“I see that ’tis all one—you blame him as much for the years he has striven to free himself from sin, as for the years he lived in it.”
“Jesus, Maria!” cried Ragnfrid, clasping her hands together: “What is come to you! Has even this not availed to change your heart?”
“No,” said Kristin. “I have not changed.”
Then Lavrans looked up from the bench where he sat by Ulvhild:
“Neither have I changed, Kristin,” he said in a low voice.
But Kristin felt within her that in a manner she was changed, in thoughts if not in heart. She had had tidings of how it had fared with them on that dreadful journey. As things fell out it had gone off more easily than they looked it should. Whether the cold had got into the hurt or whatever the cause might be, the knife-wound in Erlend’s breast had festered, and constrained him to lie sick some while in the hospice at Roaldstad, Sir Björn tending him. But that Erlend was wounded made it easier to win belief for their tale of how that other thing had befallen.
When he was fit to journey on, he had taken the dead woman with him in a coffin all the way to Oslo. There, by Sira Jon’s help, he had won for her Christian burial in the churchyard of the old Church of St. Nikolaus that had been pulled down. Then had he made confession to the Bishop of Oslo himself, and the Bishop had laid on him as penance to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Blood at Schwerin. Now was he gone out of the land.
She could not make pilgrimage to any place on earth, and find absolution. For her there was naught but to sit here and wait and think, and strive to hold out in the struggle with her father and mother. A strange wintery-cold light fell on all her memories of meetings with Erlend. She thought of his vehemency—in love and in grief—and it was borne in on her that had she been able, like him, to take up all things of a sudden, and straightway rush forward with them, headlong, afterwards maybe they might have seemed less fearful and heavy to bear. At times, too, she would think: maybe Erlend will give me up. It seemed to her she must always have had a little, lurking fear that if things grew too hard for them he would fail her. But she would never give him up, unless he himself loosed her from all vows.