At last there came a day when he could hold out no longer, threw away all shame, and went to Helga and told her that news had come from Atle's sons that Holmsten had fallen. Helga sat for a while pensive and serious. "So we shall never see him more," she said, with a slight tremor in her voice. "I cannot really imagine Atle's sons without thinking of them all three together—so I remember them the first time I saw them, so one always saw them. His brothers will be very grieved at losing him."
Leif listened breathlessly, but her words and tone made him no wiser. "Was it Haersten—or Haasten?" he thought. "I should have told her that all three had fallen."
Utterly discomfited by this frustration of his attempt at surprise, he gave it up altogether. Now he was reckless. "That is not true," he confessed wearily. "There has come no news from Atle's sons."
Helga became quite silent from surprise. Her astonished look rested almost anxiously upon him. "How can you take it into your head to say such things?"
Leif looked maliciously and despairingly at her. "It is still too early to weep for Holmsten," he said coldly and scornfully. Then he rose suddenly and went. As he stepped out of the door, a burst of cheerful, rippling laughter broke out behind him. "Why does she laugh?" he thought, anxious and angry at the same time, but did not turn round to examine her face. The rest of the day he kept puzzling about her laugh. Did she laugh because it was not true that Holmsten had fallen, or did she only laugh at him, because she had discovered that he was jealous of Holmsten? For the rest it seemed to Leif that neither was a laughing matter. So morbid had he gradually become that all laughter seemed to him suspicious and unbecoming. It took Helga several days to eradicate the effects of her laughter from Leif's mind. Even kisses and embraces seemed ineffectual. He suffered from his peculiar obstinate temper, insisting that he had been insulted, but unable to overcome it. It required a severe effort before he could bring himself to repay Helga's gentleness with the same.
But then he seemed all at once to have become quite different. It seemed as though the exposure he had made of himself had cured him. He felt an immense relief. Now he had, at any rate, proof that Helga would neither become white as snow, nor fall dead, even if she should hear that Holmsten had fallen. He began gradually to surmise that his jealousy was only a cob-web of the brain.
Besides this, a thought had taken possession of him which drove all spiteful spectres out of his mind. As early as the next summer he would go on a Viking expedition himself. He would not remain here and become prematurely old and peevish. It was true that at summer-time he would still be two years short of the regular Viking age. But Ingolf would at that time be of the right age and could get his going legalized—for Ingolf would go too, as a matter of course. They could not go about at home for ever and become moss-grown without and mouldy within.
"Look at the old men!" he broke out, when in words that stumbled over each other he made Helga privy to his plan. "Must one not be sorry for them? Yet they have been young once. This is what age makes of people. It is better, when one is good for nothing else but boasting, to have something to boast of, than for want of experiences to become a wretched liar."
"Do you think that you will some day become like—like your father?" asked Helga, smiling. She thought Rodmar was worse than Orn.