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He had felt severely the loss of Vala, and he did not presume to measure Nanna's sorrow by his own. He knew it was natural that for some weeks she should weep for a child so dear, whose little life had been so pitifully wronged, so bound to suffering, so cruelly cut short.
And the vanquisher of Vala then said to Skanda, "O foremost of gods, this lady was, even before thy birth, destined to be thy bride by that Self-existent Being. Thus told, he duly married her. And Vrihaspati learned in hymns performed the necessary prayers and oblations.
"Yet always the Borsons have had the worst of ill fortune. We three only are now left of the great earls who ruled in Surnadale and in Fjardarfolk, and see how poor and sorrowful we are. My life has been woven out of grief and disappointment; Vala will never walk; and as for your own youth, was it not labor and sorrow only?" "I believe not in any such spaedom.
Then in the doorway appeared the figure of Estella, her blue eyes bright as stars, her long golden hair falling like a cloak to her waist, the red-tipped knife in her hand; she looked like a Gothic priestess a Vala of Odin with the reeking human sacrifice already at her feet. The blood of a long line of heroic ancestors thrilled in her veins.
"And thou, when I am no more, shalt cling to him as thy father, Haco," answered Sweyn, tenderly smoothing back the child's dark locks. The boy shivered; and, bending his head, murmured to himself, "When thou art no more! No more? Has the Vala doomed him, too? Father and son, both?"
"He hath gone forth into the mart, and my sons are from home; and Harold comes hither, ere night, from his earldom." A faint smile, as of triumph, broke over the lips of the Vala, and then as suddenly yielded to an expression of great sadness. "Githa," she said, slowly, "doubtless thou rememberest in thy young days to have seen or heard of the terrible hell-maid Belsta?"
Then want and care, disturbing, nay even bitter hours, may come, but they will also go; and the bonds of love and truth will be consolation, nay, even will give strength. You have spoken, Emelie, of death and separation as the end of the drama of life; you have forgotten the awaking again, and the second youth, of which the ancient northern Vala sings.
There was unspeakable suffering and decay, and then the little breathing-house in which Vala had sojourned a short space was suddenly vacant. For a moment Nanna stood on the border-lands of being, where life hardly draws breath. A little more, and she would have pushed apart the curtains that divide us from that spiritual world which lies so close and which may claim us at any moment.
The moon, thus relieved of the lamp-light, came clear and bright through the room, shone on the trophied arms, and fell upon Harold's face, casting its brightness on the pillow on which the Vala had breathed her charm.
There was the old and withered hag, on whom, in our later mediaeval ages the character was mainly bestowed; there was the terrific witch-wife, or wolf-witch, who seems wholly apart from human birth and attributes, like the weird sisters of Macbeth creatures who entered the house at night and seized warriors to devour them, who might be seen gliding over the sea, with the carcase of the wolf dripping blood from their giant jaws; and there was the more serene, classical, and awful vala, or sibyl, who, honoured by chiefs and revered by nations, foretold the future, and advised the deeds of heroes.
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