The Bridal Wreath

by Sigrid Undset

  Lavrans thanked him, but said, “ ’Twere shame you should be troubled with the child, brother Edvin —”

  “Brother Edvin draws to himself all the children he can lay hands upon,” said Canon Martein, and laughed. “ ’Tis in this wise he gets some one to preach to —”

  “Ay, before you learned lords here in Hamar I dare not proffer my poor discourses,” said the monk without anger, and smiling. “All I am fit for is to talk to children and peasants, but even so ’tis not well, we know, to muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.”

  Kristin looked up at her father beseechingly; she thought there was nothing she would like more than to go with Brother Edvin. So Lavrans gave thanks again, and while her father and the priest went after the Bishop’s train, Kristin laid her hand in the monk’s, and they went down towards the cloister, a cluster of wooden houses and a light-hued stone church far down by the lake-side.

  Brother Edvin gave her hand a little squeeze, and as they looked at one another they had both to laugh. The monk was thin and tall, but very stoop-backed; the child thought him like an old crane in the head, for ’twas little, with a small, shining, bald pate above a shaggy, white rim of hair, and set upon a long, thin, wrinkled neck. His nose was large too, and pointed like a beak. But ’twas something which made her light of heart and glad, only to look up into the long, narrow, deep-lined face. The old, sea-blue eyes were red-rimmed and the lids brown and thin as flakes. A thousand wrinkles spread out from them; the wizened cheeks with the reddish network of veins were scored with furrows which ran down towards the thin-lipped mouth, but ’twas as though Brother Edvin had grown thus wrinkled only through smiling at mankind. Kristin thought she had never seen any one so blithe and gentle; it seemed he bore some bright and privy gladness within which she would get to know of when he began to speak.

  They followed the fence of an apple-orchard where there still hung upon the trees a few red and golden fruit. Two Preaching Brothers in black-and-white gowns were raking together withered beanshaws in the garden.

  The cloister was not much unlike any other farm steading, and the guest-house whither the monk led Kristin was most like a poor peasant’s house, though there were many bedsteads in it. In one of the beds lay an old man, and by the hearth sat a woman swathing a little child; two bigger children, boy and girl, stood beside her.

  They murmured, both the man and the woman, that they had not been given their breakfast yet: “None will be at the pains to bear in food to us twice in the day, so we must e’en starve while you run about the town, Brother Edvin!”

  “Nay, be not peevish, Steinulv,” said the monk. “Come hither and make your greetings, Kristin — see this bonny, sweet little maid who is to stay and eat with us to-day.”

  He told how Steinulv had fallen sick on the way home from a fair, and had got leave to lie here in the cloister guest-house, for he had a kinswoman dwelling in the spital, and she was so cursed he could not endure to be there with her.

  “But I see well enough, they will soon be weary of having me here,” said the peasant. “When you set forth again, Brother Edvin, there will be none here that has time to tend me, and they will surely have me to the spital again.”

  “Oh, you will be well and strong long before I am done with my work in the church,” said Brother Edvin. “Then your son will come and fetch you —” He took up a kettle of hot water from the hearth and let Kristin hold it while he tended Steinulv. Thereupon the old man grew somewhat easier, and soon after there came in a monk with food and drink for them.

  Brother Edvin said grace over the meat, and set himself on the edge of the bed by Steinulv that he might help him to take his food. Kristin went and sat by the woman and gave the boy to eat, for he was so little he could not well reach up to the porridge-dish, and he spilled upon himself when he tried to dip into the beer-bowl. The woman was from Hadeland, and she was come hither with her man and her children to see her brother who was a monk here in the cloister. But he was away wandering among the country parishes, and she grumbled much that they must lie here and waste their time.

  Brother Edvin spoke the woman fair: she must not say she wasted time when she was here in Bishopshamar. Here were all the brave churches, and the monks and canons held masses and sang the livelong day and night — and the city was fine, finer than Oslo even, though ’twas somewhat less; but here were gardens to almost every dwelling-place: “You should have seen it when I came hither in the spring — ’twas white with blossom over all the town. And after, when the sweetbriar burst forth —”

  “Ay, and much good is that to me now,” said the woman sourly. “And here are more of holy places than of holiness, methinks—”

  The monk laughed a little and shook his head. Then he routed amidst the straw of his bed and brought forth a great handful of apples and pears which he shared amongst the children. Kristin had never tasted such good fruit. The juice ran out from the corners of her mouth every bite she took.

  But now Brother Edvin must go to the church, he said, and Kristin should go with him. Their path went slantwise across the close, and, by a little side wicket, they passed into the choir.

  They were still building at this church as well, so that here, too, there stood a tall scaffolding in the cross where nave and transepts met. Bishop Ingjald was bettering and adorning the choir, said Brother Edvin. The Bishop had great wealth, and all his riches he used for the adornment of the churches here in the town; he was a noble bishop and a good man. The Preaching Friars in St. Olav’s cloister were good men too, clean-living, learned and humble. ’Twas a poor cloister, but they had made him most welcome — Brother Edvin had his home in the Minorite cloister at Oslo, but he had leave to spend a term here in Hamar diocese.

  “But now come hither,” said he, and led Kristin forward to the foot of the scaffolding. First he climbed up a ladder and laid some boards straight up there, and then he came down again and helped the child up with him.

  Upon the greystone wall above her Kristin saw wondrous fluttering flecks of light; red as blood and yellow as beer, blue and brown and green. She would have turned to look behind her, but the monk whispered, “Turn not about.” But when they stood together high upon the planking, he turned her gently round, and Kristin saw a sight so fair she almost lost her breath.

  Right over against her on the nave’s south wall stood a picture, and shone as if it were made of naught but gleaming precious stones. The many-hued flecks of light upon the wall came from rays which stood out from that picture; she herself and the monk stood in the midst of the glory; her hands were red as though dipped in wine; the monk’s visage seemed all golden, and his dark frock threw the picture’s colours softly back. She looked up at him questioningly, but he only nodded and smiled.

  ’Twas like standing far off and looking into the heavenly kingdom. Behind a network of black streaks, she made out little by little the Lord Christ Himself in the most precious of red robes, the Virgin Mary in raiment blue as heaven, holy men and maidens in shining yellow and green and violet array. They stood below arches and pillars of glimmering houses, wound about with branches and twigs of strange bright leafage.

  The monk drew her a little farther out upon the staging.

  “Stand here,” he whispered, “and ’twill shine right upon you from Christ’s own robe.”

  From the church beneath there rose to them a faint odour of incense and the smell of cold stone. It was dim below, but the sun’s rays slanted in through a row of window-bays in the nave’s south wall. Kristin began to understand that the heavenly picture must be a sort of window-pane, for it filled just such an opening. The others were empty or filled with panes of horn set in wooden frames. A bird came, set itself upon a window-sill, twittered a little and flew away, and outside the wall of the choir they heard the clank of metal on stone. All else was still; only the wind came in small puffs, sighed a little round about the church walls and died away.

  “Ay, ay,” said Brother Edvin, and sighed. “No one h
ere in the land can make the like — they paint on glass, ’tis true, in Nidaros, but not like this. But away in the lands of the south, Kristin, in the great minsters, there they have such picture-panes, big as the doors of the church here —”

  Kristin thought of the pictures in the church at home. There was St. Olav’s altar, and St. Thomas of Canterbury’s altar, with pictures on their front panels and on the tabernacles behind; but those pictures seemed to her dull and lustreless as she thought of them now.

  They went down the ladder and up into the choir. There stood the altar-table, naked and bare, and on the stone slab were set many small boxes and cups of metal and wood and earthenware; strange little knives and irons, pens and brushes lay about. Brother Edvin said these were his gear; he plied the crafts of painting pictures and carving altar-tabernacles, and the fine panels which stood yonder by the choir-stalls were his work. They were for the altar-pieces here in the Preaching Friars’ church.

  Kristin watched how he mixed up coloured powders and stirred them into little cups of stoneware, and he let her help him bear the things away to a bench by the wall. While the monk went from one panel to another and painted fine red lines in the bright hair of the holy men and women so that one could see it curl and crinkle, Kristin kept close at his heels and gazed and questioned, and he explained to her what it was that he had limned.

  On the one panel sat Christ in a chair of gold, and St. Nicholas and St. Clement stood beneath a roof by His side. And at the sides was painted St. Nicholas’ life and works. In one place he sat as a suckling child upon his mother’s knee; he turned away from the breast she reached him, for he was so holy that from the very cradle he would not suck more than once on Fridays. Alongside of that was a picture of him as he laid the money-purses before the door of the house where dwelt the three maids who were so poor they could not find husbands. She saw how he healed the Roman knight’s child, and saw the knight sailing in a boat with the false chalice in his hands. He had vowed the holy bishop a chalice of gold which had been in his house a thousand years, as guerdon for bringing his son back to health again. But he was minded to trick St. Nicholas, and gave him a false chalice instead; therefore the boy fell into the sea with the true beaker in his hands. But St. Nicholas led the child unhurt underneath the water and up on to the shore, just as his father stood in St. Nicholas’ church and offered the false vessel. It all stood painted upon the panels in gold and the fairest colours.

  On another panel sat the Virgin Mary with the Christ-child on her knee; He pressed His mother’s chin with the one hand, and held an apple in the other. Beside them stood St. Sunniva* and St. Christina. They bowed in lovely wise from their waists, their faces were the fairest red and white, and they had golden hair and golden crowns.

  Brother Edvin steadied himself with the left hand on the right wrist, and painted leaves and roses on the crowns.

  “The dragon is all too small, methinks,” said Kristin, looking at her holy namesake’s picture. “It looks not as though it could swallow up the maiden.”

  “And that it could not either,” said Brother Edvin. “It was not bigger. Dragons and all such-like that serve the devil, seem great only so long as fear is in ourselves. But if a man seek God fervently and with all his soul, so that his longing wins into his strength, then does the devil’s power suffer at once such great downfall that his tools become small and powerless — dragons and evil spirits sink down and become no bigger than sprites and cats and crows. You see that the whole mountain St. Sunniva was in is no larger than that she can wrap it within the skirt of her gown.”

  “But were they not in the caves, then,” asked Kristin, “St. Sunniva and the Selje-men? Is not that true?”

  The monk twinkled at her, and smiled again:

  “ ’Tis both true and untrue. It seemed so to the folk who found the holy bodies. And true it is that it seemed so to Sunniva and the Selje-men, for they were humble and thought only that the world is stronger than all sinful mankind, and they thought not that they themselves were stronger than the world, because they loved it not. But had they but known it, they could have taken all the hills and slung them forth into the sea like so many pebbles. No one, nor anything, can harm us, child, save what we fear or love.”

  “But if a body doth not fear nor love God?” asked Kristin, affrighted.

  The monk took her yellow hair in his hand, bent Kristin’s head back gently, and looked down into her face; his eyes were wide open and blue.

  “There is no man nor woman, Kristin, who does not love and fear God, but ’tis because our hearts are divided twixt love of God and fear of the devil and fondness for the world and the flesh, that we are unhappy in life and death. For if a man had not any yearning after God and God’s being, then should he thrive in hell, and ’twould be we alone who would not understand that there he had gotten what his heart desired. For there the fire would not burn him if he did not long for coolness, nor would he feel the torment of the serpents’ bite, if he knew not the yearning after peace.”

  Kristin looked up in his face; she understood none of all this. Brother Edvin went on:

  “ ’Twas God’s loving-kindness towards us that, seeing how our hearts are drawn asunder, He came down and dwelt among us, that He might taste in the flesh the lures of the devil when He decoys us with power and splendour, as well as the menace of the world when it offers us blows and scorn and sharp nails in hands and feet. In such wise did He show us the way and make manifest His love —”

  He looked down upon the child’s grave, set face — then he laughed a little, and said with quite another voice:

  “Do you know who ’twas that first knew our Lord had caused Himself to be born? ’Twas the cock; he saw the star, and so he said — all the beasts could talk Latin in those days; he cried: ‘Christus natus est!’ ”

  He crowed these last words so like a cock that Kristin fell to laughing heartily. And it did her good to laugh, for all the strange things Brother Edvin had just been saying had laid a burden of awe on her heart.

  The monk laughed himself:

  “Ay, and when the ox heard that, he began to low: ‘Ubi, ubi, ubi.’

  “But the goat bleated, and said: ‘Betlem, Betlem, Betlem!’

  “And the sheep longed so to see Our Lady and her Son that she baa-ed out at once: ‘Eamus, eamus!’

  “And the new-born calf that lay in the straw, raised itself and stood upon its feet. ‘Volo, volo, volo!’ it said.

  “You never heard that before? No, I can believe it; I know that he is a worthy priest, that Sira Eirik that you have up in your parts, and learned; but he knows not this, I warrant; for a man does not learn it except he journey to Paris —”

  “Have you been to Paris, then?” asked the child.

  “God bless you, little Kristin, I have been in Paris and have travelled round elsewhere in the world as well; and you must not believe aught else than that I am afraid of the devil, and love and covet like any other fool. But I hold fast to the Cross with all my might — one must cling to it like a kitten to a lath when it has fallen in the sea.

  “And you, Kristin — how would you like to offer up this bonny hair and serve Our Lady like these brides I have figured here?”

  “We have no child at home but me,” answered Kristin, “So ’tis like that I must marry. And I trow mother has chests and lockers with my bridal gear standing ready even now.”

  “Ay, ay,” said Brother Edvin, and stroked her forehead. “ ’Tis thus that folk deal with their children now. To God they give the daughters who are lame or purblind or ugly, or blemished, or they let Him have back the children when they deem Him to have given them more than they need. And then they wonder that all who dwell in the cloisters are not holy men and maids —”

  Brother Edvin took her into the sacristy and showed her the cloister books which stood there in a book-case; there were the fairest pictures in them. But when one of the monks came in, Brother Edvin made as though he were but seeking an ass’s hea
d to copy. Afterwards he shook his head at himself:

  “Ay, there you see what fear does, Kristin — but they’re so fearful about their books in the house here. Had I the true faith and love, I would not stand here as I do, and lie to Brother Aasulv — . But then I could take these old fur mittens here and hang them upon yonder sunbeam —”

  She was with the monk to dinner over in the guest-house, but for the rest she sat in the church the whole day and watched his work and chatted with him. And first when Lavrans came to fetch her, did either she or the monk remember the message that should have been sent to the shoemaker.

  Afterwards Kristin remembered these days in Hamar better than all else that befell her on the long journey. Oslo, indeed, was a greater town than Hamar, but now that she had seen a market-town, it did not seem to her so notable. Nor did she deem it as fair at Skog as at Jörundgaard, though the houses were grander — but she was glad she was not to dwell there. The manor lay upon a hillside; below was the Botnfjord, grey, and sad with dark forest; and on the farther shore and behind the houses the forest stood with the sky right down upon the tree-tops. There were no high, steep fells as at home, to hold the heavens high above one, and to keep the sight sheltered and in bounds so that the world might seem neither too big nor too little.

  The journey home was cold; it was nigh upon Advent; but, when they were come a little way up the Dale, snow was lying, and so they borrowed sleighs and drove most of the way.

  With the affair of the estates it fell out so that Lavrans made Skog over to his brother Aasmund, keeping the right of redemption for himself and his heirs.

  3

  THE SPRING after Kristin’s long journey, Ragnfrid bore her husband another daughter. Both father and mother had wished indeed that it might be a son, but they soon took comfort, and were filled with the tenderest love for little Ulvhild. She was a most fair child, healthy, good, happy and quiet. Ragnfrid doted so on this new baby that she went on suckling it during the second year of its life; wherefore, on Sira Eirik’s counsel, she left off somewhat her strict fasts and religious exercises while she had the child at the breast. On this account and by reason of her joy in Ulvhild, her bloom came back to her, and Lavrans thought he had never seen his wife so happy or so fair and kindly in all the years he had been wed.