When he told Herlufsen one day that he had thought the matter over, he could not understand why his master became so exceedingly affable. Herlufsen told him he might take a holiday for the rest of the day. He might go down to Wangen and ask to be called as a witness.
[CHAPTER IX]
THE inquiry was now approaching, and the nearer it came, the more uneasy did Norby become. He had found no way out of his difficulty yet, and he began to fear that he would not be able to find one. Whichever way he turned, he ran against his own assertions; and these assertions, which now lived in people’s minds and travelled by post and railway, had grown into a power, greater than Norby himself; they were like a son grown beyond the control of his father; they dragged him on continually, they compelled him with threats to stand on their side in this matter.
He would not go to an inquiry, however, for then he would have to take his oath; and he was not so far gone yet as to go there and perjure himself.
“I’m beginning to feel my rheumatism again,” he said to his wife, when he was restless at night.
It occurred to him that there was a suspicious stillness over the country-side, in spite of what he had done—a stillness as if some one were lying in wait. He himself had no desire to talk of anything but this one matter; for he thought of nothing else, and was only easy in his mind when others listened to what he said, and had no time, as it were, to think for themselves.
But each new falsehood always cost another as its proof, and that in its turn another. He had to keep a constant watch upon himself, lest his tongue should run away with him; he was afraid of perhaps letting something out in his sleep, and hardly dared sleep.
But day by day the inquiry drew nearer, and he involuntarily began to grope about for a means of pulling through after all, if in spite of everything it should come to an inquiry.