That night my lord sat on a piece of rock overlooking the sea, I was behind him. All in front of us was dark, but we could hear the sound of the water come from away and all along the coast.
Then, out of the silence that lies under the world, came over the edge of the sea, the bare, silver, edge of the moon, lighting slowly the tips of the waves. No mist around her; the unroofed, upward depths of the sky, full of suspended stars, that seemed to wink, being alive. She rose out of the sea, reaching toward us the elves-bridge she carries, over which we cannot see the spirits pass; sending out her still beckoning that she sends to all men. The little waves danced joyously in the light; there was no sound at all from the shore, only the water whispering on the sands.
My lord sat black, in the moonlight. After a while he got up and returned toward the shadowy hall.
He went in and took a great tankard of beer from my hand and drank, then turned toward me.
“The beer is warm—too warm,” he said. “What a beautiful night. The beer is too warm.” He waved his hand with one of his old indifferent gestures, his mouth trembling. I filled him another tankard of beer; he drank it at a drink and then asked for another, this he also drank and threw himself down on a bench. “Drink!” he said, “drink!” laughing loud.
I drink with him again and again. He leans back on his bench laughing. “Ah, old war-follower!” he cries, his voice ringing strange in the empty moonlit hall. “Dost thou remember our first cruise? We took the battleship! and that other; where we were caught in the ice. Dost thou remember Lord Raud? Ah! that was a grand time. And when we chased the bears in Lord Snorē’s forest. Through all our cruises; that old ship off Norway that we chased and frightened so? See the moonlight!” he said, suddenly, and stopped laughing. Then, with a wave of his long arm, he leaned back and called out again. “Jolly war-dog! Ah!—another tankard; Skaal! Skaal! to our old times! Skaal! Ah! Old war-dog! It is not good for men to put their hearts on women. They find them empty; there is no water in an unfilled pitcher—better the old sea-shells, like us, that are always filled. Do you know,” and he started up and shook his beer-tankard in the moonlight, a tall figure, “that, since I was a young man, I have loved that woman! She was a little —— Be silent! A ghost comes!” He grasped my arm.