Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/37

 hot and athirst, never a sound in his ears, save a dull hum of words like the plash of a breaker that was coming—coming—coming from afar. She was gone who had been everything to him. She had sunk like a wave, and the billows of the ocean were pressing on behind her. She was lost, and the tides of life were flowing as before.

The old pastor shuffled to his feet, mopping his moist eyes with his red handkerchief. "Come away, my son," he said, and tapped Jason on the shoulder.

"Not yet," the lad answered hoarsely. And then he turned with a dazed look and said, like one who speaks in his sleep, "My father has killed my mother."

"No, no, don't say that," said the priest.

"Yes, yes," said the lad more loudly; "not in a day, or an hour, or a moment, but in twenty long years."

"Hush, hush, my son," the old priest murmured.

But Jason did not hear him. "Now listen," he cried, "and hear my vow." And still he held the cold hand in his, and still the ashy face rested on them.

"I will hunt the world over until I find that man, and when I have found him I will slay him."

"What are you saying?" cried the priest.

But Jason went on with an awful solemnity. "If he should die, and we should never meet, I will hunt the world over until I find his son, and when I have found him, I will kill him for his father's sake."

"Silence, silence," cried the priest.

"So help me God!" said Jason.

"My son, my son, vengeance is His. What are we that we should presume to it?"

Jason heard nothing, but the frost of life's first winter that had bound up his heart, deafening him, blinding him, choking him, seemed all at once to break. He pushed the cold face gently back on to the pillow, and fell over it with sobs that shook the bed.

They buried the daughter of the Governor in the acre allotted to the poor in the yard of the Cathedral of Reykjavík. The bells were ringing a choral peal between matins and morning service. Happy little girls in bright new gowns, with primroses on their breasts yellowing their round chins, went skipping in at the wide west doorway, chattering like linnets in spring. It was Easter Day, nineteen years after Stephen Orry had fled from Iceland.