“See, child of my heart,” said Hilda, addressing Edith, while she still gazed on the western luminary, “see, the sun goes down to the far deeps, where Rana and Aegir [136] watch over the worlds of the sea; but with morning he comes from the halls of the Asas—the golden gates of the East—and joy comes in his train. And yet then thinkest, sad child, whose years have scarce passed into woman, that the sun, once set, never comes back to life. But even while we speak, thy morning draws near, and the dunness of cloud takes the hues of the rose!”
Edith’s hand paused from its vague employment, and fell droopingly on her knee;—she turned with an unquiet and anxious eye to Hilda, and after looking some moments wistfully at the Vala, the colour rose to her cheek, and she said in a voice that had an accent half of anger:
“Hilda, thou art cruel!”
“So is Fate!” answered the Vala. “But men call not Fate cruel when it smiles on their desires. Why callest thou Hilda cruel, when she reads in the setting sun the runes of thy coming joy!”
“There is no joy for me,” returned Edith, plaintively; “and I have that on my heart,” she added, with a sudden and almost fierce change of tone, “which at last I will dare to speak. I reproach thee, Hilda, that thou hast marred all my life, that thou hast duped me with dreams, and left me alone in despair.”
“Speak on,” said Hilda, calmly, as a nurse to a froward child.
“Hast thou not told me, from the first dawn of my wondering reason, that my life and lot were inwoven with—with (the word, mad and daring, must out)—with those of Harold the peerless? But for that, which my infancy took from thy lips as a law, I had never been so vain and so frantic! I had never watched each play of his face, and treasured each word from his lips; I had never made my life but part of his life—all my soul but the shadow of his sun. But for that, I had hailed the calm of the cloister—but for that, I had glided in peace to my grave. And now—now, O Hilda—” Edith paused, and that break had more eloquence than any words she could command. “And,” she resumed quickly, “thou knowest that these hopes were but dreams—that the law ever stood between him and me—and that it was guilt to love him.”
“I knew the law,” answered Hilda, “but the law of fools is to the wise as the cobweb swung over the brake to the wing of the bird. Ye are sibbe to each other, some five times removed; and therefore an old man at Rome saith that ye ought not to wed. When the shavelings obey the old man at home, and put aside their own wives and frillas [137], and abstain from the wine cup, and the chase, and the brawl, I will stoop to hear of their laws,—with disrelish it may be, but without scorn. [138] It is no sin to love Harold; and no monk and no law shall prevent your union on the day appointed to bring ye together, form and heart.”
“Hilda! Hilda! madden me not with joy,” cried Edith, starting up in rapturous emotion, her young face dyed with blushes, and all her renovated beauty so celestial that Hilda herself was almost awed, as if by the vision of Freya, the northern Venus, charmed by a spell from the halls of Asgard.
“But that day is distant,” renewed the Vala.