“What do you want?” he asked, his voice groggy.
“You can’t stay here,” said his wife. She held on to him, for he was reeling as he stood there. With her other hand she brushed off his velvet clothes. “It’s time for us to go to bed too, husband.” She put her hand under his arm and led the staggering man up toward the farm. They walked along behind the farmyard buildings.
“You didn’t look up, Ragnfrid, when you sat in the bridal bed wearing the crown,” he said in the same voice. “Our daughter was less modest than you were; her eyes were not shy as she looked at her bridegroom.”
“She has waited for him for three and a half years,” said the mother quietly. “After that I think she would dare to look up.”
“No, the Devil take me if they’ve waited!” shouted the father, and his wife hushed him, alarmed.
They were standing in the narrow lane between the back of the latrine and the fence. Lavrans slammed his fist against the lower timber of the outhouse.
“I put you here to suffer ridicule and shame, you timber. I put you here so the muck would devour you. I put you here as punishment because you struck down my pretty little maiden. I should have put you above the door of my loft and honored and thanked you with decorative carvings because you saved her from shame and from sorrow—for you caused my Ulvhild to die an innocent child.”
He spun around, staggered against the fence, and collapsed against it with his head resting on his arms as he sobbed uncontrollably, with long deep moans in between.
His wife put her arms around his shoulders.
“Lavrans, Lavrans.” But she could not console him. “Husband.”
“Oh, I never, never, never should have given her to that man. God help me—I knew it all along—he has crushed her youth and her fair honor. I refused to believe it, no, I could not believe such a thing of Kristin. But I knew it all the same. Even so, she is too good for that weak boy, who has shamed both her and himself. I shouldn’t have given her to him, even if he had seduced her ten times, so that now he can squander more of her life and happiness.”
“What else was there to do?” said Ragnfrid in resignation. “You could see for yourself that she was already his.”
“Yes, but I didn’t need to make such a great fuss to give Erlend what he had already taken himself,” said Lavrans. “It’s a fine husband she has won, my Kristin.” He yanked at the fence. Then he wept some more. Ragnfrid thought he had grown a bit more sober, but now the drink took the upper hand again.
As drunk as he was and as overcome with despair, she didn’t think she could take him up to the hearth room where they were supposed to sleep—it was filled with guests. She looked around. Nearby was a small barn where they kept the best hay for the horses during the spring farm work. She walked over and peered inside; no one was there. Then she led her husband inside and shut the door behind them.
Ragnfrid piled the hay up all around and then placed their capes over both of them. Lavrans continued to weep off and on, and occasionally he would say something, but it was so confused that she couldn’t understand him. After a while she lifted his head into her lap.
“My dear husband, since they feel such love for each other, maybe everything will turn out better than we expect. . . .”
Lavrans, who now seemed more clearheaded, replied, gasping, “Don’t you see? He now has complete power over her; this man who could never restrain himself. She will find it difficult to oppose anything that her husband wishes—and if she is forced to do so one day, then it will torment her bitterly, that gentle child of mine.
“I don’t understand any longer why God has given me so many great sorrows. I have striven faithfully to do His will. Why did He take our children from us, Ragnfrid, one after the other? First our sons, then little Ulvhild, and now I have given the one I love most dearly, without honor, to an unreliable and imprudent man. Now we have only the little one left. And it seems to me unwise to rejoice over Ramborg until I see how things may go for her.”
Ragnfrid was shaking like a leaf. Then she touched her husband’s shoulder.
“Lie down,” she begged him. “Let’s go to sleep.” And with his head in his wife’s arms Lavrans lay quietly for a while, sighing now and then, until finally he fell asleep.
It was still pitch dark in the barn when Ragnfrid stirred; she was surprised she had slept at all. She put out her hand. Lavrans was sitting up with his hands clasped around his knees.
“Are you already awake?” she asked, astonished. “Are you cold?”
“No,” he replied, his voice hoarse, “but I can’t sleep anymore.”
“Is it Kristin you’re thinking about?” asked Ragnfrid. “It may turn out better than we think, Lavrans,” she told him again.
“Yes, that’s what I’m thinking about,” said her husband. “Well, well. Maiden or wife, at least she lay in the bridal bed with the one she had given her love to. Neither you nor I did that, my poor Ragnfrid.”
His wife gave a deep, hollow moan. She threw herself down next to him in the hay. Lavrans placed his hand on her shoulder.
“But I could not,” he said with fervor and anguish. “No, I could not . . . act toward you the way you wanted me to—back when we were young. I’m not the kind of man . . .”
After a moment Ragnfrid murmured, in tears, “We have lived well together all the same, Lavrans—all these years.”
“So I too have believed,” he replied gloomily.
His thoughts were tumbling and racing through his mind. That one naked glance which the groom and bride had cast at each other, the two young faces blushing with red flames—he thought it so brazen. It had stung him that she was his daughter. But he kept on seeing those eyes, and he struggled wildly and blindly against tearing away the veil from something in his own heart which he had never wanted to acknowledge—there he had concealed a part of himself from his own wife when she had searched for it.
He had not been able to, he interrupted himself harshly. In the name of the Devil, he had been married off as a young boy; he had not chosen her himself. She was older than he was. He had not desired her. He had not wanted to learn this from her—how to love. He still grew hot with shame at the thought of it—that she had wanted him to love her when he had not wanted that kind of love from her. That she had offered him everything that he had never asked for.
He had been a good husband to her; he believed that himself. He had shown her all the respect he could, given her full authority, asked her advice about everything, been faithful to her; and they had had six children. He had simply wanted to live with her without her always trying to seize what was in his heart—and what he refused to reveal.
He had never loved anyone. What about Ingunn, Karl’s wife at Bru? Lavrans blushed in the darkness. He had always visited them when he traveled through the valley. He had probably never spoken to the woman alone even once. But whenever he saw her—if he merely thought of her—he felt something like that first smell of the earth in the spring, right after the snow had gone. Now he realized: it could have happened to him too . . . he could have loved someone too.
But he had been married so young, and he had grown wary. Then he found that he thrived best out in the wilderness—up on the mountain plateaus, where every living creature demands wide-open space, with room enough to flee. Wary, they watch every stranger that tries to sneak up on them.
Once a year the animals of the forest and in the mountains would forget their wariness. Then they would rush at their females. But he had been given his as a gift. And she had offered him everything for which he had never wooed her.