He dashed his fist against the tree beside him and did not seem to feel it when his hand was bleeding. “Here I take oath that they shall cause their gift to prove its value! It shall be meat and drink to me, and honor and life itself. Many happenings shall spring from this gift, for I will put my whole strength into the holding of it; Odin himself shall not wrest it from me! I will be such a king that there will not be many to equal me; such a king that they will wish they had given me happiness and left me a man.”
Whirling, he flung out his bleeding hand toward Elfgiva, and his mouth was distorted with its bitterness. “Hear that, you who were so mad to have your lord the King of England that you could not spend a thought on the love of Canute of Denmark! You have got your wish,—go back now to your Northamptonshire castle and think whether or not you are gladdened by it.”
“Go back!” Elfgiva fell from her height of injured dignity with a piercing scream. “What is it you say, King? Now by the splendor of heaven, you depart not for London without me! Be it known to you that I am going to be your Queen.”
At first he looked at her in genuine astonishment; after that he laughed, neither angrily nor bitterly, but with the quietness of utter contempt. “I will have the London goldsmiths send you a crown if you wish,” he said. “That is all you understand about being a queen.”
She tried to protest, to cajole, to threaten. She tried to do so many things at once that she accomplished none of them. Her speech became less and less intelligible until tears and hysterical laughter reduced it to mere mouthings, while her tiny hands beat the air with fingers bent hook-like.
But the young King did not look at her again. He had rejoined his nobles and was leading them toward the door, giving rapid orders as he walked. “Do you, Rothgar, see to it that the horses are saddled. Kinsman Ulf, it is my will that you join us some while later, when you have seen these women returned in safety. You, my chiefs, get you ready to ride to Oxford as quick as is possible.” His voice was lost in the trampling as they stepped from the turf upon the flagging of the gallery.
When the echoing tread was gone at last from the cloister, the garden seemed strangely silent in spite of the hurrying servants,—silent and empty. In the stillness, it came slowly to Randalin that life was not so simple as she had supposed; that she was not going to die of her grief but to live with it,—live with this dead emptiness in her breast. The years seemed to stretch before her like the snow wastes of the North,—white, white, white, without a break of living green.