It did not appear that their mistress knew whether they stayed or went, save that she seemed to feel more freedom now in allowing her eyes to follow their inclination to droop and rest on the trailing sprays of fragrant buds with which the pages had filled her lap. Her lover neither knew nor cared. He rambled on without even knowing what he was saying, more than that it was something which held her listening while his eyes drank their fill of her exquisite face. He would have stood there gazing at her in silence, when he had finished telling of the feast, if she had not roused herself hastily to end the pause.
“It has the sound of a song come true,” she said. “I wish I had better tidings to give in return than this which you will think bad, that your little foster-brother has deserted my service for Olaf’s, Thorgrim’s son.”
“For Olaf’s!” he repeated in surprise. “What possessed the cub?”
“It surprised me also,” she assented, “for since he came to me, we have never been apart either in word or deed. Yet Olaf looks grand in his eyes, and lavishes on him a great store of gifts and privileges. I am afraid he will get spoiled by it.”
His straight brows joining, the Songsmith gazed before him reflectively.
“I wonder if it would have been better had I taken him with me?” he mused. “Yet would it have been to Erna a lasting sorrow to see the change in him.... And it would have made him set greater store by himself to see their mean clothes....” His musing branched unconsciously. “It is a poor place, the Tower, yet I would not trade it for the Jarl’s house to be born in.”
“Tell me how it appeared to you now?” she asked him, smiling. “The Tower that let the wind blow in all the year around! Did it stir your wild blood so that it became a hardship for you to come back to walls?”
It seemed that she saw the danger of such a question as soon as she had given it voice, for she half put out her hand to snatch it back. But he read the meaning of the gesture and obeyed it.
“It was no hardship to come back, Jarl’s sister.... Yet the place had never seemed to me so fair. When I came home to it, that day after it had happened to me to meet you in the forest, I saw only its bareness and its poverty. Now it was as a song, every stone a word to tell of my father’s love. I never knew a greater love among all men upon earth. Night after night, while the others slept, I walked before the gray pile and read its runes. Great bowlders are there that must have challenged his strength to wrest from their beds in the earth, which yet he wrestled with rejoicingly, since even so ingloriously he was conquering something for his beloved one. The fragments over the archways—— Could you but see, Jarl’s sister, the patient labor of their fitting! Never monk toiled more devoutly with his brush! Night after night, it was as though Rolf walked beside me pouring out his mind, so could I enter into his joy that knew his love returned. Knowing that, what was it to fight Hildebrand and twenty—forty—horsemen! Here I, his son, may not even end where he began. I—”
He broke off because her hand had risen to forbid him, and stood awhile with head bent and turned aside, his breath coming fast. But she did not call her women as he had feared; he had time to master himself and begin again.