Hesitating they saluted and unwilling they wheeled, while one spoke bluntly over his shoulder. “It would be better to let us stay, King, if you please. You are weaponless.”
“Go,” Canute repeated. In a moment the doors beyond the curtain had closed behind them, and the two men were alone save for the girl hiding forgotten in the shadow of the chair.
Rothgar laughed jarringly. “Whatever has been told about you, you have not yet been accounted a coward. But I do not see how you know I shall not kill you. I have dreamed of it not a few times.”
Something like a veil seemed to fall over the King’s face; from behind it he spoke slowly as he moved away to the dais upon which his throne-chair stood, and mounted the steps. “The same dream has come to me, but never has it occurred to me to seek you out to tell you of it.”
“No such purpose had I,” the Jotun said with a touch of surliness. Pulling a bag from under his belt, he shook out of it upon the floor a mane of matted yellow hair. “If you want to know my errand, it is to bring you this. Yesterday it came to my ears that one of my men was suspected of having tried to give you poison through your wife’s British thrall. I got them before me and questioned them, and the Scar-Cheek boasted of having done it. This is his hair. If you remember anything about the fellow, you understand that he was not alive when I took it from him.”
The King looked immovably at the yellow mass. “You have behaved in a chieftain-like way and I thank you for it,” he said. “But I would have liked it better if you had come to me about the judgment that raised this wall between us—”
Rothgar’s throat gave out a savage sound. “Tempt me not! I am no sluggish wolf.”
But Canute spoke on: “What I expected that day was that you would come to me, as friend comes to friend, and with my loose property I would redeem from you every stick and stone which my kingship had forced me to hold back. Not more than they have called me coward, have men ever called me stingy—”
“And when have men called me greedy?” the Jotun bellowed. “Your thoughts have got a bad habit of lying about me if they say that it was greed for land which made me take your judgment angrily. Except for the honor of my stock, what want I with land while I have a ship to bear me? I tell you, now as heretofore, that it was your treachery which unsheathed a sword between us.”
“Rothgar my brother,—” the veil was rent from the King’s face and he had stepped from the dais and seized the other by the shoulders as though he would wrestle bodily with him,—“by the Holy Ring, I swear that I have never betrayed you! If you grudge not the land to the Englishman, you have no cause to grudge him anything under Ymer’s skull. Can a man change his blood?—for so much a part of me is my friendship for you. Time never was when it was not there, and it would be as possible to fill my veins with Thames water as to put an Englishman into your place. Can you not understand—”