"What is boring?" asked Thelma gently, and then turning her eyes full on the young Baronet, she added, "I like to hear that you will pass your days sometimes without shooting the birds and killing the fish; it can hurt nobody for you to write." And she smiled that dreamy pensive smile, of hers that was so infinitely bewitching. "You must show me all your sweet poems!"
Errington colored hotly. "They are all nonsense, Miss Güldmar," he said quickly. "There's nothing 'sweet' about them, I tell you frankly! All rubbish, every line of them!"
"Then you should not write them," said Thelma quietly. "It is only a pity and a disappointment."
"I wish every one were of your opinion," laughed Lorimer, "it would spare us a lot of indifferent verse."
"Ah! you have the chief Skald of all the world in your land!" cried Güldmar, bringing his fist down with a jovial thump on the table. "He can teach you all that you need to know."
"Skald?" queried Lorimer dubiously. "Oh, you mean bard. I suppose you allude to Shakespeare?"
"I do," said the old bonde enthusiastically, "he is the only glory of your country I envy! I would give anything to prove him a Norwegian. By Valhalla! had he but been one of the Bards of Odin, the world might have followed the grand old creed still! If anything could ever persuade me to be a Christian, it would be the fact that Shakespeare was one. If England's name is rendered imperishable, it will be through the fame of Shakespeare alone,—just as we have a kind of tenderness for degraded modern Greece, because of Homer. Ay, ay! countries and nations are worthless enough; it is only the great names of heroes that endure, to teach the lesson that is never learned sufficiently,—namely, that man and man alone is fitted to grasp the prize of immortality."
"Ye believe in immortality?" inquired Macfarlane seriously.
Güldmar's keen eyes lighted on him with fiery impetuousness.
"Believe in it? I possess it! How can it be taken from me? As well make a bird without wings, a tree without sap, an ocean without depths, as expect to find a man without an immortal soul! What a question to ask? Do you not possess heaven's gift? and why should not I?"