Fru Lagerlöf and Mamselle Lovisa felt much as he did. Anna Wachenfeldt had been the favourite sister-in-law of Fru Lagerlöf, who had looked up to her with genuine admiration. Anna had been the one to welcome her most heartily into the family, and she could never forgive Colour-Sergeant von Wachenfeldt for making this beloved woman unhappy.
Mamselle Lovisa, as a child, had made long visits at Valsäter, the home of the Wachenfeldts, and knew more about her sister’s troubles than any of them. She could never hear the name Wachenfeldt without thinking of a certain morning when a couple of strange men came to Valsäter and led from the barn the two best cows. Her sister had run out and asked them what they were doing there, and they had coolly answered that the Sergeant the night before had staked the cows in a game with their master, and lost. Mamselle Lovisa saw her sister as it were before her, and remembered how distressed she had been over this. “He will never come to his senses,” she had said, “until he has made an end of me.”
However, Mamselle Lovisa was the first to think of her duties as hostess. She got up from the sewing table, where she had been embroidering and betimes taking little peeps into a novel that lay open in her sewing basket, and went to the kitchen door.
“Maja dear,” she called to the housekeeper, apologetically, “now we have Wachenfeldt here again!”
“I can’t understand why that fellow, who was so mean to his wife, is allowed to come here at every holiday time,” the housekeeper retorted with considerable asperity.
“But one can’t very well drive him away,” pleaded Mamselle Lovisa. “And now, Maja, please put the coffeepot on, so that he’ll have something to warm him a bit after his long, cold drive.”
“Why must he always come just when you’ve all had your coffee and the fire’s gone dead in the stove!” The housekeeper looked as if she were not going to make a move.
But the coffeepot must have got on somehow, for shortly afterward the housemaid went down to the office and bade Colour-Sergeant von Wachenfeldt come to the living room for coffee.
In crossing the yard to the house, he walked with the aid of a cane, which he put by in the outer hall, and carried himself fairly well as he came into the room. Mamselle Lovisa, who stood there to receive him, noticed all the same that he had difficulty in walking. When she took his hands she felt how swollen they were, and when she looked up into his face, his distorted eye stared at her horribly. Then a good part of her resentment vanished. She thought to herself that he had already received his punishment, and she was not going to add woe to woe.
“It was nice that Wachenfeldt could come to us again this Christmas,” she forced herself to say. Whereupon she poured him some coffee and he went over to his accustomed place, between the porcelain stove and the folded card table. It was a modest corner, and also the warmest in the room. The Colour-Sergeant knew what he was about when he chose that seat.