“He took himself from the one person who was dear to him, poor little cub,” he murmured. “If they have maimed him, I swear I will tuck him under my arm and cut my way out though there be a wall of the brutes around him.”
His musings came to an end, as the man preceding him stopped suddenly where one of the milky panes broken from the cloister window gave a view of the cloister garden. With the cold November sunshine a hum of voices was coming in, now brightened by peals of laughter, again blurred by the thud of falling quoits. Over the Jotun’s shoulder, he caught a glimpse of gorgeous nobles and fair-haired women scattered in graceful groups about a sunny old garden, green in the very face of winter, thanks to the protecting shelter of the gray walls.
Only a glimpse,—for even as he looked, Rothgar caught his cloak and pulled him ahead. “Yonder door is a better place to look through; already it is open, and the shadow inside is thick enough to hide us.”
Pricked as he was by a dozen spurs, Sebert offered no resistance. In a moment, they stood just out of reach of the square of light which fell through the open doorway. Framed in carved stone, the quaint old garden with its gravelled paths, its weedless turfs and its background of ivy-hung walls, lay before them like a picture.
In the longest of the oval spaces, a group of maidens and warriors were gathered to watch a wonderful flower-faced woman play at quoits under the instruction of a noble tutor. At every one of her graceful blunders her laughter rang out in fairy music, which was sweetly echoed by her maids; but the men appeared to see nothing but her beauty as she poised herself lightly before them like some shining azure bird on tiptoe for flight. Sebert paid her the tribute of a quickly drawn breath, even as he took his eyes from her to scan the butterfly pages who ran to and fro, recovering the gilded rings. Yellow hair and red hair and brown hair curled on their gaudy shoulders, but no black. In all the picture there was but one figure crowned with such raven locks as had distinguished Fridtjof the Bold, and that figure belonged to a girl standing directly opposite by the mossy curb of the old well, which, guarded by a circle of carefully tended trees, rose like an altar in the centre of the inclosure. Four of the red-cloaked Danish nobles stood about her,—and one of them wore a golden circlet upon the gold of his hair,—but the Etheling’s eyes passed them almost unheedingly to dwell upon the black-tressed maiden.
Something about her, while it was entirely strange, was yet so absurdly familiar. She was some very high-born lady, there could be no doubt of that, for the delicate fabric of her trailing kirtle was flowered with gold, and gold and coral were twined in the dusky softness of her hair and hung around her neck in a costly chain, which the King was fingering idly as he talked with her. Now she looked up to answer the jesting words, and the man in the passage saw her smile and shake back her clustering curls with a gesture so familiar... so familiar...
Rothgar’s gloating eyes detected light breaking in his victim’s face, incredulity, amazement, consternation; and he began to jeer under his breath. “A great joy is this that you see your Fridtjof again! Why do you not go in boldly and rescue him? Does he not look to be in need of your help?” To stifle his laughter, he muffled his head in his cloak and leaned, shaking, against the wall.
Flushing a deeper and deeper red, the Lord of Ivarsdale stared at the smiling maiden. Just so, a hundred times, she had lifted her sparkling face toward him, and he—fool that he was!—where had been his eyes? Perhaps it is not strange that after the surprise had faded from his look, the first feeling to show was bitterest mortification. Turning, he forced a laugh between his teeth.
“I do not deny you the right to be amused. You speak truly that she needs no help from me. I will hinder you no longer.”
Rothgar leaped forward to bar the passage, and the mantle that fell from his face showed no laughter of mouth or eyes. “I have not as yet spoken harm, but it is not sure that I do not mean it,” he said. “If you take it in this manner to see how you have been tricked, you may suppose how well I like it to remember the lies she fed to me, who would have staked my life upon her truthfulness. It is not allowed me to take revenge on her for her treachery, but I think I need not spare you, as you got the profit of her falseness.”