“You think yourself a sly fox as you lie there watching me!” Helvin said, “but you need not take so much trouble. I have got over the wish to kill you.”
It seemed to Randvar as if the rippling wave must have frozen, so rigid did he become.
“Is it even so, then, that you tried to betray me?” he asked slowly.
“I hope you did not look for anything better from me,” Helvin returned, and laughed again.
So unbearable was the low sound that Randvar sat up sharply, and spoke with anger: “I did though! I expected that even if your wrath rose like a sea-wall against me, you would vent it in some honorable way.”
“You know better now,” Helvin answered grimly.
“That is certain,” Randvar assented with equal curtness; and for a space there was silence between them, save for the sound of Helvin’s hands tearing the root-fibres.
In the low choked voice of one holding under a fearful force, Helvin broke out at last. “I never saw a greater blockhead! and I treated you better than you deserved. It mattered not that you were quick to mark the change in my manner,—still you could not guess that from the time the trees closed around me, I saw nothing but the old troll’s twisted face in every shadow, heard nothing but his cursed ghost gibbering vengeance in my ear! Never did I so need that you should closely stand by me with your fearless mind; and what did you do, instead, but bungle it so that I had to leave you behind! I can tell you that death was likelier than life as you stood then. I wonder I did not become the fiend you saw at the Pool.”
“The fiend I saw at the Pool!” Randvar repeated, and the impulse to face standing whatever might lie before him made him start to rise to his feet. But at the first motion, Helvin’s hand fell upon his shoulder with the weight of a lion’s paw and crushed him back upon his seat.
“Now are you hot-headed,” he snarled, “and there is rashness in your actions, and that is foolish in a cool-witted man like you. It is not enough that you have made the bargain to go through Torment with me; you have got to go quietly. Quietly! do you understand that or not? Ah! You are not going to be so great a fool as to struggle.—Bear in mind what it means to thwart me!”