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Those who knew Erling well could have traced his likeness in every act and gesture of the boy. The vikings happened to observe Alric before he saw them, as was not to be wondered at, considering the noise he made.
"Methinks we are safe enough here," she said, with a gesture of impatience. "Aye, if we win the day, but not if we lose it," said the old man. "Come," said Hilda, "we must obey our father." "I have no intention of disobeying him," retorted the other, tossing her head. Just then Alric ran up with a look of anxiety on his swelled and blood-stained face. "Come, girls, ye are in the way here.
"Go; I need not tell thee to make haste!" Alric waited to hear no more, but darted away as the little maid tripped off in another direction. Thus hour by hour the night passed by and Alric ran steadily on his course, rousing up all the fighting men in his passage through the district.
"Father," he said eagerly, addressing Haldor, "short is the hour for acting, and long the hour for feasting." Haldor cast his eyes upon his son and said "What now is in the way?" "The Danes," said Alric, "are on the fiord more than six hundred men. Skarpedin leads them. One of them pitched me into the sea, but I marked his neck to keep myself in his memory!
He found little Alric sitting on the low doorstep of the house where he lodged, his stolid Saxon face pink and white in the fresh dawn, and his thick hands hanging idly over his knees, while the round blue eyes stared at the street. He got up when Gilbert came near, and pulled off his woollen cap. "Well done, Alric," said Gilbert. "That is the second time you have saved my life."
"I'm quite sure that I did not," replied Alric, to the manifest relief of his mother; "but I saw a long pole on the ground, which I seized, and attacked the beast therewith, and a most notable fight we had. I only wish that it had been true, and that thou hadst been there to see it. Mara fled away at once, for I felt no more fear, but laid about me in a way that minded me of Erling.
He bent forward to resist the animal's weight and impetus, but the baffled wolf was cowed by his resolute front. It turned tail, and fled, followed by Glumm with a wild halloo! When the first growl was heard by Alric, it strung him up to the right pitch instantly, and the next one caused the blood to rush to his face, for he heard the halloo which Glumm uttered as he followed in pursuit.
As he idly watched the soldiers going and coming, and cooking their midday meal at the camp-fires, while Dunstan and Alric were preparing his own, he was thinking that this was the third day since he had saved the Queen's life, and that although many courtiers had asked of his condition, and had talked with him as if he had done a great deed, yet he had received not so much as a message of thanks from Eleanor nor from the King, and it seemed as if he had been forgotten altogether.
Sitting there alone, while Dunstan puzzled his uncertain learning over deep-cut inscriptions of long ago, and Alric, the groom, threw his dagger at a mark on one of the cypress trees, hundreds of times in succession, and rarely missing his aim, Gilbert felt, in the silence he loved, that the soul of Rome had taken hold of his soul, and that in Rome it was good to live for the sake of dreaming, and that dreaming itself was life.
A fall of thirty feet, even though water should be the recipient of the shock, is not a trifle by any means, but Alric was one of those vigorous little fellows of whom there are fortunately many in this world who train themselves to feats of strength and daring.
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