During Yule-tide the cold grew greater—it was as though each day was colder than the last. Scarce anyone could call to mind so hard a winter—there came no more snow, not even up in the mountains; but the snow that had fallen at Clementsmass froze hard as a stone. The sun shone from a clear sky, now the days began to grow lighter. At night the northern lights flickered and flamed above the range to the north—they flamed over half the heaven, but they brought no change of weather; now and again would come a cloudy day, and a little dry snow would sprinkle down—and then came clear weather again and biting cold. The Laagen muttered and gurgled sluggishly under its ice-bridges.
Kristin thought each morning that she could bear no more, that she could never hold out to the day’s end. For each day she felt was as a duel between her and her father. And could they be against each other so, when every living being in the parish, man and beast, was suffering under one common trial?—But still, when the evening came, she had held out one day more.
It was not that her father was unfriendly. They spoke no word of what was between them, but she felt, behind all that he did not say, his firm unbending will to hold fast to his denial.
And her heart ached within her for the lack of his friendship. The ache was so dreadful in its keenness, because she knew how much else her father had on his shoulders—and had things been as before, he would have talked with her of it all—It was indeed so, that at Jörundgaard they were in better case than most other places; but here, too, they felt the pinch of the year each day and each hour. Other years it had been Lavrans’ wont in the winters to handle and break in his young colts; but this year he had sent them all south in the autumn and sold them. And his daughter missed the sound of his voice out in the courtyard, and the sight of him struggling with the slender, ragged two-year-olds in the game he loved so well. Storehouses and barns and bins at Jörundgaard were not bare yet—there was store left from the harvest of the year before—but many folk came to ask for help—to buy, or to beg for gifts—and none ever asked in vain.
Late one evening came a huge old skin-clad man on ski. Lavrans talked with him out in the courtyard, and Halvdan bore food across to the hearth-room for him. None on the place who had seen him knew who he was—he might well be one of those wild folk who lived far in among the fells; like enough Lavrans had come upon him in there. But Lavrans said naught of the visitor, nor Halvdan either.
But one evening came a man whom Lavrans Björgulfsön had been at odds with for many years. Lavrans went to the storeroom with him. When he came back to the hall again he said:
“They come to me for help, every man of them. But here in my own house you are all against me. You, too, wife,” he said hotly.
The mother flamed up at Kristin:
“Hear you what your father says to me! No, I am not against you, Lavrans. I know—and I wot well you know it too, Kristin—what befell away south at Roaldstad late in the autumn, when he journeyed down the Dale with that other adulterer, his kinsman of Hauges—she took her own life, the unhappy woman he had lured away from all her kin.”
Kristin stood with a hard, frozen face: