The pensioners had really wept and been overcome by deep regret; still their grief had not stifled all the heart’s glad emotions. One of them—was it Gösta Berling, the poet, or Beerencreutz, the card-playing old warrior, or the life-weary Cousin Christopher?—had arranged it so that old Kajsa did not have to be taken from her stall, nor the mouldering chaise from the coach-house. Instead, a big spotted ox had been harnessed to a hay-wagon, and after the red chest, the green keg, and the carved luncheon-box had been put in there, Patron Julius himself, whose eyes were dim with tears, was lifted up, not on to the luncheon-box, nor on to the chest, but on to the spotted ox’s back.
For so is man, too weak to meet sorrow in all its bitterness! The pensioners honestly mourned for their friend, who was going away to die,—that withered lily, that mortally wounded singing swan; yet the oppression of their hearts was relieved when they saw him depart riding on the big ox’s back, while his fat body was shaken with sobs, his arms, outspread for the last embrace, sank down in despair, and his eyes sought sympathy in an unkind heaven.
Out on the highway the mists began to clear for Patron Julius, and he perceived that he was sitting on the shaking back of an animal. And then people say that he began to ponder on what can happen in seventeen long years. Old Kajsa was visibly changed. Could the oats and clover of Ekeby cause so much? And he cried—I do not know if the stones in the road or the birds in the bushes heard it, but true it is that he cried—“The devil may torture me, if you have not got horns, Kajsa!”
After another period of consideration he let himself slide gently down from the back of the ox, climbed up into the wagon, sat down on the luncheon-box, and drove on, deep in his thoughts.
After a while, when he has almost reached Broby, he hears singing.
It was the merry young ladies from Berga, and some of the judge’s pretty daughters, who were walking along the road. They had fastened their lunch-baskets on long sticks, which rested on their shoulders like guns, and they were marching bravely on in the summer’s heat, singing in good time.
“Whither away, Patron Julius?” they cried, when they met him, without noticing the cloud of grief which obscured his brow.
“I am departing from the home of sin and vanity,” answered Patron Julius. “I will dwell no longer among idlers and malefactors. I am going home to my mother.”
“Oh,” they cried, “it is not true; you do not want to leave Ekeby, Patron Julius!”
“Yes,” he said, and struck his wooden chest with his fist. “As Lot fled from Sodom and Gomorrah, so do I flee from Ekeby. There is not a righteous man there. But when the earth crumbles away under them, and the sulphur rain patters down from the sky, I shall rejoice in God’s just judgment. Farewell, girls; beware of Ekeby!”