Like a strain falling from Valhalla to the World of the Dead, the voice of Yrsa the Lovely fell presently on his ear, calling out a merry good-night as she went away with the rustling train of women to the booths that had been erected for them. A moment his gaze wandered to follow out of sight the head of fiery gold that moved before them, but still he sang on.
Above the trees, presently, Night raised her silver bow and shot bright arrows through the leafless branches. Watching the shafts strike and melt into pools of moonshine at his feet, his eyes lost their alertness; his song grew dreamy, slackened and sank low as the note of a dreaming bird. But still he kept on.
Breathing the melody rather than singing it, he saw unheeding how the bright beams reached to the cloak-wrapped form and groped like hands along it; he was slow in realizing that one of the pale spots in the shadow was not moonlight, but a wan face upturned. His song ended in a gasp, when the truth did come home to him. Sometime he stood motionless before he dared speak and ask:
“Lord, how is it with you?”
The answer came out of the shadow, “It is well with me,” but no minor chord ever made the song-maker’s heart swell in his breast as did the voice in which the words were spoken. It became nothing to him what mask the tortured face might be wearing. Kneeling beside the prostrate body, he raised it up until the mass of blood-red hair rested even on his shoulder.
As a drowned man rises out of the deeps, so the Jarl seemed to rise out of the shadow into the moonlight. And as the face of one who has known the agony of buffeting waves, so was his face blanched and drawn; but no other mark was upon him. Only infinite weariness was on the finely cut mouth; in the sea-gray eyes, only infinite sadness. The swelling of the song-maker’s heart became a sharp pain in his throat.
But the Jarl said gently: “Once when I had fallen into such a strait as this, I would not accept your help. See now how I lean on you! There will ever be most help in you when there is most need of it. My true friend, for this—this!—what shall requite you?” He put up his hand; and because Randvar could not speak, he wrung it in silence.
Then gradually Helvin’s strength came back to him, so that he put out his other hand and taking hold of a branch, drew himself to his feet, and stood supported half by the tree, half by the shoulder of the Songsmith.
“Soon are my powers renewed in me,” he said. “Even as David did for Saul, you cast the devil out; and before he had gone his length—God! the length he goes! Can you raise before your mind what my state was that day, when I turned and espied a man watching me from the bushes? When my arrow missed him, and I knew that my secret was loose in the world? Ah! I do not want to remember that! Wine! Give me wine!”
Randvar’s hand unfastened the flask from his neck without the knowledge of his wits, that were like thunder in his ears, roaring explanation of all that had puzzled him. Out of the tumult, he spoke earnestly: