In the Wilderness (23 page)

Cecilia spat on her knife and wiped it on the inside of her kirtle, then she cut herself a good piece of cheese and laid it between two slices of bread—not a word did she utter.

Olav laughed.

“May I see that knife of yours—’twas a feeble defence that, my daughter!”

“Then give me a better knife, Father!” said the maid.

“That I will,” replied her father, gaily as before.

After supper Olav fetched in the little iron-bound coffer in
which he kept his treasures. The girls hung over his shoulders as he searched in it—not many times had the children been allowed to see what their father kept therein. They uttered a cry and asked a question as each thing was brought to light, and Olav, who was in a good humour this evening, let them handle the jewels and try them on. At the bottom lay four handsome daggers—Olav never wore them.

Cecilia snatched the longest. “Will you give me this one, Father?” She drew it out of its sheath.

It was a foreign weapon with a three-cornered blade, the handle and sheath finely ornamented with gilt rings. Olav took it from her, looked at it a moment.

“That is no woman’s knife, Cecilia—’tis only fit to strike down a foe. This you will find more useful—” he handed her a big Norwegian knife with a broad, strong blade and a handle of carved walrus tusk.

“I would rather have the other,” said the maid.

Olav considered a moment. “ ’Tis not often you ask anything of me—take it then.” He took up her thick flaxen plait—it lay in coils, so curly was Cecilia’s hair. “You should not have been the
daughter
of this house, Cecilia, that is sure.”

Olav heard tidings of Eirik once in a while. And as he grew accustomed to the boy’s absence, the thought sometimes came to him: perhaps Eirik would never come home. And it might happen that he thought that were best. He must surely receive something in return for having sold his soul. If the fraud were wiped out, so that his race and his heritage were not falsified—then it seemed to him it would be somewhat easier to face death and judgment. His own life he had thrown away—by his own fault; he thought of it with a strange, clear composure—it almost gave him a kind of chilly joy to recognize that the injustice was his, God was just. He had never been able to understand how any man could find consolation in blaming or cursing God. And he himself was only
one man;
his fate could be no such great matter. He felt it a good thing to know that the world was safe in the hands of the gentle Christ, however many men might rise in revolt.

Cecilia’s happiness—that he believed in firmly.

The same year, about midsummer, Baard of Skikkjustad and Signe Arnesdatter married off their eldest daughter. The bridegroom
lived in the neighbouring parish, and Olav Audunsson was one of those who brought the bride home to his house, for he was her godfather.

A good godfather he had not been; he had paid little heed to the maiden—her name was Helga. She was of plain and modest appearance and had little to say for herself, by all accounts; but on her wedding-day she was fair to look upon.

At first Baard had refused to hear of this marriage; he had had many matters in dispute with the bridegroom—who was much older than Helga. But at the mid-Lent Thing this year an atonement had been made between the men and so Baard betrothed his daughter to Hoskold Jonsson.

Olav was strangely moved at the sight of the young bride—Helga Baardsdatter was so changed that she seemed to have taken on a new semblance. Others of the wedding guests had felt the same, he found—they spoke of it as they sat together on the evening of the third day of the feast in a little house apart, where quarters had been assigned to the older and more esteemed guests who attended the wedding. Olav had been placed high up, next after Torgrim of Rynjul, the husband of the bride’s aunt; facing him sat Sira Hallbjörn in the highest seat.

From Hoskold and Helga the talk shifted to other women who had been notably fair and merry brides—or good and staunch housewives. The old men always thought that none of those now living could bear to be set beside the women they remembered in their youth.

Sira Hallbjörn leaned over the table, drawing lines with the spilt ale. He had been out of humour all through the wedding, tired and taciturn. This seemed to weary him.

“Do you mean to sit here all night prating of these dead women? While they lived, their husbands were as sick of them as are most men, I’ll warrant. Methinks that fair companion of Olav Audunsson’s is better worth possessing than all the rest together.” He laughed weakly, being somewhat gone in drink. “Tell me, friend Olav, will you sell me that fair mistress of yours?”

Olav straightened himself abruptly, red and angry—he could not guess what the priest was aiming at. Torgrim of Rynjul did not see it either; he asked:

“What mean you, Sira?”

Sira Hallbjörn laughed as before, stretched behind Torgrim’s
back, and passed his hand over the blade of Olav’s axe, which hung behind his seat. “She it is I mean—” he let his hand fall on Olav’s shoulder.

Olav shook it off with a laugh of displeasure. “No, priest—lately you would have my falcon—and this axe is not—”

The axe Kinfetch rang—everyone present heard it. Its deep notes sang out through the room and slowly died away.

Sira Halbjörn leaped up and seized the axe. “Is she one of those that sing, your axe, Olav?” he asked excitedly.

“So ’tis said. But I thought she had lost her voice long ago—from old age.” He took the axe from the priest and hung it back on the wall.

The men fell into a discussion, whether the axe had sung of itself or whether it was owing to Sira Hallbjörn’s touching it.

Olav and the priest had looked each other in the eyes an instant—then they both laughed, alike uncheerful. It was as though they had discovered a bond between them—that the heart of neither was in this merriment.

Olav took his leave of the bridal gathering the same evening, but told his men they might stay till the next day and escort Mærta Birgersdatter and the children home.

The sky was covered high up by a thin veil of cloud. Under the colourless vault of the summer night the farms loomed grey with uncut meadows and strips of pale-green corn, as Olav rode along the path that ran through the belt of copse skirting the home fields. The world was asleep but for the harsh note of the corncrake somewhere in the meadow.

He reached the hamlet by the church, and the horse moved more freely, eager for home. The church stood on a little height with its stone walls shining faintly and its shingle roof rising above the little window-slits. Olav turned his horse into the track that led to the church green. The stillness of night seemed to press upon him like a living thing, as the sound of the horse’s hoofs was deadened in the rough grass.

By the churchyard wall lay some ancient burial mounds; the largest came right up to the fence, so that the old ash trees that surmounted it cast their shade beyond it. Olav dismounted and tied his horse to a rail near the gate of the churchyard. He must have no steel on him, he remembered—he took off his belt and
laid it on the ground together with his axe. Then he went forward to the biggest of the mounds.

The very sound of dry twigs breaking under his footsteps—there was a thick carpet of them under the ash trees—gave him a chill feeling that raised the hair on his head. He walked over the mound, down to the churchyard wall, and mounted it. Within, the gravestones lay sunken in the summer growth of grass, which reached to the wall of the church. Olav gazed till black specks seemed to float before his eyes, and his heart beat so that he had a taste of blood in his mouth. But the feeling of dizziness was only as though the world swam around him; within himself there was calm, an undisturbed core. Nevertheless he involuntarily closed his eyes at the sound of his own voice, as he called clearly and firmly:

“Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter—arise!”

His horse out on the green gave a start, he could hear. He dared not turn and look that way; his eyes were fixed on the church wall, where he descried the gravestone close by the women’s door. Cold and stiff in the cheeks with pallor, he called again:

“Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter—arise!

“Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter—arise!”

Again he had closed his eyes, but he
saw
it—the grey stone slowly lifting, the white figure of the dead rising up and shaking the mould from her grave-clothes.

He bent his head back, drew breath, and opened his eyes. There was nothing to be seen but the grey, mild night. Olav stared—as though this was more incredible than aught else. But the churchyard lay there asleep, with the sunken stones half-hidden by the long grass, right up to the grey wall of the church.

At last he turned, walked back across the mound, down to his horse. As he untied the reins he saw that the dun noticed something; he stood with his head raised, nostrils distended, laid back his ears, and started twice as Olav lay his hand on him—but Olav could see nothing. Then he got into the saddle and gave the horse his head—the swift pace did him good; the pressure of the air and the thud of hoofs overcame the sinister silence.

It was morning when he reached Hestviken; the clouds were faintly tinged with pink. When Olav had stabled his horse he went out on the rock to look at the weather—from habit. A little breeze before sunrise darkened the water of the fiord.

The living-room was empty and deserted. Olav went into the closet, flung himself on the bed without undressing. But as soon as he had closed his eyes, he started up, wide awake. He stared at the grey opening into the larger room—but there was no one.

Thoughts rose in him like bitter waters. She had once
promised
—if the dead may visit the living.

But now she was infinitely farther from him than before—the first year, nay, the first summer after her death he had felt how near she was yet, in the darkness that concealed them from each other. Now they had come so far asunder that she no longer heard him when he called.

As he lay, the solitude about him turned little by little to a kind of vision. He was up on a bare and rocky mountain-top, where some heather grew and the rocks were grey with lichen. Beneath him on every side lay forest, grey with rime, and in the hollows were pale bogs with frozen water-holes, but far away the grey, closed sky was merged in low, dark-blue ridges. He tried to send a cry out yonder, but knew it was useless. The vision faded slowly into a dreamless gloom of sleep, and he did not wake till Ragna came in at breakfast-time; she had wondered greatly, she said, when she heard from Svein that his horse stood in the stable, but not the others’.

I
T
chanced several times that autumn that Olav saw smoke on the high ground above Hudrheimsland. He paused in his work to watch it. It must be there that Torhildrud lay, as near as he could guess.

There came some gleaming blue sunny days, when the very roar of the waves against the rocks seemed permeated with light and wind. Yellow leaves flew brightly in the air, and space itself was widened, from the dark-blue, foam-flecked surface of the fiord up to the bright, wind-swept vault, where little shreds of white cloud raced along, infinitely high. And one day about nones Olav went down, took one of the smallest boats, and sailed across alone.

Today it was like a sport to lie sailing over the flowing translucent waves. The spray that wetted him through was gleaming
white. The sky was so high up that he felt lost in this little boat among the waves, and every time the boat rose on the crest, he saw that the land on the other side had come nearer, plainer to the sight. He was almost in the mood of his boyhood, when he had run away from Frettastein to play in the woods.

On coming ashore he walked rapidly up the path to the hills. The wooded slopes here were already thinned; yellow leaves whirled and drifted, flying past him like showers of glittering light, dancing over the path. The rushing wind filled Olav with well-being.

Now his only wonder was that he had not thought of this years ago: he ought to have come over to see her, find out how she and the boy were doing. Not but what he could be sure she would hold her own, capable woman that she was. But he ought to have offered to help her, if she would accept his help—seeing that he was the father of her son.

He himself did not understand why it had once seemed so impossible to meet Torhild—as though their meeting could only breed new difficulties. For they were no longer young, either of them—but he had never thought of that before.

He came to the gate at the edge of the wood, followed the path between the cairns. There was much more plough-land now—stubble-fields. She seemed to have harvested all her crops.

Olav looked forward, but without excitement, to seeing her again, and Björn.

A dog began to bark within the house. The door opened—the dog came rushirig toward him, yelping. Behind it Torhild stooped in the doorway, looking out.

He could not interpret the expression of her face, but it was somehow quite different from what he had expected. She accepted his hand rather half-heartedly.

“Are
you
abroad—over here?”

“Ay—think you that so strange?”

“Oh, nay. There may well be reason in it too,” said Torhild quietly.

She invited the man in, bade him be seated, offered a bowl of milk—“ale I have none.” Then she knelt down by the hearth, blew life into the embers, and made up a fire. “You must be wet and cold—will you not sit closer?”

Olav thanked her and seated himself on the stool she had pulled
forward—for that matter, he had walked himself dry. “But warm your feet now,” suggested Torhild.

From the bed came a faint sound of whimpering—an infant, he could hear. Torhild gave a rapid glance over her shoulder, but took no further notice; she hung a pot over the fire and poured milk into it. Meanwhile their talk was of the wind and the fine weather; it dragged somewhat with both of them.

“Björn is not at home?” asked Olav.

“No, he went with Ketil—they were to take a cow to the manor here.”

“Ay, it has been told me how much you have increased your estate. You must have not a few head of cattle, since you till so many acres?”