Without lessening the click of her needles, Erna glanced over at him. “I suppose you were made curious by seeing for the first time what kind of things a high-born maiden is accustomed to. It is the truth, however, that Freya took it well. Out of everything she made a jest. She used to look at the leaf-walls around the Tower, and say that no queen had such an elf-woven tapestry, or changed her hangings so often. She was always smiling.”
“Her lips were always smiling,” Randvar said doubtfully, “but her eyes? It may be that I do not remember aright, since I was but a child in age when she died, yet it seems to me now that her eyes were always sorrowful.”
To that, Freya’s bowerwoman made no answer. The pause lasted so long unbroken by anything save the rattling of her wooden needles and the chirping of the crickets under the stone hearth that presently her foster-son threw a twig at her.
“Wake up, foster-mother! Are you going to have a weird spell, that you drowse and do not hear me?”
“Do your words need an answer, foster-son?” Erna returned. “As well as I, you should know that Freya’s nature was not such that she could be altogether happy in a life that sprang from the death of her kin.”
“I had forgotten that,” Randvar admitted.
She looked at him again across the fire. “This is where you show Rolf’s breed. I think he never even guessed it. Yet always the memory that he was the slayer of her father lay between them like a blade that no tenderness could sheathe. She loved him in spite of it, but I speak no more than the truth when I say that it was the effort of doing so which wore her out before half her life was lived.”
Supporting himself on his hand, Rolf’s son sat up and gazed at her earnestly. “The strange wonder is that she could feel any love towards him! Until to-day, what I could not get through my head was how my father could gentle himself to so weak a thing as a woman; but now I regard it as the greatest wonder that so proud and fine and wonderful a thing as a high-born maiden should give herself to a rough-minded brawling—”
“You need not take it upon yourself to speak in that manner of Rolf,” Erna interrupted him with some sternness. “All the fineness that was possible to his nature he gave her. For Freya, he who had never handled aught but a sword, toiled and sweat like a thrall to build this Tower; and afterwards he made his drinking-bouts as mild as a woman’s, lest she be touched with fear. And when she died, he slew himself from grief, as not many men have done before him. It is true that your mind is higher than his, through having her blood in your veins; but enough of his rough temper is in you, and his heedlessness about clothes and polite ways, to make any girl but a forest-bred wench like Snowfrid turn her eyes from you as from a bear.”
Wincing, Randvar dropped again to his elbow, averted his crimsoning face from the firelight. It came as a welcome diversion that at that moment Snowfrid’s voice was heard out in the darkness.