The Sentimental Vikings

by R. V. Risley

I welcomed him as a guest should be welcomed, and called for more meat to be placed before him and some ale; but the ale he only sipped and I sent to the back of my cellars for some bottles of Southern wine, which he liked much better and thanked me for, and which I liked him the less for liking better than the ale. When we had drank and eaten, we rose, and taking my arm, he walked with me up and down the end of the hall.

“Old Father Cefron,” he began, “is a learned man, but a man who has kept too strictly within the rules of his order; he lacks blood, therefore he lacks heart; he has only a head, but that head is one whose like will not be seen in Skandinavia again in this century”; and the youth’s voice was touched with enthusiasm. “Now why it is I do not know, but having killed the man in him over ponderous books, he feels he must have me to put some laughter in his life, and give him something human to think of for the moment when he is tired of the battles and treaties and that of dead kings; therefore it is, my lord and host, that I would venture to ask of you as Father Cefron has asked me to ask of you—indeed has commanded—that you let me stay with him here in the castle till the term of his life is ended, which seems not very long.”

So young Heinrick became one of my household, and though I never liked him for his dainty ways and foreign prettinesses, yet I became used to him, and his figure was familiar on the edges of my fish-ponds, in the corridors of my hall, and was seldom absent when the time for eating came. He seemed to be much with Father Cefron in the early evening, and I could hear Father Cefron’s groans come from his chamber sometimes when I passed by the door; and he was good at wrestling tricks, and quick to a wonder at southern fence, yet I liked him none the better, and I could see that the men liked him neither, for they would not learn his wrestling tricks till pressed almost to command, and I could see them whispering and glancing after him as he passed by. By this time my Lady Elsa and myself lived as most loving people. I would take her to the fish-ponds, and she would scream and find delight in the excitement; or sometimes she would come to meet me through the wood with some of her women and some men to follow, and I would come making the wood hoarsely musical through my curved horn, and bring her deer from the uplands and great hares shot with cross-bow, and sometimes little birds, very hard to come near, which dwell among the sand-hills to the westward; then she would always have flowers in her room; in the winter evergreens and the mystical, bunched, mistletoe, and ever my favourite meats and green things, cooked or wild, all the year were before me.

It was as the winter came on that I fell ill and the fever came into me; and after lying for three days I tried to get up out of my bed. I can remember them carrying me back there, and I can remember them saying, “He has gone mad with the fever.” Then I think that in the night I did go mad with the fever, for they told me afterwards that I howled and yelled and screamed for my sword to fight the gnomes and hobgoblins, and the things of hell and air; but, as I say, this I only learned long afterwards. I strove with death hard-handed, and I held him in my grasp, and he could not throw me; and at last the wrestle came to an end, for he slipped from me and disappeared, and I lay on the bed with wide-open eyes, my white face making the rough men who were in the room use words of which they were ashamed after, to me. Then came my wife, and her hand pulled the last of the fever from me; but the wrestle had left me very tired, and I lay many days knowing little. At last I could sit in the great chair by the window on sunny days, and look forth over the snows that covered my uplands and count the familiar trees which stuck up black out of the snow-drifts. Then they wrapped me in many coats, and with a man on each side of me I came down into the hall again, my wife behind me. It was the time of noonday meat, and the men rose with a hoarse shout as they saw me and pressed forward with outspread hands; but my Lady Elsa was before them in a moment, and her green robe shone strangely against their skin-clad bodies. She stopped them with gentle, firm words, asking them to let me get to the great chair that I might sit down, for I was come to eat a bite with them and drink a sup of ale; and the men sat down with a sigh, such as dogs give of contentment after full feeding. So I sat me down, and they brought me a tiny bird on a little plate and I could only eat half of it. Then they brought me a great tankard of ale, and I raised it to my lips and drank the half of it, and I felt the manhood rush to my feet, and then to my head again, and through my arms as I put the mug back on the table, and the men nodded to one another as saying, “It is well done for a sick man.” Then slowly I finished the rest of the ale, then walked feebly to the fire and stood there warming myself. Then the two men who stood by me led me back to my chamber, and my wife followed, laying cool cloths on my head. Now every day I walked feebly to my meat in the hall, but it was not till the third day that I began to notice something strange about the men. They would look at me with a great curiosity, and some of them with seeming contempt, at which I said nothing; and one of the two men who had been my nurses in the sick chamber would follow me even through the gardens, as I walked slowly abroad with a staff for the keen frosty air; so that after some weeks I spoke to my lady about it, but she answered me, shaking her hair about her shoulders, that she knew not these western peasants as I did, and that in her father’s hall there had been no suspicions and no glances of double meaning. Then spoke I to the man who followed me so faithfully as I have said, but he would answer nothing save that he thought that something was in the air, and that the spring would bring new flowers. Then asked I of young Heinrick, who still awaited the death of Father Cefron, with those laughing eyes under the wild light hair; but he laughed at me again, and told me that I was a sick man on one side of my head now and suspected everybody, and that I should send for a physician to plaster me—if he could find the side. Now old Father Cefron seemed to have dried into one of his own parchments, and his hide wrinkled, and almost rattled, as he walked. Though he came to eat with us in the hall on holy days, and said long prayers with somewhat worldly warnings after, yet he would on most days eat in his own chamber, and that of the least and coarsest, and would drink only of the ice-cold water from the well. I went to him at last and questioned him, and asked him if he had noticed the glances cast upon me, and the whispering and the sudden ceasing of the women’s tongues when I came into the room, but he answered “No!” that he had noticed none of these things, for he was too much taken up in battles and kings and the histories of nations, to see aught that passed about him; and then he told me of the ancient days, and of the mighty, warm, strange, empires of the south and east, and spoke a hundred names of battles and knew every half-month of the history of the Church; and so I left him, comforted with learning, and went and sat and looked out on the snow, and thought of all that he had said.

The acts of the night that broke my life were short and quick, yet they are too long for the telling; still I will try, for without them you will not understand the strange end of this tale by the grey wolves.

It was the next night after this, and I had sat late in the hall, just beginning now to find strength enough to think of what I should do with my lands and cattle when the soft weather and spring-time came at last. Sighing and putting these thoughts away from me as something too far off to be yet of use, I rose and through the darkened hall passed through the tapestried doorway and up the dimly-lighted stair, where the candles were distant, to my wife’s room, before which hung a curtain that I had bought her in the Port of Swenborg from a ship that had come from the east countries, and as I raised the curtain in my hand, seeing by the faint light of one candle high on the wall behind me the great oak panels of her familiar door, I stopped. I stood still, the curtain in my hand, and the light flickered over the saints’ heads carved on the oaken panels, and over my head. At the arch of the doorway stood an oak figure of a saint only the projecting edges of whose robe and face could be seen in the candle-light. I stood there while the candle blew and flamed; I heard its dripping on the floor; I glanced once toward the staircase, where the descending uncertain lights led down into the dusk and darkness. Somewhere in the distance outside the hall I heard a man singing in a coarse voice, then his comrades joined in the chorus, and I heard their “skaals.” I stood there holding the curtain while the stairs creaked mysteriously as to the ears of a weary and sick man, and while, through the window near me, curtaining clouds flitted past the face of the moon as she looked down on the infinite purity of the untrod white below.

Then I dropped the curtain, and stealing down the stairs like a thief in my own house, I came again into the great hall, and I went and took down my sword from its place, and I sat me down in the great arm-chair piling the cushions around me, with my sword across the arms and my hands resting on its sheath. At last the dawn came faintly; then a long stain of yellow light struck across the ribbed and worn floor; then for a moment, a glorious red glowed through the windows, and then this faded and the ashes of the dead fire, and the broken meats that strewed the table, and the tankards that lay on the floor, sprang out under the truthful day. Then began to come in the women to carry out the things of last night, and when they saw me sitting there alone, they curtseyed and looked frightened and would have turned back, but I spoke to them quietly to clear the floor and build up the fire, for it was a cold morning and the men must have good meat; and after a while came in some ragged boys carrying bunches of branches and some hauling great bundles of logs with roots, and these they rolled into the fireplace piling the branches above them. Then one of the women, bringing a sack of dry leaves arranged them carefully among the branches and under the places where the bark of the logs was rough. Then, with a flint and steel, an old woman knelt and touched the dry leaves into a flame that was dull in a moment. The branches caught, and crackling, sent ends of flaming twigs wild up the chimney. Then at last the great logs at the back began to smoke, and soon their bark caught fire, and their chopped ends played with the eager flame, so all the hall was warmed and a thin smoke sailing up about the rafters. Then came they with great hooks that were made fast to turning cranes driven in the fireplace wall, and on these hooks were sides of deer and legs of sheep, with pans below and ladles that no richness might be lost, and thick brown cakes were piled along the table-centre in a row; and now four men came rolling in two casks of unbroached beer, and these they set below the table’s edge down at the end. The women lifted a great cauldron on to the fire, that glowed like some sprites’ cauldron of black-art; it held fowls and green things floating in the midst, the gravy sizzling at the sides. Then the old woman who had lit the fire went to the doorway and took down a great sea-shell that hung there and she blew a hateful blast that broke the very air, and all the men came trooping to their meat.

That morn was the holy morn of Easter, and Cefron came to share our meat, his elbow sideways over Heinrick’s shoulder. My wife came later, and was blessed and sat. When Father Cefron had done his prayers, and given his pious warnings to the men, the food went from the table in a turn of the hand, for the morning was very cold and the men were hungry and the ale warm from the fire, where the men placed it. It flowed down thirsty throats like strong streams into caverns. When all had eaten and turned their stools apart from the board and leant their backs thereon or stretched their legs and arms in full content, I rose from my great chair at the head of all the table of my house, and with no word to her who was my wife, I pointed and I spoke to Heinrick quietly:

“You will meet me in holmgang, in the cleared snow, before the hall’s great door, when the sun is even overhead, and you will fight me till you are dead, or I am dead.”

He rose slowly to his feet, his face grew a dark red and his eyes seemed to go back under his brows in his anger. He said no word but stood there steadily looking at me. I seemed to feel his question how much I knew, and with one glance at Father Cefron’s lifted claw-like hand, and one glance at the white face of Elsa, who was my wife, I answered in a low voice: