Roger North looked at the peaceful scene with relief.
“I believe I’d expect a sort of school feast,” he said. “If you don’t break forth any more violently than this, I’m with you. What are the little beggars planting?”
“Michaelmas daisies. They should do there, don’t you think? And we are trying lilies in that far corner. The soil is damp and peaty. We were too late for fruit trees this year but I’ve great plans for autumn planting.”
North, oddly enough, so it seemed to many, was popular with children. He never asked them endless questions, or if they wanted to do this or that. He liked the little people, and had discovered that at heart they were like the shy wild things. Leave them alone and keep quiet, and, ten to one, presently a little hand will creep into yours.
He let himself down on the bank near the crooning child, in silence. She was a thin white slip of a thing, with very fair hair and a pair of big translucent eyes. It was an old doll she was nursing, so old that its face had practically disappeared, and a blank white circle gazed to heaven from under a quite smart tam-o’-shanter. She was telling some story apparently, but only now and then were any words intelligible.
Presently she began to look at North sideways, and her voice rose out of its low monotone into a higher key. It was like the sudden movement of a bird nearer to something or some one whose bona fides it has at first mistrusted.
The words she was crooning became more intelligible, and gradually North realized, to his astonishment, that she was repeating, after her own fashion, the old Saga of Brynhild the warrior maid whom Segurd found clad in helm and byrne. A queer mixture of the ride of the Valkyries, of Brynhild asleep surrounded by the eternal fires. Brynhild riding her war-horse on to the funeral pyre. Loki the Fire God. Wotan with his spear. All were mixed up in a truly wonderful whole. But still more to his astonishment it was the sword which appealed evidently above all to this small white maiden. On the sword she dwelt lovingly, and wove her tale around its prowess. And when she had brought her recital to a triumphantly shrill close at the moment when Siegmund draws the sword from the tree, she turned and looked him full in the face, half shyly, half triumphantly, wholly appealing. It was as if she said, “What do you think of that now?”
North nodded at her. “That’s first rate, you know,” he said.
“Which would you choose, if you had the choice? Would you choose the ring or the sword?” she asked.
“Well, I’m inclined to think old Wotan’s spear is more in my line,” said North in a tone of proper thoughtful consideration. “It broke the sword once, didn’t it? At least I believe it did. But it’s rather a long time ago since I read about these things. Do you learn them at school?”