It was a fantastic scene, the wilds of a forest river-bank turned into a guest-house for court-folk. Athwart the living green of the pines, camp-fires sent their spirals of blue smoke, and groups of thralls made white rings around the blaze as they roasted the game and heated the wine with which pages skimmed to and fro. Down by the sparkling water, knots of old chieftains and young courtmen divided their time between eating and gazing across the stream at the Skraellings’ encampment of the opposite shore. Back among the trees, where the drifted leaves had been heaped into cushions of russet and gold, groups of gentlewomen chatted as merrily amid the great stillness as though they were among the whirring wheels of their own bower. Still farther up the brown slope and deeper in the grove, Helvin Jarl, in his splendid riding dress of gold-embroidered green, sat upon a heap of bowlders over which red wolfskins had been thrown, his song-maker lounging beside him, wild-locked and wild-garbed as a creature of the wood, except for the harp at his back.
Randvar had finished eating and was staring contentedly at nothing. Over the forest lay the hush of that strange season which falls like a breathless pause in the brisk round of the autumn. Dropped suddenly motionless were the winds that had been lashing the trees like mighty flails; and as a conjuror changes knives to roses, so had the keen cold of the morning been changed to balmy warmth by the red noon sun. A fancy came to him that the golden haze veiling the end of every tree-aisle was the visible shape of a dream in the air.
“It feels like noon-spell in harvest-time,” he said aloud. “I think the earth has worked so hard that it has fallen asleep and dreams now of the summer.”
“Say the same thing later on when the day is at an end,” Helvin answered. “To me it feels like a devil’s fit of repentance. After his spite has been for weeks like a rasp in the air, and his fury has torn all within reach, he tires of his rage—for a day or two—holds his peace and puts on a watery smile.”
Even while the song-making part of Randvar smiled approval of the figure, his woodsman’s alertness detected something odd about the voice in which the words were uttered. Sideways he sent a glance at his lord.
It seemed to him that there was also something odd about Helvin’s expression; but he had no chance to scrutinize it for on the instant it was gone, while the Jarl caught his look and challenged it.
“Why do you stare as if you saw a hedge-rider?”
“Lord, your voice sounded as though it came hard for you to breathe,” Randvar answered after a moment.
Helvin’s words leaped out like tigers from a cage. “Why should it not? in this smothering stillness where even the trees are holding their breath to listen for something. Oh, for the plains! the plains! where the wind blows, and a man can see all around him, and not so much as a ghost can creep on him unawares! It is a trap, this forest of yours; and every rank of trees is a wall to shut one tighter in with his thoughts. Had I an axe ready to my hand, and the might in my arm—”
Even as it seemed that his body would be wrung by a violent gesture, he caught himself; and his voice slackened to a mocking drawl.