“What foolishness is here! If a guardsman had not grown up and gone away from his home, where would your fun have come in?”
Rain clouds were not so thick in her blue eyes but that sun shone through at that. Tiptoeing to reach his ear, she whispered, “Remind him of me, sometimes!” Then hiding her face, she fled back to the Tower; and he set forth laughing.
A silvery haze veiled all but the path just before his feet, so that he appeared to be ever advancing from mystery to mystery. He would have been less than a song-maker if it had not seemed to him a symbol of the unknown life into which he was entering, if he had not given himself unreservedly to musing on his hopes and fears. His feet travelled the trails by instinct that day, and by instinct forded the streams and threaded the marshes; his mind was travelling the roads of the Jarl’s Town, fording the deeps of Brynhild’s pride, threading the maze of Helvin’s temper.
Burning its way through the grayness, the sun came out. Like a ball of fire, it rolled up the eastern slope of the heavens. Like a ball of fire, it rolled down the sky’s western side. Still he walked in a dream, conscious only of the light of his visions. It was not until the hills showed like nicks in the fire-ball’s rim, and he had reached the last knoll rising between him and the sight of the Jarl’s Town, that he was recalled to the present.
Half-way to the crest loomed a mass of cinder-hued rusty-veined rock. Rounding this brought him suddenly upon Eric the Page, squatted on his heels beside a patch of the wintergreen berries which the youth of New Norway valued next to honey. In the process of adjusting his attention to this abrupt demand, the Songsmith stood gazing at him; but the youngster scrambled up with an involuntary “Odin!” which was as much a prayer as an exclamation. When, presently, Randvar put out a hand and lifted him by his embroidered collar, he began to talk much more like a small boy caught robbing a trap than the haughty page of a Jarl’s daughter.
“Now, foster-brother! I have not done anything. I did your bidding with her. I have not done anything, foster-brother.”
“Plain enough you have it before your mind what I ought to do,” Randvar said with his short laugh. Then he gave him a slight shake and let him go. “Have it even as you have chosen. It may be that I shall not find it harder to forget you than you found it to forget me.” While his one hand quitted the gay collar, his other took toll from the berry-laden cap, and he passed on.
That he should not be allowed to forget, however, he was able to guess. It was no surprise when the boy’s voice sounded again at his elbow, in the wheedling tone that was as familiar as the gleam of his curly head.
“Foster-brother, what is the need of taking it in that way, either? I could explain it with a mouthful of words if you would listen.”
As the Songsmith could not deny some curiosity to hear the explanation, he allowed his pace to slacken. Eric read the sign quickly.