The Snake Pit Read Free

here and to know that this was his ancestral manor and these surroundings his nativesoil; 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