He is happy
Who for himself obtains
Fame and kind words;
Less sure is that
Which a man must have
In another’s breast.
Hávamál.
The murmur of the rain that was falling gently on the roses of the
Abbey garden stole in through the open windows of Elfgiva’s bower and
blended softly with the music of Candida’s lyre. Poring over the dingy
scrolls spread out on the table before her, the Lady of Northampton
yawned until she was moved to throw herself back among her cushions
with a gesture of graceful surrender.
“It seems that the Saints are going to take pity on me and shorten one
of these endless days with a nap. Nurse, have a care for these scrolls.
And if it happen that the King’s Marshal comes—Randalin! Where is
Randalin?”
Beyond Leonorine’s embroidery frame and the stool where Candida bent
over her lyre, the length of the room away, a figure in iris-blue
turned from the window by which it stood.
“Here, lady. What is your need?”
To place the speaker Elfgiva raised her head slightly, laughing as she
let it sink back. “Watching for him already, and the sun but little
past noon? For shame, moppet! Come here.”
“So please you, I was watching the rain on the roses,” Randalin excused
herself with a blush as she came forward.
A merry chorus mocked her: “Is it to watch the roses that you have put
on the gown which matches your eyes, you sly one?”... “And the lilies
in your hair, sweet? Is it to shelter them from the rain that you wear
them?”... “Fie, Tata! Can you not fib yet without changing color?”
But Elfgiva raised an impatient hand. “Peace, chatterers!” she
commanded; and drawing the girl to her, she spoke low and earnestly in
her ear.
Randalin looked up in surprise. “You will not see him, lady? Not though
he bring news of the doings in the Palace?”
“Heaven’s mercy!” Elfgiva shrugged with a touch of scorn. “What
abundance of news he has found to bring since the day he fell in with
you at even-song!” Then she consented to smile faintly as she settled
her head among the cushions. “I would rather sleep, child. Comfort him
as best you can,—only not so well that you forget that which I enjoined
you. If he fail us, I cannot tell what we shall do,—now that the second
scullion has been so foolish as to get himself killed in some way.
Where bear you the ring?”
The girl touched the spot where the gold chain that encircled her neck
crept into the breast of her gown. The lady shook her head.
“Never would you think of it again. Take it out and wear it on your
finger.”
As she obeyed, Randalin laughed a little, for the ring was a man’s
ring, a massive spiral whose two ends were finished with serpents’
heads, and her thickest finger was but a loose fit in its girth. But
Elfgiva, when she had seen it on, closed her eyes with an air of
satisfaction.
“To keep from losing it, will keep it in your mind,” she said. “Now
leave me. Candida,—more softly! And see to it that you do not stop the
moment my eyes are closing. Leonorine, why are you industrious in
singing only when it is not required of you?... That is better... Let
no one wake me.”
They drew silence around her like a curtain through whose silken web
the blended voices of rain and lyre and singer crept in soothing
melody. To escape its ensnaring folds, Randalin stole back to the
distant window beneath which Dearwyn sat on a little bench, weaving
clover blossoms into a chain.
The little gentlewoman looked up with her soft pretty smile. “How
mysterious you are, you two!” she whispered, as she swept the mass of
rosy bloom to the floor to make room for her friend. “What with Teboen
always seething ill-smelling herbs and—Tata, I pray you to tell who has
gifted you with such a monster?”
Waving the ring where the light might catch the serpents’ eyes,
Randalin pursed her lips with so much mystery that her friend was
tempted to catch the hand and hold it prisoner while she examined the
ornament. After one look, however, she let it fall with an expression
of awe upon her dimpled face.
“The ring Canute gave Elfgiva—that he won from the giant Rothgar?
Heaven forbid that I should press upon her secrets! My ears tingle yet
from the cuff I got only for looking at yonder dirty scroll. Yet how
long is it since you were taken into their councils, Tata? Yesterday
you were no better able than I to say how things were with her.”
“How long?” Randalin repeated dreamily. Her gaze had gone back again to
the rain, falling so softly that every pool in the sodden paths seemed
to be full of lazily winking eyes. “Oh, there are many good chances
that he will be here soon now. He is seldom later than the third hour
after noon.”
After a bewildered gasp, Dearwyn stifled a burst of laughter in her
garlands. “Oh, Tata, come to earth!” she admonished. “Come to earth!”
And scooping up a handful of the fragrant bloom, she pelted the dreamer
with rosy balls.
Shaking them from robe and clustering hair, Randalin turned back,
smiling. But her lips sobered almost to wistfulness as she sank down
upon the seat beside her friend. “It seems that I must do that against
my will,” she said. “Dearwyn, do you get afraid when you are happy?
Sometimes, when I stand here watching for him and think how different
all has happened from what I supposed, I am so happy,”—she paused, and
it was as though the sun had caught the iris flowers in her eyes, until
a cloud came between and the blue petals purpled darkly—“so happy that
it causes fear to me, lest it be no more than a dream or in some way
not true.”
Her cheek, as she ended, was softly pale, but Dearwyn brushed it pink
with sweeps of the long-stemmed blossom in her hand.
“Sweet, it is the waxing of the moon. I pray you be blithe in your
spirits. Small wonder your lover bears himself as gravely as a stone
man on a tomb if you talk such—”
“Dearwyn, the same thought has overtaken us both!” Randalin broke in
anxiously, and now she was all awake and staying the other’s busy
fingers to ensure her attention. “Not a few times it has seemed to me
that he looks weary of heart, as though some struggle were sapping his
strength. He swears it is not so, yet I think the rebellion of his
pride against king-serving—”
“If you want to know my belief, it is that he carries trouble in his
breast about you,” Dearwyn interrupted.
“About me?” So much hurt surprise was in Randalin’s manner that the
little maid begged forgiveness with caresses of the swaying clover.
“Be not vexed, honey, but in truth he is overcome by the oddest look
whensoever he watches you without your seeing,—as though he were not
sure of you, in some way, and yet—Oh, I cannot explain it! Only tell me
this,—does he not ask you, many times and oft, if you love him, or if
others love you, or such like?”
In the midst of shaking her head, Randalin paused and her mouth became
as round as her eyes. “Foolishly do I recall it! As if he would! And
yet—Dearwyn, he has asked me four times if any Danes visit us here.
Would you think that he could be—”
“Jealous?” Dearwyn dropped her flowers to clap her hands softly. “Tata,
I have guessed his distemper rightly. Let no one say that I am not a
witch for cleverness! Ah, you can have the best fun that ever any maid
could have! If you could but make him believe something about that
Danishman that Teboen saw last winter!”
“Last winter?” Randalin repeated. “Oh! I had altogether forgotten him.
It seems that it has not been truthfully spoken when—”
The little Angle smothered the rest in her rapturous embrace. “The
ring, Tata,—that would be the cream of all! Let him think that Rothgar
gave it to you, that he is your lover! I would give many kirtles to see
his face.” “Rothgar?” Randalin’s voice was light with scorn. “As likely
would! be to think him love-struck for the serving-wench who sparkled
her eyes at him, as he to think that Rothgar Lodbroksson could count
for aught with me! Yet I say nothing against the fun it would be. It
may be that if he take notice of the thing and question me—just to see
how he would look—” She broke off discreetly, but the one elf which the
Abbot had not exorcised crept out and danced in the dimple of her
cheek.
Dearwyn shook her floral rod with an assumption of severity. “I trust
he will be sorely disquieted,” she said. “He deserves no otherwise for
his behavior last winter. Are you so soft of heart, Tata, that you are
never going to reckon with him for that?”
The dimple-elf took wing and all the mischief in the girl’s eyes seemed
to go with him. “Those days are buried,” she said. “Let the earth grow
green above them.” And suddenly she leaned forward and hid her face on
the other’s shoulder. “Bring them not before me, Dearwyn, my friend,
until I am a little surer of my happiness. It is so new yet, Dearwyn,
so new! And it came to me so suddenly that sometimes it almost seems as
if it might depart as suddenly from me.” A while they nestled together
without speaking, the little maid’s cheek resting lovingly on her
friend’s dark hair.
It was a page thrusting aside the arras that broke the spell. Opening
his mouth to make a flourishing announcement, the words were checked on
his tongue by four white hands motioning stern commands for silence.
“It is the King’s Marshal,” he framed with protesting lips. But even
that failed to gain him admittance.
Rising, flushed and smiling, the girl with the blue lilies in her hair
tiptoed toward him. “I have orders to receive the Marshal,” she
whispered. “Where is he?”
“He is in the Old Room,” the page answered rather resentfully, but
resigned himself as he remembered that, however this curtailed his
importance, it left open a prompter return to his game of leap-frog
along the passage.
In all probability his nimble departure saved him from a scolding for,
as she tripped after him down the corridor, a little frown was forming
between Randalin’s brows. “I think it is not well-mannered of the
fellow to say ‘the King’s Marshal’ as though my lord were Canute’s
thane,” she was reflecting, “and I shall put an end to it. Whatever
others say, one never needs to tell me that Sebert is not suffering in
his service.”
With this thought in her mind, she raised the moth-eaten tapestry and
stood looking at him with a face full of generous indignation. Except
for the noble’s embroidered belt and gold-hilted sword, his dress now
differed in no way from that of the hundreds and hundreds of
red-cloaked guards who were spread over the country like sparks after a
conflagration. As he turned at the end of the beat he was pacing and
came slowly toward her, she could see that in its gravity his face was
as soldier-like as his clothes. Always she found it so when she came
upon him unawares; and always, when she spoke to him—She held her
breath as his eyes rose to her, and let it go with a little sigh of
happiness as she saw gloom drop from him like a mask at the sight of
her.
“Randalin!” he cried joyously, and made a step toward her, then stopped
to laugh in gay wonder. “Now no poet would call you ‘a weaver of peace’
as you stand there, for you look rather like an elf of battle. What is
it, my raven?”
Her lips smiled back at him, but a mist was over her eyes. “It is your
King that I am angry with, lord. He is not worthy that a man like you
should serve him.”
Moving toward her again, he held himself a little straighter. “I serve
not the King, dear heart,” he said gently, “but the State of England,
in whose service the highest is none too good to bend.”
She yielded him her hands but not her point. “That does not change the
fact that it is his overbearingness which makes your path as though you
trod on nettles,—for certainly I know it is so, though you will not say
it!”
Neither would he admit it now, but laughed lightly as he drew her to
him. “Now may he not give me thorns who gives me also the sweetest rose
in his king-dom? I tell you he is the kingliest king ever I had to deal
with, and the chief I would soonest trust England to. Be no Danish
rebel, shield-maiden, or as the King’s officer I will mulct your lips
for every word of treason.”
She showed no rebellion against his authority, at all events; and her
hands remained in his clasp until of his own accord he opened his
fingers with an exclamation. “Do you wear bracelets for rings, my fair,
or what? _What_!” From the monstrous bauble in his palm, he raised his
eyes to hers, and if she had seen their look she might have answered
differently. But her gaze was still on the ring; and as she felt him
start, that impish dimple peeped out of her cheek.
“Is it not a handsome thing?” she said. “It looks to be a ring to
belong to a giant.”
“Is it—Rothgar’s?”
The dimple deepened as she heard his tone. For all its absurdity, there
must be some truth in Dearwyn’s witch-skill. She was obliged to droop
her lashes very low to hide the mischief in her eyes. “It is not his
now,” she murmured. “It has been given me—to keep me in mind of
something.” But after that her amusement grew too strong to be
repressed, and she looked up at him with over-brimming laughter. “There
will soon be too much of this! Sweetheart mine, are you in truth so
easy to plague?”
Laughing she looked up at him, but, even as his face was clearing,
something in it struck her so strangely that her laughter died and she
bent toward him in sudden gravity. “Lord! It is not possible for you to
believe that I could love Rothgar!” Her manner of uttering that one
word made it speak more scorn than volumes might have done.
For a while he only looked at her, that strange radiance growing in his
face; but suddenly he caught her to him and kissed her so passionately
that he hurt her, and his voice was as passionate as his caress. “No,”
he told her over and over. “Would I have offered you my love had I
believed that? No! No!”
Satisfied, she made no more resistance but clung to him with her arms
as she had clung to him with her heart since the first hour he came
into her life. Only, when at last he released her, she took the ring
from her finger and thrust it into his hand with a little gesture of
distaste. “I shall be thankful if I do not have to see it again. It is
Elfgiva’s, that Canute gave her after he had won it from Rothgar in
some wager. It is her wish that you bring it to the King again by
slipping it into his broth or his wine where he will come upon it after
he has finished feeding and is therefore amiable—” She stopped to laugh
merrily in his face. “See how the very naming of the King turns you
grave again! When one gets a Marshalship, one becomes more and more
stark.” Grown mischievous again in her happiness, she mocked him with
courtesies.
But it was only very faintly that he smiled at her fooling, as he held
the spiral against the light and shook it beside his ear. “Is there no
more to the message,” he said slowly. “Am I to know nothing of her
object? Or why I am chosen of all others?”
“Easy is it to tell that,” she laughed. “You were not chosen without a
reason, and that is because no one else is to be had, since the
scullion who formerly served her has gotten himself killed in some way
and the man who stepped into his shoes, out of some spite, has refused
Teboen’s gold. And as for her object—I wonder at you, lord of my heart!
What kind of a lover are you that you cannot guess that?” Feigning to
flout him, she drew away; then feigning to relent, turned back and
laughed it into his ear. “It is a love-token! To hold him to the fair
promises he made at its giving, and to remind him of her, and to win
her a crown, and to do so many strange wonders that no tongue can
number them! Are you not ashamed to have failed on so easy a riddle?”
To her surprise, his gravity deepened almost to horror. “Love-token!”
he repeated; and suddenly he laid his hands on her shoulders and forced
her gently to give him eye for eye. “Randalin, if I comply with you in
this matter, will you answer me a question? Answer with such care as
though your life—nay, as though _my_ life depended on it?”
“Willingly; more than one,” she consented; but forgot to wait for it as
a memory, wakened by his words, stirred in her. “Now it is time for me
to remember that there is one thing I have not been altogether truthful
about, through forgetting,—about the Danes we have seen. I recall now
that last winter Teboen often saw one when she was gathering herbs in
the wood. She spoke with him of the magic things she brews to make
Elfgiva sleep, and he gave her herbs which she thought so useful that
she has been fretful because she has not seen him since—”
Unconsciously, the young soldier’s hands tightened on her shoulders
until she winced. “You know with certainty that she has never seen him
since?” he demanded,—“that Danes had naught to do with the last token
Elfgiva sent through the scullion? You can swear to it?”
“Certainly, if they speak the truth, I know it,” she answered
wonderingly. “How should Danes—why, Sebert, what ails you?”
For he had let go her shoulders as abruptly as he had seized them, and
walked away to the window that looked out upon the rain-washed garden.
After a moment’s hesitation, she stole after him. “Sebert, my love,
what is it? Trouble is in your mind, there is little use to deny it.
Dearwyn says it concerns me, but I know that it is no less than the
King. Dear one, it seems strange that you cannot disclose your mind to
me as well as to—Fridtjof.”
It was the first time, in their brief meetings together, that she had
spoken that name, and his smile answered. Even while his lips admitted
a trouble, his manner put it aside. “You are right that it concerns the
King, my elf. Sometimes the work he assigns me is neither easy nor
pleasant to accomplish. Yet without any blame to him, most warlike
maiden, for—”
But she would not be prevented from saying stern things of her royal
guardian, so at last he let her finish the subject, and stood pressing
her hands upon his breast, his eyes resting dreamily on her face.
When she had finished, he said slowly, “Sweeting, because my mind is
laboring under so many burdens that my wits are even duller than they
are wont, will you not have the patience to answer one question that is
not clear to me? Do you think it troublesome to tell me why it was that
you said, that day in the garden—Now shake off that look, dearest;
never will we speak of it again if it is not to your wish! Tell me what
you meant by saying that you came into Canute’s camp because you had
too much faith in Rothgar, if you despise him—since you despise him
so?”
Her eyes met his wonderingly. “By no means could I have said that,
lord. When I left home, I knew not that Rothgar lived. The one in whom
I had too much faith was the King. Because I was young and little
experienced, I thought him a god; and when I came to his camp and found
him a man, I thought only to escape from him. That was why I wore those
clothes, Sebert—not because I liked so wild a life. That is clear to
you, is it not?”
He did not appear to hear her last words at all. He was repeating over
and over, “The King, the King!” Suddenly he said, “Then I got that
right, that it was he who summoned me to Gloucester to make sure that
you had kept your secret from me also?—that he was angry with you for
deceiving him?”
“Yes,” she said. But as he opened his lips to put another question, she
laid her finger-tip beseechingly upon them, “Sebert, my love, I beg of
you let us talk no more of those days. Sometime, when we have a long
time to be together, I will tell you everything that I have had in my
breast and you shall show me everything that you have had in yours,
but—but let us wait, sweetheart, until our happiness seems more real
than our sorrow. Even yet I do not like the thought of the ‘sun-browned
boy-bred wench.’” She laughed a little unsteadily at the sudden
crimsoning of his face. “And I am still ashamed—and ashamed of being
ashamed—that I showed you so plainly what my heart held for you...
Elfgiva’s tongue has stabbed me sore... Beloved, can you not be
content, for now, with knowing that I have loved no man before you and
shall love none after you?”
Bending, he kissed her lips with the utmost tenderness. “I am well
content,” he said. And after that they spoke only of the future, when
the first period of his Marshalship should be over and he should be
free to take his bride back to the fields and woods of Ivarsdale, and
the gray old Tower on the hill.