—Northern saying.
With signs of the day’s ruffling influence still visible at his mouth-corners, Randvar, Rolf’s son, put aside the cables of wild grape-vine that drooped curtain-like over the end of the home-trail, and paused to look before him.
“Poor and mean must this have seemed in my mother’s sight,” he mused.
A few steps ahead the path broadened into an open grassy space, in whose middle rose a low round tower, touched by the last rays of the setting sun. Built of gray stones held together by gray mortar, it stood out coldly amid the green and garnet and golden maples that walled it round; and among branching trees and wreathing vines its outline was as stark as the outline of an Iceland rock. No spire sprouted from its flat top; no balconies rounded out beneath the windows of its upper story, and its lower part was no more than eight gray pillars standing in a circle. On one of them now a tangle of fish-nets was hanging; against another leaned a frame on which a wild-cat skin had been stretched to dry, and before a third stood a herring-keg and a barrel of wild-grape wine. Between the pillars, eight wide archways gave plain view into the round ground-room, in whose centre a fire was burning under a kettle. A flaxen-haired girl moved back and forth before the fire, and under one of the arches a tall, muscular woman stood looking out and wiping her heated face upon her homespun apron.
Understanding that her watch was for him, Randvar raised his hand in greeting; but his gaze remained on the small deep-set window high up on the Tower’s seaward side, where he had often seen his mother’s face looking out over the green wastes of trees and the blue wastes of water that stretched between her and the home she had left. It seemed to him now that he could see her again, flower-fair and crowned with hair like winter’s pale sunshine. The contrast between her delicacy and the rough setting came home to him with new force. In the bubbling caldron of his mind, awe came uppermost.
“It was a wondrous thing, my mother’s love,” he murmured as he moved slowly forward.
The greeting of the woman in the archway brought him back to the present. She was a weather-beaten woman, almost as severe in outline as the Tower itself, and with but little more color; yet proof remained that she had once been as freshly blooming as her daughter, and her work-roughened hand had a gentle touch as she laid it on his arm. She spoke quickly, regarding him with keen eyes.
“There is a new stain on your kirtle, foster-son, and a cut in the middle of it. What have you been doing to yourself?” As she talked, she was unfastening a buckle, and now laid bare his blood-soaked shirt.
He looked down at it with surprised recognition. “Did the courtman do all that? I had altogether forgotten it.”