Olav looked at the priest attentively.
“Of one thing I have always had foreknowledge,” said Sira Benedikt. “I have always known—almost always, perhaps it were well to say—when folk were on the way to fetch me to the dying. Above all, to such as had greatest need of help—such as were burdened by an unshriven sin—”
Olav Audunsson gave a start. Unconsciously he raised one hand slightly.
“Such things set their mark upon a man. Few are they who become so hardened as to show no trace that an old priest can note. This befell me one evening in this room, as I was putting off my clothes. I was about to climb into bed when it was borne in upon me that one was on the way hither and encountered great difficulties, and that he had sore need of intercession. I knelt down and prayed that he who was faring hither might find safe guidance—and then I thought to lie down and take a little rest before I had to go out. But when I had laid me down, I felt ever more strongly that someone was in great danger. At last it was clear to me that there was one present in the room with me, who aroused terror in my heart, but I knew it to be holy awe—‘Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth,’ I prayed aloud. And immediately it was as though a voice had called within me: I arose, clothed myself and waked one of thy servants, an old and trustworthy man. I bade him go with me up to the church, enter the belfry, and ring the midmost bell. I myself went into the church and knelt on the steps of the altar—but first I took a taper from the altar of Mary, lighted it and carried it to the church door, which I set open wide. The taper burnt with a calm, clear flame, though the night was wet and raw, misty and somewhat tempestuous.
“’Twas not long before a man came and begged me to bring extreme unction and the viaticum to a sick man. The messenger had been so long on the road that he never thought he would arrive in time, for he had followed his own tracks in a ring and gone astray in bogs and rough ground. But we were able to bring succour in due time to one who needed it more sorely than most.
“Now I have been fain to think that even he who brought the message was one whose life had been such that evil spirits were more likely to guide his footsteps than his guardian angel, to whose voice he had ceased to listen. And it may well be that ’twas this angel, or the guardian spirit of the dying man, who turned to me and sent me to the church to ring the bell.
“But when I came home toward morning and went past the church, I saw that I had forgotten to close the door; the candle still stood there burning in its candlestick, and it was not consumed, nor had the wind and rain that drove in at the open door quenched it. I was afraid when I saw this sign, but I took courage and went in to bring the Virgin Mary back her candlestick and to close the door. Then I was ware that one bent over the candle and guarded the flame, for about it I saw as it were a reflection of the light falling upon something white—whether it was an arm or the lappet of a garment or a wing, I know not. I crept up the steps on my knees, and as I reached out my hand to take the candlestick, the light went out, and I fell upon my face, for I felt that one swept past me, whether it was an angel or a blessed soul—but I knew that this one had seen his and my Lord face to face.”
Olav sat motionless, with downcast eyes. But at last he looked up, he could do naught else. And again he met Sira Benedikt’s glance.
He knew not for how long they stayed thus, staring into each other’s eyes. But he felt time passing over them like a roaring stream, and he and the other stood at the bottom beneath the stream, where was eternity, unchanging and motionless. He knew that the other could see the secret sore that preyed upon his soul and was eating its way out—but he was too cowardly to allow the healing hand to touch the festering cancer. In extreme terror lest the diseased spot might be disturbed, he summoned all his will and all his strength—he closed his eyes. He sank into darkness and stillness—time ceased to roar and sing, but he felt the room turning round with him. When again he opened his eyes, the room was as usual, and Sira Benedikt lay with averted head on the green-spotted pillow. He looked weary and sorrowful and old.
Olav stood up and took his leave—knelt down and kissed Sira Benedikt’s hand in farewell. The old man took his firmly and pressed it as he murmured some Latin words that were unknown to Olav.
Then he went out, and the priest did not attempt to hold him back.
A week after came the news of Sira Benedikt’s death. The folk of the parish counted it a loss—they had esteemed him as an able priest and a bold and upright man. But the franklins had never reckoned him to be endowed with any conspicuous mental gifts—he was like one of themselves in manners and disposition and had had no learning beyond what was necessary.
Olav Audunsson alone was strangely stricken in spirit when he heard the news. It had seemed as though a door stood open—and vaguely he had reckoned that one day he would be given courage to enter it. But as yet he had not had the courage. And now the door was closed for all time.
He had not had much talk with Ingunn about her visit to the Upplands, and the child had not been mentioned between them.
But toward Yule, Olav again had fears that the worst had happened—so he called it in his own mind when Ingunn was clearly with child.
Ever since Torhild Björnsdatter had been with them, Ingunn had shown a more active spirit than ever before in all the years they had been married. There was now no need for the mistress to do anything herself; Torhild was so capable that she accomplished all the household duties alone, and she had learned how everything was done at Hestviken. But it seemed that the other’s presence had aroused a kind of ambition in Ingunn—Olav guessed that his wife had felt injured at his taking a housekeeper, and that without first consulting herself. And though Torhild was very accommodating, inquiring her mistress’s desires in everything, keeping out of the way as far as possible and living with her children in the little old house on the east of the courtyard, where Olav’s mother had once dwelt, the husband noticed that Ingunn did not like Torhild.
Fine needlework was the only thing in which Ingunn had excelled in her youth, and now she took it up again. She made a long kirtle for Olav—it was of foreign cloth, woven in black and green flowers, and she adorned it with broad borders. Her husband had little use for such a garment now—but she left the making of his working-clothes to Torhild. For the daily work about the manor she remained as useless as ever, but she insisted on taking part in it all, and for Yule she toiled at preparing the meat, brewing, and cleaning houses and clothes, running between the storehouses and the quay in driving snow-squalls that came in from the fiord and turned the whole courtyard and the road down to the sea into a mass of slippery green slush.
But the evening before Christmas Eve, when Olav came in, he found her standing by herself up on the bench, struggling with the old tapestry, which was to be hung on wooden hooks along the uppermost of the wall-logs. It was all in one piece and very heavy; Olav came up to help her, holding up a length at a time.
“I doubt if it be prudent for you to work so hard,” he said. “If you think it will be well this time, all the more reason to be careful of yourself—so that it may turn out as we both desire.”
Ingunn said: “’Twill fall out, sure enough, as ’tis fated—and rather will I face now the suffering I cannot escape than go through months of torment in the prospect of it. Think you not that I know I shall never see the day when any child calls me mother?”
Olav looked at her a moment—they were standing side by side on the bench. He jumped down, lifted her after him, and stood for a while with his hands on her hips.
“You must not talk in that way,” he said feebly. “You cannot be sure of it, Ingunn mine!”
He turned from her and began to clear away the hooks and pegs that were lying on the bench.
“I thought,” he asked in a low voice, “that you had a mind to go and see that boy—when you were at Berg in the summer?” Ingunn made no reply.
“I have sometimes wondered whether perchance you longed for him,” he said very softly. “Do you ever long for him?”
>
Ingunn was still silent.
“Is he dead mayhap, the child?” he asked gently.
“No. I saw him once. He was so afraid of me—clawed and kicked—he behaved like a young lynx when I tried to hold him.”
Olav felt old far beyond his years, weary and worn at heart. This was the fifth winter he and Ingunn had lived together—it might have been a hundred years. But the time must have seemed yet longer to her, poor woman, he reminded himself.
Meanwhile he tried to rouse himself—to hope. If this time it went well, that would indeed be the only thing that could make her happy again. And now she had been in good health longer than any time before—so maybe she was equal to going through with it.
As for himself, all desire of having children had been tortured out of him long ago. He thought indeed of his manor and his race—but now these affected him so little. And then there loomed before him a shadowy vision of something immensely far off in the future: when he had grown old, and his pain and anxiety and this strange morbid and uneasy love of his was no more—For she could not live to be old. And then his life might be like that of other men. Then he would be able to seek atonement and peace for his tortured conscience. And then there might yet be time to think of his manor and his race—
But when he had reached this point in his vague conjectures, a sharp pang went through his heart, as when a wound opens wide. Dimly he divined that, in spite of his having no peace, no joy, in spite of his soul being hurt to the death—he yet possessed happiness, his own happiness, even if it were unlike the happiness of other men. Sick and almost bled to death, his happiness yet lived within him, and his aim must be to find courage and means to save it, before it was too late.
Ingunn seemed to keep in good health, even into the new year. But by degrees it made Olav uneasy to see her so utterly unlike herself—in a continual state of futile bustling. That Torhild could have patience with such a mistress was beyond his comprehension; but the girl followed her mistress with calm endurance and made work for herself out of all Ingunn’s restless confusion.
Matters stood thus when at the beginning of Lent word came to Hestviken that Jon Steinfinnsson, Ingunn’s younger brother, had died unmarried at Yuletide. There was indeed no necessity for Olav to journey northward at this winter season in order to take up his wife’s share of the inheritance. But to Olav Audunsson this thing came as a token.
For four nights he lay with lighted candles, scarcely closing his eyes in sleep. He was bargaining with his God and judge. Some means he must find now of saving himself and this unhappy wreck of whom he was so fond that he knew of no beginning or end between them. The whole of Hestviken as his patrimony and the name of his own son—that must surely be amends in full for the brat of the vagabond Icelander.
Olav had been twelve days at Berg when he spoke of this one evening as he sat in the hall drinking with Hallvard Steinfinnsson, while Tora was present: now there only remained his most important business, to fetch home his son.
Hallvard Steinfinnsson stared at him agape—speechless. Then he flared up:
“Your—! Do you tell me that you yourself were father to the brat Ingunn had to creep into the corner and give birth to like a bitch?” He smote the table, crimson with rage.
“You well know, Hallvard, how my fortunes stood at that time,” replied Olav with composure. “Had my enemies had this against me, that I was here in secret while still under sentence of banishment, they would scarce have been easy to deal with. And it might have cost their aunt and Lady Magnhild dearly if it had come out that they had housed me, an outlaw.”
But Hallvard swore till the sparks flew. “Think you not, Olav Audunsson, my aunt and Magnhild would rather have paid all they had in fines for your thrusting yourself upon them, an outlawed man, than that it should have been said that one of our women had disgraced herself so foully that she dared not name the father of her child?” He mimicked all the guesses folk had brought forward, each one uglier than the last.
Olav shrugged his shoulders. “I know not how you care to speak of these rumours now. For now the truth will come to light—and had you let me know a little sooner that such things were said, I should not have waited so long. We deemed we ought to keep silence about it awhile for Magnhild’s sake—but you may be well assured I have never had any other thought than to acknowledge my son.”
“You had—God knows what you had!” the other mocked. All at once he sat straight up, with a stiff stare: “You had so! I wonder whether Ingunn believed it so surely—or that you would hold to your boast that ’twas a lawful marriage you made when you went to bed with her before you had hair on your chin? Why then did she throw herself into the lake?”
“Ask Tora,” said Olav curtly. “She thinks it was the milk that had gone to her head.”
“Nor do I believe,” said Hallvard slyly, “that Haftor would have sued Magnhild for this—for you and he were reconciled—”
“Believe what you will,” said Olav. “To be sure Haftor and I were reconciled—’twas on account of the Earl I was then an outlaw. A numskull you have been all your days, Hallvard, but you can scarce be so foolish as not to see that for you and your kinsfolk the more profitable way is to believe what I have now told you. Even if you should miss the inheritance you would have gotten had your sister died childless.”
Hallvard started up and made for the door.
But when Olav was left alone with Tora, he felt all at once that this thing he had taken upon himself was intolerably difficult. As she remained silent, he began with a kind of sneer:
“And you, Tora; do you believe me?”
Tora looked him straight in the face with eyes that betrayed nothing:
“I am bound to believe you, when you say it yourself.”
And Olav felt it as a physical pressure upon his neck. Weary as he was, he had now taken upon himself a new burden, in addition to the old. Nothing of it could be cast off, and nowhere could he turn for help. He must go through with it—alone.
On the evening of the next day Olav came down to Berg with the child. Tora did her best to receive her sister’s son kindly. But, for all that, the boy seemed to feel he was not very welcome in this house; he kept close to his new-found father, trotted at his heels everywhere and stood by Olav’s knee when the man sat down. Then if it chanced that he was allowed to hold his father’s hand, or that Olav took him up and set him on his knees, Eirik’s pretty little face beamed with joy—all at once he had to turn and look up at his father in glad wonder.
After this Olav stayed no longer at Berg than he was obliged. Already on the morning of the third day he was ready for the journey.
Eirik sat well wrapped in the sledge, turning this way and that, looking about and laughing with joy. Now he was to drive in a sledge again—he had had one drive when his father fetched him from Siljuaas; the sledge had been waiting for them at the last farm in the parish. Anki laughed and chatted as he made fast the baggage—the kind man who had carried him down on his back when his father fetched him. His father looked shapelessly huge in his fur mantle—and the rime on the fur of his own cape showed as white as it did on the hairs around the men’s hoods.
Tora stood looking at the boy’s red and happy face—his brown eyes were bright and quick as those of a little bird. There sprang up in the woman’s heart a few drops of the tenderness she had felt for Eirik when he was a baby. She kissed him farewell on both cheeks and bade him bring greetings to his mother.
Olav came home to Hestviken early one day, as the pale sun shone red through the frost fog; he had driven from Oslo in the pitch-dark early morning. When they came into the valley he gave the reins to Anki, lifted the sleeping boy out of the sledge, and carried him up the slope to the house.
Ingunn sat by the fire combing her hair when Olav came in. He set down the child on the floor and pushed him forward:
“Go on, Eirik, and bid your mother good-morrow as you ought”—whereupon he turned back into the anteroom. From the door
he saw with the corner of his eye that Ingunn crept toward the boy on her knees, stretching out her thin, bare arms; her hair swept the floor behind her.
He was out in the yard by the sledges when she called to him from the doorway. In the dark anteroom she threw her arms about his neck, weeping so that it shook her as she clung closely to him. He laid his hand upon her back—underneath the hair and the shift he felt her shoulder-blades standing out like boards. With that wealth of unbound hair streaming over the weak, drooping shoulders she reminded her husband in a strange way of what she had been like when she was young. Heavy and awkward she was now in her movements—it was not easy to see traces of her freshness and beauty in the tear-swollen, wasted face. And yet it was not so many years since she had been the fairest of all.—For the first time he felt the full wretchedness of her useless fecundity. He put his arm around her again.
“I thought ’twould make you happy,” he said, for she wept and wept.
“Happy—” she trembled, and now he found that she was laughing through her sobs. “I am surely happier than the angels—though you know full well, Olav, I love you more than ten children—”
“Go in and dress yourself,” he begged her; “you will take cold here.”
When he came in she put on her clothes and her wimple and was carrying in food from the closet where they kept it in winter. Eirik still stood where Olav had put him down, but his mother had taken off his leathern jacket. When he saw his father coming, he turned to him quickly and tried to take his hand, smiling a little anxiously.
“Nay, go to your mother now, Eirik,” said Olav. “Do as I tell you,” he repeated, rather sharply, as the boy shyly drew nearer to him.
8
EIRIK was nearly five years old, and he was beginning to find out that it was counted a great blemish in him that he had no father. A year before, when they had been down to the village for Lady Day in the spring, he had heard certain folk saying that he was base-born; the same word had been used by the men who called at Siljuaas on their fowling—and it was surely said of him. But when he asked his foster-mother what it meant, she boxed his ears. Afterwards she had muttered angrily that they had better deserved the blows who said such things to the poor little creature—ay, and his mother too—’twas not the boy’s fault that he was a bastard and a straw-brat. But Eirik guessed it was better not to ask more questions about these queer words. They meant some thing it was wrong to be, and that was why Torgal did not like him—he could not tell how he knew it, but it had come to him in some way that Torgal, the father of the house, was not his father.
The Snake Pit Page 12
