Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

[See p. [131]
“SHE KNELT DOWN BEFORE HIM.... THE WOMAN IN HER PLEADED AS BEFORE A LAWMAN”

Randvar the Songsmith
A Romance of Norumbega

By

Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

Author of

“The Thrall of Leif the Lucky” etc.

New York and London

Harper & Brothers Publishers

1906

Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

Published February, 1906.

“Yet onward still to ear and eye

The baffling marvel calls;

I fain would look before I die

On Norumbega’s walls.”

—John Greenleaf Whittier

The Skeleton in Armor

By

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Speak! speak! thou fearful guest!

Who, with thy hollow breast

Still in rude armor drest,

Comest to daunt me!

Wrapt not in Eastern balms,

But with thy fleshless palms

Stretched, as if asking alms,

Why dost thou haunt me?”

Then, from those cavernous eyes

Pale flashes seem to rise,

As when the Northern skies

Gleam in December;

And, like the water’s flow

Under December’s snow,

Came a dull voice of woe

From the heart’s chamber.

“I was a Viking old!

My deeds, though manifold,

No Skald in song has told,

No Saga taught thee!

Take heed, that in thy verse

Thou dost the tale rehearse,

Else dread a dead man’s curse;

For this I sought thee.

“Far in the Northern Land,

By the wild Baltic strand,

I, with my childish hand,

Tamed the gerfalcon;

And, with my skates fast-bound,

Skimmed the half-frozen Sound,

That the poor whimpering hound

Trembled to walk on.

“Oft to his frozen lair

Tracked I the grisly bear,

While from my path the hare

Fled like a shadow;

Oft through the forest dark

Followed the were-wolf’s bark,

Until the soaring lark

Sang from the meadow.

“But when I older grew,

Joining a corsair’s crew,

O’er the dark sea I flew

With the marauders.

Wild was the life we led;

Many the souls that sped;

Many the hearts that bled,

By our stern orders.

“Many a wassail-bout

Wore the long winter out;

Often our midnight shout

Set the cocks crowing,

As we the Berserk’s tale

Measured in cups of ale,

Draining the oaken pail,

Filled to o’erflowing.

“Once as I told in glee

Tales of the stormy sea,

Soft eyes did gaze on me,

Burning yet tender;

And as the white stars shine

On the dark Norway pine,

On that dark heart of mine

Fell their soft splendor.

“I wooed the blue-eyed maid,

Yielding, yet half afraid,

And in the forest’s shade,

Our vows were plighted.

Under its loosened vest

Fluttered her little breast,

Like birds within their nest

By the hawk frighted.

“Bright in her father’s hall

Shield gleamed upon the wall,

Loud sang the minstrels all,

Chanting his glory;

When of old Hildebrand

I asked his daughter’s hand,

Mute did the minstrels stand

To hear my story.

“While the brown ale he quaffed,

Loud then the champion laughed,

And as the wind-gusts waft

The sea-foam brightly,

So the loud laugh of scorn,

Out of those lips unshorn,

From the deep drinking-horn

Blew the foam lightly.

“She was a Prince’s child,

I but a Viking wild,

And though she blushed and smiled,

I was discarded!

Should not the dove so white

Follow the sea-mew’s flight,

Why did they leave that night

Her nest unguarded?

“Scarce had I put to sea,

Bearing the maid with me,—

Fairest of all was she

Among the Norsemen!—

When on the white sea-strand,

Waving his armed hand,

Saw we old Hildebrand,

With twenty horsemen.

“Then launched they to the blast,

Bent like a reed each mast,

Yet we were gaining fast,

When the wind failed us;

And with a sudden flaw

Came round the gusty Skaw

So that our foe we saw

Laugh as he hailed us.

“And as to catch the gale

Round veered the flapping sail,

Death! was the helmsman’s hail,

Death without quarter!

’Midships with iron keel

Struck we her ribs of steel;

Down her black hulk did reel

Through the black water!

“As with his wings aslant,

Sails the fierce cormorant,

Seeking some rocky haunt,

With his prey laden,

So toward the open main,

Beating to sea again,

Through the wild hurricane,

Bore I the maiden.

“Three weeks we westward bore

And when the storm was o’er,

Cloud-like we saw the shore

Stretching to leeward;

There for my lady’s bower

Built I the lofty tower,

Which, to this very hour,

Stands looking seaward.

“There lived we many years;

Time dried the maiden’s tears;

She had forgot her fears,

She was a mother;

Death closed her mild blue eyes,

Under that tower she lies;

Ne’er shall the sun arise

On such another!

“Still grew my bosom then,

Still as a stagnant fen!

Hateful to me were men,

The sunlight hateful!

In the vast forest here,

Clad in my warlike gear,

Fell I upon my spear,

O, death was grateful!

“Thus, seamed with many scars

Bursting these prison bars

Up to its native stars

My soul ascended!

There from the flowing bowl

Deep drinks the warrior’s soul,

Skoal! to the Northland! SKOAL!”

Thus the tale ended.

Randvar the Songsmith

I

“A man’s foes are those of his own house”

—Northern saying.

In the old world over the ocean the storm of the Norman Conquest was raging, but no rumble of it reached across the water to the new world and that oasis in the wilderness which men call now the lost city of Norumbega, but which was known in those days as the Town of Starkad Jarl. There in the primeval forest the breath of October was a silver elixir in the air, and the morning breeze carried only the notes of hunting-horns. When half a dozen young Norsemen came galloping down a tree-arched aisle, their talk dealt with no greater matter than the latest freak of their Jarl’s freakish son.

“It is seen from the hoof-marks that he has not turned aside. We need not wait long to overtake—”

“Suppose he should not want to turn back—”

“Heard I never of a jarl’s hunt that began by hunting the Jarl’s son!”

“He was quiet in riding out of the Town with us; what caused him to spur ahead?”

“Only that he had a whim to be alone, as he is apt.”

“I remember how he broke away once last spring.”

“It may be that this fall he has done it once too often. Starkad is wroth.”

So the talk ran on until the tall leader drew rein, signalling to those behind him to check their pace.

“Slowly!” he said. “Yonder is his horse tethered. It would ill become us to ride upon Starkad’s son as though we were charging a boar.”

“Even though we shall be as ill-received as if we were,” the youngest of the horsemen added with a laugh of some uneasiness.

The leader smiled tolerantly. He wore on his long body fine clothes of scarlet leather, and on his thin lips the semblance of a perpetual smile.

“Everything grows big in your eyes,” he observed. “There! I think I see gray cloth among those green bushes. It were best to ride on until we come where he may see that there are too many of us to withstand; then one of us can dismount and approach him with the message.”

The youngest of the riders laughed again, this time somewhat sarcastically. “No one is better fitted to take that task on him than yourself, Olaf, Thorgrim’s son. For what else did you spend your fosterhood in France but to get smooth manners to use in rough places?”

“Yes, yes! By all means, Olaf is the man!” the others chorussed, a hint of malice in their promptness.

If Thorgrim’s French-reared son read the sign, it made no difference in the confidence of his bearing. He answered that if it was their wish he would certainly undertake the errand, and immediately swung from his saddle as gaining the green bushes, they came into view of the wearer of the gray kirtle.

Prone on the earth’s broad bosom the young noble had thrown himself and lay with his head pillowed on his folded arms, a figure of utter abandon. Only at the clink of spur and bridle-chain did he turn upon his side and fling back a mass of blood-red hair from a face of startling pallor. What look came into it when he beheld the horsemen, they were not near enough to tell. By the time Olaf stood before him, his teeth were showing a snarl.

“Well, dog, you have tracked your quarry,” he said. “No wonder your trainers set store by you! What is the rest of your master’s bidding?”

Olaf laughed lightly. “Certainly, Jarl’s son, you should be a scald; you speak so glibly in figures. Starkad sends you orders to turn back and take your place again in the following.”

Starkad’s son drew himself slowly into a sitting posture. Then of a sudden his body was convulsed with laughter,—laughter mocking as the mirth of a devil.

“Who am I that I should stand in the way of the Jarl’s will?” he gasped between his paroxysms, and shaking with them rose to his feet.

But when he had come where the youngest of the riders was holding his horse in waiting, either the young man’s ill-concealed uneasiness, or some reminder growing out of it, caused his mood to change. With his foot in the stirrup he lingered, sobering until his face betrayed even the pinching hand of dread. Vaulting into his saddle, he spoke to his attendant without looking at him.

“I see they have turned my hound Sam into the pack, though the wound on his foot is still unhealed. Will you, Gunnar, do one thing for me? Separate him from the rest and bring him to me in a strong leash.”

“In this as in everything you have only to speak to have your will,” Gunnar gave the prescribed answer absently. It was not until he felt the foot of a friend behind him that he awoke to the mockery of the phrase, and glanced up appalled.

But the exasperation lightning at him did not strike. Amid silence, breathless, storm-charged, the Jarl’s son took the reins from him, wheeled his horse and rode back up the leafy path and out of sight.

In a moment Olaf was spurring after Starkad’s son, but the remainder of the escort appeared to be in no great haste to follow. First they waited while Gunnar examined the buckle of his girth; then they turned to scrutinize two figures just emerging into the open from a brush-hidden trail a few paces on their right.

Two young stags browsing the scarlet berries under the pines would scarcely have looked more natural to the scene, for one was a savage of that new-world race which the early Norse explorers called Skraellings, with hair as black as freshly turned leaf-mould, and a shining naked body of the hue of an oak-leaf in November; and the other, in the deerskin garb of a forester, with uncovered locks reflecting the sun, was a descendant of the Vikings themselves and showed untamed blood in his handsome face as he raised it to look ahead at the horsemen.

The red man the courtiers passed over indifferently, but on the white one they were beginning favorable comment when the call of a distant horn cut them short. Wheeling hastily, they gave their horses spur and rein, and passed up the shaded alley like a whirl of frost-tinted maple-leaves.

Upon them, the young forester made but one remark. He and his companion had halted as at a parting of the ways, and his hands were busy detaching a deer’s-horn cup from his belt.

“I would travel a day’s journey to see a horse run like that,” he said. “Often I dream of feeling one between my knees, and waken because my enjoyment is too real for a vision.”

The young savage’s throat gave out a sound of comprehending, and his friend did not wait for a longer response. He had filled the horn from a flask of porcupine-skin that hung around his neck; now he raised it aloft.

“To you, comrade! May your arrows and your swallows always go the right way. Skoal!” he toasted, then refilled the cup and handed it to the other, who answered in the same Northern tongue, though haltingly.

“To my brother! May he drink much of his enemies’ blood—as much as his friends have drunk of his wine. Skoal!”

It was not seen that the Northman made any grimace. While his mouth showed no bloodthirstiness, its hard line bespoke one used to grim ways. He said carelessly:

“My foster-mother has the gift of double sight, but even she has never seen that I have enemies. How came that notion into your head, brother?”

After the manner of his kind, the Skraelling was deliberate in answering, letting the purple juice trickle slowly down his throat; but he finished at last, and nodded in the direction of the departed courtmen.

“There went some of the young men who follow the head of my brother’s people. They are more bright than white fire-bugs with the gifts they get for their friendship. My brother is also young—a warrior—the son of a warrior—yet he lives apart in the forest, with a handful of women and old men—gets himself nothing. It must be that he has enemies among his people.”

The young forester shrugged his broad shoulders. “No gifts would I buy at the price Starkad Jarl asks, comrade. My little foster-brother Eric is page to his daughter; I know the lot of those who follow him. When he gives the sign they go to roost, whether they are sleepy or not. When his priest rings a bell they say their prayers, even though it break in at a time when cursing would come more easily to them. It is not allowed them to enjoy any sports that he sets his face against; and they drink no lower in the cup than he gives them leave. May illness eat me if I would ever tame myself to run with such a pack! That a man like my father should have been willing to lie quiet in a woman’s net is something I shall never be able to comprehend. I understand him better when I see how he built the Tower with the lower part left open so that the wind could blow on him all the year round and help him to forget that he was under a roof.”

Once more the Skraelling’s deliberate speech was delayed, this time by a baying of deep-voiced hounds rumbling up out of the distance like thunder. Following it, the pack streamed past—stragglers bursting from the brush behind them to skirt them with extended noses or jostle between them, leaving froth-flecks on their sides—and hard after the hounds rode the hunting party, led by a band of green-clad pages winding gilded horns. With the leisureliness of one whose pride forbids a display of curiosity, the Skraelling set his eagle face again over his shoulder; and his companion, who had started to remark upon the scene, gave up with a shrug the attempt to make himself heard against the blaring.

The din passed at last, and on its heels came a colorful train—stately old priests and chieftains gravely discussing the hunts of their youth, high-born maidens with shining uncovered locks, and matrons whose lace veils floated cloudily from their moonlike faces, stocky young thralls bent under hampers and wine-skins, and towering leather-clad guardsmen bearing bright spears on their shoulders. With the hoof-beat of the prancing horses deadened by the matted leaves, they went by as lightly as shapes in a vision, each for an instant illumined as he passed where a shaft of sunlight fell through a rift in the arching tree-tops.

As the first pair of the noble maidens reached it, sitting gracefully erect in their saddles like gilded chairs, the forester motioned towards them.

“The one with her face turned away is the Jarl’s daughter, Brynhild the Proud. It is said that she is worth looking at, though it has never happened to me to do so.”

If the Skraelling looked at her, that was all the notice he vouchsafed. It was not until the last maiden had gone by that he was stirred to interest.

“That is the great sachem that the sun now shines on?” he asked.

“That is Starkad Jarl,” the Northman confirmed; and even as he said it, the old man with the jaw like iron and the beard like steel had passed on into the shade, and the light was playing on the comely group that followed, revealing foppish secrets of gay embroidery and golden buckle.

“Here are the battle-twigs we saw a while ago,” the young forester added. “I wish I knew if any of them is Helvin, the Jarl’s son.”

The Skraelling answered but one word. “Blood!” he said; and while the young men remained in sight his eyes rested on one in garments of gray, whose bowed head was hooded by hair of the very shade of clotted blood.

Looking after the young courtmen, the forester seemed to lose all who followed. When leaves had blotted out the last guard’s broad brown back, and the music of the horns had dwindled to a silver speck in the gray silence, he spoke musingly:

“Take Helvin, now, if you wish to judge what metal comes of Starkad’s forging. It is said that he was born with the wanderlust upon him, so that his every breath is a panting to take ship and travel over the sea-king’s road wheresoever the wolf of the sail might choose to drive him. But because the sons that came before him are dead, and the only other heir is a maiden, his sister, it is not allowed him to risk his life. It may be they will find out that they have cherished the scabbard and rusted the blade,—they say that the fire cased in his flesh has given him an unlucky disposition.”

The savage’s black eyes gave forth a sympathetic flash, though his training in repression kept the feeling out of his voice. He said calmly:

“A day will come when it will be over. The old man cannot live forever. Already he has passed so far beyond the timber-line that nothing grows on his scalp.”

The Northman shook his head. “Starkad’s death will bring Helvin no nearer what lies at his heart; he is oath-bound to take the rule after his father,—so full of fear are they lest quarrels over the inheritance gnaw at the root of the Jarldom. But I will say that I think his rule will prove to be a good thing for the Town, which is now in danger of becoming more lifeless than a bone-heap. From all I have heard of his dislike of making a show of himself and his love of free ways, I have good hopes of him. It has often been in my mind to take service under him when he shall get the leadership. For Starkad I have no respect whatever. It is told that when he was young he was called Starkad the Berserker, and had the most hand in every Viking voyage and man-slaying; but now that the sap has dried in him, and he has put on Olaf the Saint’s religion, he expects all men to live like monks.”

The Skraelling gazed reflectively in the direction of the vanished cavalcade.

“Truth to say, the young braves of my race do not feel much love for the white man,” he said, presently. “He comes among us as one who comes among animals—driving them out to possess himself of their feeding-ground—dealing with them only when he wants profit out of their hides. The grayheads give us counsel to live in peace with the settlers of Norumbega. On the four trading-days of the year when they let us into their walls, they trade us useful things for our furs. But those of us whose teeth are still firm in our jaws do not like it to be led in as white men’s cows are led in to be milked, then turned out to pasture, the bars put up behind them.”

Straightening, he stood a bronze image of wounded pride. The young forester, as he bent to fasten one of his moccasin-strings, looked up at him understandingly. The softening feature of the Northman’s face was his eyes, deep blue as an evening sky, under level brows, broad and dark. When the thong was tied, he put out a hand and rested it on his companion’s bare shoulder.

“Judge not, brother, all of the white race from the behavior of one overbearing old man. It seems to me as if your people and my people should dwell together like sons of one father. Our hands are equally open to a friend, and no less hard-clinched against a foe; and you do not surpass us much in freedom and fearing nothing. When it has befallen the other white men to see the wonder of your woodcraft as I have seen it, and to be sheltered and fed by your hospitality as I have been, there will be much awanting if they do not hold you as high in honor as I do.”

Unbending gravely, the born heir of the forest laid his hand upon the breast of the forest’s adopted son.

“I know good of you; I will try to believe good of your people,” he said. “Come back with me now, brother. The lodge of the sachem, my father, is open to you. Always open to you.”

A second time the Northman shook his head. “That cannot be, comrade, for I came up here to learn a trap secret from an old huntsman, and having got it, I must hasten back and put it to use before I forget it. Do you on your side bear in mind, when next you paddle your bark-boat near the island, that the Tower will offer heartier welcome to none than to you.”

His hand fell from the bronze shoulder to the bronze palm, and with a strong clasp the two men parted,—the red man to melt into the russet shades beside them, the forester to go forward in the wake of the hunting party.

Had it blazed its path with axes, the cavalcade would scarcely have left a plainer track. Wherever foot and hoof had failed to print themselves on the path of leathery leaves, there was always the clew of a bruised lichen or a fern with a broken spine. Swinging along easily, mile after mile, the forester devoted his superfluous breath to humming scraps of melody and his alert eye to reading the fantastic runes. Here a bleeding tangle of wild grape-vine stretched out plundered hands. Yonder a long golden hair, floating like fairy gossamer from a low-growing limb, showed how the forest had exacted weregeld. Still farther on, a patch of flattened moss and ploughed-up earth told sly tales of a horseman brought low. When he came at last to the place where his road branched westward from theirs, he yielded the rune-page with regret.

That he might overtake any of the company did not occur to him. His attention was centred in his song, gradually becoming articulate and rising melodiously from under his breath. It broke a word in two when he caught the hoarse snarl of a hound in the thicket ahead.

As well as though he could see through the intervening leaves he knew the hideous landmark that lay before him,—a pond which the Skraellings called by a word meaning “the black pool,” because some sinister combination of soil and shadow gave its water the appearance of being dully thickly black. Tradition added that rather than enter it, a fleeing stag would let his pursuer kill him on the brink. If any hunted thing had been brought to bay there now, the finish might be worth seeing. Quickening his step, the young Northman leaped the stony channel of a dead brook and swept aside the screening boughs.

Set amid frost-blasted bushes and leafless barkless tree-skeletons, the Black Pool met his gaze; but it was no four-footed creature that fought for life at the black water’s edge. Above the brush rose the gray-clad shoulders of the young courtman with the blood-colored hair. Rearing as tall as he, one of the great hunting-dogs had sprung upon him; while one hand strove to draw his dagger, the other was struggling to hold foaming jaws from his throat.

To see his peril was to will to aid him; and with the forester, to will was to act. But even as the impulse thrilled him, a strange sensation blotted it out. With his first forward motion, he was seized by a sudden whirling madness as though he had stepped within the ring of a whirlpool and was being sucked into a black abyss of horror.

It lasted but an instant. Battling against it, his fingers clutched instinctively at his knife-hilt, missed it and closed instead upon the blade, and the smart of cut flesh brought him to himself. But in the time that he hesitated, the courtman’s hand had freed his weapon and plunged it into the straining throat; there was a death howl, the hiss of spurting blood, and the danger was over. The great body relaxed, stiffened, sank heavily out of sight between the bushes, and the young man stood wiping his blood-bathed face upon his sleeve.

Bewilderment and shame claimed the forester. He with a lion’s strength in the girth of his chest and in his long sinewy limbs—he whose coolness had cheated Death a hundred times—he to falter when a man was in jeopardy of life before him! It was beyond belief.

He saw without caring that the courtman seemed all at once to become aware of another presence, and turned and espied him. He heard without heeding a peremptory order to approach. All that he was conscious of was a desire to get away and fight it out with himself. Raising his hand in apology, he stepped backward, pushed between two tall bushes, and let the wiry brush spring to like doors behind him.

As he drew clear of the branches a silvered arrow sped above them, so well aimed that it severed a lock of his hair. He caught his breath with a short laugh.

“I forgot that high-born men do not take it well to be disregarded,” he muttered as he plunged into the undergrowth.

What would he have said if the shaft could have whispered as it whistled past that—back under the frost-blasted bushes—Starkad Jarl lay murdered, and that he of the guilty blood-colored hair believed the forester had witnessed his deed!

II

“No tree falls at the first stroke”

—Northern saying.

“One touch of a certain three-cornered leaf,” the forester reasoned as he moved along the winding trail, “is able to make a man’s flesh change color and swell over his eyes like a wild hog’s fat. More power lies in the earth than simpletons think of. What would be wonderful about it if such water should breed a vapor befogging to the wits? Not the wits of all men, perhaps—it was seen that the courtman had his about him—but those of all who have not Sigmund’s strength against poison.” Reasoning relapsed into mortification. “It goes hard to be taught that I am one of the weaklings. Troll take the Pool!” For a while his track over the soft leaf-mould showed that his heels ground deeply.

Presently he made an effort to crowd the incident out of his thoughts by taking up the broken thread of his song, and reeling it off with a dogged energy that sent the words far through the silent forest and set its echo-heart athrob. They were brave words, telling the brave old tale of the wooing of Fridtjof the Bold; perhaps they would have charmed away his ill-humor if they had not been cut short.

Parting like gold-embroidered tapestries, two yellow-leaved bushes a little way ahead disclosed another courtman from the hunting train, a young man magnificent in scarlet leather clothes of distinctly un-Norse make. After a critical survey of the figure in deerskin, he lifted the forefinger of one gloved hand,—a gesture that had upon the forester the effect which the scarlet dress would have had upon a bull.

“Fellow,” he said blandly, “I have to tell you that your voice has had the good luck to please a noble maiden’s ears. Follow me that she may gratify her curiosity.”

Akin to the motion of his finger was a perpetual slight smile moulding his thin lips. The forester took note of that also, and felt antagonism become a deep satisfying force within him. Coming slowly to a halt, he picked his answer with drawling deliberation.

“Fellow, if you had not the good luck to be foreign to the forest, I would make you unpleasing to a noble maiden’s eyes. As it is, I have to say that to see me following you would be more apt to provoke curiosity than to gratify it,—and you may take that as best suits you!”

The stranger took it with the utmost quietness, observing as though to himself that it was surprising there should still be places where a churl thought he had the right to choose when he was commanded; but while he was saying it he was stepping from the bushes. Now he drew his sword from its jewelled sheath.

The gleam which the steel sent through the glade was reflected in the forester’s face. He made cordial haste to pluck forth his hunting-knife.

Glancing from that short blade to his own long one, the courtman hesitated an instant; then he laughed softly at himself.

“It is no lie about Norse habits that they stick to one like iron in frosty weather!” he murmured. “Almost I was in danger of treating the matter as a combat between equals.”

Having escaped that danger, he wasted no more time on preliminaries, but delivered his first thrust. If his opponent had stood upon ceremony, he would have been disabled by a pierced right arm.

Luckily it was the school of emergency that had given the forester his training. Though a smothered word betokened surprise, his instant leap backward carried him lightly out of range, and yet not so far out of reach but that his knife was able to strike up the other’s point and take advantage of the opening to land a stroke upon the tasselled breast. A buckle turned the blade away, but the profanity of the contact could not be denied. The courtman lowered his weapon for the purpose of removing his gold-stitched gloves.

“I see now that I shall have to let off more of your hot blood than I thought,” he remarked as he tucked the gloves under his belt. “Since you will have it—”

Driving suddenly past the other’s guard, he drove his sword into the deerskin shoulder,—would have driven it through, indeed, if the bite of the knife into his wrist had not momentarily relaxed his grasp.

The forester recovered his balance coolly.

“It will then be a fair bargain if I let off some of your breath,” he returned, and straightway asserted the one advantage he had foreseen to offset the difference in blade-lengths by leading his adversary a round of gnarled roots and hidden hollows and tangles of creeping things.

As a trout knows the rapids, his feet knew the snares; but to the stranger it was like walking in fetters. What with the distraction of watching his footing and the difficulty of aiming, two out of every three thrusts went astray; while for every lunge that went home he got a wound in return. Twice his foot twisted on a hidden stone and he measured his length on the ground, plastering pineneedles and earth to every blood-stain. Twice he tripped over a root and fell headlong and almost into the arms of his jeering opponent. That the combat was between equals, there could now be no question.

That there could be any doubt of his ultimate victory, however, did not appear to enter into the courtman’s reckoning. After each fall he merely became a little more quietly determined, came on with a little more glitter in his ice-blue eyes. His unshaken assurance exasperated the forester at last; when he saw a chance to end it, he seized the opportunity promptly.

At the next lunge, instead of springing aside he took advantage of a hollow behind him to duck suddenly, so that the blade hissed like an outleaping flame above his head. Then, before the other could recover, he sprang upon him. Seizing his sword-wrist in an iron grip, he forced it aside, tore his own right arm free from the clutching fingers, and raised it to strike.

His arm rose,—but it did not fall. In the very instant of aiming, a cloak flew between him and his mark, enveloping him head and shoulders, smothering him head and face. Muscular hands followed the cloak, pinioning his elbows and dragging him backward. Through the folds he caught a babel of exclamations; above them a girl’s anxious voice calling, “Is he wounded?” and a man’s rough tones answering dryly, “Only enough to spot his clothes, Jarl’s daughter.”

Jarl’s daughter! The forester had left off struggling—he understood that it would be foolishness in that grasp—now his wrath gave place to disgust. This was a pretty trick of the Fates, who had already snatched the fruit of victory from between his teeth, to follow it up by delivering him over to the upbraidings of an hysterical girl! Sullenly he gazed before him when at last they plucked off the cloak.

The first thing he saw was his little foster-brother in his gay page’s livery, just picking up the courtman’s plumed cap; but the sight did not improve his temper for he found that the boy avoided his glance of greeting. His brows drawing together, his gaze moved on over the picture.

It was a maiden’s following, certainly. The rugged men-at-arms surrounding him were far outnumbered by the slim pages who made a green hedge around the wounded favorite. Bright against the dark background, groups of maids and matrons rustled and fluttered. Only one figure in the scene had composure, a girl standing a few paces ahead of the others, erect and motionless as a stone column against tossing trees. It was her stillness that drew the forester’s attention to her curiously; then, looking, he forgot curiosity, forgot his recognition of her for the Jarl’s daughter, felt only the thrill of her beauty.

Long of limb, long of throat, she was nobly tall, her eyes but little below the level of his own. The habit fitting close the flowing curves of her body trailed heavily behind her, and a velvet mantle dragged from jewelled clasps; but her broad sloping shoulders bore their weight as lightly as her proudly poised head held up its great braids, hanging far down the purple folds like cables of red gold. No power had the sight of bared blades and struggling men to deepen or pale the exquisite color of her face, or shake the pride of her beautiful mouth. In their high spirit, her clear gray eyes were Valkyria’s eyes. Gazing at her, his heart leaped in his breast; he understood, for the first time, why a sea-wolf of a Viking might lie quiet in the net of a woman.

For the first time, also, he knew envy of his foe. Brushing aside the pages, the courtman advanced now, the long end of his mantle drawn up gracefully over his shoulder to hide the stains of his tunic. It was maddening to see how fit he looked to bend before Brynhild the Proud and set to his lips the hand she gave him.

“I should be glad to know, madam, that I am pardoned for thus marring your pleasure with alarm,” he said. “Scarcely can I be easy in my mind until I hear that.”

To see such favor as hers squandered on such as he was worse than maddening. She answered most kindly:

“No man should have a better right to mar my pleasure than you who have so often made it. And it was bearing my message that became a misfortune to you! Will you receive my necklace for weregeld?” Reminded by the law-term, she glanced for the first time towards the prisoner, her white lids drooping coldly. “Let Visbur lay bonds on the fellow and take him where the lawmen can deal with him.”

It was not the tightening grip of the men that wrung words from the forester’s silence; it was the pang of standing ill with her that caused him to speak earnestly.

“One thing I wish, Jarl’s daughter, and that is that you yourself would hear how little I am to blame.”

Again she looked at him, this time squarely.

“You will have no cause to complain of the lawmen’s justice,” she said.

“Then will they judge me innocent, and how shall it be made up to me that I have endured the disgrace of bonds, and been a gazing-stock for your followers? Be as fair in your actions as you are fair in your face, noble one.”

The guards around gasped, but she did not belie her Valkyria eyes. As steel answers steel with a spark they answered the demand, even while her proud mouth resented his boldness in every curve. After a moment she turned back where a tree had fallen across the glade, and seated herself upon the mossy trunk.

“Will you lay it upon Norse custom and not upon me, my friend Olaf, if I think it necessary to grant the forester’s request?” she asked. “And will you support me further by feigning that this is a law-place and telling me here what he did that you disliked?”

“Is it true that Norse custom is so childish?” Olaf queried, with rising shoulders. Then as she continued to look at him entreatingly, he yielded, smiling, to come forward with playful ceremony and take up his stand before her.