THE KING OF ELFLAND’S DAUGHTER
She laid them all in a row, this for the candlestick, this for the bell, that for the holy bowl. “If I can worship these lovely stones as things ought to be worshipped,” she said, “I can worship the things of the Freer.”
Then she kneeled down before the big flat stones and prayed to them as though they were Christom things.
And Alveric seeking her in the wide night, wondering what wild fancy had carried her whither, heard her voice in the meadow, crooning such prayers as are offered to holy things.
When he saw the four flat stones to which she prayed, bowed down before them in the grass, he said that no worse than this were the darkest ways of the heathen. And she said “I am learning to worship the holy things of the Freer.”
“It is the art of the heathen,” he said.
Now of all things that men feared in the valley of Erl they feared most the arts of the heathen, of whom they knew nothing but that their ways were dark. And he spoke with the anger which men always used when they spoke there of the heathen. And his anger went to her heart, for she was but learning to worship his holy things to please him, and yet he had spoken like this.
And Alveric would not speak the words that should have been said, to turn aside anger and soothe her; for no man, he foolishly thought, should compromise
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