Arnvid told him he had brought her heavy tidings: Tora of Berg had died in the autumn. But when Olav heard that Arnvid had already been here for some days, he wondered a little—had she wept over her sister for all that time? They had not been so very closely attached. But, after all, she was her only sister—and maybe at this time her tears flowed more readily than usual.
Ingunn bade them good-night as soon as supper was over. She took Eirik with her and went out—she would lie in the women’s little house tonight—“You two would rather sleep together, I ween; you must have many things to speak of.”
Olav could not help wondering again: was there any special thing that she thought they wished to speak of so privily? For otherwise she might simply have lain in the closet.
After that their talk went but sluggishly as they sat at their drink. Arnvid spoke of Tora’s children—’twas a pity they were all under age. Olav asked after Arnvid’s own sons. Arnvid said he had joy of them: Magnus had Miklebö now; he was married, and Steinar was betrothed. Finn had taken vows in the convent of the preaching friars; they said he had good parts, and next year they would surely send him to Paris, to the great school there.
“You never thought of marrying again?”
Arnvid shook his head. He fixed his strange dark eyes upon his friend, smiling feebly and bashfully like a young man who speaks of his sweetheart. “I too shall be found among the friars, once Steinar’s wedding is over.”
“You are not one to change your mind either,” said Olav with a little smile.
“Either—?” said Arnvid involuntarily.
“So you will be father and son in the same convent.”
“Yes.” Arnvid gave a little laugh. “If God wills, it may be so turned up and down with us that I shall obey my boy and call him father.”
They sat in silence for a while. Then Arnvid spoke again:
“It is on the convent’s business we are now come south, Brother Vegard and I. We would rebuild our church of stone after the fire, but Bishop Torstein has other use for his craftsmen this year; so we were to see whether we can hire stonemasons in Oslo. But Brother Vegard said that you must do him a kindness and come into the town—and bring Ingunn with you if you could—so that he might see you.”
“Ingunn is not fit for any journey—you may guess that.—But he must be as old as the hills now, Brother Vegard?”
“Oh, ay—three and a half score, I believe. He is sacristan now.—Ay, ’twas that I was to say, that you must not fail to come. There was something he must needs say to you”—Arnvid looked down and spoke with a slight effort—“about that axe of yours, the barbed axe. He has found out a deal about it—that it is the same that was once at Dyfrin in Raumarike, at the time your ancestors held the manor.”
“I know it,” replied Olav.
“Ay, Brother Vegard has heard a whole saga about that axe, he says. In former times it was the way with it, they say, that it sang for a slaying.”
Olav nodded. “That I have once heard myself,” he said quietly. “That day when I was in the guest house, ready to fare northward—you know, the last time I visited you at Miklebö—”
Arnvid was silent for a while. Then he said in a low voice: “You told me that you had lost your axe on that journey?”
“You think me not such a fool as to set out through the forest with that huge devil of an axe?” Olav laughed coldly. “’Twas a woodcutter’s axe; it served me well enough, that one. But true it is, I heard Kinfetch ring—she would fain have gone with me.”
Arnvid sat with his arms crossed before him, perfectly silent. Olav had got up and walked uneasily about the hall. Then he came to a sudden stop.
Aloud and as though defiantly he asked: “Was there none who wondered—was nothing rumoured, when that Teit Hallsson disappeared from Hamar so abruptly?”
“Oh—something was said about the matter, no doubt. But folk were satisfied that he must have been afraid of the Steinfinnssons.”
“And you? Did you never wonder what had become of him?”
Arnvid said quietly: “It is not easy for me to answer that, Olav.”
“I am not afraid to hear what you thought.”
“Why do you wish me to say it?” whispered Arnvid reluctantly.
Olav was silent a good while. When he spoke, it was as though he weighed every word; he did not look at his friend meanwhile:
“I trow Ingunn has told you how it has gone with us. I thought it must be because He would that I should offer atonement to the boy for the man I put out of the world. That vagabond”—Olav gave a little laugh—“he was mad enough to imagine he would marry Ingunn—keep her and the child, he said. I had to put him out of the way, you can see that—”
“I can see that you thought you had to,” replied Arnvid.
“Well, he struck first. It was not that I decoyed the fellow into an ambush. He came of himself, stuck to me like a burr—I was to help him, as a man buys a marriage for his leman when he would be rid of her.”
Arnvid said nothing.
Olav went on, hotly: “So said this—a man of his sort—said it of Ingunn!”
Arnvid nodded. Nothing was said between them for a while. Then Arnvid spoke with hesitation:
“They found the bones of a man among the ashes, when they came up in the spring, my tenant of Sandvoid; those sæters up there on Luraasen. That must have been he—”
“Oh, the devil! Was it your hut? That is well so far—now I can make amends to you for it.”
“Oh, no, Olav, stop!” Arnvid rose abruptly and his face contracted. “What is the sense of that? So many long years ago—”
“That is so, Arnvid. And every day I have thought of it, and never have I spoken of it to any living soul until this evening—Then he was given Christian burial?”
“Yes.”
“Then I have not that to grieve over—to think of. I need not have vexed myself with that for all these years—that maybe he still lay there. I have not that sin upon me, that I left a Christian corpse unburied.—And no one asked or made search, who it might be that lay there?”
“No.”
“That seems strange.”
“Oh, not so strange either. The folk up there are wont to do as I say, when for once I let them know my will.”
“But you should not have done that!” Olav wrung his hands hard. “It had been better for me if it had come to light then—if you had not helped me to carry out my purpose, hush the matter up. That you could lend your hand to such a thing—you, a Godfearing man!”
Arnvid burst out laughing all at once, laughed so that he had to sit down on the bench. Olav gave a start at the way the other took it; he said heatedly:
“That ugly habit of yours—bursting into a roar of laughter just as one is speaking of—other things—you will have to give that up. I should think, when you are a monk!”
“I suppose I must.” Arnvid dried his eyes with his sleeve.
Olav spoke in violent agitation: “You have never known what it is to live at enmity with Christ, to stand before Him as a liar and betrayer, every time you enter His house. I have—every day for—ay, ’twill soon be eight years now. Hereabouts they believe me to be a pious man—for I give to the church and to the convent in Oslo and to the poor, as much as I am able, I go to mass as often as I have the means to come thither, and two or three times a day when I am in the town. Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy mind and all thy heart, we are told—methinks God must know I do so—I knew not that such love was within the power of man until I myself had abandoned His covenant and lost Him!”
“Why do you say this to me?” asked Arnvid in distress. “You ought rather to speak to your priest of such things!”
“I cannot do that. I have never made confession that I slew Teit.”
As he received no reply, he said hotly: “Answer me! Can you not give me a counsel?”
“It is a great thing you lay upon me. I can give you no other counsel than that which your priest wou
ld give you.—I can give you no other counsel than that you know yourself—And that is not the counsel you wish for,” he said a moment later, as the other stood silent.
“I cannot.” Olav’s face turned white, as though congealed. “I must think of Ingunn too—more than of myself. I cannot condemn her to be left alone, poor and joyless and broken in health, the widow of a secret murderer and caitiff.”
Arnvid answered doubtfully: “But I trow it is not certain—quite certain it cannot be, that the Bishop could not find a way out—since this happened years ago—and no innocent man has suffered for the misdeed—and the dead man had done you grievous harm, and you fought together. Mayhap the Bishop will find a means of reconciling you with Christ—give you absolution, without demanding that you accuse yourself of the slaying also before human justice.”
“That can scarce be very likely?”
“I know not,” said Arnvid quietly.
“I cannot venture it. Too much is at stake for those whom it is my duty to protect. Then all that I have done to save her honour might as well have been undone. Think you I did not know that had I proclaimed the slaying there and then, it would have been naught but a small matter?—the man was of no account, alive or dead, and had you then backed me and witnessed she was mine, the woman he had seduced—But Ingunn would not have been equal to it—she could face so little always—and then is every mother’s son in these parts to hear this of her now that she is worn out—?”
It was a little while before Arnvid could answer. “It is a question,” he said in a low voice, “whether she could face the other thing better. Should it go with her this time as all the other times—that she lose her child again—”
A quiver passed over Olav’s features.
“However that may be—she is not fit to go through it many times more.”
“You must not speak so,” whispered Olav. “Then there is Eirik,” he began again, after a pause. “This promise I have made to God Himself, that Eirik should be treated as my own son.”
“Think you,” asked Arnvid, “that it avails you to offer God this and that—promise Him all that He has never asked of you—when you withhold from Him the only thing you yourself know that He would beg of you?”
“The only thing?—but that is everything, Arnvid—honour. Life, maybe. God knows I fear not so much to lose it in other ways—but to lose it as a caitiff—”
“Nevertheless, you have nothing that you have not received of Him. And He Himself submitted to the caitiff’s death to atone for all our sins.”
Olav closed his eyes. “Nevertheless I cannot—” he said almost inaudibly.
Arnvid rejoined: “You spoke of Eirik. Know you not, Olav, you have not the right to act in this way—to make a promise to set aside an heir—since by so doing you play your kinsmen false.”
Olav frowned in anger. “Those men of Tveit—never have I seen them, and they did not deal by me as kinsmen when I was young and had sore need of their coming forward.”
“They came forward after you had fled to Sweden.”
“And they might just as well have stayed where they were, for all the good I had of them. Nay, then I should rather let her son take Hestviken.”
“That will not make wrong right, Olav.—And neither you nor she can know whether it will tend to the boy’s happiness that you two make him a gift that he has no right to receive.”
“Oh, ay, I thought as much: she has been talking to you of what is in her head—that I hate her child and wish him ill. ’Tis not true,” he said hotly. “I have never had aught else in mind for Eirik but his own good—’tis she who corrupts him; she trains him to be afraid of me, to lie and sneak out of my way—”
On seeing the expression in Arnvid’s face he shook his head. “Nay, nay, I blame her not for that—Ingunn knows no better, poor woman. I have not changed my mind either, Arnvid. Do you remember, I promised you once that I would never fail your kinswoman? And I have never regretted it—in whatever shape my last hour may come, I shall thank God that He held my hand when I was tempted to do harm to her—showed me, ere it was too late, that I must protect and support her as well as I was able. Even if I had come back and found her stricken with leprosy, I could have done no less than remember that she was my dearest friend—the only friend I had in all the years I was a child and brought up among strangers.”
Arnvid said calmly: “If you think, Olav, that it would make it easier for you to judge what you ought to do in order to make your peace with God, should you be unable to care for those belonging to you, I promise to be as a brother to Ingunn, to provide for her and the boy. I shall take them under my roof, if need be—”
“But you have given up Miklebö to Magnus. And you yourself will enter the convent—” Olav said it almost with a touch of scorn.
“Thereby I have not parted with my whole estate. And if I have endured the world so long, I doubt not I can endure it to my dying day, if it must be—while my near kinsfolk need me by them.”
“Nay, nay,” said Olav as before. “I will not have you think of the like for my sake or for the sake of any who are properly in my care.”
Arnvid sat gazing into the dying embers on the hearth, feeling the presence of his friend in the gloom. “I wonder if he does not see himself that it is no small burden he has thrown upon me tonight,” he thought.
Olav pulled a stool toward him with his foot and sat down by the hearth, facing his friend.
“Now I have told you much, but not that which I had it in my mind to say: I have told you that I yearn, day and night, to be reconciled with the Lord Christ—I have told you that never did our Lord seem to me so lovable beyond all measure as when I knew that He had marked me with the brand of Cain. But I marvel that I yearn so, for never have I seen Him so hard on other men as on me. I have wrought this one misdeed; and then I was so—incensed—that I do not now recall what were my thoughts at the time; but I did it because I judged that ’twould be even worse for Ingunn if I did it not—I would save a poor remnant of respect for her, even if it cost me a murder. And then it all came about as easily as if it had been laid out for me—he begged me to take him on that journey; no man was aware that we set out together. But had God or my patron or Mary Virgin directed our way to some man’s house that evening and not to those deserted sæters under Luraas—you know it would have fallen out otherwise.”
“I scarce think you had prayed God and the saints to watch over your journey, ere you set out?”
“I am not so sure that I did not—nay, prayed I had not truly. But all that Easter I had done nothing but pray—and I was so loath to kill him, all the time. But it was as though all things favoured me, so that I was driven to do it—and tempted to conceal it afterwards. And God, who knows all, He knew how this must turn out, better than I—why could not He have checked me nevertheless, without my prayers—?”
“So say we all, Olav, when we have accomplished our purpose and then see that it would have been better if we had not. But beforehand I ween you think like the rest of us, that you are the best judge of your own good.”
“Ay, ay. But in all else beyond what this deed has brought in its train I have dealt uprightly with every man, to the best of my power. I have no goods in my possession that were come by unjustly, so far as I know; I have not spread ill report of man or woman, but have let all such talk fall to the ground when it reached my door, even though I knew it to be true and no lie. I have been faithful to my wife, and ’tis not as she thinks, that I bear the boy ill will—I have been as good to Eirik as most men are to their own sons. Tell me, Arnvid, you who understand these thinks better than I—you have been a pious man all the days of your life and have shown compassion to all—am I not right when I say that God is harder on me than on other men? I have seen more of the world than you”—Arnvid was sitting so that Olav could not see him smile at these words—“in the years when I was an outlaw, with my uncle, and afterwards, when I was the Earl’s liegeman. I have seen men who loaded thems
elves with all the seven deadly sins, who committed such cruel deeds as I would not set my hand to, even if I knew of a surety that God had already cast me off and doomed me to hell. They were not afraid of God, and I never marked that they thought of Him with love or longing to obtain His forgiveness—and yet they lived in joy and contentment, and they had a good death, many of them, as I myself have seen.
“Then why can we have no peace or joy, she and I? It is as though God pursued me, wherever I may go, vouchsafing me no peace or rest, but demanding of me such impossible things as I have never seen Him demand of other men.”
“How should I be able to give you answers to such questions, I, a layman?—Olav, can you not go with me to the town and speak with Brother Vegard of this?”
“Maybe I will do so,” said Olav in a low voice. “But you must tell me first—can you understand why it is to be made so much harder for me than for other men?”
“You do not know everything about the other men you speak of, either. But you must be able to see that, if you feel that God pursues you, it is because He would not lose you.”
“But He has so ordered it for me that I cannot turn about.”
“Surely it was not God who ordered it so for you?”
“Nay, but I have not brought it about myself either—I had to do what I did, it seems to me; Ingunn’s life and welfare were laid in my hands. But that which was the cause of all this, Arnvid—that the Steinfinnssons would steal from me the marriage that had been promised to my father—should I have been content with that—bowed before such injustice? I have never heard aught else but that God commands every Christian man to fight against wrong and law-breaking. I was a child in years, unlearned in the law—I knew no other way to defend my right than to take my bride myself, ere they could give her to another.”
Arnvid said reluctantly: “That was the answer you gave me when I—spoke to you of your dealings with my kinswoman. Do you remember yet, Olav, that—that you did not speak the truth that time?”
Olav raised his head with a jerk, taken by surprise. He paused a moment with his reply. “No.—And I believe,” he said calmly, “most men would have done the same in my place.”
The Snake Pit Page 18
