But she did not seem to hear his explanation as she stood there gazing at him, her mind leaping lightning-like from point to point. “It was that which made you behave so strangely in the garden,” she said, and she spoke each phrase with a kind of breathless finality. “You thought that I—I was like those—those other women in the camp.” As he tried to take her hand she drew farther away, and stood looking at him out of eyes that were like purple shadows in her white face. It was with a little movement of anger that she came to herself at last. “And what are you thinking of me now? Do you dare to dream that the King—” Turning, she confronted the old warrior fiercely. “Thorkel Jarl, I ask you to tell the Lord of Ivarsdale as quick as you can what the King wants with me.”
“That I will not do,” the Jarl said quickly. “You know no prudence, maiden. The Lord of Ivarsdale is also English; a mishap might occur if—”
She flung the words at him; “I care not if it lose Canute his crown! If you will not risk it, I will tell him that the King settles to-night with Edric of Mercia and his men, and that it is to witness the punishment of my kinsmen’s murderer that he has sent for me. As for my camp-life, ask Rothgar himself, or Elfgiva, or the King—or any soldier of the host! Of them all, you alone have thought such thoughts of me.” She flung up her hands against him in a kind of heart-broken rage. “You! To whose high-mindedness I trusted everything I have!” Hiding her face, she ran from them, sobbing, into the house.
CHAPTER XXXI. The Twilight of The Gods
Circumspect and reserved
Every man should be,
And wary in trusting friends;
Of the words
That a man says to another
He often pays the penalty.
Hávamál.
Waking to tapestried walls and jewelled lanterns and a strange splendor of furnishings, Randalin experienced a moment of wild bewilderment. What had happened to the low-ceiled dormitory with its bare wall-spaces splotched with dampness? What had become of the row of white beds, with Dearwyn’s rosy face on the next pillow? And she herself—why was she lying on the outside of the covers, with all her clothes on, a cramped aching heap? Rising on her elbow, she gazed wonderingly at the frowzy woman stretched near her on a pallet. It was not until the woman turned over, puffing out her fat cheeks in a long breath, that the girl on the bed recognized her and knew what room this was and remembered what had happened to separate to-day from all the yesterdays of her life. Falling down upon the pillows, she lay with her face hidden among them, living over with the swift sharpness of a renewed brain the scenes of the previous night.
As she had seen it from the gallery where the King’s soldiers had hidden her, she saw again the great stone hail, enshrining a feasting-table around which a throng of nobles in their gorgeous dresses and their jewels and their diadems made a glittering halo. At the farther end, the King sat in his shining gilded chair. Just below her, was Edric of Mercia with Norman Leofwinesson beside him. She could not see their faces for their backs were toward her, but now and again the Gainer’s velvet voice rose blandly, and each time she was seized with shuddering. How was it possible that he did not feel disaster in the air? To her it seemed that the very torch-flames hissed warnings above the merriment, while the occasional pauses were so heavy with doom that their weight was well-nigh unendurable; at each, she was forced to fight down a mad impulse to scream and scatter the hush.
Then the light from the taper which a page was holding behind Norman of Baddeby fell upon the gemmed collar that was his principal ornament, and the sight wrought a subtle change in her mood. The collar had been her father’s; she could not look at it without seeing again his ruddy old face with its grim mouth and faded kindly eyes. Beside this vision rose another,—the vision of this beloved face dead in the moonlight, with Fridtjof’s near it, his brave smile frozen on his young lips. From that moment, softness and shrinking died out in her bearing as out of her heart, and her blood was turned to fire within her,—the liquid fire of the North. Hour after hour, she sat in rigid waiting while the endless line of servants ran to and fro with their silver dishes and the merriment grew and spread and the clinking came faster and louder and the voices grew thicker and wilder.
When the wave of good-will and fellowship had reached its height, like one who would ride in upon its crest the Gainer rose to his feet and began speaking to the King. His manner was less smoothly deferential than when addressing Edmund, she noticed, affecting more the air of bluff frankness which one might who wished to disarm any suspicion of flattering; but she could not hear what he said because of the noise around him. The first words she heard distinctly were Canute’s, as he paused with upraised goblet to look at the Mercian. Like an arrow his voice cleft the uproar, so that here and there men checked the speech on their lips to look at him, and their neighbors, observing them, paused also, until the lull extended from corner to corner.
“Strangely do you ask,” he said. “Why should I give you more than Edmund gave you?”