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"But when I saw you with Thorstan's child about to be born and saw how rich and sedate you walked the ways, and how peace sat upon your forehead like a wreath, then I grudged you." Freydis turned round in the bed and showed her burning face. "And I said, 'This woman has a secret joy, and for all she is so quiet and still she is stronger than I. And when the child died I was glad.
She went to see Theodhild in her hermitage. To her only she told Thorstan's prediction, that she should be married yet again, and outlive her husband, and then find the life that she loved the best. Theodhild nodded her head. "That was a true saying of my son's. You will find the only rest there can be in this life." Gudrid asked her more, but she would not tell her.
He put a reeve in each of them and took her to Brattalithe. Afterwards she understood everything, and was confounded by her former blindness; but it is the truth that Thorstan's love for her was of a sort to forbid thinking. She was carried off her feet and out of her common sense by his passion. He, so dumb and still a man, was by the touch of passion set on fire. And fire caught fire.
So it was settled they were to build a new ship before they left. That night Freydis's child was born. It was a girl, and she called it Walgerd. That had been the name of Thorstan's daughter, who had not lived. Gudrid wondered why she chose that name. She could never understand Freydis nobody could; yet she had been right about her in one thing. Freydis loved the child more than life itself.
Grimhild had the kitchen door open; dry snow was sweeping in upon her; the front of her gown was white with it. "Look at them there," she said; "look at them. Gurth is whipping them round the garth. See how they huddle heed their crying. There, there and there go I among them, wringing my hands." She clutched his arm. "Hush and there go you." Thorstan's heart jumped, and then fell quiet.
Leif said: "I don't think you a lucky man, Thore. And I don't think your wife will care about so long and rough a voyage, seeing what you made of her last." The laugh went against Thore. "Gudrid shall stay with her father," said he; but Gudrid said, "I shall go if you do." Thorstan's face fell, and Eric Red burst into a great shout of laughter.
There were many things about her marriage with Thorstan which she did not understand at the time Thorstan's urgency for it was one, a kind of feverish haste about getting through with preliminaries; and another was his opposition to living anywhere but at Brattalithe. He would not go to her father's house, nor to that which had been Thore's, and which was now hers for life.
He held her close to him, with a passion which despair may have quickened into flame. Wildly as he had loved her since she had given him herself, he never loved her as he did now, when the end seemed close upon them. For a week they lived so, the supreme week of Thorstan's and Gudrid's lives.
As for this stricken land, we shall beat the sickness yet. A man tempers himself. There should be a fine race here one day, of them who have got through." Gurth turned up the whites of his eyes. He was very sick. By and by they had news from the Settlement, where things were going badly. The sickness was very rife. Many of Thorstan's men from Ericsfrith were dead of it.
She was rich, too, for she had her father's and Thore's estates, as well as her share of Eric's wealth which had been Thorstan's. She sold her father's house and land to Thorstan Black, who settled down there, and came to great honour in Ericshaven, as he deserved to do.
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