Stellan’s voice sounded cold:
“Thank you, but I am too much handicapped.”
She shrugged her shoulders and gave her black mare a light cut with her whip. But Manne sat still and looked as if he could not get going. Stellan was cruel enough to wave a glove, with a meaning wink, to remind his friend of his faithlessness to “The Glove.”
Never before in his life had Manne looked so lost on horseback. He suddenly set his bay to a gallop and followed his companion, who was already disappearing through the park gates.
Stellan had settled on an entirely different plan of action to Manne. He had made up his mind to be indifferent to Miss Lähnfeldt so as to excite her spirit of contradiction, and to try to win the father instead. For that reason he at once began to display immense interest in the history of the castle. Faithfully and indefatigably he accompanied the Count, as he rattled out a whole armoury of dates, and roamed around like a parody of greatness in the many splendid apartments. Patiently he sat for hours in the library amongst peerages, pedigrees, genealogies, and Gotha-almanacs and listened to the anecdotes of the lord of the castle. Count Lähnfeldt knew every anecdote concerning a prince.... Then they walked outside and down the steps, and Stellan duly admired the Oxenstierna coat of arms cut in sandstone over the proud Renaissance doorway. He sat with a becoming thrill of reverence on the seat round the giant oak which Axel Oxenstierna had planted with his own hand and in the shadow of which the Count, like the previous owners of the castle, used to sit and marvel at “the small amount of wisdom that the world is ruled with” and grow horrified at the tendency of the time to level us all “like pigs’ feet.” Stellan was surprised at himself that he need not sit silent at the feast but was also able to say something about Oxenstierna. The moment before he had not suspected his knowledge. It had been the same at school long ago when lazy Stellan always knew an answer after all. Perhaps it was some kind of thought reading....
The Count by and by worked himself up into stammering enthusiasm. Oxenstierna! Oxenstierna! It sounded as if he were speaking of his own ancestor. Well, who knows if he had not some such thoughts. Then he took Stellan’s arm and drew him to the small Chapel, of which he had the patronage, whose white-washed gable shone under the yellowing birches on the other side of the garden wall. He took the rather large key of the crypt out of a case he always carried in his pocket, and staggered in front of Stellan down into the dusky vault. And over the richly carved oak and copper coffins he mumbled reverently a string of names of which most were well known in history, and stopped at last in front of a gigantic open coffin of porphyry, the lid of which was leaning against the wall.
“This,” he said, caressing the carvings on the lid, which depicted a bear with a little child on its back, “is the Lähnfeldt coat of arms. And here I shall one day rest my weary bones.”
You could hear from his tone that death had lost its bitterness for him since he would enter such distinguished company.
After all this the Count was a little tired, and, excusing himself on the plea of important correspondence, he went up to take his little snooze before dinner, just like any ordinary human being.
Stellan wandered about alone with his hands behind his back in the stately park of Trefvinge. Around him this September day he heard from the high tree tops a sharp sound, as from an over-tense string. In the clear transparent air a dry leaf floated slowly down to his feet with a fine even motion. It was a motion as symmetrical and regular as the shape of the leaf itself. He pondered for a moment on the static problem. Then it struck him that even in his youth he had felt irritated that wealth and secure luxury should chase shadows and idle fancies in order to obtain a little excitement. He suddenly shivered with a light but penetrating dread. He realised here in the silence of the park in a way that he had never done before, that he, Stellan Selamb, was on the verge of ruin. “If I don’t succeed in this,” he thought, “there is no other way out than the revolver....”