“Oh, speak not so—you,” she begged wildly, pressing her thin hands to his temples. “You know well I would not you should do aught but what you feel yourself is the right.”
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 in to 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 to-night 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.