"He wins, Ketill! he wins!" cried Helgi.
"Ay," said the black-bearded captain; "there is little skill we can teach Estein."
As they neared the stones, Estein"s onset became more furious than ever; sword and shield had to shift up and down, right and left, to guard his storm of blows, and all the while Liot was being driven back the faster towards one place where larger stones than usual had been used to make the ring. In vain he sprang suddenly to one side; Estein was before him, and his blade nearly found its way home. Two paces more Liot gave way, and then his heel struck a boulder. For an instant he lost his balance, and that moment was his last on earth. As the shield shifted, Estein"s sword came full on his neck, and it was only the bairn-slayer"s body that fell without the ring.
"Bring the spades!" cried Ketill--"a fitting enough epitaph for Liot Skulison."
His conqueror was already in Helgi"s arms.
"I thought I should have had to avenge you, Estein. My heart is light again."
"Odin has answered me, Helgi."
"And the spell is broken?"
"No; that spell, I fear, will break only with my death-wound."
Helgi laughed out of pure light-heartedness.
"There are fair maids in the south lands," he said.
"I go to Norway," replied Estein. "I would fain see the pine woods again."
That evening they saw the Orkneys faint and far away astern, and Estein, as he watched them fade into the dusk, would have given all Norway to hear again the roost run clamorous off the Holy Isle.
CHAPTER VIII.
IN THE CELL BY THE ROOST.
On the rocky sh.o.r.e of the Holy Isle, Osla sat alone. The spell of summer weather had pa.s.sed from the islands, and in its wake the wind blew keenly from the north, and the grey cloud-drift hurried low overhead. All colour had died out of land and sea; the hills looked naked and the waters cold.
And Vandrad, the sea-rover, had gone with the sunshine--had gone, never so Osla said to herself, to return again.
She rose and tried to give her thoughts a lighter turn, but the note of the north wind smote drearily upon her ears, and she left the sea-sh.o.r.e with a sigh. For seven uneventful years she had found in the sea a friend of whom she never tired, and on the little island duties enough to make the days pa.s.s swiftly by. Why should the time now hang heavy on her hands?
She walked slowly to the wind-swept cells. Her father sat within, the blackness of night upon his soul, the Viking fire now burned completely out.
She tried to rouse him, but he answered only in absent monosyllables. Again she sought the solace of the sea, but never, it seemed to her, had it looked so cold and so unfriendly.
"Why did he ever come at all?" she said.
And so the days went by; summer changed to autumn, and autumn gave place to winter. For week after week one gale followed another.
For days on end the spin-drift flew in clouds across the island, salt and unceasing.
The sea was never silent, the gulls flew inland and the cormorants sat storm-bound in their caves; brief glimpses of cold and sunny weather pa.s.sed as abruptly as they came, and in the smoke of a driftwood fire Osla plied her needle and followed the wanderings of her thoughts.
During all these months the hermit spoke little. So engrossed was Osla in herself that she hardly noticed how seldom the cloud seemed to lift from his mind. Never as before did he talk with her at length, or instruct her from the curious sc.r.a.ps of knowledge his once acute mind had picked up from sources Christian and pagan, from the wise men of the North and the monasteries of southern lands. He never once alluded to their guest, never even apparently observed his departure, and in her heart his daughter thanked him for his silence.
The lingering winter pa.s.sed at length, and one morning, in the first freshness of spring, Osla stood without the cell. Presently her father joined her, and she noticed, though her thoughts were busy elsewhere, that he wore a strange expression. He looked at her doubtfully, and then said,--
"Where is Vandrad? I would hear him sing."
Then Osla started, and her heart smote her.
"Vandrad, father?" she said gently. "He has been gone these eight months. Did you not know?"
The hermit seemed hardly to comprehend her words.
"Gone!" he repeated. "Why did you not tell me?"
"Surely you knew," she said.
"Why went he away? I would hear him sing. He used to sing to me of war. He sang last night. Last night," he repeated doubtfully; "methinks it was last night. Bring him to me."
She turned his questions as best she could, and strove to make him think of other things. With her arm through his they paced the turf along the sh.o.r.e, and all the while her heart sank lower and lower. She was in the presence of something so mysterious that even wise men in those days shrank from it in fear. It was the finger of G.o.d alone, they said, that laid a blight on human minds, and there before her was His handiwork.
Yet, had she but known it, this blight had been the slow work of years. Her father"s mind, always dark and superst.i.tious, and tinged with morbid melancholy, had gradually in these long solitary years given way more and more before sombre underminings, till now, with old age at the gates, it had at last succ.u.mbed.
Some few bright moments there were at rare intervals, but in all the months that followed it was but the shattered hull of Thord the Tall, once the terror of the western seas, that lingered on the Holy Isle.
The care of him had at least the effect of turning Osla"s thoughts away from herself. Than sunshine and another"s troubles there are no better tonics.
Yet it was a dreary summer for the hermit"s daughter, and it grew all the drearier and more lonesome when the long, fresh days began to shorten, and the sea was more seldom still and the wind more often high. All the time, the old man grew slowly worse. He sat continually in his cell; and though Osla would not acknowledge her fears even to herself, she knew that death could not be far away.
Yet he lingered through the winter storms, and the end came upon a February evening. All the afternoon the hermit had lain with shut eyes, never speaking a word or giving a sign. It fell wet and gusty at night, and Osla, bending over the couch, could hear nothing but the wind and the roost she knew so well.
At length he raised his head and asked,--
"Are we alone, Osla?"
"There is no one here but me, father."
"Listen then," he said. "I have that on my mind that you must hear before I die. My end is close at hand. I seem to have been long asleep, and now I know that this wakefulness you see is but the clearness of a man before he dies."
He took her hand as he spoke, and she tried to stifle a sob.
"Not so," she said, while the tears rose so fast that she could only dimly see his face; "you are better, far better, to-night."
"I am death-doomed, Osla. Thord the Tall shall die in his bed to- night, an old and worthless wreck. Once I had little thought of such a death; and even now, though I die a Christian man, and my hope is in Christ Jesus, and St. Andaman the holy, I would like well to hear the clash of swords around me. But the doom of a man is fated from his birth."
His daughter was silent, and the old Viking, seeming to gather strength as he talked, went on in a strong, clear voice.
"I have heavy sins at my door. I have burned, I have slain in battle, I have pillaged towns and devastated corn-lands. May the Lord have mercy on my soul!
"He shall have mercy, Osla! I am saved, and the heathen I slew are lost for ever. For the souls of the Christians who fell by this hand I have done penance and given great gifts, and to-night these things shall be remembered. To-night we part, Osla."
She held his great hand in both of hers, and pressed it against her lips, and in a broken voice she said,--