Then at last Randvar understood that the torch of his friend’s reason—so often flickering, so often burned low—had been extinguished forever. To shut out the sight of the ghastly ruin it left, he hurled himself against the wall and flattened his face against the rough boards. Unreal as the mouthing of a vision, the caressing voice came to him.
“Does your heart speak so heavily about dying? Try if you cannot bring your mind to the mountain-top on which my mind stands. Then shall you see that what looks to be a storm-sky is but a cloud over one valley, while sun hallows all the rest. I kill you when life holds much for you, yet see this! I keep you from sin. I save your memory fair for those who love you. Above all, I preserve our friendship from the first tremble of dissolution. A nobler tree than our friendship never sprang from man-clay. Would you rather see it withered and decayed than laid low in all its glory by one axe-stroke?”
As from a man on the rack, a cry was wrung from the song-maker: “Oh, Powers of Might, must it indeed end so?”
Yet softer grew the voice of Starkad’s son, till it was hushed to the unearthly stillness of a forest-deep.
“Alas, how has the love of woman clouded your eyes, that were once so clear to see the truth! Yet think not I blame the weakness of your flesh. So shrinking is my own that, plain as I see the goodness of the deed, I could not do it as we stand. It is the working of fate that when my Other Shape possesses me, I know no qualms. Until I come in that guise, then! Yet before we part, press my hand once more in love. Friends clasp when they separate for a day,—shall souls sunder forever and say no farewell?”
It was a strange embrace; for in the eyes of Starkad’s son, the doomed man was as one dead; and to the mind of the song-maker, his friend had ceased to live. Like the sound of a clod upon a coffin-lid was the sound of the door closing for the last time between them.
XXII
“Those live long who are slain by words alone”
—Northern saying.
