Ulvhild lay in bed. She lay alone in the sisters’ bed, and someone watched by her each night. It chanced sometimes that both Kristin and her father would be sitting by her. On such a night Lavrans said to his daughter:
“Mind you what Brother Edvin said that time about Ulvhild’s lot? Even then the thought came to me that maybe he meant this. But I thrust it from me then.”
Sometimes in these nights he would speak of this thing and that from the time when the children were small. Kristin sat there, white and desperate—she knew that behind the words her father was beseeching her.
One day Lavrans had gone with Kolbein to hunt out a bear’s winter lair in the wooded hills to the north. They came home with a she-bear on a sledge, and Lavrans brought with him a living bear-cub in the bosom of his coat. Ulvhild brightened a little when he showed it to her. But Ragnfrid said that was surely no time to rear up such a beast—what would he do with it at a time like this?
“I will rear it up and bind it before my daughters’ bower,” said Lavrans, laughing harshly.
But they could not get for the cub the rich milk it needed, and Lavrans had to kill it a few days after.
The sun had gained so much strength now that sometimes, at midday, the roofs would drip a little. The titmice clambered about, clinging on the sunny side of the timber walls, and pecked till the wood rang, digging for the flies sleeping in the cracks. Over the rolling fields around, the snow shone hard and bright as silver.
At last one evening clouds began to draw together over the moon. And the next morning the folk at Jörundgaard woke in the midst of a whirling world of snow that shut in their sight on every hand.
That day they knew that Ulvhild was dying.
All the house-folk were indoors, and Sira Eirik came over to them. Many candles were burning in the hall. Early in the evening Ulvhild passed away, quietly and peacefully, in her mother’s arms.
Ragnfrid bore it better than any had thought possible. The father and mother sat together; both were weeping very quietly. All in the room were weeping. When Kristin went across to her father, he laid his arm round her shoulders. He felt how she shook and trembled, and he drew her close in to him. But to her it seemed that he must feel as if she were farther from him far than the dead child in the bed.
She understood not how it was that she still held out. She scarce remembered herself what it was she held out for; but, dulled and dumb with grief as she was, she held herself up and did not yield—
—A few planks were torn up from the church floor in front of St. Thomas’s shrine, and a grave was hewn in the stone-hard ground beneath for Ulvhild Lavransdatter.
It was snowing thick and silently all through those days, while the child lay in the dead-straw; it was snowing still when she was borne to the grave; and it went on snowing, almost without cease, till a whole month was out.
To the folk of the Dale, waiting and waiting for the spring to deliver them, it seemed as though it would never come. The days grew long and light, and the steam-cloud from the melting snow lay on all the valley as long as the sun shone. But the cold still held the air, and there was no strength in the heat to overcome it. By night it froze hard—there was loud cracking from the ice, there were booming sounds from the distant fells; and the wolves howled and the fox barked down among the farms as at midwinter. Men stripped the bark from the trees for their cattle, but they dropped down dead in their stalls by scores. None could tell how all this was to end.
Kristin went out on such a day, when water was trickling in the ruts and the snow on the fields around glistened like silver. The snow-wreaths had been eaten away hollow on the side toward the sun, so that the fine ice-trellis of the snow-crust edges broke with a silver tinkle when her foot touched them. But everywhere, where the smallest shadow fell, the sharp cold held the air and the snow was hard.
She went upward towards the church—she knew not herself what she went to do, but something drew her there. Her father was there—some of the freeholders, guild-brothers, were to meet in the cloister-way, she knew.
Halfway up the hill she met the troop of farmers, coming down. Sira Eirik was with them. The men were all on foot; they walked stoopingly in a dark, shaggy knot, and spoke no word together. They gave back her greeting sullenly, as she went by them.
Kristin thought how far away the time was when every soul in the parish had been her friend. Like enough all men knew now that she was a bad daughter. Perhaps they knew yet more about her. It might well be that all believed now there had been some truth in the old talk about her and Arne and Bentein. It might be that she had fallen into the worst ill-fame. She held her head high and passed on toward the church.
The door stood ajar. It was cold in the church, yet was it as though a mild warmth streamed into her heart from the brown dusky hall with the
