Vandrad the Viking | Page 9

I can stand--" and as he spoke he rose to
his feet, and slipping on the seaweed, slid quietly into the water.
The girl screamed; and then, as he scrambled out none the worse and
only a little the wetter, an irresistible inclination to laugh overcame her.
Forgetful of his head, he laughed with her.
"Forgive me," she said; "I could not help laughing, though, to be sure,
you seem in no laughing plight. I thought at first that you were
drowned."
"'Tis your doing, I think, that I am not. Did you find me in the water?"
"Half in and half out; and it took much pulling to get you wholly out."
Estein impulsively drew a massive gold ring off his finger, and in the
gift-giving spirit of the times handed it to his preserver.

"I know not your name, fair maiden," he said, "but this I know, that you
have saved my life. Will you accept this Viking's gift from me? It is all
that the sea has left me."
"Nay, keep such gifts for those who deserve them. It would have been
an unchristian act to let you drown."
"You use a word that is strange to me; but I would that you might take
this ring."
"No, no!" she cried decidedly; "it will be time enough to talk of gifts
when I have earned them. Not," she added, a little proudly, "that it is
my wish to earn gifts. But you are wet and wounded; come where I can
give you shelter, poor though it be."
"Any shelter will seem good to me. Yet, ere I go, I would fain learn
something of my comrades' fate."
He scanned the sound narrowly, and in all its long stretch there was not
a sign of friend or foe. About a mile back the fatal reef, bared by the
ebbing tide, showed its line of black heads high out of the water, but of
ships there was no vestige to be seen. It was long past mid-day by the
sun, and he knew that he must have been unconscious for some hours.
In that time, such of the Vikings as had escaped the rocks had evidently
sailed away, leaving only the dead in the sound.
"They are gone," he said, turning away, "friends and foes--gone, or
drowned, as I should have been, fair maid, but for you."
They scrambled together up the rocks, and then struck a winding
sheep-path that led them over the shoulder of a heath-clad hill.
At first they walked in silence, the girl in front, going at a great speed
up the narrow track; and Estein watched the wind blow her fair hair
about her neck in a waving tangle, and he saw that she was tall and
slender. By-and-by, when they had crossed the hill and reached a less
broken tract of ground, he came up to her side.

"How did you come to be down where you found me?" he asked.
"I was on the hill," she answered, "when I saw ships in the sound
rowing hard to escape the current, and then I saw that some had been
wrecked. Wreckage was floating by, and I espied, for my eyes are good,
a man clinging to a plank; and presently he drifted upon a rock, and I
thought that perhaps I might save a life. So I went down to the
shore--and you yourself know the rest."
"I know, indeed, that I have to thank you for my life, such as it is. And
I know further that every girl would not have been so kind."
She smiled, and her smile was one of those that illuminate a face.
"Thank rather the tide, which so kindly brought you ashore, for I had
done little if you had been in the middle of the sound. But you have not
yet told me how you came to be wrecked."
Estein told her of the storm at sea and the fight with the Vikings; how
they had fallen man by man, and how he too would have been
numbered amongst the dead but for the tideway and the rocks.
As she listened, her eyes betrayed her interest in the tale, and when he
had finished, she said,--
"I have heard of Liot and Osmund. They are the most pitiless of all the
robbers in these seas. Give thanks that you escaped them."
He asked her name, and she told him it was Osla, daughter of a Norse
leader who had fought in the Irish seas, and had finally settled in
Ireland. There his daughter was born and passed her early girlhood; and
it was a trace of the Irish accent that Estein had noticed in her speech.
In one fatal battle her two brothers fell, her father was