"But when I saw you with Thorstan's child about to be born—and saw how rich and sedate you walked the ways, and how peace sat upon your forehead like a wreath, then I grudged you." Freydis turned round in the bed and showed her burning face. "And I said, 'This woman has a secret joy, and for all she is so quiet and still she is stronger than I.' And when the child died I was glad. I said, 'Now we are level again, but I will be better than you, for I will have a child which shall live and be strong like me.' But you have had yours first, and it is a boy. So you are better than me still." Then her eyes filled with hot tears, which made her eyelids blink.
"Oh, Freydis," Gudrid said, "you don't grudge me my boy?"
"No, no, it is not that. It is that I am ashamed. You are good, and I am very bad. I hate myself now."
Gudrid kissed her.
"Tell me, Freydis, now," she said, "why did you call your girl Walgerd?"
Freydis did not want to answer, but presently she said: "I should have called her Gudrid if that had been lucky. But we must not use the names of living persons for the new-born, so I called her Walgerd, because yours had been called so. I went as near to you as I could."
It seemed to hurt Freydis to talk about it, but Gudrid kissed her again, and went away feeling happy about her. "It is good to be loved, even by Freydis," she said to Karlsefne, whose answer was, "Who could help loving you?"
XXIX
But before the ship-building was began Freydis changed her mind, and said that she would go home with the rest. Nobody caring to stop alone out there without some chieftain over them, it came to it that all must go home in one ship. They killed what stock they could not take alive, and sailed out of the river at the beginning of summer. Gudrid's boy Snorre was just two years old, and Karlsefne was anxious to be safe at home before he had a brother or sister.
They waited about at the river's mouth for a fair wind, then set all sail and ran before it northerly along the coast. So they came again to Markland and stayed there for certain days. It was there that Karlsefne and some of the crew, on shore after game, surprised some savages in a hollow of the woods: a bearded man, two women and two children. He saw them, unperceived himself, stalked them with art, and made a dash into the midst of them. He caught the two children, but the others disappeared into the earth. He brought them home with him and gave them to Gudrid. "Can you have too many children? I don't think so." She took them gladly and brought them up. They were brown all over and naked; they had black eyes round and staring as beads, but a ring of blue all about them, as blue as that on a thrush's egg. In time she taught them her own tongue, and in time had them baptized—but that was not until she went to Iceland. When they sailed from Markland the wind still held good, and they came safely into Ericsfrith, and picked up their moorings in the haven. It was as if they had never been away.