“Say to the white chief that the men of the stone-axe race have set up their houses around him. Say to him that they turn their weapons whither he points. Say to him that they will bring him the white sachem’s red scalp whenever he gives the sign.”
The hand of the white sachem’s sister made a convulsive movement that lost her the horn, but her brave gray eyes continued to meet his steadily.
“I will tell him,” she answered. “His heart will be thankful towards his friends.”
Though his face remained set in her direction, the Skraelling turned the rest of him and moved away as he had come, until his dusky shape was lost in the dusky wood.
Gazing after him with unseeing eyes, she stayed a moment in the archway, while—mute and motionless as so many bowlders—the foresters stayed gazing furtively at her. Then a curly-headed boy in a page’s ragged dress of blue came out of the Tower and broke in upon her thoughts, as he bent to pick up the forgotten cup.
“How clumsy in their manners such creatures must look to you, Jarl’s sister, it is easy for me to understand, for in former days they went against my taste also. But when your experience of life has been as broad as mine has, sooner will you choose their ugly worth than the fair falseness of the Town-people. I say it, though I am hard to please!”
A note of unsteady laughter shook the long breath with which the Jarl’s sister straightened; but her arm lay lightly around the boy’s neck as they went back in-doors, and he expanded under the caress as a bantam that is about to crow.
“It is my wish that you should always lean upon me! I told my mother this noon—when she asked me to fetch you the fowl and the loaf—that it was in my mind to visit you as often as I could find time. And I told her that I meant always to wear these fine clothes so that you should feel at home with me, and not feel that I had grown savage and terrible like the others around you. And perhaps it will also help you to lose it out of your thoughts for a while that you are poor, with no one to wait on you.”
Though she laughed again, the sound was more soft than a caress.
“Poor?” she repeated. “Listen, little Viking! Once I was poor, when I thought there was no more to the world than the few hedged roads I knew, and my life was but an empty round that others marked out for me, and I had nothing but ring-bought gifts to give my friends. But now! Now when each hour some wondrous path undreamed of is opened to me—Now that my life is a fabric I weave myself till from the roots of my hair to the soles of my feet I thrill with the joy of the work—Now that my breast is so full of love that ofttimes it aches with the burden and yearns for a worldful of folk to lavish it upon—”