In the Wilderness by Sigrid Undset Page B

be of little use to look for
that
manor-house: it would scarce be there today. The little church where the bell was ringing stood on a mound on the other side of a brook. He made for it, sure that there he would find the solution of all that baffled him.
    It was a bare and poor little house and the air was musty and raw within; Olav guessed that mass was not often said here, and the mass that was now being celebrated was for the benefit of the ten or twelve poorly clad men who stood near the altar with a banner in their midst—it was no doubt some little brotherhood and this was their feast-day. The men had made themselves trim according to their means. But the priest’s chasuble was threadbare, the deacon and the choirboys seemed listless and comported themselves without grace or dignity, while the priest hurried through the service, as though his only thought was to get it over.
    Any message to himself he could not find, other than that he stood there, poor and a stranger, among these poor men who took part with him in the perfunctory office. It became clearer to him than before, how little a middle-aged man counts for in this world when he is stripped of all the added worth that goods and kindred bring. And he would learn this more and more thoroughly the farther he strayed from his home—he saw that now.
    He had learned it once before, he remembered—in his youth, in the years when he was an outlaw. A clear, cool bitterness seized upon him. Was it for this he had come home, and was it for this he had dwelt all those years with his only dear one as in a dark house—that God should now lead him out, lock the door behind him, and send him roaming again?
    He
saw
his manor, as in a vision—more clearly than he had ever seen it with his eyes. The wharf and the sheds with the water of the fiord lapping about the piles, the long row of sun-scorched turf roofs and dun gables up on the hillside and the wall of the Horse Crag behind, his cornfields among bare grey and reddishrocks, the hills around, grey and weather-worn, with wind-bent firs toward the fiord, meadows inland along the valley, and then the forest. The domain was not so great but that he had seen greater, but it was
his;
from here his fathers before him had gone out into the world, and hither they had returned. If all else in his life had turned out otherwise than he had expected, he had won back his patrimony and maintained it; he would leave behind no less than he had received. There were boats now, great and small, by the wharves; there were fields and meadows that he had cleared anew on the mossy, alder-grown land toward Kverndal.
    The poor men advanced to the altar in a body. Now he saw the image on their banner: Jesus bending under the cross, and a man walking behind and helping to bear it, Simon the Cyrenian. So it was a guild of porters. A deacon made a sign to Olav, thinking he belonged to the fellowship. Olav shook his head and knelt down where he had been standing, by the door.
    And in the poor vesture of the host our Lord descended and gave Himself to His poor friends—he was the only one present who dared not to go forward to the table. For years he had known that when he needs must go, at Easter, he went as Judas went to the Last Supper. As a child he had never been able to understand that Judas dared, for he must have known that God knew what he had done. Now he himself was in the same case as Judas Iscariot: he moved among his even Christians, and they reckoned him a good Christian, even as the apostles had reckoned Judas their fellow as they sat down with him at table that evening. And his only thought had been that in the midst of the company he was alone with Him who knew of his betrayal.
    Such a man had he become. Yet his spirit had once been as a young field, full of the good corn that had been sown in it: the heritage of his ancestors, loyal men and unafraid, who did not cast their eyes backward after their lost happiness so long as they