The question was repeated in her lover’s attitude; but Thorkel Jarl answered it, coming between them and drawing her aside.
“I will remedy that,” he said. “My men are to fetch you to the Palace so soon as ever your lady has left. The King has a use for you.” The rest he spoke into her ear, but its effect was to blanch her cheeks and cause her hands to clasp each other in terror as she started back.
“I cannot!” she cried. “I cannot.” “You must,” he said harshly. “Or you will do little credit to the blood that is in you. Do you no longer think your father and brother of any importance?”
“They are pitiless to demand it of me,” she murmured, and buried her face in her hands.
Anger leaped from the young noble’s eyes as, in his turn, he came between her and the Jarl. He said forcefully, “No one shall ask anything of you that you do not want, nor shall any king compel you. Yet I think I have a right to know what his will is with you.”
“You have not,” the Dane contradicted. “Do you think the King’s purposes are to be opened to the sight of every Angle who becomes his man? Nor have you ally right soever over her who is the King’s ward. End this talk, maiden, and give me your promise to be obedient.”
She gave it in a cry of despair, “I must—I know I must!” then sought to make peace with her lover by laying caressing hands on his breast. “And he is right, love, that I ought not to tell any one. It is another one of those things that you must trust.”
But for once the Etheling’s will did not bend to her coaxing; his mouth was doggedly set as he looked down upon her. “I trust no man I do not know,” he answered, “and I do not know Canute the man,—nor do I greatly like what I have heard of him, or this plan of sending me from the City at this time. You have no cause to reproach me with lack of faith in you, Randalin, for when every happening—even your own words—made it appear as if it were love for Rothgar Lodbroksson which brought you into the camp, I looked into your eyes and believed them against all else.” In the intensity of the living present he forgot the dead past—until he saw its ghosts troop like gray shadows across her face.
“Love for Rothgar Lodbroksson?” she repeated, drawing back. “Then you did believe that I could love Rothgar?” Her voice rose sharply. “You believed that I followed him!”
Too late he saw what he had done. “I said that I did not believe it,” he cried hastily. “What I thought at first in my bewilderment,—that could not be called belief.” Now it was the present that he had forgotten in the past, as he strove desperately to recapture the phantoms and thrust them back into their graves.