The Bondman: A New Saga. Sir Hall Caine
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year, a house at Reykjavik, and another at the Danish capital.
This person was five-and-forty, tall, wrinkled, powdered, oiled, and devoted to gallantry. Jorgen's daughter, resembling her Welsh mother, was patient in suffering, passionate in love, and fierce in hatred. Her name was Rachel. At the advent of Count Trollop she was twenty, and her mother had then been some years dead.
The Count perceived Jorgen's drift, smiled at it, silently acquiesced in it, took even a languid interest in it, arising partly out of the Governor's position and the wealth the honest man was supposed to have amassed in the rigorous exercise of a place of power, and partly out of the daughter's own comeliness, which was not to be despised. At first the girl, on her part, neither assisted her father's designs nor resisted them, but showed complete indifference to the weighty questions of whom she should marry, when she should marry, and how she should marry; and this mood of mind contented her down to the last week in June that followed the anniversary of her twenty-first birthday.
That was the month of Althing, the national holiday of fourteen days, when the people's law-givers—the Governor, the Bishop, the Speaker, and the Sheriffs—met the people's delegates and some portion of the people themselves at the ancient Mount of Laws in the valley of Thingvellir, for the reading of the old statutes and the promulgation of the new ones, for the trial of felons and the settlement of claims, for the making of love and the making of quarrels, for wrestling and horse-fighting, for the practice of arms and the breaking of heads. Count Trollop was in Iceland at this celebration of the ancient festival, and he was induced by Jorgen to give it the light of his countenance. The Governor's company set out on half-a-hundred of the native ponies, and his daughter rode between himself and the Count. During that ride of six or seven long Danish miles Jorgen settled the terms of the intended transfer to his own complete contentment. The Count acquiesced and the daughter did not rebel.
The lonely valley was reached, the tents were pitched, the Bishop hallowed the assembly with solemn ceremonies, and the business of Althing began. Three days the work went on, and Rachel wearied of it; but on the fourth the wrestling was started, and her father sent for her to sit with him on the Mount and to present at the end of the contest the silver-buckled belt to the champion of all Iceland. She obeyed the summons with indifference, and took a seat beside the Judge, with the Count standing at her side. In the space below there was a crowd of men and boys, women and children, gathered about the ring. One wrestler was throwing everyone that came before him. His name was Patricksen, and he was supposed to be descended from the Irish, who settled, ages ago, on the Westmann Islands. His success became monotonous; at every fresh bout his self-confidence grew more insufferable, and the girl's eyes wandered from the spectacle to the spectators. From that instant her indifference fell away.
By the outskirts of the crowd, on one of the lower mounds of the Mount of Laws, a man sat with his head in his hand, with elbow on his knee. His head was bare, and from his hairy breast his woolen shirt was thrown back by reason of the heat. He was a magnificent creature—young, stalwart, fair-haired, broad-chested, with limbs like the beech tree, and muscles like its great gnarled round heads. His coat, a sort of sailor's jacket, was coarse and torn; his stockings, reaching to his knees, were cut and brown. He did not seem to heed the wrestling, and there rested upon him the idle air of the lusty Icelander—the languor of the big, tired animal. Only, when at the close of a bout a cheer rose and a way was made through the crowd for the exit of the vanquished man, did he lift up his great slow eyes—gray as those of a seal, and as calm and lustreless.
The wrestling came to an end. Patricksen justified his Irish blood, was proclaimed the winner, and stepped up to the foot of the Mount that the daughter of the Governor might buckle about him his champion's belt. The girl went through her function listlessly, her eyes wandering to where the fair-haired giant sat apart. Then the Westmann islander called for drink that he might treat the losing men, and having drunk himself, he began to swagger afresh, saying that they might find him the strongest and lustiest man that day at Thingvellir, and he would bargain to throw him over his back. As he spoke he strutted by the bottom of the Mount, and the man who sat there lifted his head and looked at him. Something in the glance arrested Patricksen and he stopped.
"This seems to be a lump of a lad," he said. "Let us see what we can do with him."
And at that he threw his long arms about the stalwart fellow, squared his broad hips before him, thrust down his head into his breast until his red neck was as thick as a bullock's, and threw all the strength of his body into his arms that he might lift the man out of his seat. But he moved him not an inch. With feet that held the earth like the hoofs of an ox, the young man sat unmoved.
Then those who had followed at the islander's heels for the liquor he was spending first stared in wonderment at his failure, and next laughed in derision of his bragging, and shouted to know why, before it was too late, the young man had not taken a bout at the wrestling, for that he who could hold his seat so must be the strongest-limbed man between the fells and the sea. Hearing this Patricksen tossed his head in anger, and said it was not yet too late, that if he took home the champion's belt it should be no rude bargain to master or man from sea to sea, and buckled though it was, it should be his who could take it from its place.
At that word the young fellow rose, and then it was seen that his right arm was useless, being broken between the elbow and the wrist, and bound with a kerchief above the wound. Nothing loth for this infirmity, he threw his other arm about the waist of the islander, and the two men closed for a fall. Patricksen had the first grip, and he swung to it, thinking straightway to lay his adversary by the heels; but the young man held his feet, and then, pushing one leg between the legs of the islander, planting the other knee into the islander's stomach, thrusting his head beneath the islander's chin, he knuckled his left hand under the islander's rib, pulled towards him, pushed from him, threw the weight of his body forward, and like a green withe Patricksen doubled backwards with a groan. Then at a rush of the islander's kinsmen, and a cry that his back would be broken, young man loosed his grip, and Patricksen rolled from him to the earth, as a clod rolls from the ploughshare.
All this time Jorgen's daughter had craned her neck to see over the heads of the people, and when the tussle was at an end, her face, which had been strained to the point of anguish, relaxed to smiles, and she turned to her father and asked if the champion's belt should not be his who had overcome the champion. But Jorgen answered no—that the contest was done, and judgment made, and he who would take the champion's belt must come to the next Althing and earn it. Then the girl unlocked her necklace of coral and silver spangles, beckoned the young man to her, bound the necklace about his broken arm close up by the shoulder, and asked him his name.
"Stephen," he answered.
"Whose son?" said she.
"Orrysen—but they call me Stephen Orry."
"Of what craft?"
"Seaman, of Stappen, under Snaefell."
The Westmann islander had rolled to his legs by this time, and now he came shambling up, with the belt in his hand and his sullen eyes on the ground.
"Keep it," he said, and flung the belt at the girl's feet, between her and his adversary. Then he strode away through the people, with curses on his white lips and the veins of his squat forehead large and dark.
It was midnight before the crowds had broken up and straggled away to their tents, but the sun of this northern land was still half over the horizon, and its dull red glow was on the waters of the lake that lay to the west of the valley. In the dim light of an hour later, when the hills of Thingvellir slept under the cloud shadow that was their only night, Stephen Orry stood with the Governor's daughter by the door of the Thingvellir parsonage, for Jorgen's company were the parson's guests. He held out the champion's belt to her and said, "Take it back, for if I keep it the man and his kinsmen will follow me all the days of my life."
She answered him that it was his, for he had won it, and until it was taken from him he must hold it, and if he stood in peril from the kinsmen of any man let him remember that it was she, daughter of the Governor himself, who had given it. The air was hushed in that still hour, not a twig or a blade rustling over the serried face of that desolate land as far as the wooded