CHAPTER XXV. The King’s Wife

Long is and indirect the way
To a bad friend’s,
Though by the road he dwell.
Hávamál.

The fact that King Edgar had slept under its uneven on some visit to Dunstan’s monkish colony, was scarcely sufficient to make a palace of the rambling rookery which a wall separated from the West Minster. It was an irregular one-storied building,—or, rather, group of buildings connected by covered passages,—and every kind of material had been used in its construction,—brick and stone and wood,—while some of the smaller offices were even straw-thatched and wattled.

“It is the waste-place of ruins,” Elfgiva said on the day of their arrival, when the monk who guided them proudly identified the brick portions as fragments of the old Roman Temple to Apollo, the wooden door-posts as beams from the Saxon Seberht’s refectory, and the stone walls as contributions from Dunstan’s chapel, which the Danes of the year one thousand and twelve had reduced to a crumbling pile.

To-day, a fortnight later, Randalin repeated the comment with a despondent addition: “It is the waste-place of ruins, and ruins have come to dwell in it. I can believe that it is no lie about the Fates to call them women, when they put like with like in so housewifely a manner.”

She was alone in one of the bare mouldering rooms, leaning against the deep-set small-paned window which had become her accustomed post. It offered no pleasanter outlook than the snow-powdered thicket beyond the wall and a glimpse of the Thames, spreading silently over the surrounding marshes; but from it her fancy’s eye could follow the mighty stream around its eastern bend to the point where the City walls began, and Saint Paul’s shingled steeple reared itself in lofty pride. The Palace stood in the shade of that steeple,—the real Palace, where the King sat deciding over the fate of his new subjects, taking their lands from them, when he did not take their lives, and banishing them across the sea to live and die in beggary. Her fingers tapped the glass in desperation as she realized her helplessness even to get news of his judgments.

“The King will never come to this rubbish heap,” she told herself despairingly. “Here we are buried no less than if we lay in a mound. It is not likely that we shall get news by an easier way than by going to him.”

Straining her eyes out over the mist-robed river, she tried for the thousandth time to think of some bait alluring enough to tempt Elfgiva to that point of daring. Hope the Lady of Northampton had every morning when she awoke and looked in her mirror, and Wrath lay down with her every night, but the rashness which had prompted her first attempt, Thorkel must have taken away with him, a trophy tied to his saddle-bow. She made big plans and she talked big words,—but always she put off their fulfilment until the morrow.

“At this gait, he could be dead and in his grave without my knowing it!” Randalin cried in despair, and her voice made it quite clear that “he” no longer meant the King. Since there was no one to see it, she even allowed her head to fall forward on her arms, and let the ache in her throat ease itself in a little sob. “Now it is open to me that I was foolish to let what happened in the garden, that day, cause so much sadness in my heart,” she sighed. “It should have been a great joy to me that he was still safe and happy... and I should have found some hope in it, also, for as long as he is in England there would always be the chance that I might see him again... And perhaps, after a long while, when he had quite forgotten how I looked as Fridtjof... if I should be able to learn many graceful woman’s ways from Elfgiva... and if he should come upon me when I had on a very beautiful kirtle... so long as he likes my hair...”

But even as the smile budded on her lips, she plucked it from them, trembling. “How dare I think of such things, when already they may have driven him across the sea! It would be quite enough if I could know that the same land is to hold us both, if I could have the hope of seeing him again to make it seem worth while for me to go on living. Oh, I did not dream how much I leaned on that, until it was taken from me!” In the utter loneliness of her despair, she crushed her face against her arm, pressing back the burning tears, and her heart rose in a prayer to the Englishman’s God, since her own no longer answered her: “Oh, Thou God, if Thou art kind and helpful as he says, it is easy for Thee to let him remain here where I can sometimes see him! Leave me this one hope, and I also will believe in Thee.” With her face hidden, she stood there praying it until it rang so strong through her soul that it seemed to her the Power could not but hear. And after He had heard, it would be so simple,—if He was as helpful as Sebert said.