Then said Ina, looking into my face and smiling, as if well pleased:
"The choice is free, my Thane, and I should be wrong if I did not say that I am glad to hear you choose thus. I have missed you in these days, and I have work here for you yet. It was in my mind that thus you would choose, and I am glad. Let it be so. I need one to take the place of Owen, as second in command of the household, as one may say, and that you must do for me henceforward.
"Nay," he said quickly, raising his hand as I tried to find some words of thanks for this honour; "you know the ways of Owen, and men know you, and it will be as if there had been no change, and that will mean that we shall have no grumbling in the palace, and the right men will be sent to do what they are best fitted for--and all that, so that there will be quiet about the court as ever. It is a matter off my mind, let me tell you, and no thanks are needed."
So he laughed and let me kiss his hand, patting me on the shoulder as I rose, and then bade me sit down again. He had yet more to say.
"With Erpwald who is dead, men would hold that you had a blood feud. That is done with; but his son yet lives. I do not think it is your way, or Owen's, to hold that a feud must be carried on in the old heathen way of our forefathers."
"Most truly not," I said. "What ill has a son of Erpwald done to me or mine?"
"None! Nay, rather has he done well, for I know that he has honoured the grave of your father, and even now is ready to do what he can to make amends for the old wrong. He brought me this."
He took up the parchment that he had shewn me before. It was a grant of the manors of Eastdean to Erpwald, gained by those means of utmost craft whereby the king thought that indeed the last of our line had perished by other hands than those of the heathen thane.
"Honest and straightforward and Christian-like is this young Erpwald," the king said. "Well brought up by his Christian mother, if not very ready or brilliant in his ways. Now he has learned how his father came into the lands, and though he might well have held them after his uncle on this grant, he has come hither to set the matter in my hands. 'It is not fair,' quoth he, 'that I should hold them if one is left of the line of Ella. I should not sleep easily in my bed. Nevertheless, I will buy them if so be that one is left to sell them to me.' So he sighed, for the place is his home."
"All these years it has been no trouble to me that Erpwald's brother has held the place, my King. It will be no trouble to think that a better Erpwald holds them yet."