“Then all is gone—all,” cried Rachel. And thereupon the old woman shuffled to her feet and said bitterly, “And a good thing too. I know you—trust me for seeing through your sly ways, my lady. You expected to take my son from me with the price of your ginger hair, you ugly bald-pate.”
Rachel’s head grew light, and with the cry of a baited creature she turned upon the old mother in a torrent of hot words. “You low, mean, selfish soul,” she cried, “I despise you more than the dirt under my feet.”
Worse than this she said, and the old woman called on Stephen to hearken to her, for that was the wife he had brought home to revile his mother.
The old witch shed some crocodile tears, and Stephen lunged in between the women and with the back of his hand struck his wife across the face.
At that blow Rachel was silent for a moment, and then she turned upon her husband. “And so you have struck me—me—me,” she cried. “Have you forgotten the death of Patriksen?”
The blow of her words was harder than the blow of her husband’s hand. The man reeled before it, turned white, gasped for breath, then caught up his cap and fled out into the night.
Stephen never comes back, and the son born to Rachel is christened Jason and is the “Bondman” of the tale. He is brought up by his mother in one of the meanest huts in the fishing quarter of the Icelandic capital, and supported by her drudgery. After nineteen years of flickering belief in her husband’s return, she comes by the knowledge that he is indeed living, but with another wife and another son, in the Island of Man. Broken-hearted and worn-out with hard living, Rachel sinks to her death, and, with her cold hand in his, Jason swears the oath that forms the motive of the book.
“My father has killed my mother.”
“No, no, don’t say that,” said the priest.
“Yes, yes,” said the lad more loudly; “not in a day, or an hour, or a moment, but in twenty long years.”