Meanwhile, all the time the earth was bearing her lowly witness to the resurrection in opening buds and nestling birds, and all the renewal of the spring. Yet the Lady thought only, "My love is dead. My Lord has died."
But one twilight, as they walked together in the sombre shadows of a pine-forest, the boy said to her,—
"Mother, I heard strange talk last night by the camp-fires. Old Snorro was talking to Gunhilda, and he said he could not make out all this wandering to the Sepulchre in the Morning Land. His mother, he said, used to tell him how, when they lived far away by the Northern Seas, the young men and maidens mourned for the death of Balder the Good and Beautiful, the sun-god, until one day a stranger priest came, with the Cross, from the south, and told them to mourn no longer for the slain god, for he brought them tidings of One good, and strong, and beautiful, the Light of all the worlds, who had wrestled with death and had not been overcome, but had broken through the grave and risen in immortal life to give life to men. If indeed He lived, Snorro said, why did all the people run away from the places He set them in, to His grave, where He was not, instead of praying to Him, and trying to please Him in the heaven where He is? And Gunhilda said Snorro must not talk of things he did not understand; that it was a good and holy work to wrest the Holy Grave from the infidel; the priest said so, and the Pope said so; and how should he know who had only been a Christian at all for two generations? Old Snorro did not seem satisfied. He said he only wanted to understand. And she said he ought not to want to understand; that was like Eve, and like the devil, and was the beginning of all wickedness. And so they were whispering on when I fell asleep.
"Mother, what did old Snorro mean?"
She took his hand, and they walked on some little time in silence.
"Was old Snorro quite wrong, mother?" the boy said at length.
"Not quite, my son," she said. "I think not altogether wrong. Our Lord is surely living. Nevertheless, it is surely right that we should reverence the Holy Grave, and seek to wrest it from the unbeliever."
But that night she had a strange dream. She thought the ancient spirits, with legends of whom her Northern land was full, were all awake, careering through the forest like winds, flickering like the flames of the dying camp-fires, flitting to and fro like shadows; water-spirits from the forest-pools, dwarfs from the mountains, gnomes from under the hills. And some were laughing, some were sighing; but all kept saying to each other,—
"It is the old funeral procession we remember so long ago; it is the old, old wail. The children of men are mourning once more their Good and their Beautiful slain, and buried, and lost. Once more they find their best and dearest in a grave. For a little while we thought the death-wail was interrupted, swallowed up in the New Song of Life and Victory. But it has come back. Balder the Beautiful, the Light of heaven, is slain. This new Light of Life, this new Hope of the children of men, is also slain. It is the old funeral train, and the old death-wail. We—the earth-born, spirits of the waters and the forests and the hills—live on, and send our echoes on from age to age. They—the heaven-born—die, and mourn, and pay vain worship to their dead. Once more the religion of the children of men is a pilgrimage to a grave."
All that day the wondering doubt of old Snorro the Norseman, and the moans and whispers of that strange dream, sent wild, bewildering echoes through the Lady's heart.