The chant ceased, the wavering treble dying away in a note of haunting sweetness. The man moaned and clutched at his wound; and the bowed figure by his side roused herself to tend him. Then a grating of rusty hinges made her turn her head.
Under the crumbling arch, relieved against the green of the lane beyond, stood the figure of a slender boy wrapped in a mantle of scarlet that bore a strangely familiar look. His hair fell upon his shoulders in soft wavy locks of raven blackness; but his face was turned away as his hands fumbled at the fastening.
Sister Wynfreda rose and took a step forward, staring at him in bewilderment.
“Fridtjof?” she questioned.
At the sound of her voice, the boy turned and hastened toward her. Then a great cry burst from Sister Wynfreda, for the face under the black locks was the face of Randalin.
CHAPTER II. Randalin, Frode’s Daughter
At a hoary speaker
Laugh thou never.
Often is good that which the aged utter;
Oft from a shrivelled hide
Discreet words issue.
Hávamál.
She made a convincing boy, this daughter of the Vikings. Though she was sixteen, her graceful body had retained most of the lines and slender curves of childhood; and she was long of limb and broad of shoulder. Her head was poised alertly above her strong young throat, and she was as straight as a fir-tree and as supple as a birch. A life out-of-doors had given to her skin a tone of warm brown, which, in a land that expected women to be lily-fair, was like a mask added to her disguise. The blackness of her hair was equally unconnected with Northern dreams of beautiful maidens. “Dark-haired women, like slaves, black and bad,” was the proverb of the Danish camps. Some fair-tressed ancestor back in the past must have qualified his blood from the veins of an Irish captive; in no other way could one account for those locks, and for her eyes that were of the grayish blue of iris petals.
The eyes were a little staring this morning, as though still stretched wide with the horror of the things they had looked upon; and all the glowing red blood had ebbed away from the brown cheeks.
She said in a low voice, “My father... Fridtjof...” then stopped to draw a long hard breath through her set teeth.