Randvar the songsmith

by Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

As suddenly, Randvar moved away from the door; and with his coming into the moonlight it could be seen that he held his sword naked in his hand. When he had stood awhile looking down at it, he set its point against his heart; and then he stood for another space with musing eyes fixed on the gleaming blade.

To slay one’s self, to run away from the fight—how could that be aught but the act of a coward? And yet to die in a fit of mad terror—with shaking limbs and blanched cheeks and reason overthrown—was that a death for a brave man? Muscle by muscle, his grip on his sword tightened; and then muscle by muscle it relaxed; and he stood arguing it over and over.

Deaf to all but that inner strife, he heard neither voices at the foot of the steps nor the tread of feet ascending. The sound which he had been dreading came at last and even that he did not know. Like the rattling of the casement in some wandering breeze it befell at first, and then slowly it revealed itself for the fumbling of unsteady fingers upon a bolt. Only when a river of moonlight streamed across the floor at his feet did he start awake and turn his head.

On the threshold, dark against the silver night, stood the man who had drawn the bolts. A hood concealed his face, but massive shoulders showed under his cloak; and over one of them could be seen the mailed form of Visbur drawn up in respectful salute. Though it was but a flash of time before the door had closed behind the muffled figure, merging its dark drapery into the darkness of the wall, the song-maker felt no doubt of the visitor’s identity. Indeed, almost the only thing he felt—amid the sudden stiffening of his muscles and chilling of his blood—was wild relief that for once his wits stood firm. Pitched to utter recklessness, he flung his sword from him as at sight of the bare blade a smothered cry came from the other’s wrappings.

“Have no fear that that was meant for you!” he said, and his strained voice vibrated as with discordant laughter. “Easier were it to be slain by you than to bear the burden of being your slayer. Have your will with—”

Like over-strained wire his voice snapped, and he did not gather up the ends. Only in passing through that strip of shadow, the man had become another man; and it was the Shepherd Priest who stood revealed in the moonlight.

“I bring you life and not death, my son,” he said gently. “Nor was it in my head that Helvin meant to push the matter so far, even though his sister told me that it had stirred his unreasoning wrath against you that you set the boy free. God is to be twice thanked that I can at once save my lord a crime and you a wrong! Yet no long space is given me to do it in.”

Moving on up the room, he bent and swept the straw away from the middle of the floor. Across the long cracks of the boarding showed dimly the lines of the wooden hatch that had been set in the hole through which—in the days when the prison loft had been a store-chamber—the huge vat below had been refilled each brewing season. Easily as one pries the head out of a barrel, he pried up the clumsy door and laid it back from the opening.

Like a half-hanged man whose body has been cut down in time but whose emotions have gone on out of the world of the living, the Songsmith remained gazing at him.

“Even if it had happened to me to remember that place,” he said slowly, “I should have been so sure that it was fastened on the under side that I would not have thought it worth while to try it.”