CHAPTER IX
AN IMPORTANT STEP TAKEN
If Silla had not come like a wedge between the bark and the wood, how comfortably and free from care Barbara could have lived now. She had no one but Silla to thank that she was now deprived of all the help she might and—it was her firm conviction—ought to have had in her son Nikolai, with the regular earnings he might have put, every single week, into the till; which, for some reason or other, never would exhibit the amount it ought to have done.
It was not improbable that Barbara, after the fashion of country people, forgot to take into account the articles that went towards the nourishment of her own weighty person. On the other hand her ever ready hospitality with the coffee-pot was not without its savour of trade-policy—what she gave away was only to be looked upon as seed which would bring forth a hundredfold in the shape of customers.
Barbara's room was thus becoming the meetingplace for all the gossiping forces of the neighbourhood.
The posts in the fences had snow hats on, and snow-drifts lay by the roadside and on the fields.
One afternoon, when the sledges were creaking outside in the cold, and the door too, whenever anybody came in, Mother Taraldsen, who cupped people and applied leeches, and tall Mother Bækken were sitting and enjoying a cup of steaming hot coffee with loaf-sugar.
Mother Taraldsen was holding forth on the subject of bad liquids and ruined times, and how every trade was going down-hill, while Mother Bækken, getting more and more full of objections, put her head on one side, and stirred up her cup.