Chapter V: Cormac in Love

Cormac was very silent at home, and remained silent for several days; but he was intensely happy, feeling himself in bondage to Stangerd. He made up more situations for her than you would believe, and was not himself in one of them. In his fancy he saw Stangerd beloved by everything in the world, and beloved by everything in turn. He was happy enough in this possession of her without any other, and did not make any attempt to visit her.

After a while, he told his mother of his affair. Dalla looked rather grave.

“I hear she is a fine girl, much sought after.”

“She is a beautiful girl,” said Cormac, “and most reasonably sought.”

“I am thinking that she will be too fine for your winning, my son. Thorkel will want a price for her. And he is no great friend of ours.”

Cormac said, “There is no hurry. I shan’t speak to him yet awhile. But I shall go to see Stangerd to-morrow.”

“And what shall you say to her?”

“That is as may be. If I feel called upon to say anything, I shall say it. All that I need now is to see her.”

* * * * *

He went, as he had foretold. He reached Nupsdale about noon and, as he leaned over the wall of the intake, saw Stangerd through the open doorway of the kitchen, and two men with her, watching her while she worked. He watched her for a long time, speculating which of the two fellows loved her more, and whether either of them loved her as he did. He became very excited over his nearness to her, but had no immediate need to be nearer. The homestead seemed to him a holy place; everything about it was enhanced by her presence in it, moving familiarly about it; the two young men, her companions, grew tall and splendid to him. He felt more interested in them than he had ever been in any man. Then he sang, as the song moved in him:

“I love a lovely woman--well,
And if some other love her, good!
All goes to prove my hardihood,
All goes her magicry to tell.
For say she is a miracle,
Say that her beauty is my food,
Am I so surly in my mood
That what feeds me rings t’other’s knell?
Nay, should a hundred be about her,
And she of her great bounty feed them,
Is that to say my heart must heed them?
Not so. ’Tis they can’t do without her.
Women are so made, they grow stouter
Of heart the more their lovers bleed them.”

He felt perfectly at ease. He wished the young men very well, hoped she was kind to them, “as kind as she was to me when I was with her all day.” The thought of that day came back upon him like a flood of sudden warm weather. His heart beat. “Oh, I am a fortunate man--that such a beautiful woman should be kind to me, and let me be about with her all day!”

Presently Stangerd, having finished what she was about, came to the door and stood there; she leaned against the door-post. She saw Cormac out in the meadow, but made no sign. He stood still looking at her, and then leapt the wall and came directly to her. Two dogs rushed out of the house, barking furiously; but he took no notice of them, and kept his eyes upon Stangerd.

She coloured up, but he did not. He came and stood before her.

“When did you come?” she asked him.

“A long time ago. I don’t know when it was.”

“Why did you not come to the house?”

“Because I was looking at you.”

“Will you come in now?”

“I will come in if you are going in. If not I will stay here.”

“My foster-father will be in soon. He will ask me why you are here.”

“You may tell him, if you please.”

“What am I to tell him?”

“That I am come to see you.”

“No--I shan’t tell him that.”

He laughed, but said no more for a time; nor had she anything to say.

Then, suddenly, he said, “The sun is loving you.”

“He is burning me,” she said, and put her hand up to shade her face.

* * * * *

The goodman came home to dinner, and was not very pleased. Whatever he may have asked Stangerd, he took little notice of Cormac, but ate his dinner grimly and soon afterwards went out. Cormac stayed with Stangerd all the afternoon. It grew dark, and the moon came up over the fiord.

“Now it is her turn,” Cormac said. “She will light me down the fell; but her eyes will be upon you all the time.”

Then he said, “Will you come to the end of the court with me?”

“Why should I come?”

“The night is blue,” said Cormac. “I wish to see you in the night’s arms.”

Stangerd said nothing to this; but she went with him into the air, and as far as the end of the court.

He told her, “I shall come again to-morrow.”

“You were wiser not,” she said.

“It is necessary for me to see you.”

“It was not necessary yesterday.”

“It will be necessary to-morrow.”

Again she had no answer, being neither able to agree with him nor to deny. He left her without a touch or a look, and was gone like a nightbird into the dusk that fleets far upon one stroke of his silent wings.

Stangerd remained where she was for a while. Many men had loved her, but not in this fashion, to say at once so much and so little about it, to be so plain and so dark. After this he came to see her most days, and treated her in just the same way.

Stangerd was a beautiful girl, richly coloured and finely formed. She had been admired since she was ten years old, and had often been told so. But she had never been admired as Cormac admired her, and had heard nothing like his admiration. Most men expressed themselves indirectly, by look or inference, by silence, by quarrelling with other men. If they told her in so many words that she was a beauty, they did it shamefacedly, and tried to make a joke of it. But Cormac from the first told her so plainly, and seemed to devote himself to making clear to her exactly how and exactly how much she was beautiful. He was, without doubt, making it clear to himself, but she couldn’t have known that. And everything that he told her was told in a plain, still voice, as if he were speaking about the weather or the crops, as indeed he thought he was.

Naturally, she was very much interested. Who in the world does not like to hear about herself?

He told her some very strange things, too, which she did not at all understand, but which none the less she accepted or passed over because they came from him. She would have been highly offended if any other man had so spoken.

He said that everything in the world was her lover. He said that in rhyme, and said it to her when she was sitting on the brae in full sunlight, with him kneeling on one knee behind her. She felt his eyes bent upon her, boring like two augers through the top of her head.

“Great joy of Stangerd have I had,
Joy to the full of one man’s tether;
Greatly have loved her, hugely dared,
Riding the dales or upland heather,
Singing her bounty; being glad
Because her blissfulness I shared
With every other mother’s son
In this good world: for this is true,
Stangerd, the whole world joys in you.

Let her have husbands, one, two, three--
A dozen are no more than one:
All Nature is her lord in fee,
And bird and hill-flower, stock and stone,
And spearing grass and springing tree,
The clouds, the river and the sun
Hold Stangerd in coparcenary.

For, as I look upon the thing,
Their beauty is a cup for hers,
And nothing worth considering
But what they tell as messengers
Of how she figures in their glass.
So the lark lift as she did pass
And said, ‘The world is bright with glee
Since Stangerd lookt and smiled at me;
Therefore I sing’--or grass, ‘Her feet
Press me in love!’--or flower, ‘How sweet
The breath of Stangerd when she goes
With parted lips!’--or tree, ‘Who knows--
Passing, she laid a lingering hand
On me, and doubtful seemed to stand
Whether or no to take me to her;
Who knows but she will let me woo her
And be her lover in the dark
When the sap throbs beneath the bark?’”

She sat very still while he was singing this, nursing her cheek in her hand. Presently she said, “You say curious things in your songs. I think I ought to be offended, but I am not. I should be offended if I believed them, or if I thought that you believed them.”

Cormac said, “You are wrong there. If you thought that I did not believe them, you would have cause to be offended. But I know them to be true. I read them in the face of things, I can’t be mistaken.”

Then he sang on:

“So did the cloud, a jealous lover,
Beshadow her, as he would cover,
And prove himself her bosom’s lord,
And make a guarded woman of her--
Had not the sun with his bared sword
Rent him with gashes, and outpour’d
His courage on her; the which the river
Rejoicing saw: ‘O, thou brave giver
Of heart to horse, and horse to pasture,’
Cried he, ‘I hail thee! Warm the blood
Of Stangerd, that she slip her vesture
And come to me, and know my flood!’”

She grew very hot, and got up to go. She thought he was following her, but he was not. When she turned to look for him behind her, he was not there; and presently she saw him far down the fell, springing from boulder to boulder, going down towards the sea.

Another day he told her that she was too beautiful to be the wife of one man. No plain-minded man, he said, would ever marry her, because he would know that he had neither the power nor the right to engross so rare a thing. When she frowned and bent her blue eyes upon him, and presently asked him: “Why, what would you have done with me?” he said that his own opinion was that she ought to be the wife of everybody. Then he sang:

“There were four brothers loved one lass--
Ask not how much or when this was.
It was before the world took heed
Of more than how to serve its need.

Their need was sore, her bounty such,
They askt not, nor she gave, too much:
They roamed the heath, they fought and kill’d;
They were as one long sword and shield.

She kept the house; there was no strife
Within doors, such a sweet housewife
Was she, this kindly kindled lass,
Such wife as no man living has.”

Then he turned his head and looked down upon her where she lay wondering, with her face between her hands. “So should you be the whole world’s wife, since you are as much more beautiful than she was, as she in her turn outwondered the women of her day. You should live in a temple by yourself, and be mate of every man who honestly and respectfully commended himself. In that way you would be Goddess and Bride of all Iceland and Goddess and Mother too. You would wear the Girdle of Fricka. No other woman would be thought of at all--which is as it should be. Some day soon I will make a song about that.” She moved away, saying that he must not.

What was she to make of it? She pretended to be angry, but was not so at all, for she knew that he meant it for a high compliment.

So the winter passed and the spring came on; and so the year wore to the summer. Cormac spent most of the time with Stangerd, but did not declare himself in any way that you could take hold of. It seemed that he talked to Stangerd as if she were a beautiful landscape, a cornfield in heavy ear, or the fell when the heather was in flower, or a birch-wood in early spring, or the firth in the quiet of dawn. He never scrupled to say that she was as lovely as any of these, or that everything in nature loved her. It never occurred to him to say that he, in particular, loved her. As for asking for her, Stangerd was sure that such a thought had never entered his head. Meantime--she fed upon his talk as if it were bread and honey.