing would Helvin’s justice be, to forgive you two
attacks upon his life and then imprison you only for challenging your
foe or loosing a worthless cub. Likely he is afraid to take open
vengeance because so many people are fooled by you as to stand your
friends; and therefore—even to me—he makes this poor excuse, and adds an
order that no others of his household shall even know that you are here,
but believe that it is still Eric that I hold prisoner. He might make
himself easy that no guardsman who saw you as you stood over your
chief’s wounded body, with a bloody sword in your grip, would lift a
finger to save you from torture.”
The song-maker’s voice sounded strange to himself as it came out of the
darkness in which he stood: “Only grant me to die a man’s death! You can
say that you looked in to see how it went with me, and I tried to force
my way out, and you slew me. Only that, as you were Rolf’s friend!”
The force with which Visbur’s spear came down upon the landing made up
for the low key in which he was obliged to pitch his voice.
“Do you know how I could find it in my heart to behave because I was
Rolf’s friend? Because you have stained an honorable name with traitor’s
deeds, I could see you hanged like a dog. Never make so bold as to speak
my name again.” Suddenly his feet went thundering down the steps, and
his spear could be heard striking against the side of the house as he
took up a new post below.
As suddenly, Randvar moved away from the door; and with his coming into
the moonlight it could be seen that he held his sword naked in his hand.
When he had stood awhile looking down at it, he set its point against
his heart; and then he stood for another space with musing eyes fixed on
the gleaming blade.
To slay one’s self, to run away from the fight—how could that be aught
but the act of a coward? And yet to die in a fit of mad terror—with
shaking limbs and blanched cheeks and reason overthrown—was that a death
for a brave man? Muscle by muscle, his grip on his sword tightened; and
then muscle by muscle it relaxed; and he stood arguing it over and over.
Deaf to all but that inner strife, he heard neither voices at the foot
of the steps nor the tread of feet ascending. The sound which he had
been dreading came at last and even that he did not know. Like the
rattling of the casement in some wandering breeze it befell at first,
and then slowly it revealed itself for the fumbling of unsteady fingers
upon a bolt. Only when a river of moonlight streamed across the floor at
his feet did he start awake and turn his head.
On the threshold, dark against the silver night, stood the man who had
drawn the bolts. A hood concealed his face, but massive shoulders showed
under his cloak; and over one of them could be seen the mailed form of
Visbur drawn up in respectful salute. Though it was but a flash of time
before the door had closed behind the muffled figure, merging its dark
drapery into the darkness of the wall, the song-maker felt no doubt of
the visitor’s identity. Indeed, almost the only thing he felt—amid the
sudden stiffening of his muscles and chilling of his blood—was wild
relief that for once his wits stood firm. Pitched to utter recklessness,
he flung his sword from him as at sight of the bare blade a smothered
cry came from the other’s wrappings.
“Have no fear that that was meant for you!” he said, and his strained
voice vibrated as with discordant laughter. “Easier were it to be slain
by you than to bear the burden of being your slayer. Have your will
with—”
Like over-strained wire his voice snapped, and he did not gather up the
ends. Only in passing through that strip of shadow, the man had become
another man; and it was the Shepherd Priest who stood revealed in the
moonlight.
“I bring you life and not death, my son,” he said gently. “Nor was it in
my head that Helvin meant to push the matter so far, even though his
sister told me that it had stirred his unreasoning wrath against you
that you set the boy free. God is to be twice thanked that I can at once
save my lord a crime and you a wrong! Yet no long space is given me to
do it in.”
Moving on up the room, he bent and swept the straw away from the middle
of the floor. Across the long cracks of the boarding showed dimly the
lines of the wooden hatch that had been set in the hole through which—in
the days when the prison loft had been a store-chamber—the huge vat
below had been refilled each brewing season. Easily as one pries the
head out of a barrel, he pried up the clumsy door and laid it back from
the opening.
Like a half-hanged man whose body has been cut down in time but whose
emotions have gone on out of the world of the living, the Songsmith
remained gazing at him.
“Even if it had happened to me to remember that place,” he said slowly,
“I should have been so sure that it was fastened on the under side that
I would not have thought it worth while to try it.”
“It was fastened by bolts on every corner until I drew them,” the
Shepherd Priest answered.
Dusting his hands upon his cloak in an unconscious habit from his youth,
he came back to the moonlight and began to give further directions for
the carrying out of the plan he had made, his quiet tones as well-fitted
to seem the voice of a priest preparing a sinner for death as the voice
of a man guiding a brother man to life.
“For much talking I have now no time, but everything lies on your
understanding this much. Listen then, my son! So soon as the door closes
upon me, let yourself down through the opening,—I will keep the guard in
talk to cover any noise you may make. The door at the back you will find
ajar, and an oak’s shadow screens the entrance from without. That oak
clump, and the shadow of the wall, will make it easy for you to reach
the western gate, where a man stands guard whose love for you has got in
his eyes so that he will not be able to see you as you pass. When you
reach the lane outside—But it will turn out that I reach that before you
do, since my road need not be so roundabout—”
Upon his speech fell the sound of Visbur’s great fist on the door. He
broke off to lay hands upon the song-maker’s shoulders and press him
down upon his knees. It was a benediction that he was saying over the
prisoner when the door opened and the brass-bound head was thrust in.
Its owner said gruffly:
“Good luck go with your prayers, since for love of my soul I let you up
to him! But I love my body also, father; and the risk to that gets
greater the longer you stay.”
“I was even now coming,” the priest answered, turning; and Visbur lost
no time in fastening up behind him.
As one trying to rouse himself out of a stupor, Randvar arose and stood
shaking back his hair and opening and shutting his hands. As one in a
dream, he heard the old man’s unsteady steps following the guard’s rapid
descent, heard the gentle voice pleading with the gruff one. Then of a
sudden his wandering glance fell upon the black gap in the floor—the
loop-hole in what had seemed a dead wall. Like the leap of flame through
smoke leapt his blood through his dulness, parching his throat, roaring
in his ears. Now it was to restrain frantic eagerness that he crushed
his lip between his teeth as he swung himself swiftly through the
opening.
A fur-bale that had been placed at the bottom of the now empty vat
received him without noise. Drawing himself up to the top of the wall
which the vat’s side made, he balanced there until on the darkness
shrouding him he had found the thread of silver light. Using hands,
then, in place of eyes, he climbed out and groped his way between bales
and boxes and barrels to the door that had been set ajar, drew it open
and stepped through it into the moonlight, and then stepped aside into
the shadow of a giant oak that grew there.
Lifting the damp hair on his forehead, the night wind met him freshly.
As to meet the lips of a woman, he lifted his burning face and spread
wide his arms. For that long a space, his heart sang a song of wild
exulting.
For that long—but for no longer. Around the great bole of the oak,
looming dark beyond a silver sea, he glimpsed the silent mass of
Brynhild’s bower. Brynhild! And this should have been their wedding-day!
His hands tearing at his collar to relieve the swelling agony of his
throat, he had taken a dozen blind steps towards the silent pile before
his senses came back to him, before he thought to ask himself what good
would come of it even should he succeed in making his way to her. She
armored in pride, and he an outlawed man! Like a sail which the breeze
has deserted, his head sank; he stood becalmed.
When he looked up again, the lines of his white face had hardened as
iron settling in a mould.
“Once in his lifetime it is well for a man to tell himself the truth,”
he said. “To lose me will strike as near her heart as though she had
lost a jewel from her ring—no nearer. Once she might look for it, once
frown over the loss, once speak regretfully of it,—and that is soon
over! The memory of my arms around her, the fire of her lips on mine,
the dream of possessing her—what more could I hope for? For the dreamer,
a dream-bride! It is well-befitting!”
A smile curled his lips that was new and ill to see, as he looked his
last upon the shrine of her he loved. Then he turned and walked on
rapidly over the tree-guarded path that led eventually to the shadow of
the wall and the western gate.
From a distance he glimpsed again the gray-cloaked beggar, outstretched
as if in slumber; but he saw no other living thing until he saw the
black-robed priest move across the bright court and pass out of the gate
ahead, the sentinel making him reverent salute. Even though it had been
foretold him, it deepened his sense of belonging no more to the living
world that when he himself reached the exit the man remained gazing
fixedly at the sky, and he dared neither greet nor touch him as he
passed.
The gate gained and left behind, his instructions were exhausted; and he
would have halted to plan further but that out in the radiant lane he
found the Shepherd Priest awaiting him, his heavy shock of hair turned
into a silver glory around his swarthy face. Moving down the dewy path
beside him, the old man began at once to speak:
“One thing I think needful to say, my son; and that is that I should not
be less afraid of taking this second step than of taking the first one,
if God had not given me to see most plainly what His will is. I want you
to know that one week ago He moved the Jarl’s heart to speak and call me
as witness that he had solemnly consented in your espousal of his
sister.”
Randvar could not have replied if he would.
His gaze had gone ahead to a blossoming crab-tree that leaned over the
low stone wall and canopied half the lane. Masses of snowy bloom were
its branches, and snowed over with petals was the earth beneath it, but
that white shape moving before it—was that only another branch blowing
in the soft night wind? Coming to meet them, it looked like a girl in a
thrall’s robe of white wool; but the queenful poise of the head—the
glint of red-gold hair as the light fell upon it—He put out a hand and
gripped the old priest’s shoulder.
“Tell me how much this means?” he demanded.
She answered for herself, the girl in the bondmaid’s kirtle, as she
stopped before them; and in voice as well as face she was Brynhild, the
Jarl’s sister.
“I should have thought there was more risk of a man’s forgetting
anything than his wedding-day,” she said with lips that smiled through
trembling.
Even then he dared not believe it, but stood gazing from her to the pair
of saddled horses tethered in the shelter of a spreading tree. Drawing
yet nearer, she held out her hands, her gray eyes meeting his as
steadfast as the gray North star.
“It means,” she said, “that even as Freya followed Rolf, your wife
follows you into banishment—Love, what is it?”
For he had flung himself on his knees before her and was kissing the hem
of her coarse robe.