Vengeance by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur

Author:Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur [Brodeur, Arthur Gilchrist]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter VI

The Second Stroke

The bower by the forest stood empty.

Siggeir had decreed that none should go nigh the haunted spot. Signy bided at home, perforce, her face masked in sadness, her heart on fire with hope.

She knew she was watched; her husband, convinced though he was that the ghosts of his foes, and not their living arms, had stolen his son, yet doubted his wife. She was Volsung’s daughter; might not her dead kin work their will through her?

He kept her ever by him, and at night she could not stir from his side. He was determined none should speak with her, man or ghost, without his knowledge. Yet Signy was not discouraged; there would be some way to get word to her brother. Sigmund was shrewd, and she herself no fool. She spoke not save when the king addressed her, but her eyes roved to Valrun’s, whenever the maid came to her. And Valrun understood.

None thought to restrain Valrun; she was a Goth born, sister to one of Siggeir’s bravest officers. Thus it chanced that Valrun—her pulses hammering with fear of the unknown—slipped out one night to the forest, ten days after the child had been taken. For most of that interval Siggeir’s house-carls had quartered the forest, searching for any sign of Sigmund, living or dead; for the king, who had never taken chances in his life, meant to take none now. Men they found—outlaws, wretched things in rags and shreds of mail; half-starved folk who knew nothing, and could but whine at their own hardships.

These, wherever caught, told always the same tale: They were poor folk, who had fled to the wood to escape justice, but had done no great wrong. Nay, they had seen no man in the forest save other poor folk like themselves; but there was One that hunted them, and It they feared above all things, for It leaped upon them like the thunderbolt, slaying, and sparing none.

“Sigmund!” the king’s men whispered to one another; but the outlaws shook frightened heads.

“It is no man, but a fiend—one of the offspring of Loki the Evil God!” they stammered. “We know! If it were a man, we could have slain him; but, though ten of us go against It at once, It slays, and takes no hurt. No man could do this!”

“No man indeed!” the soldiers muttered; and they reported to Siggeir that a devil haunted the wood.

To Siggeir that devil assumed the face and shape of Sigmund; but he was certain now that it was Sigmund’s ghost. The searching ceased. It does no good to hunt the dead; nor would his house-carls any longer enter the forest. Thus Sigmund owed his safety to those three rascals who, long since dead, had plotted to betray him to Siggeir, and who had succeeded only in making him a terror to all their kind.

The search thus ended, Valrun found none between her and the royal garth to bar her way. Well she knew what her mistress wanted.

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