The Snake Pit Read Online

When the order came that the priests of Norway were to live in celibacy, Ingolf Priest sent his wife home to Tveit, the estate in Soleyar which she had brought him as her dowry; and all the children followed their mother, save the youngest son, Olav; he was himself set apart for the priesthood and newly ordained deacon when the accident befell him that made him a cripple. But he had lived in chastity all his days, and folk thought he had such great insight into many things that some held him to be more learned and pious than their parish priest. It was above all when folk were troubled by the walking dead and by goblins on sea and land, or when they had some sickness that was thought to be the work of witchcraft or evil spirits, that they sought counsel of Olav Half-priest, for he had more understanding of such things than all men else.

Olav Audunsson took to his namesake at once—in the first place because he was his nearest kinsman and the first man of his father’s race whom he had met. It was strange to be here and to know that this was his ancestral manor and these surroundings his native soil; here he was destined to live the rest of his life—and he would have grown up here, but that his lot had been so markedly unlike that of other young men. But fate had cast him far from his home while he was yet a child, and since then he had been homeless and rootless as a log adrift in the sea.

Now he had come back to the place from which he had sprung. In a way he felt at home with many things, both indoors and out; but for all that it was very different from what he seemed to remember. The mill in Hestvikdal was familiar, but all that lay on the other side of the creek—the Bull, the wooded ridge—was as though he had never seen it, nor could he remember the marshy valley along the stream, a waste full of foliage trees. He could never have known what the country was like to the north of the creek—perhaps he had believed it settled and tilled like the shores of Lake Mjösen. But from Hestviken not a single human dwelling was to be seen.

The houses of the manor he remembered much bigger than they were. And the little strip of beach hemmed in by rocks, which had seemed to him a whole stretch of country with many distinctive marks—a great bluish rock on which he used to lie, some bushes in which he could hide—now he saw that the little strip of sand was scarcely fifty of a grown man’s paces in length. He looked in vain for a hollow in the meadow above the manor, where he had been wont to sit and sun himself—it might have been a little pit east of the barn, which was now overgrown with osiers and alders. In a crack of the rock in the courtyard he had once found a curious snow-white ring—it must have been a vertebra of some bird or fish, from which the points were broken off, he now thought. But at that time he had taken it for a rare treasure, had preserved it carefully and often searched in the crevices of the rock to see if he could find others like it. It was almost like remembering old dreams—the scenes of the past floated before him in fragments—and at times he recalled a forgotten feeling of eeriness, as though after bad dreams he remembered no more than the dread.

So he snatched at everything that might help him to overcome this sense of insecurity, of dreams and shadows, and make him feel that Hestviken was his, and that when he walked over the fields here he had his own ancestral soil under his feet—the Bull, the woods and hills on both sides of the valley, all was his land. And he was glad to think that now he was dwelling under the same roof as a kinsman, his own grandfather’s cousin, who had known all the men and women of his race since the days of his great-grandfather’s, Olav Ribbung’s manhood. When he sat in the evening drinking with his namesake and the old man told him of their bygone kinsmen, Olav had a sense of fellowship with his father’s stock which he had never known when he was in Denmark among his mother’s kindred.

And he was drawn to the old man by the belief that Olav Priest’s son was so pious and learned. During these weeks, while he was awaiting the time when he could go northward and fetch Ingunn, he felt in a way as though he were settling his account with God.

He himself was fully aware that it would not be easy for him to show perfect serenity and a glad countenance when he came to Berg to conclude the atonement with Haftor and receive Ingunn as his wife at the hands of the Steinfinnssons. But it could not be otherwise—and to get her was what he himself wished, in spite of all—and so he would surely be man enough to put a good face on it. But he could not defend himself against the insistence of childish memories—the certain knowledge that they belonged to each other and should always be together. That anything could come between them had been so far from their thoughts that it had never moved their hearts to either joy or wonder—they had taken it for granted that it should be as it had been determined for them. Until that summer when, locked in an embrace, they had fallen out of childhood and innocence, frightened, but at the same time giddy with rapture at the new sweetness they had found in each other—whether it were right or wrong that they abandoned themselves to it. Even when he awoke to a fear and defiance of all who would meddle with their destiny, he had been full sure that at last they two would win their cause. These memories would come suddenly upon Olav, and the pain of them was like the stab of a knife. That dream was now to take its course-but not the course he had imagined. And remembering himself as he was then was like remembering some other man he had known—a boy of such infinite simplicity that he both pitied and despised him, and envied him excruciatingly—a child he had been, with no suspicion of deceit, either in himself or in others. But he knew that for this anguish of the soul there was but one remedy—he would have to hide his wound so that no one, she least of all, might see that he bore a secret hurt.

These thoughts might assail him while he sat conversing with the other Olav, and he would break off in the midst of his talk. The old man scarcely noticed it, but talked on and on, and the young man stared before him with a face hard and close—till old Olav asked him some question, and young Olav became aware that he had not heard a word of what the other had been saying.

But he made ready to shoulder the burden he had to bear-without wincing, should it be God’s will to chasten him sorely in the coming years. For in a way the memory of that ski journey he had made with another and of the night at the sæter was ever present to him—except that he did not seem to see himself as the murderer. Rather was it as though he had witnessed a settling of scores between two strangers. But it was he, he knew that in a strange, indifferent way, and the sin was his sin.