“Surely not. I did not say that I had the wish to be thrown out of your hall.”
“More likely would you have been carried out,” Helvin answered dryly.
Despite his resentment, Randvar had a feeling of admiration for a man who dared say such a thing to him,—a man whose exhausted body would have been a rag in the forester’s hands. He said, as he turned and threw the untasted wine into the fire:
“If you have set your heart on hating me, have it your own way. It must be because your temper has been tried to-day. I will only say that I am sorry, for I have always felt a liking towards you.”
Though his head continued to lean heavily against the pillar, the Jarl’s eyes opened to flash at him. “Excepting once to-day and once last season, when you sang in a hunter’s cabin, I do not know that I have ever seen you.”
“I mean that I have been so told about you—” Randvar was beginning, but was checked as much by his own sense of intrusion as by a flame from the smouldering eyes.
The young Jarl went on haughtily: “It had come to my mind, before, that my affairs must be a juicy mouthful for gabblers to chew over the fire; but I did not know that the things they said were the kind to attract friends to me, and there will be much awanting before I believe it.”
Randvar gave up then; shrugging, he said only: “Believe whatever you like about it; yet I wish I had a chance to prove my good-will.”
Again he expected the jeering laughter, and again he missed his foretelling. A long time Starkad’s son sat staring out at the darkness, strange expressions playing over his white face like flickerings of his inner fire; then, at last, his thoughts formed themselves into slow-spoken words:
“Never could it happen that my look encountered you without recalling how I saw you this morning,—yet what else is to be done? To hold enmity against a man who offers me good-will—This, at least, you have never heard of me, Songsmith, that I am low-minded! Only one way is open to me.” He stretched out his hand for the horn. “I will accept it from you now,” he said, and drained gratefully the second draught his host brought him, the rich juice imparting some of its own warm life to his ghastly face. He drew himself erect as he gave back the cup. “There shall be peace between us, only I make it a condition that you shall enter my following.”