But Gaute was flourishing. No one could doubt that these two young people lived well together. Gaute loved his wife, and both of them were so proud of their son and loved him beyond all measure.
So everything should have been fine and good. If only Jofrid Helgesdatter hadn’t been . . . well, she was stingy; Kristin couldn’t find any other word for it. If she hadn’t been stingy, Kristin wouldn’t have felt annoyed that her daughter-in-law had such a desire to take charge.
During the grain harvest that very first autumn, right after Jofrid had returned to the estate as a married woman, Kristin could see that the servants were already discontented, although they seldom said anything. But the old mistress noticed it just the same.
Sometimes it had also happened in Kristin’s day that the servants were forced to eat herring that was sour, or bacon as yellow and rancid as a resinous pine torch, or spoiled meat. But then everyone knew that their mistress was bound to make up for it with something particularly good at another meal: milk porridge or fresh cheese or good ale out of season. And if there was food that was about to go bad and had to be eaten, everyone simply felt as if Kristin’s full storerooms were overflowing. If people were in need, the abundance at J?rundgaard offered security for everyone. But now people were already uncertain whether Jofrid would prove to be generous with the food if there should be a shortage among the peasants.
This was what angered her mother-in-law, for she felt it diminished the honor of the manor and its owner.
It didn’t trouble her as much that she had discovered firsthand, over the course of the year, that her daughter-in-law always saved the best for her own. On Saint Bartholomew’s Day she received two goat carcasses instead of the four she should have been given. It was true that wolverines had ravaged the smaller livestock in the mountains the previous summer, and yet Kristin thought it petty to hold back from slaughtering two more goats on such a large estate. But she held her tongue. It was the same way with everything she was supposed to be given from the farm: the autumn slaughtering, grain and flour, fodder for her four cows and two horses. She received either smaller amounts or poor-quality goods. She saw that Gaute was both embarrassed and ashamed by this, but he didn’t dare do anything for fear of his wife, and so he pretended not to notice.
Gaute was just as magnanimous as all of Erlend’s sons. In his brothers Kristin had called it extravagance. But Gaute was a toiler, and frugal in his own way. As long as he had the best horses and dogs and a few good falcons, he would have been content to live like the smallholders of the valley. But whenever visitors came to the estate, he was a gracious host to all his guests and a generous man toward beggars—and thus a landowner after his mother’s own heart. She felt this was the proper way of living for the gentry—those nobles who resided on the ancestral estates in their home districts. They should produce goods and squander nothing needlessly, but neither should they spare anything whenever love of God and His poor, or concern for furthering the honor of their lineage, demanded that goods should be handed out.
Now she saw that Jofrid liked Gaute’s rich friends and highborn kinsmen best. And yet in this regard Gaute seemed less willing to comply with his wife’s wishes; he tried to hold on to his old companions from his youth. His drinking cohorts, Jofrid called them, and Kristin now learned that Gaute had been much wilder than she knew. These friends never came to the manor uninvited after he was a married man. But as yet no poor supplicant had gone unaided by Gaute, although he gave fewer gifts if Jofrid was watching. Behind her back he dared to give more. But not much was allowed to take place behind her back.
And Kristin realized that Jofrid was jealous of her. She had possessed Gaute’s friendship and trust so completely during all the years since he was a poor little child who was neither fully alive nor dead. Now she noticed that Jofrid wasn’t pleased if Gaute sat down beside his mother to ask her advice or got her to talk about the way things were in the past. If the man stayed for long in the old house with his mother, Jofrid was certain to find an excuse to come over.
And she grew jealous if her mother-in-law paid too much attention to little Erlend.
Amid the short, trampled-down grass out in the courtyard grew several herbs with coarse, leathery dark leaves. Now, during the sunny days of midsummer, a little stalk had sprung up with tiny, delicate pale blue flowers in the center of each flattened rosette of leaves. Kristin thought the old outer leaves, scarred as they were by each time a servant’s foot or a cow’s hoof had crushed them, must love the sweet, bright blossoming shoot which sprang from its heart, just as she loved her son’s son.
He seemed to her to be life from her life and flesh from her flesh, just as dear as her own children but even sweeter. Whenever she held him in her arms, she noticed that the boy’s mother would keep a jealous eye on the two of them and would come to take him away as soon as she deemed it proper and then possessively put him to her breast, hugging him greedily. Then it occurred to Kristin Lavransdatter in a new way that the interpreters of God’s words were right. Life on this earth was irredeemably tainted by strife; in this world, wherever people mingled, producing new descendants, allowing themselves to be drawn together by physical love and loving their own flesh, sorrows of the heart and broken expectations were bound to occur as surely as the frost appears in the autumn. Both life and death would separate friends in the end, as surely as the winter separates the tree from its leaves.
One evening, two weeks before Saint Olav’s Day, a group of beggars happened to come to J?rundgaard and asked for lodgings for the night. Kristin was standing on the gallery of the old storeroom—it was now under her charge—and she heard Jofrid come out and tell the poor people that they would be given food, but she could not give them shelter. “There are many of us on this manor, and my mother-in-law lives here too; she owns half the buildings.”
Anger flared up in the former mistress. Never before had any wayfarers been refused a night’s lodging at J?rundgaard, and the sun was already touching the crest of the mountains. She ran downstairs and went over to Jofrid and the beggars.
“They may take shelter in my house, Jofrid, and I might as well be the one to give them food too. Here on this manor we have never refused lodging to a fellow Christian if he asked for it in the name of God.”
“You must do as you please, Mother,” replied Jofrid, her face blazing red.