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.
When Kristin had a look at the beggars, she almost regretted her offer. It was not entirely without cause that the young wife had been unwilling to have these people on her estate overnight. Gaute and the servants had gone up to the hay meadows near Sil Lake and would not be home that evening. Jofrid was home alone with the parish’s charity cases, two old people and two children, whose turn it was to stay at J?rundgaard, and Kristin had only her maid in the old house. Although Kristin was used to seeing all kinds of people among the wandering groups of beggars, she didn’t like the looks of this lot. Four of them were big, strong young men; three of them had red hair and small, wild eyes. They seemed to be brothers. But the fourth one, whose nose had once been split open on both sides and who was missing his ears, sounded as if he might be a foreigner. There were also two old people. A short, bent old man with a greenish-yellow face, his hair and beard ravaged by dirt and age and his belly swollen as if with some illness. He walked on crutches, alongside an old woman wearing a wimple that was completely soaked with blood and pus, her neck and face covered with sores. Kristin shuddered at the thought of this woman getting near Erlend. All the same, for the sake of these two wretched old people, it was good that the group wouldn’t have to wander through Hammer Ridge in the night.