Now the spruce trees rustled closer and closer in the night; she stepped in among them, still as calm as a sleepwalker. She sensed every sound and hardly dared blink because of the dark. The drone of the river, the heavy sighing of the firs, a creek trickling over stones as she walked toward it, passed by it, and then continued on. Once a rock slid down the scree, as if some living creature were moving about up there. Sweat poured from her body, but she did not venture either to slow or to speed her step because of it.
Kristin’s eyes had now grown so accustomed to the dark that when she emerged from the woods, she could see much better; a glint came from the ribbon of the river and from the water on the marshes. The fields became visible in the blackness; the clusters of buildings looked like clumps of earth. The sky was also beginning to lighten overhead; she could feel it, although she didn’t dare look up at the black peaks towering above. But she knew that it would soon be time for the moon to rise.
She tried to remind herself that in four hours it would be daytime; people would be setting about their daily chores on all the farms throughout the countryside. The sky would grow pale with dawn; the light would rise over the mountains. Then it wouldn’t seem far to go; in the daylight it wasn’t far from Formo to the church. And by then she would have returned home long ago. But it was clear that she would be a different person.
She knew that if it had been one of her own children, she would not have dared make this last attempt. To turn away God’s hand when He reached out for a living soul. When she kept watch over her own ill children, back when she was young and her heart bled with tenderness, when she thought she would collapse in anguish and torment, she had tried to say: Lord, you love them better than I do, let thy will be done.
But now on this night she was walking along, defying her own terror. This child who was not her own—she would save him, no matter what fate she was saving him for. . . .
Because you too, Simon Darre, acquiesced when the dearest thing you possessed on earth was at stake; you agreed to more than anyone can accept with full honor.
Do you not want me to go? He hadn’t been man enough to answer. Deep in her heart she knew that if the child died, Simon would have the strength to bear this too. But she had struck at the only moment when she ever saw him on the verge of breaking down; she had seized hold of that moment and carried it off. She would share that secret with him, the knowledge that she had also witnessed him when he once stood unsteady on his feet.
For he had learned too much about her. She had accepted help from the man she had spurned every time it was a matter of saving the one she had chosen. This suitor whom she had cast aside—he was the man she had turned to each time she needed someone to protect her love. And never had she asked for Simon’s help in vain. Time after time he had stepped forward, covering her with his kindness and his strength.
So she was undertaking this nighttime errand to rid herself of a little of the debt; until that hour, she hadn’t fully realized how heavy a burden it was.
Simon had forced her to see at last that he was the strongest: stronger than she was and stronger than the man to whom she had chosen to give herself. No doubt she had realized this from the moment all three of them met, face-to-face, in that shameful place in Oslo. And yet she had refused to accept it then: that such a plump-cheeked, stout, and gaping young man could be stronger than . . .
Now she was walking along, not daring to call on a good and holy name; she took upon herself this sin in order to . . . She didn’t know what. Was it revenge? Revenge because she had been forced to see that he was more noble-minded than the two of them?
But now you too understand, Simon, that when the life of the one you love more than your own heart is at stake . . . Then the poor person grasps for anything, anything.
The moon had risen over the mountain ridge as she walked up the hill to the church. Again she felt as if she had to overcome a new wave of terror. The moonlight lay like a delicate spiderweb over the tar-timbered edifice. The church itself looked terrifying and ominously dark beneath the thin veil. Out on the green she saw the cross, but for the first time she didn’t dare approach to kneel before the blessed tree. She crept over the churchyard wall at the place where she knew the sod and stone were the lowest and most easily breached.
Here and there a gravestone glistened like water down in the tall, dewy grass. Kristin walked straight across the cemetery to the graves of the poor, which lay near the south wall.
She went over to the burial place of a poor man who had been a stranger in the parish. One winter the man had frozen to death on the mountainside. His two motherless daughters had been taken in by one farm after another,1 until Lavrans Bj?rgulfs?n had offered to keep them and bring them up, for the sake of Christ. When they were full grown and had turned out well, Kristin’s father had found honorable, hardworking husbands for them and married them off with cows and calves and sheep. Ragnfrid had given them bedding and iron pots. Now both women were well provided for, as befitted their station. One of them had been Ramborg’s maid, and Ramborg had carried the woman’s child to be baptized.