Frey and His Wife

by Maurice Hewlett

Gerda, who, although she looked as sleek as a stroked kitten, had a shrewd tongue and a clear understanding, employed both to his discomfort—but not until she felt that she was justified. So long as he lay bemused and muttering thickly she was all devotion; but when he picked up a bit, and presently would get out of bed and sit by the fire huddled in a bearskin, she did not scruple.

"You look like a shagged rock," she said, "and with a cave in the crown of it, too. Pity is that you had so little in your head. If there had been some sense or some manliness there you might have driven against the hatchet. Halward would have split it open, it's likely, and who knows what he might have eased you of? A lot of wind."

"Such talk as that maddens me," said Ogmund. "I wish you would have done with it. It becomes you not at all, and puts me out."

"That's a service I can do you," said Gerda. "You need something of the kind."

"Woman," said Ogmund, "I am meditating my revenge."

"Yes," said she, "and I have a hen sitting on a chalk egg. She's meditating also."

However, she did her duty by him, and as he got stronger she did more. As she said, "It pleases him, and is nothing to me."

Wigfus came to see him now and then, and told him what had happened. He said that Earl Haakon held Halward to have been justified in what he had done, and that Halward himself was content for the moment. "There was plenty more smiting in his axe," Halward said, "and if Ogmund wants any more he knows now how to get it, and where." Ogmund, brooding over the fire, swung his foot violently as he heard, but said nothing. He complained of pains in the head, and dreams at night. Gerda scorned him.

Wigfus went on to say that he himself had taken Halward's deed very much awry. He had challenged Halward to a battle, and intended to slay him in that wise, or otherwise, but the Earl had forbidden battle, and had had a watch set over him, so that he could not get away. He did not then say what was in his mind to say, that he expected Ogmund to take vengeance on his own account, because the man was too ill to hear it.