“Out with you!” continues the major. “Beg your bread on the highway! You shall have no pleasure of his money, you shall not live on his lands. There is no more a mistress of Ekeby. The day you set your foot in my house I will kill you.”
“Do you drive me from my home?”
“You have no home. Ekeby is mine.”
A feeling of despair comes over the major’s wife. She retreats to the door, he following close after her.
“You who have been my life’s curse,” she laments, “shall you also now have power to do this to me?”
“Out, out!”
She leans against the door-post, clasps her hands, and holds them before her face. She thinks of her mother and murmurs to herself:—
“‘May you be disowned, as I have been disowned; may the highway be your home, the hay-stack your bed!’ It is all coming true.”
The good old clergyman from Bro and the judge from Munkerud came forward now to Major Samzelius and tried to calm him. They said to him that it would be best to let all those old stories rest, to let everything be as it was, to forget and forgive.
He shakes the mild old hands from his shoulder. He is terrible to approach, just as Christian Bergh had been.