In his rage he lifted his hand and slapped her on the face. The old hound whimpered as though his master had struck him.
Elgiva was speechless with surprise. Cormac fell back to his old position beside Ethne.
Elgiva’s face smarted with pain; one of the half-healed wounds bled afresh. Cormac had struck her—just as in the days when they had been babes together! Moreover, he had said he would not marry her. Her eyes filled with tears; she did not care for the pain, or for Cormac’s unkindness to her—but the thought that he had turned so soon against his dead father’s wishes was anguish!
“It is your fault, Ethne,” she said. “You have persuaded him to say this. You are wicked and heartless! You did not love Griffith because he would not make you his wife. You hate me because, for my mother’s sake, Griffith warred upon the Saxons!”
She sat down on the floor and, burying her face in the hound’s neck, sobbed as though her heart would break. The animal licked her hair and shoulders. Cormac watched her uneasily. It was unlike Elgiva to give way to tears. The Saxon blood which flowed in her veins—loathed by herself as well as by her companions—had endowed her with a stoical calm in times of ordinary distress.
He began to feel ashamed of the blow he had given Elgiva. He had determined that he could not marry her, but the very fact that he was breaking his father’s commands made him more anxious to show kindness to one who had served that father with more than a daughter’s devotion.
He remembered how, on the battle-field, she had attempted to throw herself between him and his death-blow; and how she had waited on his dying moments under the swords of the enemy.
In the midst of her grief, a new and comforting idea came to Elgiva. She sat up suddenly, ceased sobbing, and looked inquiringly at Cormac.
“Perhaps,” she cried, “you have no mind to marry! You mean to follow the good Saint Kevin and become a monk!” If such were the case, Cormac’s treatment of her was explained. Had not the holy Kevin himself done more than Cormac when a girl had spoken to him of marriage? Had he not taken a great bunch of nettles and beaten her with them till she was sore? Elgiva’s warm heart filled with remorse at her unkind thoughts of Cormac. She knew the dead Griffith’s wishes too well to doubt that it would be more pleasing to him that Cormac should enter a monastery than that he should become her husband.
“To enter a monastery!” sneered Ethne. “To till the ground like a slave! To wear homespun and tend sick-beds! Bah! Cormac is a warrior, and the monks have not enough spirit to kill a slave!”