In the Wilderness (9 page)

And the mortal horror of it had been that he had thought this was his work, and he was not able to bear it.—He tried to take the dead child up in his arms; he must bring her back to life. Yet he could not remember having dreamed that he thrust the dagger into the child. And it was but a dream.

A wind was blowing, with a sighing in the tree-tops and a rustling of leaves. He lay shivering and tried to distinguish things about him in the dark. A little animal was stirring among the dry leaves. His dream still troubled him; and he could not guess what it might mean—he had never wronged any
woman
that he knew of, save Torhild; but this was a little girl. He remembered plainly the face of the dead child among the leaves: the chin was short and broad, the lips full, the hair dark and reaching no farther than the shoulders. He could not recall having known any child like her.

It could not be Cecilia, his fair-haired child. A warm feeling of relief went through him: there could be no danger threatening her.

But his thoughts would not leave the dream. It was either a sorcery of the evil powers or a warning that he was unable to interpret—as yet. And he thought of that adventure in the garden the evening before—was that real or glamour? She had been so like Ingunn that it could not be true—and he had felt that Ingunn herself was there, quite near him, wailing in the fires of sorrow and impotence. And all at once he saw it—if she had not been able to make him hear, if she had been forced to witness it, in the place where she was, bound with fetters of gloom and death and powerlessness—that he yielded himself to the pixy or whatever she was—

It was as though something went to pieces within him. Sorrow and tenderness flowed over, hot as blood, and filled his being, thawed and relaxed every fibre—
so
near had he been to working her destruction—after he had striven, all the years she had lived, to sustain her as well as he could.

Then it flashed on him that he had called on Mary for help—and he wondered at it; for it was years since he had asked anything of
her
. It had seemed that he must think himself above seeking help there, when he wilfully defied her Son. He had said his Ave as he had been wont to do from childhood, in order to show her such honour as was her due, but never with the thought
of gaining anything. And now he had called upon her, as a lost child calls for its mother.

Olav turned over on his other side and settled himself with his face buried in his arm so as to shut out the darkness.
Salve Regina, mater misericordia
—he would repeat the anthem over and over again until he fell asleep and had no other thought in his mind. “Ay, Mary, now I will come and pray for grace with our Lord.”

By turns he slept awhile, woke again, slept, and tossed in a riot of disconnected dream-visions, and over them all was a vague horror—each time he awoke with a stab of pain at the heart. But each time he settled himself again, summoning all his will to the same end: the prayer that was to be his shield that night.

And then at last he woke and felt that the sun was shining and that he was rested. And there still lingered in his mind the aftertaste of a morning dream, giving sweetness and security beyond compare.

He was penetrated all through by the raw cold of the ground, but he lay still, gazing about him in the woodland, where the dew glistened blue and white in the brightness of the morning. The drops lay thick on every blade of grass. The bushes with the dark, hard, spiked leaves shone like burnished steel. A blue haze lay among the trees, round which the ivy twined its green curtain. And the dream ran on in his mind like the soft and milky morning light.

He had thought he lay in a woman’s lap, with his head against her heart, and from his feeling of deep sweetness, free from desire, he knew who she was, and said it: Mother! He did not recall the look of her face—did not recall it now—but in his dream he thought he had recognized her, though he had been but a tiny witless infant when she died.

Arnvid had also been dimly present once in his dream, in a long, white garment—the habit of his order, no doubt—and Arnvid had spoken to his mother; but they had talked as it were over his head, as though he had been a child in swaddling-clothes that his mother held in her lap. Bishop Torfinn he had also seen. Their figures were all illumined as clouds are by the sun behind them, but this refulgence did not shine upon him; and he knew that it was not the sun, but a knowledge, or a vision, that was theirs; but he had it not, he only saw the reflection of it in them.

A little church bell began to tinkle not far away. Olav got to
his feet, stiff with cold. He was in a sorry state, with kirtle rent and soiled. He brushed and picked off leaves and litter. If he had only had a cloak with a hood to it—he took it off and carried it over his arm; thus his going hatless would be less noticed.

Olav followed the sound of the bell; the path led down along the edge of the beechwood. On rounding the corner he looked involuntarily to the westward—but instantly thought it would be of little use to look for
that
manor-house: it would scarce be there today. The little church where the bell was ringing stood on a mound on the other side of a brook. He made for it, sure that there he would find the solution of all that baffled him.

It was a bare and poor little house and the air was musty and raw within; Olav guessed that mass was not often said here, and the mass that was now being celebrated was for the benefit of the ten or twelve poorly clad men who stood near the altar with a banner in their midst—it was no doubt some little brotherhood and this was their feast-day. The men had made themselves trim according to their means. But the priest’s chasuble was threadbare, the deacon and the choirboys seemed listless and comported themselves without grace or dignity, while the priest hurried through the service, as though his only thought was to get it over.

Any message to himself he could not find, other than that he stood there, poor and a stranger, among these poor men who took part with him in the perfunctory office. It became clearer to him than before, how little a middle-aged man counts for in this world when he is stripped of all the added worth that goods and kindred bring. And he would learn this more and more thoroughly the farther he strayed from his home—he saw that now.

He had learned it once before, he remembered—in his youth, in the years when he was an outlaw. A clear, cool bitterness seized upon him. Was it for this he had come home, and was it for this he had dwelt all those years with his only dear one as in a dark house—that God should now lead him out, lock the door behind him, and send him roaming again?

He
saw
his manor, as in a vision—more clearly than he had ever seen it with his eyes. The wharf and the sheds with the water of the fiord lapping about the piles, the long row of sun-scorched turf roofs and dun gables up on the hillside and the wall of the Horse Crag behind, his cornfields among bare grey and reddish
rocks, the hills around, grey and weather-worn, with wind-bent firs toward the fiord, meadows inland along the valley, and then the forest. The domain was not so great but that he had seen greater, but it was
his;
from here his fathers before him had gone out into the world, and hither they had returned. If all else in his life had turned out otherwise than he had expected, he had won back his patrimony and maintained it; he would leave behind no less than he had received. There were boats now, great and small, by the wharves; there were fields and meadows that he had cleared anew on the mossy, alder-grown land toward Kverndal.

The poor men advanced to the altar in a body. Now he saw the image on their banner: Jesus bending under the cross, and a man walking behind and helping to bear it, Simon the Cyrenian. So it was a guild of porters. A deacon made a sign to Olav, thinking he belonged to the fellowship. Olav shook his head and knelt down where he had been standing, by the door.

And in the poor vesture of the host our Lord descended and gave Himself to His poor friends—he was the only one present who dared not to go forward to the table. For years he had known that when he needs must go, at Easter, he went as Judas went to the Last Supper. As a child he had never been able to understand that Judas dared, for he must have known that God knew what he had done. Now he himself was in the same case as Judas Iscariot: he moved among his even Christians, and they reckoned him a good Christian, even as the apostles had reckoned Judas their fellow as they sat down with him at table that evening. And his only thought had been that in the midst of the company he was alone with Him who knew of his betrayal.

Such a man had he become. Yet his spirit had once been as a young field, full of the good corn that had been sown in it: the heritage of his ancestors, loyal men and unafraid, who did not cast their eyes backward after their lost happiness so long as they could keep their honour bright. But he had so ordered his life that now it had become as the lost fields he had found when he came home to Hestviken, overgrown with weeds and scrub.

Olav looked up. On the wall opposite there was painted a picture of our Lord sitting at the marriage feast in Cana. And near to Him stood Mary; she motioned with her hand to the servants, while her eyes looked straight into those of the man kneeling by the door:

“Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it!”

Olav knew not whether he had heard the words from without or within himself.

“Then clear me, Lord, as the husbandman clears his field with fire and with sickle—take back Thine inheritance, that it may bear increase for Thee!”

Once again he saw Hestviken as in a magic vision. A vision of a grey sea, flecked with silver over the glittering waves, and beyond it the coast sinking in a blue-grey mist. And he saw himself, so puny and alone, as a man standing on a rock in the outermost belt of skerries. In solitude he waited for Him who walks upon the glittering waves as a husbandman walks over his fields, and checks the storm as a man checks his horse. And the man on the skerry was free, so free as none can conceive, save him who has been stifled in the darkness through the long night of deadly sin.

Among the torch-bearing acolytes the priest advanced along the line of poor workmen. Each time he took a host from the ciborium Olav prayed softly: “Thou rich Christ, have mercy upon me!” Thou rich Christ—never till now had he reflected why men called God so. Now he knew it. “Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter in under my roof, I am poor and naked, I own nothing wherewith to do Thee honour; but Thou enterest into an empty house, Lord, and fillest Thy creature with blessings.

“Then it may be that Thou wilt take me into Thy service again. Am I too old to learn to read and sing Thy praises? Then I am surely young and strong enough to be sold in exchange for an outworn slave in the land of the blacks.”

He became aware of someone tapping on the wall close beside him. A half-grown boy was chipping off plaster with the key and seemed impatient to lock up. The church was empty. Olav rose to his feet and went out.

Down through the fields they passed, the brotherhood, the priest and his assistants. The blue silken banner showed up against the yellowing wheat. The boy locked the church door and darted after them. Olav followed slowly, bareheaded in the sunshine.

The ship’s boat was gone when he reached the landing-place in the west of the town; he had to go on to the hithe where they lay and find a ferryman. He laughed on seeing Olav, and said something. Olav guessed the meaning, if not the words, joined in
the laugh, and shook his head. He was strangely cheerful and light-hearted—as though in face of a new departure.

On board he found the Richardsons. Olav saw that they had been talking about him—and they looked at him with sly merriment, coming home so late in the day, ragged and without his hat. But they ignored it, and so did Olav.

The Richardsons had come to get the others to join them in a pilgrimage. There was a sanctuary somewhere in the woods north of London, with a miraculous image of our Lady; this had once been hidden in a hollow oak when the vikings were harrying the land, and found again in that place. Tomorrow was the feast-day.

Olav was glad. He had already thought that from tomorrow he would attend a church of Mary; he cared no more to think of the Dominicans’ church.

I
N
the afternoon of the next day Olav stood on the green outside the place of pilgrimage—he was looking for his companions.

In the yellow rays of the declining sun the dust hung like a mist over the trampled grass—the place swarmed with folk who were now taking their departure. An immense cross came swaying along, carried in the midst of a body of men in penitential garments; they sang the litany as they marched, stirring up fresh clouds of dust with their feet. For a long time the notes of their singing floated after them like a streak through the drone of voices and the thunder of hoofs, the plaintive whining of fiddles, and the sombre throbbing of harps.

The beechwood surrounded the place like a wall, and the foliage shone with a dull gleam in the sunshine against the blue-grey sky—it was a hot day. At the bottom of the slope a fair was being held in a meadow by the stream: the smoke of bonfires rose above the copsewood; oxen and sheep were being roasted whole down there, and the shrill cries of the vendors cleft the hum and uproar of folk who were now beginning to be drunken and frolicsome.

A few people were still moving in and out of the church; but that morning the men from the
Reindeer
had barely been able to press their way in to the mass, and they had seen nothing, so
packed was the great church. And it had taken a long time to elbow their way into the chapel where stood our Lady of the Oak. At least a hundred candles were burning in there, like a wall of living flame; the shrine gleamed with gold and silver. The image was black as pitch, the face was long, stiff, and hard under the golden crown, and the child peeping out under the mantle of gold brocade was like the stump of a root. But it was very ancient and venerable. There was no time to say any long prayer within the sanctuary, such was the press of folk.