Read Online In the Wilderness by Sigrid Undset - Free Book Online Page A

so he tried to desist. But he could think of nothing but her presence—every moment he had to glance across at her. Once he met a stolen look from her, shy and inquisitive. Quickly she dropped her eyes again.
    The procession came down from the choir, and the sprinkling of holy water recalled him wholly to his senses. But truly it was a strange thing that here in London he should chance to see a woman who was so like his dead wife. And young enough to be her daughter.
    He remembered that he had not yet said his evening prayers, knelt down and said them, but without thinking of what he was whispering. Then he saw that she was coming this way—she swept past so close to him that her cloak brushed against his. When he rose to his feet, she was standing beside him, with her back turned. She had laid her hand on the shoulder of a man who was still kneeling. Behind her stood an old serving-woman in a hooded cloak, carrying her mistress’s cushion under her arm.
    The man stood up; Olav guessed he must be the strange woman’s husband. Olav knew him well by sight, for he came to this church nearly every day. He was blind. He was young, and always very richly clad, and he would not have been ugly but for the great scar over his eyebrows and his dead eyes. The left one seemed quite gone—the eyelid clung to the empty socket—but the right eye bulged out, showing a strip under the lid, and this was grey and darkly veined as pebbles sometimes are. His face was pale and swollen like that of a prisoner—he looked as if he sat too long indoors; his small and shapely mouth was drawn down at the corners, tired and slack; his black, curly hair fell forward over his forehead in moist strands. He was of middle height and well-knit, but somewhat inclined to fatness.
    Olav stood outside the church door and watched them: the blind man kept his hand on his wife’s shoulder as he walked, and after them came the serving-woman and a page. They went northward along the street.
    That night Olav could not fall asleep. As he lay he felt the slight rocking of the vessel in the stream and heard the sound of the water underneath her—and through his mind the memories came floating—of Ingunn, when they were young. Sometimes they gathered speed, came faster, wove themselves into visions. He thought he had opened his arms to receive her—and started up, wide awake—felt that he was bathed in sweat, with a strange faintness in all his limbs.
    It was too hot in his barrel; he crawled out and went forward on deck. It was dripping wet with dew; the sky was clear tonight above the everlasting light mists that floated over the river and the marshy banks. A few great stars shone moistly through the haze. The water gurgled as it ran among the piles of the wharf. A man was rowing somewhere out in the darkness.
    Olav seated himself on the chest of arms in the bow. Bending forward over the gunwale, he gazed out into the night. The outline of the woods in the south showed black against the dark sky. A dog barked far away. Dreams and memories continued to course through him; it was their youth that rose from the dead and appeared to him. All the years since then, his outlawry, the time of disaster that came and shattered all his prospects, all the after-years when he had tried to bear his own burden and hers too as well as he could—they seemed to drift past him, out of sight, as he headed back against the stream.
    At last he started up—he had fallen asleep on the chest, and now he was chilled all through. Now he would surely be able to sleep if he crept in again and lay down. Outside, the day was already dawning.
    He grunted when Tomas Tabor came and waked him. Today Tomas could take Leif with him to mass; then he would stay aboard.
    In the course of the afternoon Olav made ready to row ashore. It was warm now in the daytime; he could not bear his haquetonunder his kirtle, the one he had brought with him was so heavy, of thick canvas padded with wool. There