His wife stiffened in his arms and pulled away a little.
“It’s fasting time,” she said quietly, her voice strangely hard.
“So it is.” Her husband chuckled. “You and I, Ragnfrid, we have observed all the fast days and have tried to live by God’s commandments in all things. And now it almost seems to me . . . that we might have been happier if we had had more to regret.”
“Don’t talk that way,” implored his wife in despair, holding his temples in her gaunt hands. “You know that I don’t want you to do anything except what you think is right.”
He pulled her to him once more. He gasped aloud as he said, “God help her. God help us all, my Ragnfrid.
“I’m tired,” he said, releasing her. “You should go to bed now too, shouldn’t you?”
He stood by the door, waiting as she put out the fire in the hearth, blew out the little iron lamp by the loom, and pinched the wick. Together they walked through the rain over to the main house.
Lavrans already had his foot on the stairs up to the loft when he turned back to his wife, who was still standing in the door to the entryway. He pulled her fervently to him one last time and kissed her in the darkness. Then he made the sign of the cross over his wife’s face and went upstairs.
Ragnfrid threw off her clothes and crept into bed. She lay still for a while, listening to her husband’s footsteps overhead in the loft room; then the bed creaked up there and silence fell. Ragnfrid crossed her thin arms over her withered breasts. Yes, God help her. What kind of woman was she? What kind of mother was she? She would soon be old. And yet she was just the same. She no longer begged the way she had when they were young, when she had threatened and raged against this man who closed himself off, shy and modest, when she grew ardent—who turned cold when she wanted to give him more than his husband’s right. That’s the way things were, and that’s how she had gotten with child, time after time—humiliated, furious with shame because she couldn’t be content with his lukewarm, married man’s love. Then, when she was pregnant and in need of kindness and tenderness, he had had so much to give. Whenever she was sick or tormented, her husband’s tireless, gentle concern for her fell like dew on her hot soul. He willingly took on all her troubles and bore them, but there was something of his own that he refused to share. She had loved her children so much that it felt as though her heart were cut out of her each time she lost one of them. God, God, what kind of woman was she, who in the midst of her suffering was capable of tasting that drop of sweetness when he took on her sorrow and laid it close to his own?
Kristin. She would gladly have walked through fire for her daughter; they wouldn’t believe it, neither Lavrans nor the child, but it was true. And yet she felt an anger toward her that was close to hatred right now. It was to forget his own sorrow over the child’s sorrow that Lavrans had wished tonight that he could have given in to his wife.
Ragnfrid didn’t dare get up, for she didn’t know whether Kristin might be lying awake over in the other bed. But she got soundlessly to her knees, and with her forehead leaning against the footboard of the bed, she tried to pray—for her daughter, for her husband, and for herself. As her body gradually grew stiff with the cold, she set out once more on one of her familiar night journeys, trying to break a path to a peaceful home for her heart.
CHAPTER 3
HAUGEN LAY HIGH up on the slope on the west side of the valley. On this moonlit night the whole world was white. Wave after wave of white mountains arched beneath the bluish, washed-out sky with few stars. Even the shadows cast across the snowy surfaces by rounded summits and crests seemed strangely light and airy, for the moon was sailing so high.
Down toward the valley the forest, laden white with snow and frost, stood enclosing the white slopes around the farms with intricate patterns of fences and buildings. But at the very bottom of the valley the shadows thickened into darkness.
Fru Aashild came out of the cowshed, pulled the door shut behind her, and paused for a moment in the snow. The whole world was white, and yet it was still more than three weeks until the beginning of Advent. The cold of Saint Clement’s Day would herald the real arrival of winter. Well, it was all part of a bad harvest year.
The old woman sighed heavily, standing outdoors in the desolation. Winter again, and cold and loneliness. Then she picked up the milk pail and the lantern and walked toward the house, gazing around once more.
Four black spots emerged from the forest halfway down the slope. Four men on horseback. There was the flash of a spear point in the moonlight. They were making their way across with difficulty. No one had come here since the snowfall. Were they heading this way?