He lay with closed eyes and saw it all.
“If I wanted to make it all straight again,” he said to himself, “neither getting forgiveness from God nor taking my punishment in a prison would help, for my wicked accusation would still live somewhere. But if I could find out all the ways it had gone, and follow all the threads to the end, should I be finished then? No. I should have to give compensation for the evil consequences. One will have forgotten the falsehood, another will have laughed at it, but a third will remember it and make Wangen suffer for it. But suppose I could make up for this too? Would that be the end of it? No. There would still be need to pay for what he suffered all the time people believed him guilty. Can that be paid for? No! No!” And he involuntarily shook his head as he lay with closed eyes. How was he to get to sleep?
The next day he roused himself and went up to Gudbrandsdal where he owned large forests, and where his men were driving timber. He felt that he must get away—he must forget.
Up there he was not a rich man dressed in furs. He was in a frieze suit, and went on ski through the forest; and the exercise and the fresh air did him good. He saw immense piles of timber, and it was his; he stopped now and again to look out over endless stretches of tufted fir-trees, sprinkled with snow and gilded by the sun, and they were his.
“If Wangen had even been a worthy antagonist,” he thought, as he leant upon his ski-staff and surveyed his wealth. “If it had been Herlufsen now.” But this man was down in the world, and did not own so much as the spoon he ate with. “And it’s that poor wretch you want to injure!” he said to himself. “And not even using honourable means; for you’re attacking him in the rear—attacking a dead man in the rear!” He felt inclined to thrash himself.
When he got home he had caught cold and was a little feverish in the night. He himself thought it might be typhoid fever, and that he would die; and he was tortured by the thought of the evil action that would live after him.
At last one morning he felt he could bear it no longer, and determined to get rid of the whole thing—first go to his wife and tell her the truth, and then go to the bailiff and make things right with him. Now it was settled, thank goodness!
But just as he was getting out of bed, Marit called from the door that there was some one downstairs who had been waiting for him for ever so long.
“That’s sure to be the bailiff,” he said to himself, turning cold at the thought. But when he came down he found it was an old farm labourer, Lars Kleven, who wanted to speak to him.
“Come into the office!” said Norby.