He drew her to him closely once more—and groaned aloud: “God help her. God help us all, my Ragnfrid—”
Then: “I am weary,” he said, and let her go. “And ’tis time, too, for you to go to rest.”
He stood by the door waiting, while she quenched the embers on the hearth, blew out the little iron lamp by the loom, and pinched out the glowing wick. Together they went across through the rain to the hall.
Lavrans had set foot already on the loft-room stair, when he turned to his wife, who was still standing in the entry-door.
He crushed her in his arms again, for the last time, and kissed her in the dark. Then he made the sign of the cross over his wife’s face, and went up the stair.
Ragnfrid flung off her clothes and crept into bed. A while she lay and listened to her husband’s steps in the loft-room above; then she heard the bed creak, and all was still. Ragnfrid crossed her thin arms over her withered breasts:
Aye, God help her! What kind of a woman was she, what kind of mother? She would soon be old now. Yet was she the same; though she no longer begged stormily for love, as when they were young and her passion had made this man shrink and grow cold when she would have had him be lover and not only husband. So had it been—and so, time after time, when she was with child, had she been humbled, beside herself with shame, that she had not been content with his lukewarm husband-love. And then, when things were so with her, and she needed goodness and tenderness—then he had so much to give; the man’s tireless, gentle thought for her, when she was sick and tormented, had fallen on her soul like dew. Gladly did he take up all she laid on him and bear it—but there was ever something of his own he would not give. She had loved her children, so that each time she lost one, ’twas as though the heart was torn from her. God! God! what woman was she then, that even then, in the midst of her torments, she could feel it as a drop of sweetness that he took her sorrow into his heart and laid it close beside his own.
Kristin—gladly would she have passed through the fire for her daughter; they believed it not, neither Lavrans nor the child—but ’twas so. Yet did she feel toward her now an anger that was near to hate—’twas to forget his sorrow for the child’s sorrow that he had wished tonight that he could give himself up to his wife—
Ragnfrid dared not rise, for she knew not but that Kristin might be lying awake in the other bed. But she raised herself noiselessly to her knees, and with forehead bent against the footboard of the bed she strove to pray. For her daughter, for her husband and for herself. While her body, little by little, grew stiff with the cold, she set out once more on one of the night-wanderings she knew so well, striving to break her way through to a home of peace for her heart.
III
Haugen lay high up in the hills on the west side of the valley. This moonlight night the whole world was white. Billow after billow, the white fells lay domed under the pale blue heavens with their thin-strewn stars. Even the shadows that peaks and domes stretched forth over the snow-slopes seemed strangely thin and light, the moon was sailing so high.
Downward, toward the valley, the woods stood fleecy-white with snow and rime, round the white fields of crofts scrolled over with tiny huts and fences. But far down in the valley-bottom the shadows thickened into darkness.
Lady Aashild came out of the byre, shut the door after her, and stood a while in the snow. White—the whole world; yet it was more than three weeks still to Advent. Clementsmass cold—’twas like winter had come in earnest already. Aye, aye; in bad years it was often so.
The old woman sighed heavily in the desolate air. Winter again, and cold and loneliness—Then she took up the milkpail and went towards the dwelling-house. She looked once again down over the valley.
Four black dots came out of the woods halfway up the hillside. Four men on horseback—and the moonlight glanced from a spearhead. They were ploughing heavily upward—none had come that way since the snowfall. Were they coming hither?
Four armed men—’Twas not like that any who had a lawful errand here would come so many in company. She thought of the chest with her goods and Björn’s in it. Should she hide in the outhouse?
She looked out again over the wintry waste about her. Then she went into the living-house. The two old hounds that lay before the smoky fireplace smote the floorboards with their tails. The young dogs Björn had with him in the hills.
Aashild blew the embers of the fire into flame, and laid more wood on them; filled the iron pot with snow and set it on the fire; then poured the milk into a wooden bowl and bore it to the closet beside the outer room.
Then she doffed her dirty, undyed, wadmal gown, that smelt of the byre and of sweat, put on a dark-blue garment, and changed her tow-linen hood for a coif of fine white linen, which she smoothed down fairly round her head and neck. Her shaggy boots of skin she drew off, and put on silver-buckled shoes. Then she fell to setting her room in order—smoothed the pillows and the skin in the bed where Björn had lain that day, wiped the long-board clean, and laid the bench-cushions straight.
When the dogs set up their warning barking, she was standing by the fireplace, stirring the supper-porridge. She heard horses in the yard, and the tread of men in the outer room; someone knocked on the door with a
