The Path of the King | Page 4

spark once transmitted may smoulder for
generations under ashes, but the appointed time will come, and it will
flare up to warm the world. God never allows waste. And we fools rub
our eyes and wonder, when we see genius come out of the gutter. It
didn't begin there. We tell ourselves that Shakespeare was the son of a
woolpedlar, and Napoleon of a farmer, and Luther of a peasant, and we
hold up our hands at the marvel. But who knows what kings and
prophets they had in their ancestry!"
After that we turned in, and as I lay looking at the frosty stars a fancy
wove itself in my brain. I saw the younger sons carry the royal blood
far down among the people, down even into the kennels of the outcast.
Generations follow, oblivious of the high beginnings, but there is that
in the stock which is fated to endure. The sons and daughters blunder
and sin and perish, but the race goes on, for there is a fierce stuff of life
in it. It sinks and rises again and blossoms at haphazard into virtue or
vice, since the ordinary moral laws do not concern its mission. Some
rags of greatness always cling to it, the dumb faith that sometime and
somehow that blood drawn from kings it never knew will be royal

again. Though nature is wasteful of material things, there is no waste of
spirit And then after long years there comes, unheralded and
unlooked-for, the day of the Appointed Time....
This is the story which grew out of that talk by the winter fire.

CHAPTER I.
HIGHTOWN UNDER SUNFELL
When Biorn was a very little boy in his father's stead at Hightown he
had a play of his own making for the long winter nights. At the back
end of the hall, where the men sat at ale, was a chamber which the
thralls used of a morning--a place which smelt of hams and meal and
good provender. There a bed had been made for him when he forsook
his cot in the women's quarters. When the door was shut it was black
dark, save for a thin crack of light from the wood fire and torches of the
hall. The crack made on the earthen floor a line like a golden river.
Biorn, cuddled up on a bench in his little bear-skin, was drawn like a
moth to that stream of light. With his heart beating fast he would creep
to it and stand for a moment with his small body bathed in the radiance.
The game was not to come back at once, but to foray into the farther
darkness before returning to the sanctuary of bed. That took all the
fortitude in Biorn's heart, and not till the thing was dared and done
could he go happily to sleep.
One night Leif the Outborn watched him at his game. Sometimes the
man was permitted to sleep there when he had been making sport for
the housecarles.
"Behold an image of life!" he had said in his queer outland speech. "We
pass from darkness to darkness with but an instant of light between.
You are born for high deeds, princeling. Many would venture from the
dark to the light, but it takes a stout breast to voyage into the farther
dark."
And Biorn's small heart swelled, for he detected praise, though he did
not know what Leif meant.
In the long winter the sun never topped Sunfell, and when the gales
blew and the snow drifted there were lights in the hall the day long. In
Biorn's first recollection the winters were spent by his mother's side,
while she and her maids spun the wool of the last clipping. She was a

fair woman out of the Western Isles, all brown and golden as it seemed
to him, and her voice was softer than the hard ringing speech of the
Wick folk. She told him island stories about gentle fairies and
good-humoured elves who lived in a green windy country by summer
seas, and her air would be wistful as if she thought of her lost home.
And she sang him to sleep with crooning songs which had the
sweetness of the west wind in them. But her maids were a rougher
stock, and they stuck to the Wicking lullaby which ran something like
this:
Hush thee, my bold one, a boat will I buy thee, A boat and stout oars
and a bright sword beside, A helm of red gold and a thrall to be nigh
thee, When fair blows the wind at the next wicking-tide.
There was a second verse, but it was rude stuff, and the Queen had
forbidden the maids to sing it.
As he grew older he was