“The mind rules one-half of the victory”
—Northern saying.
“Jarl, it is not fitting that you should even seem to attend on me! Let me accompany you to your hall as becomes me, and afterwards go my way alone—”
“And rob me of a chance to see the horses come up to the post in a race I have wagered on?” the Jarl interrupted. “Out upon your idea of fitness! I am not sure that I shall not even go upon that slope behind the women’s house and watch you through a broken window I know of. Would it not give you a sense of being supported to feel my eyes upon you?” He walked on as one serenely unaware that his companion had stopped short in dismay.
He did not go so far as to carry out his threat, however. When—by snow-banked roads and snow-buried lanes, dim in the early gloaming—they had come to the court-yard and the looming pile of the women’s house, Helvin halted in the shadow of a tree.
“I think I will go no farther,” he said. “If it happen as I expect, they will not close the doors after you immediately, as after one whose welcome is certain. I shall be able to see some of the sport from here, before the banging of them in my face tells me that my foretelling has come true.”
“It is for you to decide,” Randvar made use of the proper phrase. And he had made a stride forward when—like the jerk of a cord suddenly stretched—an impulse turned him back.
“Lord,” he said, almost with fierceness, “tell me that you were jesting when you accused me of forsaking my allegiance to you. Say that you do not hold me for a deserter, or my foot shall wither before ever it makes a move to leave you!”
Out of the shadow in which he stood, Helvin’s voice sounded presently like a harp strain with one minor chord.