At that moment an old monk wearing an ash-brown cowl came out of the chapel. He paused for a minute, smiled at the child, and pulled out some sacking and homespun rags that had been stuffed into a hole in the wall. He spread them out on the landing.
“Sit down here; then you won’t be so cold,” he said, and continued on down the stairs in his bare feet.
Kristin was asleep when Father Martein, as the priest was called, came out to get her. From the church rose the loveliest song, and inside the chapel, candles burned on the altar. The priest gestured for Kristin to kneel beside her father, and then he took down a little golden reliquary that stood above the altar. He whispered to her that inside was a fragment of Saint Thomas of Canterbury’s bloody clothing, and he pointed to the holy image, so that Kristin could press her lips to the feet.
Lovely tones were still streaming from the church as they went downstairs. Father Martein told them that the organist was practicing while the schoolboys sang. But they had no time to listen, for Lavrans was hungry; he had fasted before confession. Now they would go over to the guest quarters at the canons’ house2 to eat.
Outside, the morning sun gleamed gold on the steep shores of distant Lake Mj?sa, so that all of the faded leafy groves looked like golden dust in the dark blue forests. The lake was rippled with little white specks of dancing foam. The wind blew cold and fresh, making the multicolored leaves float down onto the frost-covered hill.
A group of horsemen appeared between the bishop’s citadel and the house belonging to the Brothers of the Holy Cross. Lavrans stepped aside and bowed with his hand to his breast as he nearly swept the ground with his hat; then Kristin realized that the horse-man in the fur cape had to be the bishop himself, and she sank in a curtsey almost to the ground.
The bishop reined in his horse and greeted them in return, beckoning Lavrans to approach, and he spoke with him for a moment.
Then Lavrans came back to the priest and the child and said, “I have been invited to dine at the bishop’s citadel. Do you think, Father Martein, that one of the canons’ servants could accompany this little maiden home to Shoemaker Fartein’s house and tell my men that Halvdan should meet me here with Guldsvein at the hour of midafternoon prayers?”
The priest replied that this could easily be arranged. Then the barefoot monk who had spoken to Kristin in the tower stairway stepped forward and greeted them.
“There’s a man over in our guest house who has business with the shoemaker anyway; he can take your message, Lavrans Bj?rg ulfs?n. And then your daughter can either go with him or stay at the cloister until you return. I’ll see to it that she’s given food over there.”
Lavrans thanked him and said, “It’s a shame that you should be troubled with this child, Brother Edvin.”
“Brother Edvin gathers up all the children he can,” said Father Martein with a laugh. “Then he has someone to preach to.”
“Yes, I don’t dare offer you learned gentlemen here in Hamar my sermons,” said the monk, smiling, and without taking offense. “I’m only good at talking to children and farmers, but that’s no reason to tie a muzzle on the ox that threshes.”
Kristin gave her father an imploring look; she thought there was nothing she would like better than to go with Brother Edvin. So Lavrans thanked him, and as her father and the priest followed the bishop’s entourage, Kristin put her hand in the monk’s and they walked down toward the monastery, which was a cluster of wooden houses and a light-colored stone church all the way down near the water.
Brother Edvin gave her hand a little squeeze, and when they glanced at each other, they both had to laugh. The monk was tall and gaunt but quite stoop-shouldered. The child thought he looked like an old crane because his head was small, with a narrow, shiny, smooth pate above a bushy white fringe of hair, and perched on a long, thin, wrinkled neck. His nose was also as big and sharp as a beak. But there was something about him that made Kristin feel at ease and happy just by looking up into his long, furrowed face. His old watery-blue eyes were red-rimmed, and his eyelids were like thin brown membranes with thousands of wrinkles radiating from them. His hollow cheeks, with their reddish web of veins, were crisscrossed with wrinkles that ran down to his small, thin-lipped mouth. But it looked as if Brother Edvin had become so wrinkled simply from smiling at people. Kristin thought she had never seen anyone who looked so cheerful or so kind. He seemed to carry within him a luminous and secret joy, and she was able to share it whenever he spoke.