If he had been her husband, if she had lived with his honorable goodwill for fifteen winters, he was certain that she would have stood up to defend him too if he had landed in misfortune. With shrewdness and courage she would have stood by his side. But he would never have seen that stony face she turned toward him on the evening in Oslo when she told him that she had been over to take a look around in that house. He would never have heard her scream his own name in such desperate need and distress. And it was not the honorable and just love of his youth that had answered in his heart. The ardor that rose up and cried out toward her wild spirit . . . he would never have known that such feeling could reside in his own heart if things had happened between them as their fathers had intended.
Her expression, as she walked past him and went out into the night to find help for his child . . . She would not have dared to take those measures if she had not been Erlend’s wife and had grown accustomed to acting fearlessly, even when her heart trembled with anguish. Her tear-streaked smile when she woke him up and said the boy was calling for his father . . . A smile of such heartbreaking sweetness was possible only for someone who knew what it meant both to lose a battle and to win.
It was Erlend’s wife whom he loved—the way he loved her now. But that meant his love was sinful, and that was why things stood as they did and why he was unhappy. He was so unhappy that sometimes he felt only a great astonishment that he was the one this had befallen, and he could see no way out of his distress.
When he trampled on his own honor and noble decorum and reminded Erling Vidkunss?n of things that no honorable man would have imagined that he knew, he had done it not for his brothers or kinsmen but for her alone. It was for her sake that he had dared plead with the other man, just like the lepers who begged at the church doors in town, displaying their hideous sores.
He had thought that someday he would tell her about it. Not everything, not how deeply he had humbled himself. But after they had both grown old, he thought that he would say to Kristin: I helped you as best I could because I remembered how sincerely I loved you, back when I was your betrothed.
But there was one thing he didn’t dare touch on with his thoughts. Had Erlend said anything to Kristin? Yes, he had thought that one day she should hear it from his own lips: I never forgot that I loved you when we were young. But if she already knew, and if she had learned it from her husband . . . No, then he didn’t think he could go on.
He had intended to tell only her . . . someday, a long time from now. Then he thought about that moment when he had revealed it himself, when Erlend unwittingly happened to see what he thought he had hidden in the most secret part of his soul. And Ramborg knew—although he didn’t understand how she had found out.
His own wife . . . and her husband—they both knew.
Simon gave a wild, stifled scream and abruptly flung himself onto the other side of the bed.
May God help him! Now he was the one who lay here, flayed naked, violated, bleeding with torment and trembling with shame.
The proprietress peeked around the door and met Simon’s feverish, dry, and sharply glittering eyes from the bed. “Didn’t you sleep? Erlend Nikulauss?n was just riding past with two men; no doubt two of his sons were traveling with him.” Simon mumbled something in reply, angry and incomprehensible.
He wanted to give them a good head start. But he too would soon have to see about setting off for home.
As soon as Simon entered the main house at Formo and took off his outer garments, Andres would seize hold of his leather cap and try it on. While the boy straddled the bench and rode off to see his uncle at Dyfrin, the big cap would slip down, first over his small nose and then back over his lovely blond curls. But it did little good for Simon to try to remember such things now. God only knew when the boy would be visiting his uncle at Dyfrin again.
Instead the memory of his other son rose up: Halfrid’s child. The tiny, pale blue body of an infant. He had seen little of the boy during the few days he lived; he had to sit at the bedside of the dying mother. If the child had survived, or if he had lived longer than his mother, then Simon would have kept Mandvik. Then he probably would have looked for a new wife there in the south. Occasionally he might have come north to the valley to see to his estate up here. Then surely he would have . . . not forgotten Kristin; she had led him into much too strange a dance for him to do that. By the Devil, a man should be allowed to remember it as a peculiar dventure: that he had been forced to rescue his betrothed, a high born young maiden, reared in Christian and seemly behavior, from a house of ill repute and another man’s bed. But then he wouldn’t have been able to think of her in such a way that it troubled him and robbed the taste from everything good that life had to offer.