The Snake Pit Read Online Free PDF Page A

asked:
    “I know not what you mean, Sira Benedikt. I am but newly come home and am strange to these parts—I have never heard aught of this enmity between your kindred and mine.”
    Sira Benedikt seemed greatly surprised, and a little embarrassed as well. “I thought surely Olav Half-priest had spoken to you of this?”
    Olav shook his head.
    “Then ’tis better I tell you myself.” The priest sat in thought awhile, jogging the little dipper that floated in the ale-bowl and making it sail round.
    “Did you look at those fair children of mine, the little maids that came in here, Olav?”
    “Indeed they were fair. And were it not that I have a young bride waiting for me in the Upplands, I had used my eyes better while your kinswomen were here, Sira!” said Olav with a little smile.
    “If I guess your meaning aright,” replied the priest, and he too smiled, but with a troubled look, “you cannot be aware that they are your own kinswomen, and near of kin too?”
    Olav turned his eyes upon the priest and waited.
    “You are second cousins. Torgils Foulbeard was the father of their father. He ruined my sister—”
    Involuntarily Olav’s face was convulsed with horror. Sira Benedikt saw it, guessed the young man’s thought, and said:
    “Nay, ’twas before God took his wits from Torgils, or the Evil One, whom he had followed so faithfully, while sin and lust tempted him. Ay, God knows I am not an impartial man when I speak of Olav Half-priest; he and Torgils were foster-brothers, and Olav backed the other through thick and thin. Olav Ribbung would compel Torgils to marry Astrid; he was an honourable, resolute, and loyal man—and when Torgils left her to her shame with his bastard son, while he himself kept to his leman in Oslo and would marry her, Olav Ribbung commanded his son to come hither. Ingolf, your grandfather, and Olav’s daughters, and Ivar Staal, his son-in-law, all said they would not sit at meat with Torgils nor speak to him while he held fast to his purpose. But Torgils was living with the priest, the father of Olav Ingolfsson—the more shame to them that they received him; one was a priest and the other was to be one.
    “Ay, and the end was that my father and brothers accepted fines and made atonement with the Hestvik men when we saw that neither Olav Ribbung nor Ingolf could do aught to shake Torgils or force him to make amends for Astrid’s misfortune.’Twas the better and more Christian way—that is true. But had I been of an age to bear arms, I know full sure I would not have rested till I had laid Torgils low—I had done it even if I had been a priest, ordained to the service of God. I have hated that man so that—God sees my heart, and He knows it. But He knows too, I ween, that the hardest thing He can require of a man is that he shall not avenge his kinswoman’s honour with the sword.—I was ten years old when it happened. Astrid had been to me as a mother; she was the eldest of our family, and I was the youngest. I shared a bed with her that summer: she wept and wept; I know not how it was she did not weep herself to death. I tell you, Olav, the man who can forgive such a thing from his heart, him I would call a holy man.”
    The priest sat in silence. Olav, still as a rock, waited for him to say more. But at last he thought he must say something.
    “What became of her, your sister?” he asked in a low voice. “Did she die?”
    “’Tis eight winters since she died,” said the priest. “She lived to be an old woman. She was married some years after, to Kaare Jonsson of Roaldstad, north in Skeidis parish, and she had a good life with him. Father was too hard on her and could not bear the sight of her child; had it been another man’s—but that a daughter of his should swell the flock of Torgils’s concubines—But Kaare was good to them both; it was he too who brought about the good marriage for his stepson, with the daughter and heir of Hestbæk. And when disaster fell upon