The Snake Pit (The Master of Hestviken, #2)

by Sigrid Undset

She lifted the boy down, hugged him in her arms, kissed and kissed again his face and neck and shoulder, while he struggled, making himself long and heavy in her embrace. When he began to kick her as hard as he could, his mother took a firm hold of his smooth bare calves—feeling with painful joy how firm and strong his little body was. At last she sank into a crouching attitude, and as she wept and muttered wild endearments over the child, she strove to coax and force him to sit in her lap. When she was obliged for a moment to loosen her grip of him, the boy managed to wriggle away from her. He darted like a hare across the little clearing, was lost among the bushes—then she heard the gate close. Ingunn stood up—she wailed aloud with pain. Then she staggered forward, bent double by sobs, with drooping arms. She came to a hedge, saw Eirik running over the turf so fast that his heels nearly reached his neck. The mother stood there, weeping and weeping, as she bent over the hedge. The withered, rust-red branches of spruce had been felled to fence in a little field, where the corn had just begun to shoot—still soft and pinched like some kind of new-born life, it appeared ever after to her inner vision, when she thought of her sorrow, though now she had no idea of what her tear-blinded eyes looked upon.