"And can't he?" said Helga.
"I ask you," said Oscar--"can't a man love more than one woman?"
"Why not? Aren't we all told to love one another?" laughed Helga, and then Oscar lifted her in his arms and swung her back to her saddle and they started on their journey afresh.
Their road lay through a bleak and barren country, past red hills of volcanic sand and jagged mouths of extinct volcanoes, over a deep dale of lava rocks, rutted with paths and scored with fissures, but brightened by a farmstead here and there with its little green-roofed elt house smoking for breakfast and its hummocked home-field gleaming like a gem in a wilderness of waste. At the last of these farms they stopped to rest their ponies and to refresh themselves, being now half-way to Thingvellir, with the caravan far behind them.
An untidy man in his shirt-sleeves took possession of their ponies and a slatternly housewife in a soiled apron brought them milk and skyr. She was still young, but already she had three children. One of them was whimpering at her breast, another was dragging at her skirts and the third was bellowing for her from the floor above. She belonged to the capital and had once been considered a beauty, but she was seven years married and it was six since she had seen the town.
"There!" said Oscar, when they returned to the road. "That's the patriarchal life, if you please."
"Then I'm done with it," said Helga. "Ugh! To think of being buried in a place like that, year in year out, with three children and only one man! It might do for Thora, but give me life, life, life!"
"And the man who gives you that may have you body and soul, perhaps?" said Oscar.
"Body and soul," laughed Helga.
For the next hour their course lay across an almost trackless heath, bare as a desert and flat as an inland sea. The mountains that bounded it were stark and cold and far away--on the one side steep with running screes and on the other side clouded with steaming vapor, which rose out of the glistening snow. Not a house was to be seen on any side, not a tree or a bush or a flower or a plant, and hardly a blade of grass, but only a broad stretch of silver moss, leaden and dull, like the mold on a dead man's face. No birds sang in that solitude, but sometimes the wimbrel sent its long love cry across the waste; sometimes the wild swan sped far overhead and uttered its eerie ululation, and sometimes the raven perched on a stone and croaked out its melancholy note. A line of beacons, broken and old, each with a projecting stone like an amputated arm, showed the course of the road, going on and on like soldiers in single file tramping back after a lost battle. Midway on the Heath there was a House of Rest for travelers overtaken by the storms of winter--a little hut, half cubicle and half stable, with nothing but a plank bed and a truss of hay.