It was not that her father was unfriendly. They spoke no word of what was between them, but she felt, behind all that he did not say, his firm unbending will to hold fast to his denial.
And her heart ached within her for the lack of his friendship. The ache was so dreadful in its keenness, because she knew how much else her father had on his shoulders—and had things been as before, he would have talked with her of it all—It was indeed so, that at Jörundgaard they were in better case than most other places; but here, too, they felt the pinch of the year each day and each hour. Other years it had been Lavrans’ wont in the winters to handle and break in his young colts; but this year he had sent them all south in the autumn and sold them. And his daughter missed the sound of his voice out in the courtyard, and the sight of him struggling with the slender, ragged two-year-olds in the game he loved so well. Storehouses and barns and bins at Jörundgaard were not bare yet—there was store left from the harvest of the year before—but many folk came to ask for help—to buy, or to beg for gifts—and none ever asked in vain.
Late one evening came a huge old skin-clad man on ski. Lavrans talked with him out in the courtyard, and Halvdan bore food across to the hearth-room for him. None on the place who had seen him knew who he was—he might well be one of those wild folk who lived far in among the fells; like enough Lavrans had come upon him there. But Lavrans said naught of the visitor, nor Halvdan either.
But one evening came a man whom Lavrans Björgulfsön had been at odds with for many years. Lavrans went to the storeroom with him. When he came back to the hall again he said:
“They come to me for help, every man of them. But here in my own house you are all against me. You, too, wife,” he said hotly.
The mother flamed up at Kristin:
“Hear you what your father says to me! No, I am not against you, Lavrans. I know—and I wot well you know it too, Kristin—what befell away south at Roaldstad late in the autumn, when he journeyed down the Dale with that other adulterer, his kinsman of Haugen—she took her own life, the unhappy woman he had lured away from all her kin.”
Kristin stood with a hard, frozen face:
“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 things 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 wintry-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.
So the winter dragged on toward its end. And Kristin could not cheat herself any more; she had to see that the hardest trial of all lay before them—that Ulvhild had not long to live. And in the midst of her bitter sorrow for her sister she saw with horror that truly her own soul was wildered and eaten away with sin. For, with the dying child and the parents’ unspeakable sorrow before her eyes, she was still brooding on this one thing—if Ulvhild dies, how can I bear to look at my father and not throw myself at his feet and confess all and beseech him to forgive me—and command me—
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