“When I think about it,” he said at last, “I can after all understand why Norby wants to injure me.”
“Can you?” she said eagerly.
He continued to stand motionless in the same position.
“Yes,” he said; “that man is both jealous of his honour and revengeful. He wasn’t made chairman of the parish last time either, and I expect he thinks it’s my fault.”
“Good heavens!” she sighed.
As he stood there, he could see in his mind’s eye Norby with his cherished grudge, sitting in his house like a wicked ogre, ready to burst with a desire for revenge, and this distorted picture strengthened Wangen’s feeling of innocence, which now seemed like a kind of thread upon which he hung, and which must not break.
He heard his wife say good-night, but he still stood there. When at last he went into the bedroom, she was standing half-undressed in front of the looking-glass, doing up her thick hair for the night in a long plait.
“And what’s more,” he said softly, gazing as if at a dawning salvation, “I understand now why Norby managed to frustrate the intention of building the church of brick. The brickfields, do you see, shouldn’t make anything out of it. Norby wanted to provide the timber.”
He began to walk up and down, and then stopped again. “And now I understand too,” he went on, “how it is that so many customers have left me lately. The brickfields were to be removed out of the way of the large forest-owners here.”
“Do you really think so?” she exclaimed, turning from the glass and looking at him, half in horror that people could be so wicked, half in gladness that the decline in the brickfields business was not wholly his fault.