The coffins were to be carried by horses, two to each burden. The first pair were brought forward, and planks slung between them. Then a psalm was sung, and the first coffin fastened in its place.
When both were thus secured, the train moved off, the mourners and followers leading their horses until the psalm was at an end. Then all mounted, and rode on in silence towards the vicarage at Hof.
Ørlygur rode behind the second coffin, gazing out over the country with tear-stained eyes.
“It all looks strange,” he thought to himself. “As if it were there only for a time. Or is it only myself that am become a stranger? My mind that has so changed that nothing in it now can last? It seems so. We see things according to the mood of our own mind. I seem like a stone set rolling, knowing nothing of where it will stop.
“Not a pleasant thing to be compared with, either. A rolling stone must needs be on the downward track. Well, after all, most comparisons have a weakness somewhere. A stone rolling down from barren mountains to a grassy valley, where it finds a softer bed, has surely changed for the better. But my path lies the opposite way. And no one ever knew a stone roll upward. Only the glowing rock, hurled from the bowels of the earth by a volcano, comes to a rest in the mountains after an upward flight. Oh, what nonsense!” he broke off. “I am not a stone.
“Or, at least, it is only my heart that is of stone,” he went on bitterly. “Why can I feel no real grief at my loss? Why is there room in my heart for all these things on such a day as this? Am I worse than other people, I wonder? I do not feel unkindly towards any one. Or is it that _thinking_ of sorrow stifles the real sorrow itself? If _she_ were dead....”
He turned pale at the thought, and tears flowed from his eyes.
“God in heaven! That would mean death to me—to live would be impossible. Her body to decay, her golden hair to be soiled by earth—her eyes lifeless and dull....”
His heart beat as if it would burst, and he shivered.
Suddenly he ceased to weep, and a silence seemed to fill him.
“I cannot bear to think of her as dead,” he thought. “And yet I have planned to do that which will ruin her life—to kill her love, and strike her soul the cruellest blow that any human being can inflict upon another. What a desperate tangle it all is. Would it not be better for her to die? Would it not be better if I were to end her life—kill her at once? Surely it would. But it was not her I was thinking of. I was only thinking of myself; not of what would be best for her, but of what would hurt me least. And if it were better for her to die, then what I am about to do is a greater crime than if I took her life....”