“The story will show,” sneered Thorer Sel, and proceeded to tell it at great length, with less and less regard for the truth.
He drew it out so long that many of the feasters tired of him and began talking among themselves; but four people continued to listen attentively. One was the Viking who had asked for the tale. Another was Erling, ominously fingering his sword-hilt. A third was a young girl sitting among the matrons on the cross-bench—a beautiful girl who bore her small fair head with brave dignity. The fourth was a strange man in poor attire who had come in unnoticed among the servants that were fetching fresh supplies of ale.
The stranger listened the most keenly of all—it almost seemed as if the bailiff might have left him hanging on the words. Step by step, he was drawn forward until only a space of bare table lay between him and the storyteller.
He was a tall man, with a mighty girth of chest and limb. For all that he wore a shabby hat and held a hayfork in his hand, he did not carry himself like a churl. As he moved from the shadow of the last pillar into the firelight, the girl on the cross-bench stifled an exclamation, and her cheeks went white as the linen before her.
“Astrid, my friend, what ails you?” the housewife beside her asked kindly.
A woman on the matron’s other side admonished her with a nudge.
“Have you forgot,” she whispered, “that Asbiornsson wooed her before her father married her to Hall the Wealthy? Naturally she would be troubled at hearing him ill-spoken of.”
Then both forgot her and their gossip and all else.
“How did Sigurd behave when you unloaded his vessel?” the Viking had just inquired.
And the bailiff had answered brazenly: “When we were discharging the cargo, he bore it tolerably, though not well; but when we took the sail from him, he wept.”