"Be it so!" he said briefly. "I cover the blade! You are men; like men you speak truth. As such, I receive you! Had you told me a lie concerning your coming here,--had you made pretense of having lost your way, or other such shifty evasion, your path would never have again crossed mine. As it is,--welcome!"
And he held out his hand with a sort of royal dignity, still resting one foot on the fallen weapon. The young men, struck by his action and gratified by his change of manner and the genial expression that now softened his rugged features, were quick to respond to his friendly greeting, and the bonde, picking up and re-sheathing his hunting-knife as if he had done nothing at all out of the common, motioned them towards the very window on which their eyes had been so long and so ardently fixed.
"Come!" he said. "You must drain a cup of wine with me before you leave. Your unguided footsteps led you by the wrong path,--I saw your boat moored to my pier, and wondered who had been venturesome enough to trample through my woodland. I might have guessed that only a couple of idle boys like yourselves, knowing no better, would have pushed their way to a spot that all worthy dwellers in Bosekop, and all true followers of the Lutheran devilry, avoid as though the plague were settled in it."
And the old man laughed, a splendid, mellow laugh, with the ring of true jollity in it,--a laugh that was infectious, for Errington and Lorimer joined in it heartily without precisely knowing why. Lorimer, however, thought it seemly to protest against the appellation "idle boys."
"What do you take us for, sir?" he said with lazy good-nature. "I carry upon my shoulders the sorrowful burden of twenty-six years,--Philip, there, is painfully conscious of being thirty,--may we not therefore dispute the word 'boys' as being derogatory to our dignity? You called us 'men' a while ago,--remember that!"
Olaf Güldmar laughed again. His suspicious gravity had entirely disappeared, leaving his face a beaming mirror of beneficence and good-humor.
"So you are men," he said cheerily, "men in the bud, like leaves on a tree. But you seem boys to a tough old stump of humanity such as I am. That is my way,--my child Thelma, though they tell me she is a woman grown, is always a babe to me. 'Tis one of the many privileges of the old, to see the world about them always young and full of children."