“Does our mother not love thee?” Mirea would add.
Then would Dame Roxana’s heart quiver with pain once more; and yet the untutored child had become very dear to her.
Not long after this a clatter of hurrying horse’s hoofs sounded up the hillside, and then upon the stones of the courtyard; it was Rolanda, riding bare-headed and with fluttering locks. As pale as death she burst in upon Dame Roxana. “For God’s sake, let me take shelter with you! Grandfather is dead! I closed his eyes myself; I made him ready for the grave, and laid him there to rest, and felt no fear the while. But now all the kinsfolk have come flocking in, quarrelling over the inheritance, and giving me hard and cruel words because some of it is to be mine. And one bald-headed fellow would straightway have taken me to wife. Ah me! then I was affrighted. Such a wretch! But I told him I was called Urlanda, and was so bad that none would care to marry me. Nor will I have any husband. I will stay here with you until I am turned out.”
It was a hard matter for Dame Roxana to understand this flow of incoherent words, and harder still for her to soothe the agitated girl. She folded her to her heart and stroked the disordered curls; then she led her to the little white bed-chamber, where she had often dwelt before, and told her this should be her home as long as there was a roof over the house.
Rolanda threw herself into her arms, kissed her hands, and promised to become as gentle and calm as a deep, calm lake.
Dame Roxana smiled. “Methinks,” she replied, “that the calm and gentleness will come all in good time, when once thou art a wife.”
“But I would never become a wife. I would always remain a maiden and free—free as a bird.”
Dame Roxana sighed quite low, and listened for the voices of her sons, who had just come home and were asking for Rolanda, whose tumultuous arrival they had witnessed from afar.
A wondrous change took place in the behaviour of the brothers after Rolanda came to sojourn with them.
They had greeted her as their “little sister,” but thereupon the young girl had suddenly grown shy and constrained. They lived out of doors more than ever now, only they no longer went together, but by separate ways; and Rolanda stayed much at home with the mother, and grew dreamy and absent, often shedding tears in secret. When she thought herself unnoticed, her quick glance would travel backwards and forwards between the brothers, as though she would fain discover something that yet remained dark to her. She often still confused the two together, yet now she no longer laughed at this, but gazed anxiously over at the mother. Dame Roxana watched with a heavy heart the dark cloud that seemed gathering over her house, and wept far oftener and more secretly than Rolanda, since the day that each of her sons had confessed to her, alone at the twilight hour, his great, undying, unconquerable love, and had asked—