The Snake Pit (18 page)

Ingunn tumbled out of bed and went to him. “Eirik, Eirik, Eirik mine, hush, hush, hush, you will wake your father—oh be quiet now—there is nothing here that you need be afraid of, my little son!”

“You had better bring him over to us,” came Olav’s voice, wide awake, from the darkness.

“Oh, has he waked you again!” complained Ingunn as she came back with the boy and lay down—the two tossed and wriggled till they were comfortable.

“I was not yet asleep. What have you dreamed of this time, Eirik?”

But at night it was only his mother who would serve Eirik’s turn. He simply nestled closer to her and did not answer his father. They never got to hear anything of his dreams. He made a gesture of wiping something from his hands and throwing it from him two or three times. Then he gave a sigh of relief and lay down to rest. Very soon they were both asleep.

Olav was always more sleepless in spring than at other seasons; he seldom fell asleep before midnight and woke very early. On these early summer mornings the fiord often lay smooth as a mirror, pale blue and glistening in the sunlight, and the desolate shore opposite seemed bright and tranquil as a mirage. Olav was absurdly happy and light-hearted when he went out on such a morning. Torhild Björnsdatter was singing somewhere in the outhouses; she had already been long at work. Olav and the girl met in the yard; they stood and talked together in the morning sunshine.

When he came in again some hours later he sometimes stood for a moment looking at the two, mother and child, who were still asleep. Eirik lay with his face against his mother’s neck, breathing with half-open mouth. Ingunn held her narrow hand, heavy with rings, about his shoulder.

A fortnight before St. John’s Day, Ingunn gave birth to a man-child. Olav had him christened at once, Audun.

It was a tiny boy, purple and skinny. Olav put two fingers around his son’s hand one day, when he lay in Signe Arnesdatter’s
lap and was being washed—it was so thin, that little hand, almost like a chicken’s leg, and just as cold.

Olav felt no very deep affection for his son or joy that at last he had one. The waiting had been so long that the bare suspicion that Ingunn might be with child again had struck him with black despondency. He had grown so unused to the hope that all this misery might end at last in rejoicing that he had to have time to take it in.

But he saw that it was not so with the mother. In spite of her having expected nothing but bitter pain, against her own will her heart had trembled each time with hopeless and despairing love for the little unborn creatures. Now Audun inherited this love from all his brothers, who had left behind them not even a name or a memory.

Eirik was boisterously happy at having a brother. He knew from Siljuaas that the birth of a child was the greatest of great events. Then there were two or three strange women in the house, and they brought with them good food, and candles were burning in the room all night long. The child in the cradle was tended as a most precious thing—those outside the fence were lying in wait to steal it—and its health and well-being were constantly inquired after. That it was the worst off of all in the home when the next child came and took its place in the cradle—the child of yesteryear was abandoned to the care of its little sisters, always in the way and always in danger—of this Eirik took no account. Here in this house the time was one of immense festivity, so many wives, each with her maid, and masses of food—but the candles at night he and his father were cheated of; his mother and the new brother lay in another house.

“It’s my silken brother, but it’s only your woollen brother,” he said to Torhild’s two youngest children as they stood together watching Audun being dressed.

Olav was sitting with his wife at the moment; he heard it. He glanced at Ingunn. She lay looking at her two sons, radiant with joy.

His son—that little creature there, that the maid was pulling about. The other bent his healthy, beaming face over him and prattled to the little brother, whom all unwittingly he had deprived of his birthright.

It had caused a certain mild stir in the neighbourhood when the people of Hestviken so unexpectedly produced a big son of five who had been hidden away all this time.

Olav was not very well liked in the neighbourhood. He had been received with evident and cordial goodwill when he came home to his own—but little by little a feeling grew up among the people of the countryside that he had repelled their offers of friendship and good-neighbourship. Olav kept to himself more than they liked, and in company he was little inclined to be sociable; never discourteous—and this did not make him more popular, for it was taken as a sign that he thought himself something above the other franklins—but taciturn, quiet, and unapproachable. It was hinted in private, with a slight sneer, that Olav must think himself something like a courtier, since he had been Earl Alf’s man and was kinsman on his mother’s side to these great Danish lords who lay here in Norway half a year at a time and fed at the Duke’s table. Ay, ay. He owned his fathers’ manor yet, whole and undivided—but let him wait and see how long that would last, in days such as these. Although he never shirked doing anything that was his due, and was not ill-natured when it was a question of helping anyone, nobody
cared
to ask Olav Audunsson to do him a favour. For if folk who were in difficulties went to the rich Master of Hestviken, it was as though he scarce troubled himself to listen to them. When they had explained to him their situation at length, he would ask at the end of it all, as though he had been thinking of other things: ay, what was it they wanted—? No one could deny that Olav was generous in both giving and lending, but if anyone would ease his heart and discuss his affairs with him, there was no comfort to be had of it in that house—he gave such answers that one knew not whether the man was foolish or indifferent. So that unless folk had the most crying need of a helping hand, they preferred to go to another, who would listen to what they said, express an opinion, and give them counsel and consolation, even if this man might not grant them help without some hanging back, saying he was badly off himself—but in God’s name—

Another matter which had been remarked by the neighbours was that no man had seen Olav get honestly drunk or free-spoken in a carouse. He drank no less than other good men at a banquet. But it seemed that God’s gifts did not bite on him.

And by degrees there grew up a feeling in the countryside—vague and formless, for no one really knew on what they based it, but with all its obscurity it was strong as a certainty—that this man had something on his mind, a secret misfortune or a sin. The handsome, erect young master, with the broad, fair face beneath his curly flaxen hair, was a marked man.

It was a strange thing too about his wife, that she could not give birth to living children. Little it was that one saw of Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter, and the poor thing was not much to look at either. But folk still remembered how fair she had been—and that not so many years ago.

And now it came out that they
had
a child. For all these years they had had a son hidden away, the Fiend knew where, far in the north in her home country.

Begotten while the father was an outlaw, ay, that was it. Olav had made that known, briefly and clearly. Folk knew that his quarrel with his wife’s kinsmen had arisen from this, that Steinfinn on his deathbed had given into Olav’s charge the daughter to whom the lad had been betrothed since their childhood. Olav had accepted her as his wife, and it was impossible to interpret Steinfinn’s words otherwise than that this accorded with his wishes. But the new sponsors had thought they might dispose of the fair and wealthy maid in another manner. Now Olav declared that the summer before he made final reconciliation with his wife’s kinsmen, he had secretly visited the house where she dwelt. But in the meantime this had had to be kept secret.

So said Olav Audunsson. But folk began to wonder. Perhaps it was not so sure that Olav had accepted purely of his own free will the wife he was made to marry by Steinfinn’s order, while he was a mere boy and subject to Steinfinn’s authority. Had he not rather tried to shuffle out of a marriage into which he had been forced in childhood? Folk who had seen a little of their life together—their serving-folk and the neighbours’ wives who had been with Ingunn when she lay sick—spoke of what they knew. True enough, Olav was good to his wife in a way, but he was sulky and silent at home as he was abroad; days might pass when he spoke not a word to his wife even. Ingunn never looked happy, and that was not so strange either—a woman who was tied to this
cross-stick of a husband, always in bad health and giving birth to one dead child after another.

One day the new priest, Sira Hallbjörn, came to Hestviken.

He was a fairly young man, tall and slight, with a handsome face, but his hair was fiery red and folk thought he had a haughty look. He had made himself somewhat disliked in a short time. Scarcely had he come to the parish when he raised dissension on every side, over the property of the Church and the incomings of the glebe, over old agreements which Sira Benedikt had made with the owners of the land, but which this new man found to be unlawful. Both the monastery on Hovedö and the nuns’ convent of Nonneseter owned farms and shares of farms in the parish, as did several of the churches and pious foundations in Oslo. The deputies of these institutions were for the most part wise and kindly men who were on good terms with the country folk, many of whom had bought themselves a resting-place within the walls of the convents; and when it happened that any of the Hovedö monks themselves came to visit their farms, the franklins flocked from far around to hear mass in their chapels. And then it was not long before Sira Hallbjörn fell out with the convent folk. On the other hand the priest had set his whole heart upon some monks of a new order that had just come into the country: they went barefoot, in habits that were like sackcloth and ashes, and the virtues they chiefly practised were said to be humility, meekness, and frugality—ay, ’twas said these friars begged their daily bread as they went about teaching rich and poor the true fear of God, and had they aught left in their bag after vespers, they were to share it among the poor and themselves go out each morning with empty hands. Now it was sure that Sira Hallbjörn was neither humble nor meek, but proud of his birth—he came of noble stock far away in Valdres—and he was little fitted to teach the fear of God, for he was so learned and his speech was so hard to understand that folk had no great benefit from listening to him. But he could never praise these beggar friars enough—Minorites they called themselves—and made himself as it were their protector, gave great gifts to the house they had set about building in the town, and tried to persuade his parishioners to do the same. But folk found out that this must be because the Duke favoured
these new monks greatly, while the Bishop and most of the priests and learned men in the town liked them ill and thought that the rule of this order was dangerous and unsound. And folk knew that Sira Hallbjörn had been sent out to this parish because he, a man who by his birth and rare learning seemed destined for the highest offices of the Church, had fallen out with the Bishop and the whole chapter of Oslo, through being so proud and quarrelsome and thinking he knew and understood and could teach everything better than all the others. But they were not able to do any worse thing to him than banish him to this good call—his conduct was blameless in all else, he had studied in foreign lands for many years, and he knew all that was to be known of the law and justice of the land, from the oldest times down to his own day.

It was in order to hear what Olav knew about a right to salmon-fishing in a little river over on the Hudrheim side that he had come today. Olav could not tell him much—the farm with which the right went had been sold by his grandfather to his son-in-law and since then it had been divided and had passed into many hands. He could see that Sira Hallbjörn was vexed because he could tell him so little of the matter; nevertheless Olav asked, while the priest sat at meat, if he could throw light on a question that weighed on his mind. “It concerns my sons—”

It was thus: he had heard that a child begotten while the father is under ban of outlawry is outside the law and has no rights, even if the mother be the outlaw’s duly married wife.

“Nay, nay,” said Sira Hallbjörn, with a sweep of the hand. “You have heard of the wolf’s cub—such was the name they gave to an outlawed man’s child in old days. Then it was so that the outlaw was treated as a dead man: his estate was divided and his wife held to be a widow; and if he were granted grace, he had to ask her again of her kinsfolk and wed her anew. But you know full well that such a law cannot hold among Christian men—among us no sin and no sentence can sever the bond of wedlock between man and wife.”

“Her kinsmen would not have it that ’twas lawful wedlock, that which had been made between us when we were young,” said Olav. “’Twas only after Eirik was born that I got her with her kinsfolk’s consent.”

“You need have no fear on that score now. Whether the boy were true-born or not, he enjoys the same rights now that you
are married with her kinsfolks’ consent, so none can dispute with you whether ’tis lawful marriage.”