“No!” he cut him short. “I won’t move. You’ll find here, Mattson, no use for your rake pins. Clear out now!”
Shortly before Christmas a couple of sand barges arrived at the pier, and took on board Mattson’s corn, cattle, furniture and tools. It cut one’s heart to see the kitchen table, the folding bed, the plants, moved out into the winter cold. Tord stood up on his hill-top and watched. He meant to be defiant and hardhearted and enjoy the ice-cold wind. But as a matter of fact he was frightened and felt sick.
Then four steady and determined men from the barges came up and demanded on Mattson’s account a round sum for the autumn sowing, manure, newly planted fruit trees, and improvements to piers, fences, outhouses. Tord paid without bargaining and with a certain tremulous eagerness.
Mattson did not show himself except on a receipt.
Then one of the barges set off with the old couple on board. The other remained a little behind. There, hidden among the alders by the shore, stood a powerful youth and peered up towards the hill. When he saw Tord set out for a walk, he followed him unperceived. He chose a quiet, suitable place where there were no witnesses. There he suddenly sprang out and gave Tord a blow on the back of his head, so that he fell unconscious for a time and awoke covered with blood and with two teeth missing. The barge had already disappeared, swallowed up by the grey ice-cold winter twilight across the bay.
That was the first time Tord had suffered rough, bodily ill-treatment. It brought out again all the timid hatred of mankind that his marriage had seemed for a moment to thrust aside.
He came home late and said he had fallen and struck against a tree stump. Dagmar could not help laughing for a moment at the ridiculous gap in his teeth. But she stopped short when she saw his expression, and her laugh turned to sobs. She had evil presentiments, Dagmar, and they were to come true....
Tord had not so many opportunities of kicking down Mattson’s fences and revelling in his new eaglelike loneliness. It soon appeared that he must go and buy provisions if they were not to starve to death when the ice came and it was too thick to get through with a boat, and not thick enough to walk on. They had, as a matter of fact, cut away the ground beneath their feet by turning Mattson out. Where were they now to procure milk, fish, meat and wood? Tord sailed about to the neighbouring islands and told the peasants to bring him these necessities, but they were annoyed at his treatment of Mattson and therefore could not spare him even a herring.
Tord was to learn to his annoyance that Mattson with his foresight and experience had stood like a rock between him and a thousand worries and difficulties. But this only strengthened him in his angry resolve to help himself. In a furious north wind he and the old gardener sailed twelve miles to the nearest store and there he bought a boatload of preserved food, ham, potatoes, flour and lamp oil. They had to hack their way out of the harbour through ice half an inch thick, frozen during the night, so it was high time....
Then came the real winter and locked them in with dark and unsafe ice.