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Page 19
When they reached Otter Pool the _Golden Hind_ grounded comfortably on a
shallow, and they lay beneath a roof of close green, watching the water
trickle over the flood-gates down the mossy brick chute from the
mill-stream to the brook. A big trout--the children knew him
well--rolled head and shoulders at some fly that sailed round the bend,
while, once in just so often, the brook rose a fraction of an inch
against all the wet pebbles, and they watched the slow draw and shiver
of a breath of air through the tree-tops. Then the little voices of the
slipping water began again.
'It's like the shadows talking, isn't it?' said Una. She had given up
trying to read. Dan lay over the bows, trailing his hands in the
current. They heard feet on the gravel-bar that runs half across the
pool and saw Sir Richard Dalyngridge standing over them.
'Was yours a dangerous voyage?' he asked, smiling.
'She bumped a lot, sir,' said Dan. 'There's hardly any water this
summer.'
'Ah, the brook was deeper and wider when my children played at Danish
pirates. Are you pirate-folk?'
'Oh no. We gave up being pirates years ago,' explained Una. 'We're
nearly always explorers now. Sailing round the world, you know.'
'Round?' said Sir Richard. He sat him in the comfortable crotch of an
old ash-root on the bank. 'How can it be round?'
'Wasn't it in your books?' Dan suggested. He had been doing geography at
his last lesson.
'I can neither write nor read,' he replied. 'Canst _thou_ read, child?'
'Yes,' said Dan, 'barring the very long words.'
'Wonderful! Read to me, that I may hear for myself.'
Dan flushed, but opened the book and began--gabbling a little--at 'The
Discoverer of the North Cape.'
'Othere, the old sea-captain,
Who dwelt in Helgoland,
To King Alfred, the lover of truth,
Brought a snow-white walrus tooth,
That he held in his brown right hand.'
'But--but--this I know! This is an old song! This I have heard sung!
This is a miracle,' Sir Richard interrupted. 'Nay, do not stop!' He
leaned forward, and the shadows of the leaves slipped and slid upon his
chain-mail.
'"I ploughed the land with horses,
But my heart was ill at ease,
For the old sea-faring men
Came to me now and then
With their Sagas of the Seas."'
His hand fell on the hilt of the great sword. 'This is truth,' he cried,
'for so did it happen to me,' and he beat time delightedly to the tramp
of verse after verse.
'"And now the land," said Othere,
"Bent southward suddenly,
And I followed the curving shore,
And ever southward bore
Into a nameless sea."'
'A nameless sea!' he repeated. 'So did I--so did Hugh and I.'
'Where did you go? Tell us,' said Una.
'Wait. Let me hear all first.' So Dan read to the poem's very end.
'Good,' said the knight. 'That is Othere's tale--even as I have heard
the men in the Dane ships sing it. Not in those same valiant words, but
something like to them.'
'Have you ever explored North?' Dan shut the book.
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