The Snake Pit (28 page)

Olav came in to Ingunn about midday on the morrow—he and one of the house-carls had been bringing in the hay on pack-horses from some outlying meadows on the high ground. The nap of his short cloak was thickly beaded with drops of mist, and his boots were heavy with wet earth and withered leaves. He gave off a raw scent of autumn as he bent over Ingunn and asked her how she did.

With a little embarrassed smile he showed her what he had brought in his hand—some big watery strawberries threaded on straws—as they had used to do when they were children. The berries were soft, so that the palm of his hand was red with them.

“I found these up by the mill.”

Ingunn took them, without remembering to thank him. It was these little red spots within his coarse, worn hands—and she recalled their life together from childhood, all the way till now. Twice he had reddened that hand with blood for her sake, and it was the same hard, resin-smirched boy’s fist that had helped her over fences and opened to show her gifts.—Their life appeared as a tapestry to her—as one long tissue: little images of brief, hot, happy love, with long intervals between of waiting and longing and barren dreams, the time of shame and mad despair like a big dark spot, and then all these years at Hestviken—all appeared to her in an instant as though embroidered on a ground—a single fabric, a whole tapestry of the same stuff from their childhood’s days until now, until the end.

True, she had always acknowledged to herself that Olav was good to her. She had known in a way that few men would have had patience with her so long, would have been equal to the task of protecting her and sustaining her all these years. She had indeed thanked him in her heart—thanked him sometimes with burning intensity. But only now did she see, as a whole, how strong his love had been.

He was standing by the cradle now. The rockers bumped and bumped against the floor, and the child gurgled and cried with delight, drumming its heels with wild persistence against the skin rug under it—the mother could just see its little pink hands waving above the side of the cradle.

“Nay, Cecilia—you will soon strangle yourself in these snares!” Olav laughed and lifted up the child in his arms. She had wriggled so violently that her clothes were quite undone, and the swaddling-band had become so tangled about her arms and legs and neck and her little body that it was a wonder she had not strangled herself with it. “Can you get this straight?” He laid the child on the bed by its mother.

“Are you weeping?” he asked, saddened. Ingunn was blinded by tears, so that she could scarcely see as she tried to free Cecilia from her bands.

“She will be just as fair-haired as the rest of us Hestvik folk,” said the father; “and now you have seven curls—” he passed his hand over the child’s forehead, where the hair had grown long and curly in little, pale-yellow locks. “Are you in such pain today, my Ingunn?”

“’Tis not that. I am thinking that, though you have been good to me and faithful so long as I have known you, I have never had it in my power to reward you for your affection.”

“Say not so. You have been a—gentle—” he could not find another word in her praise on the spur of the moment, though he was trying to say something to please her. “You have been a gentle and—and quiet wife. And you know how fond I am of you,” he said with feeling.

“And now it will soon be a year,” she whispered, distressed and shy, “that you have been as a widower—with an infirm sister to take care of—”

“Ay, ay,” said her husband softly. “But if I love you—Sister, you say. Do you remember, Ingunn, the first years we lived to
gether; we slept in the same bed, drank from the same bowl, and were as brother and sister; we knew of naught else. But then too we were happiest when we were together.”

“Yes. But we were children in those days. And then I was fair—” she whispered with more passion in her voice.

“You were. But I fear I was too childish to see it. I believe in those years I never had a thought whether you were fair or not.”

“And I was not a burden on you. I was healthy and strong—”

“Oh nay, Ingunn—” Olav smiled weakly and stroked her arm. “Strong you have never been, my dearest friend!”

It was a long winter for them at Hestviken.

Olav was at home all the time; he thought he could not leave her for a single night. She now suffered greatly from lying in bed, since she was so emaciated, and then she had got some hurt in her back: when she had lain awhile in one position, it felt as if a pain crept over her ribs and filled her whole chest. The only thing they could do to relieve her was to move and turn her constantly. She could take no food at all; they kept life in her by giving her gruel, broth, and milk, a mouthful at a time.

She had tried to do a little needlework as she lay in bed, but her hands became numbed whenever she held them raised a little while, so that she could neither sew nor plait. And then she lay in a doze, altogether motionless. She never spoke a word of complaint, and she thanked them gently when anyone came and turned her or arranged her pillows. Sometimes she slept a good deal in the daytime, but at night she seldom had any sleep at all.

Olav had the fire burning on the hearth all night and he had shut off the closet with a door, to make the great room warmer. The winter was not a very cold one, but all this smoke day and night was troublesome.

He watched by the sick woman night after night. Eirik lay in the bed behind his back asleep, Liv slept on the bench, and Cecilia slept in her mother’s bed. Olav lay in a sort of doze, but it was never too deep for him to hear an ember shooting out of the fire, or Ingunn’s almost inaudible groans—he was up and beside her in a moment. All that winter he was never out of his clothes, except every washing-day, when he went to the bath-house.

He knelt beside her bed, laid the palms of his hands under her shoulders, then under her back, and then he held her heels in the
hollows of his hands for a while. In his heart he expected with a kind of morbid horror that she would get bed-sores there. It was like the last glowing ember of all he had once felt for her body-he thought he could not bear to see the skin broken and the sores eating into Ingunn’s flesh while she yet lived. Never had it been so hard for him to endure the sight and smell of wounds and impurities—though he was ashamed of this weakness. But he prayed desperately to God that at least it might not come to this—he asked it as much for his own sake as for hers.

He was away tending the fire.

“Are you thirsty, Ingunn?—Shall I take you in my arms, Ingunn?”

Olav wrapped the bedclothes about her and lifted her up in his arms. He sat with her on the settle before the fire. Carefully he bent the lifeless legs, laid down pillows under her feet on the bench, supporting her hips and back on his thighs, as he laid her head to rest on his shoulder.

“Is that better?”

Sometimes she fell asleep when she lay thus in his arms. And Olav sat by the hour holding her, till he was chilled through about the shoulders, stiff in all his limbs. She woke if he made the slightest movement. Then she extricated a hand from the bedclothes and passed it over his face.

“Now I am much better. Carry me back to bed now, Olav, and go and lie down—you must be tired.”

“I am become a heavy burden for you, Olav,” she said one night. “But bear with me a little—’twill not last longer than this winter.”

He did not deny it. He had thought the same himself. When spring came, it would take her with it. And now at last he was ready to submit to it.

But as winter drew to a close, she seemed rather to be slightly on the mend. In any case she revived sufficiently to ask how things were going on the farm and in the fishery. She listened for the cow-bells morning and evening, mentioned her cows by name, and said one day that when spring was fully come they must carry her out of doors, that she might see her cattle once more.

Cecilia was now a very pretty child, and big for her age; Ingunn had great comfort of her in the daytime, but then she had to
have Liv in with her. At night she slept with her foster-mother in another house—Ingunn could no longer bear the big, heavy child in bed with her: Cecilia rolled over on her mother in her sleep, and when she was awake she stumped about the bed and fell heavily over her palsied body.

Olav had so little liking for Liv that he avoided the room while the maid was there. He knew too that she stole in a small way, and he had more than a suspicion that she was too good friends with Anki and thus taught the man to pilfer and lie—Arnketil’s word had always been untrustworthy, but till now it had mostly been because he had no better wit. What they stole was no great matter, but he did not like having dishonest folk in his house. And now there was such disorder in the household in many ways—he himself was so tired every day that he could not accomplish all he ought, and downhill is an easy road.

So now he did not see much of Cecilia in the daytime. But by degrees it had come to this, that his affection for his daughter was mingled with a profound soreness—it pained him sharply when he recalled that blue, damp night of spring when he came home and found her in the cradle. The first time they laid her in his arm he had believed so surely that she betokened a turn in their fortunes, that Cecilia came into the world bringing their happiness with her.

He loved this little daughter, but his affection was, at it were, spread within him, it lay at the bottom of his heart, shy and mute. In the first days of her life her father had often stopped before her cradle and touched her with a couple of fingers, playfully and caressingly—full of quiet joy and wonder when he got her to smile. And he had lifted her up and held her to him a moment, in his clumsy, unpractised way: Cecilia, Cecilia—Now he usually stopped at a little distance when he saw her being carried from house to house; he smiled at his daughter and beckoned; she never took the smallest notice. The very fact that she was so pretty, and that he recognized in her the fair complexion of his own race, seemed only to increase the father’s melancholy.

Not much was seen of Eirik now. The nine-year-old boy instinctively kept away from the grown people, whom he saw to be always heavy at heart. He found enough to do about the manor and only came into the hall to eat and sleep.

Olav had to go in to Oslo for the Holy Cross fair
⁸
in the spring. There he received a message asking him to go to the convent of the preaching friars.

The Prior had news for him that his friend Arnvid Finnsson had died during the winter. In the middle of last summer he had adopted the professed habit among the friars at Hamar. But by the second week of Lent he died suddenly—none could say of what. As they went to morning mass, the monk who walked beside him saw that Brother Arnvid turned pale and faltered, but on his asking in a whisper if he were sick, Arnvid shook his head. But when they knelt at
Verbum caro factum est,
his neighbour saw that Brother Arnvid was not able to rise to his feet again, and when the mass was at an end he lay in a swoon. Then they carried him into the dormitory and laid him on his couch; he moaned a little now and again, but was unconscious. In the middle of the day, however, he came to and asked in a low voice for the last office. As soon as he had received the sacraments he fell asleep, and when the monks came from vespers he was dead, so calmly that the friar who sat with him could not say when he ceased to breathe.

The Prior told him also that before Arnvid entered the convent he had disposed of a great part of his treasure to kinsmen and friends, and he had bidden his sons send these two drink-horns to Olav Audunsson. But the Arnvidssons were so unlike other men that they would never leave their home parish, and only when they went down to Hamar for their father’s burial had Magnus brought the horns to the convent; and Father Bjarne had been unwilling to send these rare treasures south until he could place them in the hands of one of his own order.

Olav knew the horns well from Miklebö. They were small, but very costly: two griffin’s claws mounted in silver and gilt. Olav and his friend had used them on the evenings of high festivals, when they drank mead or wine—they only held drink for one man.

The news of Arnvid’s death shook Olav to the heart. He could not bear to stay in town among the other men, but sailed out to Hestviken the same evening.

There had been times when he thought of his friend and recalled their last talk together, and it pained him that he had stripped himself so bare to the other. He regretted this weakness
so, that at times he had doubtless thought it would be easier for him if he heard that Arnvid was no more.—And then he felt all at once that this was the last stroke, and now he was no longer capable of fighting against his own heart—now that he knew that not a single one shared his secret: alone he would not be able to keep it any longer.

And for the first time he saw the true nature of this friendship. It was he who had taken advantage of the other—and Arnvid had allowed him to do so. He had lied to his friend, and his friend had seen through his untruthfulness; not only the first time, but always he had told Arnvid what suited himself—even to their last meeting; and Arnvid had accepted it and held his peace. It was always he who had sought support, and Arnvid had supported him—as Arnvid had given to all, whatever was asked of him. And the reward they had given him was to scourge him—he had found such reward as awaits the man who has courage to follow Christ’s example. And nevertheless Arnvid had blamed himself and thought himself an unfaithful follower, whenever he was unable to see his path clearly and whenever his heart was full of bitterness and contempt for men’s baseness—as must at times befall a sinful man, when he ventures to follow where God went before.