“When did I ever get my will against you,—after I got out of swaddling-bands? I ask, however, that you do not keep me feeling foolish here longer than is necessary.”
Probably it was the same to her as though he were still in swaddling-bands, when once she had closed her eyes that all her forces might be concentrated in her sense of touch. The palms she pressed upon his firm cool flesh—polished satin-smooth by the water, glistening satin-fair in the firelight—moved as tenderly as though the sinewy frame were still the soft child-body that she had tended in its helplessness. Each time his glance fell upon her worn face with its mouth hard-set in anxiety for him, he swallowed his impatience one time more; and when the waxing light made delay no longer possible, his efforts to free himself were begun with all gentleness.
“Foster-mother, be good enough to remember that I cannot start later than sunrise, if I am to reach there by sunset.”
She clutched him with one hand, while the other pressed hard upon his left side.
“I thought I felt a place—stand still!—over your heart. It would be a death wound, indeed. There! Cold! A spot as cold as Hel’s mouth!” She opened eyes dilated with excitement in a face that had become ashen pale.
An involuntary shiver passed over him, cooling his impatience. He watched thoughtfully while she began to knead his flesh with her warm and tingling finger-balls. After a time he said:
“It cannot be gainsaid that this is a better place to give a thrust than to take one. I admit that I expect to meet some unexpected things in the path I am entering. Not a little overgrowth hides it. Although I cannot tell why, much that the Jarl said that night came to me as a surprise. I suppose that the strangeness of his temper is the explanation of it.... Yet there is one thing that I can find no answer to,—why should he act as if it were important to him to have an unknown man like me in his following?”
Instead of answering, she began to rub at what she considered a vulnerable place in his discretion. “Never make the mistake of belittling yourself like that, and least of all where strangers can hear you. The result might be that they would take you at your word and believe you to be a man of no mark.”
He stirred impatiently. “Brisk enough am I, and many shall give place to me; but this I know not,—why it should matter to the Jarl of New Norway where I spend my days.”
Neither did she know, when she came to think it over. She soon gave up the attempt to fall back upon what she did know.