Towards autumn the eyrie in the cliffs was ready. It was visible from afar and became at once an excellent and recognized landmark for sailors both out at sea and in the bay. There was a large, high hall and a couple of small rooms with folding beds. Tord furnished them with reindeer skins, elk horns, Lapplanders’ knives, guns, axes and ice hooks. And over the door a bear’s skull glinted ghostlike in the twilight.
They had made a secret arrangement with the old gardener at Selambshof, the philosopher in the neglected garden, and he used to come out as their only servant. He had been a sailor before he started growing cabbages and he felt a longing for the sea. His work was to carry water, make log fires, and open tins of preserves.
Meanwhile the Mattsons down in the dell lived their quiet workaday life, tied to the soil, the water, and the seasons of the year. They banked up their potatoes, cut their hay and their rye, milked their two cows, and plied their nets and lines, all with silent, disapproving side-glances at the queer folk on the hill.
As long as there was summer and sunshine and the air vibrated with the hammer blows on his cliff fortress, Tord was contemptuous of the silent disapproval that crawled about on its ridiculous daily round somewhere below his feet. But now it was autumn, silent, still, darkening autumn, far away from the noise and the lights of the town. And Tord began by and by to realize that the Mattsons were in their neighbourhood.
One evening he took a bottle in his pocket and climbed down into the valley: “I will feel that devil’s pulse,” he thought.
Mattson sat in his workshop carving:
“Well, Mattson, shall we have a drink to clear our heads?”
“Thank you, sir, but I don’t care about anything strong in the middle of the week like this.”
“All right, I’ll drink it myself then. What are you slaving away at?”
The old man thoughtfully turned a piece of lilac wood in his hand before he began to work with his knife: