The Son Avenger

  “No, no,” said Aslak; “I am not that sort of man either. You know well that I will stay as long as you have use for me.”

  Olav shook his head. Aslak removed some scythe-blades he had been sharpening; he seemed somewhat agitated. Then he turned and faced Olav. He had a serious look: the fellow was handsome, his bold-featured, ruddy face was frank and honest; it was remarkable how little it was spoiled by the prominent eyes.

  “If I were to come back, Olav, so soon as my father or my eldest brother can make ready to accompany me south—you can guess what it is I would have my kinsmen ask of you?”

  Olav made no reply.

  Aslak went on: “You can guess what our business would be with you? How would you receive us, and what answer might my father expect of you?”

  “If your meaning is what I believe it to be,” said Olav very low and indistinctly, “then I will tell you that you shall not trouble your kinsmen to make the long journey for naught.”

  Aslak gave a little start.

  “Can you say that so surely, Olav—before you have heard what conditions we could offer you? ’Tis true, you might find a richer son-in-law, but you might also find a poorer. And the richest men are seldom those of best birth or repute—as times are now—unless you should look for them among those knights and nobles with whom you yourself have not cared to associate in all the time you have dwelt here at Hestviken. I come of such good kin, so old in all its branches, that I may claim on that score to be a match for your daughter, and there are not many men in Heidmark who enjoy such honour as my father.”

  Olav shrugged his shoulders slightly. He could not find an answer to this, offhand; it was not quite clear to his mind why he would not at any price marry Cecilia to a man from the Upplands.

  “There is this too,” said Aslak again; “it may be a good enough thing to marry one’s child to wealth, but this avails little if the son-in-law be such a one as knows not how to husband his estate and improve his position. I think I may promise you this: in my hands it shall not decrease, if God do grant me health and save us from great misfortunes. Ay, now I have been with you more than half a year, and you know me.”

  “I say naught else but that I like you, Aslak—but that is not reason enough for giving away one’s only daughter to the first man who asks for her. I know little more of you than that you have many brothers and sisters, and you yourself have said that Gunnar’s lot is not an easy one—though indeed I have never heard aught but good of your house, the little I have heard of it. But ’tis another matter that, young as you are, you have already been the death of a man—and it was as an outlaw you came hither to me”—Olav felt a strange relief in every reason he found for refusing the lad. “Moreover it seems to me you are far too young to think of marriage without having asked the advice of your kinsfolk.”

  “I have repented and atoned for my sin,” said Aslak; “and as to my having slain a man so early in life—that surely is the more reason for thinking I have learned to command myself better, so that I shall not fall into the like another time, unless I be strongly provoked. But you should be the last man to blame me for that, Olav Audunsson; nor can you rightly deem me too young to seek a bride. For I am full nineteen winters old—you were fifteen or sixteen, I have heard, when you took a wife by force and cut down her cousin who sought to deny her to you.”

  “The one case is not like the other, Aslak.” Olav succeeded in speaking quite coolly. “The maid whom I took to myself was affianced to me and I to her; there was a legally binding act between her father and my father while we were yet of tender age, and afterwards her kinsmen tried to set at naught the rights of us two fatherless children. You will lose neither honour nor rights if you fail to win the first young maid you have cast your eyes upon, without your kinsmen so much as knowing what you have in mind.

  “No, no,” said Olav hotly; “your father shall never have leave to say of me that I received you when you came hither, a friendless outlaw, and then treated with you, a young lad under age, for the hand of my daughter, without even knowing whether your kinsfolk were minded to ally themselves with my house.”

  “You know yourself,” replied Aslak coolly, “’tis not likely my father woud be loath to see me wed the daughter of Olav Audunsson of Hestviken. I know not what you mean! Is it on account of those rumours that were abroad concerning you at the time when your marriage with Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter was at issue? So much water has flowed into the fiord since then that no man cares any more what you did or left undone in your young days—for since that time you have lived peaceably for more than twenty years and have won renown for honourable conduct in both peace and war.”

  Olav felt his heart beating with terrible force. But he broke off, cold as ice: “That is well and good, Aslak—but ’tis vain for you to say more on this subject. For Cecilia I have other designs.”

  “Of that she knows nothing!” exclaimed Aslak hotly.

  “Is it so” —Olav felt relieved at being given just cause for breaking out in anger—“that you have made bold to woo my daughter behind my back?”

  “You surely do not believe that of me. Not one word have I spoken to Cecilia with which you could have found fault. But that I like her she has seen; and I have seen that she likes me—neither of us can help that, such things cannot be hid. If you would listen to us, Olav, Cecilia would give her consent without sorrow—so much I have guessed.”

  Olav said: “Nor will it bring so much sorrow upon either of you if I refuse to listen to your suit. The maid is but a child—and you are not so old either.”

  “Say you so! You yourself and her mother held fast to each other for ten years or more and would not suffer her kinsmen to part the love that was between you—I have heard you spoken of it at home, Olav, as patterns of loyalty in love!”

  Olav was silent a moment. The boy’s words went strangely to his heart—while at the same time he was yet more unshakably determined that he would never have Cecilia married to a man from that part of the country. Then he replied in a low and faltering voice:

  “That was different, Aslak—I had a right to her. And we had grown up together like two berries on a twig—loved each other as brother and sister from early childhood. You two, Cecilia and you, have known each other for one winter, and there is no compact between you. So it cannot be so great a grief to either of you if you now must part.”

  Aslak flushed deeply. He stood for a moment with bowed head, his hand on his breast, his fingers plucking at his brooch.

  “For your daughter I cannot answer,” he then said shortly. “I—” He shrugged his shoulders, then turned on his heel and went out.

  Next day he was already prepared for the road. He took it with a good grace, thanked Olav in well-chosen words for the help and friendship he had shown, and bade him farewell. He went round and took leave of all his fellows. Privily Olav kept an anxious watch on the two young people when they said farewell to each other. But they took it well: they did not look at each other, and their hands dropped with a strange slackness after they had joined them; otherwise there was no sign, for one who did not know.

  Then Aslak rode away from Hestviken.

  Olav continually watched his daughter in secret. But Cecilia was like her usual self, and her father tried to make himself believe that she did not regret Aslak—not much, anyway. And she was only fifteen.—Fifteen had been Ingunn’s age. But that was different altogether.

  He had nothing to regret. The youngest son from Yttre Dal—Cecilia Olavsdatter of Hestviken might well look for a better match than that. It was natural that she should like Aslak; she had seen so few young men, and the boy had winning ways; but she would forget him sure enough when she met others.

  It had made a stir in Olav’s mind, an insufferable welter of conflicting emotions, to find that there were still folk in the north who remembered his and Ingunn’s love and talked about it. As a pattern.—And rumours—he knew not what sort of rumours they might be. He had believed them both forgo
tten in those parts, both himself and her. Here none remembered Ingunn save himself alone, and he no longer remembered her so well that he thought of her often; it was only that he knew of all that had been, that he was aware of the origin of all that had befallen him.

  Sin and sorrow and shame, and, beneath it all, the memories of a sweetness which might well up as water wells up over the ice and flood his whole soul whenever a break was made in the crust of his peace of mind.—And there in the north all this lived among folk as a legend, true or false. Not for anything in the world would he resume fellowship with men who perhaps talked behind his back of his youth’s adventures.

  And this merely for a young maid’s fancy, which she would surely have forgotten ere a year was out, if only none reminded her of it. Was he to return alive to such a purgatory for the sake of two children’s childishness? Never would he consent.

  2

  A MONTH later Eirik Olavsson came home to Hestviken. He had sent word in advance that he was bringing with him a friend, Jörund Kolbeinsson from Gunnarsby, and he begged his father to receive the guest kindly.

  The sun-warmed air of the valley was charged with the scent of hay and of lime blossoms as Eirik rode down by the side of the Hestvik stream. At Rundmyr the hay was still lying in swaths, dark and already somewhat spoiled, in the little meadows; around the poor homestead stood the forest, deep and still, drinking in the sunlight. Anki came out when he heard the horseman, shading his eyes with his hand, and then he broke into a run, with his thin neck stretched out, his back bent, swinging his overlong arms. After him came the whole flock of half-naked, barelegged children, and last of all waddled Liv herself, carrying her last baby in her arms and with the next one already under her shift; she was so marked with age that with her chinless face she looked like a plucked hen.

  Eirik stayed in the saddle, so that they might have a good sight of him. But when the first greetings were over, he had to dismount, and Anki looked his horse over and felt him, while Liv sang the praises of Eirik and his companion. He had to go back to the hut with them.

  The very smell within, sour and putrid as it was, seemed grateful and familiar. The round mud hut, with no walls and a pointed roof like a tent, was divided into two raised floors with a passage between, and this passage was wet like a ditch of stinking mud: one had to sit with legs drawn up. The dark hole was full of a litter of rubbish. Eirik’s memories were of all that was strange and lawless: here he had lain listening, all ears, to vagabonds’ tales of a life that lurked, darkly and secretly, like the slime of Liv’s floor, beyond the pale of law-abiding, workaday men, in bothies and caves in summertime, on the fringe of the great farms—the life of husbandmen, townsmen, priests, as seen from the beggar’s pallet. He heard of smuggling in wares banned by the King, of robbery and of secret arts, of illicit intercourse between men and women who kept company for a while and then parted, of St. Olav’s feast and the consecration of churches, and of sheer heathendom, sacred stones and trees. Here he had won in gaming a silver-mounted knife, which he gave away, for he dared not keep it. And over there in the corner they had once found a dead child—the mother had overlain it in the night, and then she had simply gone her way. Liv had got rid of the corpse. Eirik had been sick with suspense—what if his father came to hear that such a thing had happened in a croft that belonged to Hestviken! It was a dire thought, but at the same time there was solace in it! It would be a sort of redress for his miserable, everlasting rebuffs—his father ought just to know what things he dared to see and hear and do at Rundmyr. As yet his father knew nothing of his defying him in this way. Even when he first misconducted himself with a woman it was more to avenge himself on his father than for anything else. Afterwards he had been sick with shame and fright when he had to creep home in the dark and steal from the storehouse the piece of meat he had promised her; and he knew not which was the stronger, his remorse or a kind of joy that he had ventured to do a thing at which his father would be beside himself with wrath—if he knew of it.

  Eirik picked the flies out of the old wooden bowl and drank. The milk was villainously sour and acrid, but it had the familiar taste that was proper to Liv’s cabin. After that he sat with his knees drawn up and his hands clasped about them, listening to the talk of Anki and Liv: ay, they were well off, now that Cecilia and Bothild ruled the house; nay, Olav himself never had a hand in it, either when Mærta refused them or when his daughter gave. Interwoven with their talk came news of deaths and births and feastings throughout the countryside, of Hestviken and the ravages of the Swedes, so far as these things had affected their life.

  Eirik listened to them with half an ear. Rather sleepily he allowed his memories to drift through his mind, wondering with a faint smile what was to come now. He had buffeted about the world so long that he felt old and invulnerable. Outside the door the sun shone upon rock and mossy meadow; lower down the bog-holes glistened among the osier thickets, and behind him rose the dark wall of the spruce forest. It was his land and his forest, the cabin here was his, and these people were his: his heart warmed toward them in all their wretchedness of body and soul. He would be good to them, for they had been true to him when he was a child.

  Jörund Rypa called to him from outside—he lay taking his ease in the grass, had refused to enter the foul hut. Anki and Liv and their whole flock of children followed at Eirik’s heels as he came out.

  The millstream trickled, narrow and shrunken, among the rocks. Eirik recognized pool after pool where he used to take trout. The sheeny green flies that darted hither and thither under the overhanging foliage might have been the same as of old, and the same tufts of setwall and clusters of bluebells were to be found as he remembered them. He rode past one meadow after another; in some places the haycocks were still out. The scent was overpowering; screes and bluffs were covered with lime trees that clung fast to the cliff with their honey-coloured bunches of blossom showing beneath the dark overlapping leaves. Where a tongue of the forest intruded on the bridle-path, the shingles-grass1 carpeted the whole ground with little pale-pink bells.

  There was the little overhanging rock under which he had found thunderbolts lying in the sand—Lapps’ arrows his father had called them. He forded the stream near its mouth and rode out of the thicket, and there lay the old creek before him, glittering in the sun. On the north the Bull rose with the reflection of the water like a luminous net on its rusty, smooth-worn cliff; on the south side the land sloped upward, meadows already cut and bright, waving cornfields under the steep black wall of the Horse, and against the blue summer sky the roofs of the manor showed up on the knee of the hill, below the crag. Smoke whirled above the roofs up there; outside there was a glimpse of the fiord, dark blue in the fair-weather breeze. Every stone of the path and every straw in the fields was his and he loved it.

  There stood the bath-house, a little apart, and the great barn above it. He rode up the steep little bend that was so hard to get round with a loaded sledge when there was no snow on the ground. And now the horses’ hoofs were striking against the bare rock of the courtyard.

  From the door of the living-room came his father, followed by his sister. His father was in holiday dress, a green kirtle reaching to the feet with a silver belt about his waist; he went to meet his son, erect and dignified. He was freshly shaved and combed, and about his square-cut, stone-grey face with its bloodshot, pale-blue eyes, a wealth of hair lay curled. It was now quite grey, with pale-yellow strands floating here and there in the softly waving locks. Eirik had always pictured to himself God the Father Almighty in his father’s likeness.

  He was the handsomest and manliest man in the world. He was that still, though his head had grown grey and the right side of his face seemed driven in and the cheek was wrinkled and furrowed all over by the great scar. The two young men sprang from their horses; Eirik took his father’s outstretched hand and kissed it.

  Then Olav greeted Jörund and bade him welcome.

  Cecilia came forward. She bore the
old drinking-horn in both hands, and she too was in festival attire with her flowing hair bright about her grave little face. She stood there in doubt, looking from one young man to the other, when her father gave a nod: she must offer it first to the son of the house.

  A wave as of the final, perfect joy came over Eirik—this was his sister! Young and erect, fair and fresh and pure as the noble damsels he had never been able to approach—here was one, the fairest, the brightest of all high-born maids, meeting him at the door of his home; and she was his own sister.

  “Our guest first, sister mine,” said Eirik joyfully, and Cecilia greeted Jörund and drank to him.

  Indoors a fire had been lighted on the hearth; the flame played palely in the sunshine that made its way through the smoke-vent and turned the smoke blue under the rafters. The floor was thickly strewn with leaves and flowers; on the northern bed, which had been Eirik’s when he was a boy, a new red and yellow coverlet had been spread over the skins. The table was laid as for a banquet, and on each side of Olav’s high seat were set the two silver-mounted griffin’s claws from which he and Jörund were to drink; never before had Eirik been allowed to drink from these horns.

  After sunset they sat on the lookout rock, the three young people. Eirik lay in the heather, in a little dry hollow among the rocks; his sister sat higher up, straight in the back, with her little, short hands folded in her lap. With quiet delight Eirik listened to her talk—she was sparing of words and judicious beyond her years.

  It was dead calm; the ripples gently licked the base of the cliff. The sky was perfectly clear but for some strips of red-tinged cloud down in the south-west. A flood of light from the fiord and the pale vault of heaven shone upon his sister’s white face, as she turned it upward to see if any stars were visible tonight.

  Jörund sat a little apart. He too was unusually silent this evening; he listened to the others’ talk and looked at Cecilia.