“Glory and honor be to the Lord God!” said the old soldier, suddenly.
They looked at him. He had risen and was looking eagerly about him.
“Wicked, wicked has everything been,” he said. “Everything I have seen since I got my eyes opened has been wicked. Bad men, bad women! Hate and anger in forest and plain! But she is good. A good woman has stood in my house. When I am sitting here alone, I shall remember her. She shall be with me in the wood.”
He bent down over Gösta, untied his fetters, and lifted him up. Then he solemnly took his hand.
“Hateful to God,” he said and nodded. “That is just it. But now you are not any more; nor I either, since she has been in my house. She is good.”
The next day old Jan Hök came to the bailiff Scharling. “I will carry my cross,” he said. “I have been a bad man, therefore I have had bad sons.” And he asked to be allowed to go to prison instead of his son; but that could not be.
The best of old stories is the one which tells of how he followed his son, walking beside the prison van; how he slept outside his cell; how he did not forsake him until he had suffered his punishment.