The hermit seemed hardly to comprehend her words.
"Gone!" he repeated. "Why did you not tell me?"
"Surely you knew," she said.
"Why went he away? I would hear him sing. He used to sing to me of war. He sang last night. Last night," he repeated doubtfully; "methinks it was last night. Bring him to me."
She turned his questions as best she could, and strove to make him think of other things. With her arm through his they paced the turf along the shore, and all the while her heart sank lower and lower. She was in the presence of something so mysterious that even wise men in those days shrank from it in fear. It was the finger of God alone, they said, that laid a blight on human minds, and there before her was His handiwork.
Yet, had she but known it, this blight had been the slow work of years. Her father's mind, always dark and superstitious, and tinged with morbid melancholy, had gradually in these long solitary years given way more and more before sombre underminings, till now, with old age at the gates, it had at last succumbed. Some few bright moments there were at rare intervals, but in all the months that followed it was but the shattered hull of Thord the Tall, once the terror of the western seas, that lingered on the Holy Isle.
The care of him had at least the effect of turning Osla's thoughts away from herself. Than sunshine and another's troubles there are no better tonics.
Yet it was a dreary summer for the hermit's daughter, and it grew all the drearier and more lonesome when the long, fresh days began to shorten, and the sea was more seldom still and the wind more often high. All the time, the old man grew slowly worse. He sat continually in his cell; and though Osla would not acknowledge her fears even to herself, she knew that death could not be far away. Yet he lingered through the winter storms, and the end came upon a February evening. All the afternoon the hermit had lain with shut eyes, never speaking a word or giving a sign. It fell wet and gusty at night, and Osla, bending over the couch, could hear nothing but the wind and the roost she knew so well.
At length he raised his head and asked,—
"Are we alone, Osla?"