Nobody said much. Laura pulled her shawl more closely over her shoulders and even Stellan seemed somewhat ill at ease.
Then Hedvig led Percy with an absent-minded expression to the wedding presents which were laid out on a table by the window. There were crystal vases and bowls in the taste of the day—all eloquent of decent, commonplace domestic life. Hedvig walked away. Percy looked at the floor.
“They are all overtaxing my nerves,” he thought. “Such meaningless ugliness!” He had to make a real effort to realise that this was not a deliberate mockery of their marriage, but merely a sacrifice to the conventionalities. At last he began to thank everybody very eagerly and politely to right and left on behalf of himself and Hedvig.
It was Stellan who saved the situation. He took Percy’s arm.
“Now I must show you round a little in this owls’ nest,” he said, in a tone of command that had something engagingly impersonal in it. “Selambshof was not conjured up in a day like your palace. It is as old as sin, though it was unfortunately rebuilt and spoilt in the process sometime in the ’fifties.”
Percy stopped in the dining-room in front of old Enoch’s portrait. Suddenly he looked quite relieved and was delighted:
“This is very interesting!” he exclaimed.
“Do you think so? It’s our grandfather. An old devil, between ourselves.”
Percy climbed up and examined the signature in the corner:
“Just fancy, a Tervillius! But yet not quite like him. He never achieved such rapid execution elsewhere. What swift, cruel characterisation! And he is otherwise so extremely conscientious.”