Oh, Eberhard, why do you not wander about wood and field in these last days of the departing summer like the other pensioners? No one, you know, worships unpunished the goddess of wisdom. Your back is bent with sixty and some years; the hair which covers your head is not your own; the wrinkles crowd one another on your brow, which arches over hollow eyes; and the decay of old age is drawn in the thousand lines about your empty mouth.
Oh, Eberhard, why do you not wander about wood and field? Death parts you just so much the sooner from your desk, because you have not let life tempt you from it.
Uncle Eberhard draws a thick stroke under his last line. From the desk’s innumerable drawers he drags out yellowed, closely scribbled manuscripts, all the different parts of his great work,—that work which is to carry on Eberhard Berggren’s name through all time. But just as he has piled up manuscript on manuscript, and is staring at them in silent rapture, the door opens, and in walks the young countess.
There she is, the old men’s young mistress,—she whom they wait on and adore more than grandparents wait on and adore the first grandson. There she is whom they had found in poverty and in sickness, and to whom they had now given all the glory of the world, just as the king in the fairy tale did to the beautiful beggar girl he found in the forest. It is for her that the horn and violin now sound at Ekeby,—for her everything moves, breathes, works on the great estate.
She is well again, although still very weak. Time goes slowly for her alone in the big house, and, as she knows that the pensioners are away, she wishes to see what it looks like in the pensioners’ wing, that notorious room.
So she comes softly in and looks up at the whitewashed walls and the yellow striped bed-curtains, but she is embarrassed when she sees that the room is not empty.
Uncle Eberhard goes solemnly towards her, and leads her forward to the great pile of paper.
“Look, countess,” he says; “now my work is ready. Now shall what I have written go out into the world. Now great things are going to happen.”
“What is going to happen, Uncle Eberhard?”