The Snake Pit Read Free Page B

deeper wisdom underlay our Lord’s commandment “Thou shalt not kill” than merely that which he had been told—God desires not the death of any sinner. Behind the commandment lay also a care for the slayer—the slayer also exposed his soul to many kinds of evil powers, which now found occasion for sudden assaults.
    Therefore it might well be of service to him to dwell with so pious a man as Olav Half-priest; his kinsman could surely afford him useful guidance in many things. Such as the penitential psalms —he had learned a number of them of Asbjörn All-fat and Arnvid in his days at Hamar, but now he had forgotten the most part.
    Olav invited his neighbours to a home-coming feast and told them that the wife he was to bring home was the daughter of Steinfinn Toresson, his foster-sister, to whom he had been betrothed when both were of tender age. So soon as he had looked about him at home and seen how his affairs stood he would ride back to the Upplands and fetch his wife. But as to the wedding he said not a word, whether it had already been drunk or was still to come; nor did he ask any of his neighbours to accompany him, though it was impossible for his kinsman to make the journey. Folk were quick to remark that the young Master of Hestviken was one who kept his own counsel and knew full well how far he would give an account of himself—not much was to be got out of him by asking questions.
    Olav had thought long and deeply whether he should mention that there was a child. Perhaps it might make the matter easier if he spoke of this beforehand. But he could not bring himself to it. And then he thought that after all it might be dead. It had been born quick—but death came easily to young children, he had heard it said. Or they might hit upon some means—put it out to foster-parents on the way, perhaps. That Ingunn should give himout as the child’s father, as he had told her in his first bewilderment and desperation, he now saw to be madness. He could not understand how he had come to conceive such a thought—bringing a bastard into the race. Had it but been a daughter, they could have put her in a convent, and no man would have suffered any great wrong by his letting her pass as his; but Ingunn had had a man-child—Oh, he had been witless at the time, from grief and anger. But he felt bound to accept the child, if the mother wished to have it with her. It must now fall out as fate would have it; useless to take up an evil before it was there.
    Nevertheless he crept one day up to the little room that was above the closet and the anteroom. The thought occurred to him that the child and its foster-mother might live there, if Ingunn wished to have her son in the house. Olav Ribbung’s daughters had slept in this loft with their serving-maids; but it was an age since the young women had lodged there. The dust and cobwebs of at least twenty years had collected there undisturbed, and the mice scrambled out of the bedstead when he went to see what might be stowed away there. Some old looms stood against the wall, and trestles for a table, and then there was a chest, carven with armorial bearings, which showed him that it had been his mother’s. He unlocked it: within lay spindles, spools, and combs and a little casket. In the casket was a book and a child’s swathe of white linen—a christening-robe, Olav guessed, no doubt the same that had been wrapped round him when he was lifted out of the baptismal font. He lingered, sitting on his haunches and twisting its embroidered border between two fingers.
    He took the book down with him and showed it to Olav Half-priest. But although the old man had always let it be thought that he could read and write as well as any priest—and much better than Sira Benedikt, their parish priest—there was in any case not much that he could make out of Cecilia Björnsdatter’s psalter. In the evening Olav sat and looked at it: little images were drawn within the capital letters, and