She tried to look up at Saint Olav’s picture—he stood there red and white and comely, leaning on his axe, treading his own sinful human nature underfoot—but her glance would ever go back to Sir Björn; and nigh to him she saw Eline Ormsdatter’s dead face, looking unmoved upon her and Erlend. They had trampled her underfoot that they might come hither—and she grudged it not to them.
The dead woman had arisen and flung off her all the great stones that Kristin had striven to heap up above her. Erlend’s wasted youth, his honour and his welfare, his friends’ good graces, his soul’s health. The dead woman had shaken herself free from them all. “He would have me and I would have him; you would have him and he would have you,” said Eline. “I have paid—and he must pay and you must pay when your time comes. When the time of sin is fulfilled, it brings forth death—”
It seemed to her she was kneeling with Erlend on a cold stone. He knelt there with the red, burnt patches on his pale face; she knelt under the heavy bridal crown, and felt the dull, crushing weight within her—the burden of sin that she bore. She had played and wantoned with her sin, had measured it as in a childish game. Holy Virgin—now the time was nigh when it should lie full-born before her, look at her with living eyes; show her on itself the brands of sin, the hideous deformity of sin; strike in hate with misshapen hands at its mother’s breast. When she had borne her child, when she saw the marks of her sin upon it and yet loved it as she had loved her sin, then would the game be played to an end.
Kristin thought what if she shrieked aloud now, a shriek that would cut through the song and the deep voices intoning the mass, and echo out over the people’s heads? Would she be rid then of Eline’s face—would there come life into the dead man’s eyes? But she clenched her teeth together.
“—Holy King Olav, I cry upon thee. Above all in Heaven I pray for help to thee, for I know thou didst love God’s justice above all things. I call upon thee, that thou hold thy hand over the innocent that is in my womb. Turn away God’s wrath from the innocent; turn it upon me; Amen, in the precious name of the Lord—”
“My children,” said Eline’s voice, “are they not guiltless? Yet is there no place for them in the lands where Christians dwell. Your child is begotten outside the law, even as were my children. No rights can you claim for it in the land you have strayed away from, any more than I for mine—”
“Holy Olav! Yet do I pray for grace. Pray thou for mercy for my son; take him beneath thy guard; so shall I bear him to thy church on my naked feet, so shall I bear my golden garland of maidenhood in to thee and lay it down upon thy altar, if thou wilt but help me—amen.”
Her face was set hard as stone in her struggle to be still and calm; but her whole body throbbed and quivered as she knelt there through the holy mass that wedded her to Erlend.
And now, as she sat beside him in the high-seat at home, all things around her were but as shadows in a fevered dream.