Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/20

 there, on the strength of his knowledge of English affairs, to appoint him to the Governor-Generalship of Iceland (then vacant) at a salary of four hundred pounds a year, and landed at Reykjavík with the Icelandic flag, of the white falcon on the blue ground—the banner of the Vikings—at the masthead of his father-in-law's Welsh brig.

Jorgen Jorgensen was then in his early manhood, and the strong heart of the man did not decline with years, but rode it out with him through life to death. He had always intended to have a son and build up a family. It was the sole failure of his career that he had only a daughter. That had been a disaster for which he was not accountable, but he prepared himself to make a good end of a bad beginning. With God's assistance and his own extreme labour he meant to marry his daughter to Count Trollop, the Danish Minister for Iceland, a functionary with five hundred a year, a house at Reykjavík, 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 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 whom she should marry, when she should many, and how she should marry; and this mood of mind contented her down to the first week in July 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