“Aye, ’tis of that I was thinking,” said the man. “Aye, aye—maid or woman, at least she is come to the bride-bed with the man she loves. And ’twas not so with either you or me, my poor Ragnfrid.”
His wife gave a deep, dull moan, and threw herself down on her side amongst the hay. Lavrans put out a hand and laid it on her shoulder.
“But ’twas that I could not,” said he, with passion and pain. “No, I could not—be as you would have had me—when we were young. I am not such a one—”
In a while Ragnfrid said softly through her weeping:
“Yet ’twas well with us in our life together—Lavrans—was it not?—all these years?”
“So thought I myself,” answered he gloomily.
Thoughts crowded and tossed to and fro within him. That single unveiled glance in which the hearts of bridegroom and bride had leapt together—the two young faces flushing up redly—to him it seemed a very shamelessness. It had been agony, a scorching pain to him, that this was his daughter. But the sight of those eyes would not leave him—and wildly and blindly he strove against the tearing away of the veil from something in his own heart, something that he had never owned was there, that he had guarded against his own wife when she sought for it.
’Twas that he could not, he said again stubbornly to himself. In the devil’s name—he had been married off as a boy; he had not chosen for himself; she was older than he—he had not desired her; he had had no will to learn this of her—to love. He grew hot with shame even now when he thought of it—that she would have had him love her, when he had no will to have such love from her. That she had proffered him all this that he had never prayed for.
He had been a good husband to her—so he had ever thought. He had shown her all the honour he could, given her full power in her own affairs, and asked her counsel in all things; he had been true to her—and they had had six children together. All he had asked had been that he might live with her, without her for ever grasping at this thing in his heart that he would not lay bare—
To none had he ever borne love—Ingunn, Karl Steinsön’s wife, at Bru? Lavrans flushed red in the pitch darkness. He had been their guest ever, as often as he journeyed down the Dale. He could not call to mind that he had spoken with the housewife once alone. But when he saw her—if he but thought of her, a sense came over him as of the first breath of the plough-lands in the spring, when the snows are but now melted and gone. He knew it now—it might have befallen him too—he, too, could have loved.