The Ward of King Canute Part 13

It did not appear that the lad was seriously cast down; a betraying dimple came out and played in his cheek, though his mouth struggled for gravity. "That is unjustly spoken, lord," he protested. "Did I not bear my punishment with befitting penitence?"

"Penitence!" the Etheling gave one of the small ears a menacing pull as he descended to the gra.s.s. "What! Do you think I did not see your antics with the dog? You made a jest of the matter, you pixie!"

The page sobered. "I think it great luck that I could, Lord Sebert! Your servants were eager in making a jest of me when they got the courage from your displeasure."

But Lord Sebert reached out the wand and gave him a gentle stroke across the shoulders.

"Take that for your foolishness," he said lightly. "What matters their babble when you know how safe you sit in my favor?"

Through lowered lashes the boy stole him a glance, half mischievous, half coaxing. "How safe, lord?" he murmured.

But the Etheling only laughed at him, as he drew up his long riding-boots and readjusted his belt. "Safe enough so that I forgive you some dozen floggings a day, you imp; and choose you for my comrade when I should be profiting by the companions.h.i.+p of your betters. Waste no more golden moments on whims, youngling, but go bid them fetch the horses, and we will have another day of blithe wandering."

Blithe they were, in truth, as they cantered through shaded lanes and daisied meadows, nothing too small to be of interest or too slight to give them pleasure. An orchard of pears, whose ripening they were watching with eager mouths, a group of colts almost ready for the saddle,--for the young master the fascination of owners.h.i.+p gave them all a value; while another fascination made his companion hang on his least word, respond to his lightest mood.

By gra.s.sy commons and rolling meadows sweet with cl.u.s.tering hayc.o.c.ks, they came at last to the crest of the hill that guarded the eastern end of the dale. The whole round sweep of the horizon lay about them in an unbroken chain of ripening vineyards and rich timber-land, of grain-fields and laden orchards; not one spot that did not make glorious pledges to the harvest time. Drinking its fairness with his eyes, the lord of the manor sighed in full content. "When I see how fine a thing it is to cause wealth to be where before was nothing, I cannot understand how I once thought to find my pleasure only in destroying,"

he said. "Next month, when the barley beer is brewed, we will have a harvest feast plentiful enough to flesh even your bones, you bodkin!"

The Danish page laughed as he dodged the plaguing wand. "It is true that you owe something to my race, lord. He had great good sense, the Wide-Fathomer, to stretch his strips of oxhide around this dale and turn it into an odal."

"Nay now, it was Alfred who had sense to take it away from him," the Etheling teased.

But the boy shook back his long tresses in airy defiance. "Then will Canute be foremost in wisdom, for soon he will get it back, together with all England. Remember who got the victory last week at Brentford, lord."

In the midst of his exulting, a cloud came over the young Englishman's smile. "I would I knew the truth concerning that," he said slowly.

"The man who pa.s.ses to-day says one thing; whoso comes to-morrow tells another story. Yet since Canute is once more free to beset London--" He did not finish, and for a while it appeared as though he did not see the sunlit fields his eyes were resting on.

But suddenly the boy broke in upon him with a burst of stifled laughter.

"Look, lord! In yonder field, behind the third hayc.o.c.k!"

The moment that he had complied, laughter banished the Etheling's meditations. Cozily ensconced in the soft side of a hayc.o.c.k was Father Ingulph, a couple of jovial harvesters sprawled beside him, a fat skin of ale in his hands on its way to his mouth. As the pair on the hilltop looked down, one of the trio began to bellow out a song that bore no resemblance whatever to a hymn. Keeping under cover of the bushes, the eavesdroppers laughed with malicious enjoyment.

"But I will make him squirm for that!" the Etheling vowed. "I will tell him that your paganism has made spells over me so that I cannot tell a holy relique from an ale-skin; and a bedridden woman looks to me like two strapping yeomen. I will, I swear it!"

"And I shall be able to hold it against him as a s.h.i.+eld, the next time he is desirous to fret me about taking a new belief," the boy rejoiced.

But presently Sebert's remarks began to take a new tone. "They have the appearance of relis.h.i.+ng what they have in that skin," he observed first. And then, "I should not mind putting my own teeth into that bread-and-cheese." And at last, "By Saint Swithin, lad, I think they have more sense than we, that linger a half-hour's ride from food with a noonday sun standing in the sky! It is borne in upon me that I am starving."

Backing his horse out of the brush, he was putting him about in great haste, when the boy leaped in his stirrups and clapped his hands.

"Lord, we need not be a half-hour from food! Yonder, across the stubble, is a farmhouse. If you would consent that I might use your name, then would I ride thither and get their best, and serve it to you here in the elves' own feast-hall."

The answer was a slap on the green shoulders that nearly tumbled their owner from the saddle. "Now, I was right to call you elf, for you have more than human cleverness!" the Etheling cried gayly. "Do so, by all means, dear lad; and I promise in return that I will tell every puffed-up dolt at home that you are the blithest comrade who ever fitted himself to man's moods. There, if that contents you, give wings to your heels!"

Chapter XIII. When Might Made Right

Now may we understand That men's wisdom And their devices And their councils Are like naught 'Gainst G.o.d's resolve.

Saxon Chronicle.

What difference that, somewhere beyond the hills, men were fighting and castles were burning? At Ivarsdale in the shelter and cheer of the lord's great hall, the feast of the barley beer was at its height. While one set of serfs bore away the remnants of roast and loaf and sweetmeat, another carried around the br.i.m.m.i.n.g horns; and to the sound of cheers and hand-clapping, the gleeman moved forward toward the harp that awaited him by the fireside.

Where the glow lay rosiest, the young lord sat in the great raised chair, jesting with his Danish page who knelt on the step at his side.

Now the boy's answering provoked him to laughter, and he put out a hand and tousled the thick curls in his favorite caress. One of the tresses caught in his jewelled ring; and as he bent to unfasten it, he stared at the wavy ma.s.s in lazy surprise. It was as soft and rich as the breast of a blackbird, and the fire had laid over it a sheen of rainbow lights.

"Never did I think there could be any black hair so alluring," he said involuntarily.

He could not see how the face under the clark veil grew suddenly as bright as though the sun had risen in it. And the lad said, rather breathlessly, "I wonder at your words, lord. You know that such hair is the curse of black elves."

Leaning back in his chair, the Etheling shook his head in whimsical obstinacy. "Not so, not so," he persisted. "It has to it more l.u.s.tre than has yellow. My lady-love shall have just such locks."

He had a glimpse like the flash of a bluebird's wing in the sun, as the page glanced up at him, and the sight of a face grown suddenly rose-red.

Then the boy turned shyly, and slipping back to his cus.h.i.+on on the step, nestled himself against the chair-arm with a sigh that was almost pathetic in its happiness.

Like a quieting hand, the first of the mellow chords fell upon the noise of the revel. The servants bearing away the dishes began to tread the rushes on tiptoe, and a dozen frowns rebuked any clatter. Through the hush, the gleeman began to sing the "Romance of King Offa," the king who married a wood nymph for dear love's sake. It began with the wooing and the winning, out in the leafy greenwood amid bird-voices and murmuring brooks; but before long the enmity of the queen-mother entered, with jarring discords, to send the lovers through bitter trials. Lord and page, man and maid and serf, strained eye and ear toward the harper's tattered figure. So breathless grew the listening stillness that the crackling of the fire became an annoyance. What matter that outside an autumn wind was howling through the forest and stripping the leaves through the vines? Within sound of the mellow harp-music it was balmiest spring-time, as the castlefolk followed the gleeman over the hills and dales of a flowering dream-world.

For a s.p.a.ce after he had finished, the silence remained unbroken, then gave way only to an outburst of applause. And one did even better than applaud. Bending forward, his beautiful face quite radiant with his pleasure, the curly-headed page pulled a golden ring from his pouch and tossed it into the harper's lap.

As he caught the largess, the man's mouth broadened. "I thank you for your good-will, fair stripling," he returned. "May you find as true a love when your time comes to go a-wooing."

The maids t.i.ttered, while the men guffawed, and a richer glow came into the cheeks of Fridtjof the page. Suddenly his iris-blue eyes were daringly a-sparkle.

"The spirits will have forgot your wish before that time comes," he laughed, "for I vow that I will raise a beard or ever I woo a maiden."

Above the mirth that followed rose the voice of the brawniest of the henchmen, pa.s.sing his judgment on the ballad. "Now that is my own desire of songs," he declared. "That was worth possessing,--the love of that la.s.s. A sweetheart who will cleave to your side when your fortune is most severe, and despise every good because she has not you also, she is the filly to yoke with. Drink to the wood maiden, comrades, bare feet and wild ways and all!" Swinging up his horn, he drained off the toast at a draught. "Give us a mistress like that, my lord," he cried merrily, "and we will hold Ivarsdale for her though all of Edmund's men batter at the doors."

Laughing, they all looked up where the young master leaned in his chair, watching the revels with a smile of idle good-humor. All except the blue-eyed page; he bent forward instead, so that his long locks fell softly about his face.

The Lord of Ivarsdale shook his head indolently against the cus.h.i.+on. "No wood la.s.s for me, friend Celric," he said. "The lady of my love shall be a high-born maid who knows no more of the world's roughness than I of woman's ways. Nor shall she follow me at all, but stay modestly at home with her maids and keep herself gentle and fair against my return.

Deliver me from your sun-browned, boy-bred wenches!"

"I am consenting to that, lord!" a voice cried from the benches; and a hubbub of conflicting opinions arose. Only the page neither spoke or moved.

The henchman would not be downed; again his voice rose above the others.

"In soft days, my lord, in soft days, it might easily be so. But bear in mind such times as these, when grief happens to a man oftener than joy.

Methinks your lily-fair lady would swoon at the sight of your blood; and tears would be the best answer you would get, should you seek to draw comfort out of her."

White as a star at dawn, the page's face was raised while his wide eyes hung on his master's; and from the little reed wound between his brown fingers, the juice began to ooze slowly as though some silent force were crus.h.i.+ng the life out of its green heart.

But the young n.o.ble laughed with gay scorn: "Tears would be in all respects a better answer than I should deserve, should I whimper faint-hearted words into a maiden's ear. What folly-fit do you speak in, fellow? What! Do you think I would wed another comrade like yourself, or a playfellow like this youngster?" Ever so gently his foot touched the boyish form on the step. "It is something quite different from either of you that is my desire; something that is as much higher as the stars are above these candles."

Disputing and agreeing, the clamor rose anew, and the Etheling turned to his favorite with a jest. But the page was no longer in his place. He had risen to his feet and was standing with his head flung back like one in pain, both hands up tearing the tunic away from his throat. Sebert bent toward him with a question on his lips.

He forgot the query before he could speak it, however, for at that moment there was a sound of hurried steps on the stone stairs, and one of the armed watchmen from the top of the Tower burst into the room.

"Lord," he gasped, "some one is upon us! We thought first it was naught but the noise of the wind--then Elward saw a light. We swear they came not over the bridge, yet--"