So many times in the years that followed she had received his caresses, and stony and cold with anger, she had obediently complied with her husband’s will, while she felt on the verge of collapse, ravaged by weariness. She had felt a sort of resentful pleasure when she looked at Erlend’s lovely face and healthy, graceful body—at least that could no longer blind her to the man’s faults. Yes, he was just as young and just as handsome; he could still overwhelm her with caresses that were as ardent as they had been in the days when she too was young. But she had aged, she thought, feeling a rush of triumphant pride. It was easy for someone to stay young if he refused to learn, refused to adapt to his lot in life, and refused to fight to change his circumstances in accordance with his will.
And yet even when she received his kisses with her lips pressed tight, when she turned her whole being away from him in order to fight for the future of her sons, she sensed that she threw herself into this effort with the same fiery passion this man had once ignited in her blood. She thought the years had cooled her ardor because she no longer felt desire whenever Erlend had that old glint in his eyes or that deep tone to his voice, which had made her swoon, helpless and powerless with joy, the first time she met him. But just as she had once longed to ease the heavy burden of separation and the anguish of her heart in her meetings with Erlend, she now felt a dull but fervent longing for a goal that would one day be reached when she, at long last, was a white-haired old woman and saw her sons well provided for and secure. Now it was for Erlend’s sons that she endured the old fear of the uncertainty that lay ahead. And yet she was tormented with a longing that was like a hunger and a burning thirst—she must see her sons flourish.
And just as she had once given herself to Erlend, she later surrendered herself to the world that had sprung up around their life together. She threw herself into fulfilling every demand that had to be met; she lent a hand with every task that needed to be done in order to ensure the well-being of Erlend and his children. She began to understand that Erlend was always with her when she sat at Husaby and studied the documents in her husband’s chest along with their priest, or when she talked to his leaseholders and laborers, or worked alongside her maids in the living quarters and cookhouse, or sat in the horse pasture with the foster mothers and kept an eye on her children on those lovely summer days. She came to realize that she turned her anger on Erlend whenever anything went wrong in the house and whenever the children disobeyed her will; but it was also toward him that her great joy streamed whenever they brought the hay in dry during the summer or had a good harvest of grain in the fall, or whenever her calves were thriving, and whenever she heard her boys shouting and laughing in the courtyard. The knowledge that she belonged to him blazed deep within her heart whenever she laid aside the last of the Sabbath clothes she had sewn for her seven sons and stood rejoicing over the pile of lovely, carefully stitched work she had done that winter. He was the one she was sick and tired of one spring evening when she walked home with her maids from the river. They had been washing wool from the last shearing, boiling water in a kettle on the shore and rinsing the wool in the current. And the mistress herself felt a great strain in her back, and her arms were coal-black with dung; the smell of sheep and dirty fat had soaked into her clothes until she thought her body would never be clean, even after three visits to the bathhouse.
But now that he was gone, it seemed to the widow that there was no purpose left to the restless toil of her life. He had been cut down, and so she had to die like a tree whose roots have been severed. The young shoots that had sprung up around her lap would now have to grow from their own roots. Each of them was old enough to decide his own fate. The thought flitted through Kristin’s mind that if she had realized this before, back when Erlend mentioned it to her . . . Shadowy images of a life with Erlend up at his mountain farm passed through her mind: the two of them youthful again, with the little child between them. But she felt neither regret nor remorse. She had not been able to cut her life away from that of her sons; now death would soon separate them, for without Erlend she had no strength to live. All that had happened and would happen was meant to be. Everything happens as it is meant to be.
Her hair and her skin turned gray; she took little interest in bathing or tending to her clothes properly. At night she would lie in bed thinking about her life with Erlend; in the daytime she would walk about as if in a dream, never speaking to anyone unless addressed first, not seeming to hear even when her young sons spoke to her. This diligent and alert woman did not raise a hand to do any work. Love had always been behind her toil with earthly matters. Erlend had never given her much thanks for that; it was not the way he wanted to be loved. But she couldn’t help it; it was her nature to love with great toil and care.
She seemed to be slipping toward the torpor of death. Then the scourge came to the countryside, flinging her sons onto their sickbeds, and the mother woke up.
The sickness was more dangerous for grown-ups than for children. Ivar was struck so hard that no one expected him to live. The youth acquired enormous strength in his fevered state; he bellowed and wanted to get out of bed to take up arms. His father’s death seemed to be weighing on his mind. With great difficulty Naakkve and Bj?rgulf managed to hold him down. Then it was Bj?rgulf’s turn to take to his bed. Lavrans lay with his face swollen beyond recognition with festering sores; his eyes glittered dully between narrow slits and looked as if they would be extinguished in a blaze of fever.
Kristin kept vigil in the loft with all three of them. Naakkve and Gaute had had the sickness as boys, and Skule was less ill than his brothers. Frida was taking care of him and Munan downstairs in the main room. No one thought there was any danger for Munan, but he had never been strong, and one evening when they thought he had already recovered, he suddenly fell into a faint. Frida had just enough time to warn his mother. Kristin ran downstairs, and a moment later Munan breathed his last in her arms.
The child’s death aroused in her a new, wide-awake despair. Her wild grief over the infant who had died at his mother’s breast had seemed red-tinged with the memory of all her crushed dreams of happiness. Back then the storm in her heart had kept her going. And the dire strain, which ended with her seeing her husband killed before her very eyes, left behind such a weariness in her soul that Kristin was convinced she would soon die of grief over Erlend. But that certainty had dulled the sharpness of her pain. She went about feeling the twilight and shadows growing all around her as she waited for the door to open for her in turn.
Over Munan’s little body his mother stood alert and gray. This lovely, sweet little boy had been her youngest child for so many years, the last of her sons whom she still dared caress and laugh at when she ought to have been stern and somber, chastising him for his little misdeeds and careless acts. And he had been so loving and attached to his mother. It cut into her living flesh. As bound to life as she still was, it wasn’t possible for a woman to die as easily as she had thought, after she had poured her life’s blood into so many new young hearts.