So she came out, and looked at herself, and thought on the days of her girlhood when she had been yellow, pink and white like the flower called guldå. Her mother’s hair had also been yellow, they said, but Astrid could not remember her. Indeed, how much do the dead understand of anything? Ask the Preacher, and he will tell you that this matter also is hidden. Between Astrid Audunsdottir and the living past lay a single spider-strand glittering over wet moss.
Magnhild’s hair had darkened when she bore children and lightened again when she grew old, until it became as blonde as when she was a child. She was proud of her hair until Astrid came. How she had hated Astrid for her shining yellow hair! Now Astrid was dead, as were all Magnhild’s children. She lived alone with one servant in her dead brother’s house, whose routine continued as in his time, except that the inmates burned candles more freely nowadays; Loden had never permitted anyone but himself to expend tallow.
Like most of us who have committed cruelties, Magnhild got through life by not thinking about them. On the occasions when that shield slipped aside, she could thrust out with sharp reasons and justifications; and when those failed, she simply needed to envision Astrid before her, in order to be renewed in her hatred. Just as a man who hates dogs might correctly anathematize their greed, their odor when wet, and their enthusiasm for rolling in filth, without yet explaining, even to himself, why he must hurt them at any chance, so did Magnhild cherish up her reasons as blackly distinct as the hymn numbers posted on the cathedral’s wooden board, unlike Loden, who had never stooped to explanations. In brief, she despised Astrid because she loved her brother; and how he could be loveable to her and why he hated Astrid from the instant she belonged to him are two more of the Preacher’s far-off and deep things.
Magnhild was in some respects an excellent woman. Her greatest pleasure lay in hearing the choir’s melodies echoing and blending until they seemed to butter the cold stone pillars of the church. On that evening, which Marianne had off, Magnhild felt ill and cold, so she went to bed early, listening to the rain and that freshening autumnal wind. The beauty and comfort of the hymns she had sung in her life nourished her as she lay there reading her Bible, and presently she slept. But just before she began to dream, she made the error of remembering a certain pretty girl of long ago, who once slipped into the Domkirke to hear her neighbors at choir practice; in those days Magnhild had had a fine contralto voice, whereas this pretty Anne Kristin, the one with the long yellow hair, could not sing, and married far away, so that Magnhild had forgotten her for many a year; and one cannot blame her for missing this innocuous girl’s susceptibility to being employed as a disguised emanation of Astrid, whom it was best never to think about at bedtime.