"O ye gods of my fathers, whether ye be Powers of Light or of Darkness I know not. Pity my ignorance, and my apostasy, for I have turned to this Jesus whom the Christians worship, and He has failed me, and turned my joy into mourning. My father and my brother have been slain by the followers of this Jesus. My home is made desolate, and I flee for life and honour from these Christian fiends. There is one also who might have been my lover, who is bravest amongst the brave, and most chivalrous amongst the chivalrous; who is gentle as a sunbeam, and tender as my own lost mother, yet strong as any tower in the storm. He is lost to me through the subtle arts of their women. My life has become to me but a living torment. Can ye turn again the heart of Oswald to me? 'Tis said ye can turn even hatred into love. I know it is unmaidenly to plead for a love I cannot inspire, but I can bear this burden no longer alone, and I would ye could give me favour in his eyes, or give me a long home in one of these sepulchral mounds."
She started to her feet with a shriek, as a deep voice saluted her from behind,—
"Waes hael, Viking's daughter!"
She hastily turned, and behold there stood before her Olaf, the aged priest of this Vikings' temple, to whom for a couple of generations the heathenism and savagery of the countryside had repaired for ghostly consolation, and into whose ears had been poured the secrets of fierce loves and fiercer hatreds of these descendants of the Norsemen. He had been the grim dispenser of dark and mystic rites and potent spells to weirdly savage and credulous votaries. A strange being surely to claim a place in times so advanced as these! He was a living embodiment and personification of a bygone era, and so totally destitute of all humanising instincts that he might have slid down the ages, glacier-like, from prehistoric times—when men dwelt in caves, and gnawed the flesh from the bones of their prey like wild beasts—without ever having come in contact with the outermost fringe of civilisation; a Viking of the Vikings in savagery and blood. His head was uncovered, and his long and matted grey hair fell over his shoulders. His form was shrunken and racked with rheumatic pains, from his long exposure and unlovely life. Long, deep furrows ploughed his face, and the long, powerful, and uncleanly teeth stood away from the shrunken cheeks, whilst his sunken eyes gleamed like the eyes of some savage beast of prey. He was a visible and concentrated embodiment of the war spirit in its unrelieved and unredeemed essentials. No touch of pen or pencil, however graphic, could depict, in all his hideous grimness, this stranded relic of a bygone age of savage lawlessness and force, who seemed to be but half a dozen removes from the tooth-and-claw methods of wild beasts.
"Ha! ye are come at last, are ye?" he hoarsely croaked. "Ye are come now, when ye find that this strange God, this Christ of whom the Christians speak, has proved to be no God, and cannot save ye! But the gods of your fathers have given ye over to desolation because ye have forsaken them. Ha, ha, ha! I could laugh at ye now! Ye despised the old priest, did ye not? ha, ha, ha!"
As the harsh, grating voice of the priest fell upon her ears, Ethel almost cowered in terror before him. At sight of her terror, the old priest somewhat relented his fierceness.
"Hist to me," said he. "Ye are a Viking's daughter, after all, and come of a stock whose deeds our Sagas tell of, though the Christian taint has mixed too freely with your father's blood. It does my old tired bones good, nevertheless, to see ye come back again to me once more. I have been very lonely and forsaken, for my fellow priests are all lying beneath these mounds. I buried the last myself not a month agone. See! the mound is newly heaped. I shall soon be gone also, and there will be never a priest at hand to give me back into the arms of mother earth, to reveal to ye the dark mysteries of Valhalla, or to call from the land of the dead the Sein-lœca,[4] to speak with you. Viking's daughter, are ye now aweary of following this strange God of the Christians?"
"Alas! I know not what to do, priest! I am as desolate and forsaken as ye are. I would have the heart of Oswald, the Saxon chieftain, turned towards me. If ye have any charm that will give me favour in his eyes, I covet it, priest."
"Ah, but this Oswald is Christian; ye do not well in seeking thus to further dilute the Viking blood that flows in your veins. Is there no hardy Norseman ye can mate with? and I can help ye."
"None, father! I gave my heart to this valiant Saxon long ago; but alas! a Norman woman has won his love, and when he comes into my presence now, I see that there is always a far-away look in his eye, and I know he is looking in imagination upon the dark-haired Norman he loves more than me. He shuns his couch to keep nightly tryst with her. I have dogged his steps, and watched them in the starlight nights, pacing the battlements of the castle in loving converse, and in loving embrace. He is kind and gentle to me, but there is none of the subtle tones of love so dear to us women when once our heart is won. Men say I am fair; but have ye any charm to make me fair to him? It matters not what men may say, or what the multitude may say. There is but one man in all the world, and if I am not fair to him, why then the sun goes down on all my hopes, and leaves naught behind but the long black shadows of despair! Ah! I fear me, priest, it is in my spirit! There is no charm for him in the passion and frenzy, the fire and restlessness, of my Viking spirit. This voluptuous southern maiden, with her courtly manners and her gentle speech, has touched a chord in his heart which never responds to the Saxon maiden!"