But late in the autumn they would return to the priest’s house and stay with him awhile, and then they promised to visit him and pay their respects to his wife.

Olav was profoundly troubled in his mind as he rode homeward. That he should have been impelled to visit the church today—and that he should have met Sira Benedikt and learned this of his grandfather’s brother and the priest’s sister, this seemed so singular to Olav that he could scarce believe it to be pure chance.

For though it was true that only the Bishop could give him absolution for the slaying of Teit, yet he could confess it to Sira Benedikt first. And with a sort of terror Olav felt how unspeakably he longed to do so.

He knew that if he knelt at Sira Benedikt’s knee and laid it bare to him that he was a murderer, and how it had come about that he was one—then he would find himself in the presence of a servant of God who was not merely a spiritual father. Sira Benedikt would understand him as a father understands the son of his body.

He had loved Bishop Torfinn because that monk from Tautra had suffered him to approach a world of riches and beauty and wisdom, which before he had only known as something distant and strange. The Christian faith had been to him a power like the King and the law of the land—he knew that it was to govern his life, and he bowed to it, without reluctance, with reverence and with the recognition that a man must be loyal to all these things if he was to be able to meet his equals and look them freely in the face without shame. In Bishop Torfinn he had seen the man who could take him by the hand and lead him on to all that gave happiness and self-knowledge to serve and to love. What manner of man he would have been had it been his lot to follow the lord Torfinn for a longer space, he could not tell. To Olav the Bishop remained an advocate from the eternal heights—and he himself was as a child, who had only understood a little of that to which the other opened his eyes, before his own conduct forced him to fly from his good instructor.

Of Arnvid he was fond, but their tempers were so unlike that he had felt Arnvid’s piety as merely a part of what he did not understand in his friend. Arnvid was reserved, Olav felt, though he was far from being a taciturn man—but Arnvid’s loquacity seemed a part of his readiness to help. Time and again Olav remembered that it was always himself who had received and Arnvid who had given—but such a man was Arnvid Finnsson that Olav could not feel humiliated by it; he might have accepted even more of the other, and still they would have been close friends. Arnvid knew him through and through, thought Olav, and yet was fond of him—he did not know Arnvid, but yet was fond of him.

It had diverted him greatly to listen to Olav Half-priest’s talk of spiritual things. But all that the old man talked of, angels and devils, pixies and sprites and fairies and holy men and women, seemed as it were to belong to another side of life than that in which he himself contended with his difficulties. The Lady Sancta Maria herself became almost as a king’s daughter in a fairy tale, the fairest rose of paradise—but it seemed very far from his part of the world, this paradise, when old Olav talked of it.

Sira Benedikt was the first man he had met in whom he had recognized something of himself—a man who had fought the fight in which he himself was engaged. And Sira Benedikt had won, had become a God-fearing man, strong and steadfast in the faith. And Olav felt longing and hope pulsing in his veins. All he needed was to take heart. Pray for strength, as Brother Vegard had said, without the reservation: O God, grant not my prayer too quickly.

He lay awake most of that night. It came over him that now he understood one thing: a conflict had been waged in the whole of creation since the dawn of the ages between God and His enemy, and all that had life, soul, or spirit took part in the fight in one host or the other, whether they knew it or not—angels and spirits, men here on earth and on the farther side of death. And it was most commonly by a man’s own cowardice that the Devil could entice him into his service—because the man was afraid God might demand too much of him—command him to utter a truth that was hard to force through his lips, or to abandon a cherished delight without which he believed himself not strong enough to live: gain or welfare, wantonness or the respect of others. Then came the old Father of lies and caught that man’s soul with his old master lie—that he demanded less of his servants and rewarded them better—so long as it lasted. But now Olav himself had to choose whether he would serve in one army or in the other.

It was thick weather, mild and grey, when he came out next morning. The mist shed tiny drops of water over him, which fell gratefully on his face and refreshed his lips after the sleepless night.

He went out on the high ground west of the manor, where the hill sloped in a rounded curve toward the open fiord, with stretches of bare rock and flowery crevices. It was already his habit to turn his steps thither every morning and to stand and watch the weather. He was beginning to be familiar with the voice of the fiord. Today the sea was calm. A light swell lapped the smooth sides of the Bull, breaking through the mist with little gleams of white, where the spray was thrown high into the air when the slightest breeze blew on the shore. There was a trickling of water among the rocks down on the beach, a lapping of the wreath of seaweed just beneath him, where the smooth rock slid down into the sea; a breath of good salt water came up to him.

Olav stood motionless, gazing out and listening to the faint sound of the fiord. Now and again the fog thickened so that he could scarcely see it.

He had seen long ago that he had committed a sinister folly in not proclaiming the slaying straightway at the first house he came to. Had he done that, ’twas not even certain that he would have been condemned to make amends—Teit’s life might have been found forfeit, if Ingunn’s kinsmen had been willing to witness that he, Olav, had an older right to the woman. He had now thought so long this way and that, that he scarce remembered what had been in his mind, when he chose to remain silent and wipe out all traces of the deed—but he must have fooled himself into the belief that so the shame might be kept hid.