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-shells, 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 passed 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 passed 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 hoarsely
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 hell 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
hoarse 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 coarsest, 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 passed 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 passed 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 coarse 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-shell 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
gods meanwhile and sending them all to Hell in Latin and Danish. Then he
began to blame me, and though he did not curse me as he had done the
gods, 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 hoarsely, "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.