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

sleepily.
    The shower drummed on the poop above them and splashed on the boards; the hiss of raindrops could be heard on the surface of the river. The men shuffled in under cover, as far as they could come, and fell asleep, while the summer shower passed over the town.
    Torodd and Galfrid were tarrying in the west country, it seemed—perhaps they had not found it so easy to get their hands on the heritage of Dom John. Olav was as well pleased one way as the other—and the days went by, one like another.
    2 Psalm cxix, 95, 96, 1.
    3 St. Matthew, xiii, 44.
    4 St. Matthew, x, 34.

3
    O NE EVENING Olav had been sitting half-asleep in his corner of the church. When he heard the scraping of feet in the choir, he stood up and went forward into the nave.
    Right opposite on the women’s side was a statue raised against one of the pillars, of the Virgin with the Child in her arms and the crescent moon under her feet. This evening a thick wax candle was burning before the image; just beneath it knelt a youngwoman. The moment Olav looked at her, she turned her face his way.
    And now his breath went from him and he lost all sense of himself and where he was—but this was Ingunn, she was kneeling there, not five paces from him.
    Then he recalled the time and place and that she was dead, and he knew not what to believe. It felt as if the heart within him stood still and quivered; he knew not whether it was fear or joy that made him powerless, whether he was looking on one dead—
    The narrow face with the straight nose and long, weak chin—the shadow of the eyelashes on the clear cheeks. The hollows of the temples were darkened by a wave of golden-brown hair; a transparent veil fell from the crown of the head in long folds over the weak and sloping shoulders.
    Even as he drank in the first vision of her charm, Olav saw that perhaps this was not she—but that two persons could be so like one another! So slender and delicate from the waist down to the knees, such long, thin hands—she held a book before her, and her lips moved slightly—now she turned the leaf. She knelt on a cushion of red silk.
    A sobering sense crept over him that it was not she after all. As when one wakes from a heavy sleep and recognizes one thing after another in the room where one is, realizing that the rest was a dream—so now he realized little by little.
    His poor darling, she had not been able to read a book. Nor had she ever had such clothes. As he looked on the rich dress of the strange woman, a bitter compassion with Ingunn stirred within him—there was never anyone to give
her
such apparel. He remembered her as she had been all the years at Hestviken, in bad health and robbed of her youth and charm, poor and unkempt in the coarse, rustic folds of her homespun kirtle.
She
should have been like this one, kneeling on her silken cushion, rosy-cheeked, fresh and slim; her mantle spread far over the stone slabs, and it was of some rich, dark stuff; her kirtle was cut so low that her bosom and arms showed through the thin golden-yellow silk of her shift. Half-hidden in the folds at her throat gleamed a great rosary—some of its beads were of the color of red wine and sparkled as her bosom rose and fell. She was quite young. She looked as Ingunn had looked as she knelt in the church at Hamar, childlike and fair under her woman’s coif.
    The strange woman must have felt his continual stare—now she looked up at him. Again Olav felt his heart give a start: she had the same great, dark eyes too, and the uncertain, hesitating, sidelong glance—just as Ingunn used to look up at those she met for the first time. She had never looked at
him
in this way—and a vague and obscure feeling stirred in the man’s mind that he had been cheated of something, because Ingunn had never looked upon
him
for the first time.
    The young wife looked down at her book again; her cheeks had flushed, her eyelids quivered uneasily. Olav guessed that he annoyed her with his staring,