Lavrans Bj?rgulfs?n arrived home at J?rundgaard late in the evening. A feeling of warmth passed through him when he saw that someone was still awake in the hearth room—there was a faint flicker of firelight behind the tiny glass window facing the gallery. It was in this building that he always felt most at home.
Ragnfrid was alone inside, sitting at the table with clothes to be mended in front of her. A tallow candle in a brass candlestick stood nearby. She got up at once, greeted him, put more wood on the hearth, and then went to get food and drink. No, she had sent the maids off to bed long ago; they had had a hard day, but now enough barley bread had been baked to last until Christmas. Paal and Gunstein had gone off into the mountains to gather moss. While they were talking about moss . . . Would Lavrans like to have for his winter surcoat the cloth that was dyed with moss or the one that was heather green? Orm of Moar had come to J?rundgaard that morning, wanting to buy some leather rope. She had taken the ropes hanging in the front of the shed and said he could have them as a gift. Yes, Orm’s daughter was a little better now; the injury to her leg had knit together nicely.
Lavrans answered her questions and nodded while he and his servant ate and drank. But he was quickly done with eating. He stood up, wiped his knife on the back of his thigh, and picked up a spool of thread that lay at Ragnfrid’s place. The thread had been wound around a stick with a bird carved into both ends—one of them had a slightly broken tail. Lavrans smoothed out the rough part and whittled it down so the bird had a stump of a tail. Once, long ago, he had made many of these thread spools for his wife.
“Are you going to mend them yourself?” he asked, looking down at her sewing. It was a pair of his leather hose; Ragnfrid was patching the inner side of the thighs, where they were worn from the saddle. “That’s hard work for your fingers, Ragnfrid.”
“Hmm.” His wife placed the pieces of the leather edge to edge and poked holes in them with an awl.
The servant bade them good night and left. The husband and wife were alone. Lavrans stood near the hearth, warming himself, with one foot up on the edge and his hand on the smoke-vent pole. Ragnfrid glanced over at him. Then she noticed that he wasn’t wearing the little ring with the rubies—his mother’s bridal ring. He saw that she had noticed.
“Yes, I gave it to Kristin,” he said. “I always meant it to be hers, and I thought she might as well have it now.”
Then one of them said to the other that they ought to go to bed. But Lavrans stayed where he was, and Ragnfrid sat and sewed. They exchanged a few words about Kristin’s journey, about the work that had to be done on the farm, about Ramborg and about Simon. Then they mentioned again that they should probably go to bed, but neither of them moved.
Finally Lavrans took off the gold ring with the blue-and-white stone from his right hand and went over to his wife. Shy and embarrassed, he took her hand and put on the ring; he had to try several times before he found a finger it would fit. He put it on her middle finger, in front of her wedding ring.
“I want you to have this now,” he said in a low voice, without looking at her.
Ragnfrid sat motionless, her cheeks blood red.
“Why are you doing this?” she whispered at last. “Do you think I begrudge our daughter her ring?”
Lavrans shook his head and gave a little smile. “I think you know why I’m doing this.”
“You’ve said in the past that you wanted to have this ring in the grave with you,” she said in the same tone of voice. “And no one but you was to wear it.”
“And that’s why you must never take it off, Ragnfrid. Promise me that. After you, I want no one else to wear it.”
“Why are you doing this?” she repeated, holding her breath.
Her husband looked down into her face.
“This spring it was thirty-four years ago that we were married. I was an under-aged boy; during all of my manhood you have been at my side, whenever I suffered grief and whenever things went well. May God help me, I had such little understanding of how many troubles you had to bear in our life together. But now it seems to me that all of my days I felt it was good that you were here.
I don’t know whether you believed that I had more love for Kristin than for you. It’s true that she was my greatest joy, and she caused me the greatest sorrow. But you were mother to them all. Now I think leaving you behind will hurt me the most, when I go.
“And that’s why you must never give my ring to anyone else—not even to one of our daughters; tell them they must not take it from you.
“Perhaps you may think, wife, that you’ve had more sorrow than joy with me; things did go wrong for us in some ways. And yet I think we have been faithful friends. And this is what I have thought: that afterwards we will meet again in such a manner that all the wrongs will no longer separate us; and the friendship that we had, God will build even stronger.”
Ragnfrid lifted her pale, furrowed face. Her big, sunken eyes burned as she looked up at her husband. He was still holding her hand; she looked at it, lying in his, slightly raised. The three rings gleamed next to each other: on the bottom her betrothal ring, next her wedding ring, and on top his ring.
It seemed so strange to her. She remembered when he put the first one on her finger; they were standing in front of the smoke-vent pole in the hall back home at Sundbu, their fathers with them. He was pink and white, his cheeks were round, hardly more than a child—a little bashful as he took a step forward from Sir Bj?rgulf’s side.
The second ring he had put on her finger in front of the church door in Gerdarud, in the name of the Trinity, under the hand of the priest.
With this last ring, she felt as if he were marrying her again. Now that she would soon sit beside his lifeless body, he wanted her to know that with this ring he was committing to her the strong and vital force that had lived in this dust and ashes.
Her heart felt as if it were breaking in her breast, bleeding and bleeding, young and fierce. From grief over the warm and ardent love which she had lost and still secretly mourned; from anguished joy over the pale, luminous love which drew her to the farthest boundaries of life on this earth. Through the great darkness that would come, she saw the gleam of another, gentler sun, and she sensed the fragrance of the herbs in the garden at world’s end.
Lavrans set his wife’s hand back in her lap and sat down on the bench a short distance away, with his back against the table and one arm resting along the top. He did not look at her, but stared into the hearth fire.
And yet her voice was quiet and calm when she once again spoke.
“I did not know, my husband, that you had such affection for me.”
“I do,” he replied, his voice equally calm.
They sat in silence for a while. Ragnfrid moved her sewing from her lap onto the bench beside her. After a time she said softly, “What I told you that night—have you forgotten that?”
“I doubt that any man on this earth could forget such words. And it’s true that I myself have felt that things were no better between us after I heard them. But God knows, Ragnfrid, I tried so hard to conceal from you that I gave that matter so much thought.”
“I didn’t realize you thought so much about it.”
He turned toward her abruptly and stared at his wife.
Then Ragnfrid said, “I am to blame that things grew worse between us, Lavrans. I thought that if you could be toward me exactly the same as before that night—then you must have cared even less for me than I thought. If you had been a stern husband toward me afterwards, if you had struck me even once when you were drunk—then I would have been better able to bear my sorrow and my remorse. But when you took it so lightly . . .”