But now that he was gone, it seemed to the widow that there was no purpose left to the restless toil of her life. He had been cut down, and so she had to die like a tree whose roots have been severed. The young shoots that had sprung up around her lap would now have to grow from their own roots. Each of them was old enough to decide his own fate. The thought flitted through Kristin’s mind that if she had realized this before, back when Erlend mentioned it to her . . . Shadowy images of a life with Erlend up at his mountain farm passed through her mind: the two of them youthful again, with the little child between them. But she felt neither regret nor remorse. She had not been able to cut her life away from that of her sons; now death would soon separate them, for without Erlend she had no strength to live. All that had happened and would happen was meant to be. Everything happens as it is meant to be.
Her hair and her skin turned gray; she took little interest in bathing or tending to her clothes properly. At night she would lie in bed thinking about her life with Erlend; in the daytime she would walk about as if in a dream, never speaking to anyone unless addressed first, not seeming to hear even when her young sons spoke to her. This diligent and alert woman did not raise a hand to do any work. Love had always been behind her toil with earthly matters. Erlend had never given her much thanks for that; it was not the way he wanted to be loved. But she couldn’t help it; it was her nature to love with great toil and care.
She seemed to be slipping toward the torpor of death. Then the scourge came to the countryside, flinging her sons onto their sickbeds, and the mother woke up.
The sickness was more dangerous for grown-ups than for children. Ivar was struck so hard that no one expected him to live. The youth acquired enormous strength in his fevered state; he bellowed and wanted to get out of bed to take up arms. His father’s death seemed to be weighing on his mind. With great difficulty Naakkve and Bj?rgulf managed to hold him down. Then it was Bj?rgulf’s turn to take to his bed. Lavrans lay with his face swollen beyond recognition with festering sores; his eyes glittered dully between narrow slits and looked as if they would be extinguished in a blaze of fever.
Kristin kept vigil in the loft with all three of them. Naakkve and Gaute had had the sickness as boys, and Skule was less ill than his brothers. Frida was taking care of him and Munan downstairs in the main room. No one thought there was any danger for Munan, but he had never been strong, and one evening when they thought he had already recovered, he suddenly fell into a faint. Frida had just enough time to warn his mother. Kristin ran downstairs, and a moment later Munan breathed his last in her arms.
The child’s death aroused in her a new, wide-awake despair. Her wild grief over the infant who had died at his mother’s breast had seemed red-tinged with the memory of all her crushed dreams of happiness. Back then the storm in her heart had kept her going. And the dire strain, which ended with her seeing her husband killed before her very eyes, left behind such a weariness in her soul that Kristin was convinced she would soon die of grief over Erlend. But that certainty had dulled the sharpness of her pain. She went about feeling the twilight and shadows growing all around her as she waited for the door to open for her in turn.
Over Munan’s little body his mother stood alert and gray. This lovely, sweet little boy had been her youngest child for so many years, the last of her sons whom she still dared caress and laugh at when she ought to have been stern and somber, chastising him for his little misdeeds and careless acts. And he had been so loving and attached to his mother. It cut into her living flesh. As bound to life as she still was, it wasn’t possible for a woman to die as easily as she had thought, after she had poured her life’s blood into so many new young hearts.
In cold, sober despair she moved between the child who lay on his bier and her ill sons. Munan was laid out in the old storeroom, where first the infant and then his father had lain. Three bodies on her manor in less than a year. Her heart was withered with anguish, but rigid and mute, she waited for the next one to die; she expected it, like an inevitable fate. She had never fully understood what she had been given when God bestowed on her so many children. The worst of it was that in some ways she had understood. But she had thought more about the troubles, the pain, the anguish, and the strife—even though she had learned over and over again, from her yearning every time a child grew out of her arms, and from her joy every time a new one lay at her breast, that her happiness was inexpressibly greater than her struggles or pain. She had grumbled because the father of her children was such an unreliable man, who gave so little thought to the descendants who would come after him. She always forgot that he had been no different when she broke God’s commandments and trampled on her own family in order to win him.