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 Edwin—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 the Olav’s cloister were good men too, clean-living, learned and humble; ’twas a poor cloister, but they had made him most welcome—Brother Edwin 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 grey-stone 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 further 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 windowpane, 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 windowsill, 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.
“Aye, aye,” said Brother Edwin and sighed. “No one here 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.