Stellan felt an emptiness in his head, paralysed, sick. His glance wandered from one face to the other in the circle. He scorned them, he saw through them, but still he begged them for help. “If only I can get up out of this cursed chair. If only I could get up out of this cursed chair!”
Then his wandering glance suddenly fell on Georg. Georg sat in his corner and looked lost and unhappy. An honest young face. “Bah, you know nothing yet,” Stellan thought, shrugging his shoulders. “What is straight will be crooked, my young friend, and what is warm will grow cold.” And he felt his lips move in a pitying smile. But still he could not look away from the boy’s face. It was as if he had suspected that here was something like a crack in the wall of ice, a break in the magic circle. Yes, deep down he felt a strange relief to see him, to notice his timid protest against his stepfather, his anxious wonder at his mother, and all reflected in a face that knew nothing of dissimulation.
At last Stellan got up and made his well-balanced speech to the newly married couple with a certain military briskness in his delivery.
After all even lies have nothing but truth to live on. And even the coldest egoism must in the end draw breath beside whatever honour and goodness is left in the world. Otherwise it would die of suffocation....
Two days after the dinner at Selambshof, Count von Borgk got typhus and was taken to a nursing home. At the same time not less than three of the servants on the estate fell ill, amongst them Peter’s housekeeper.
Peter was in deadly fear, and could think of no other way out than to sail away immediately from all this misery. He was already on his way down to his boat—Herman’s old “Laura,”—which still lay at her buoy in the bay where the bathing box was. But when he passed the well on the slope below the terrace, he saw that the cotter pin was not in its place in the little trap door at the foot of the pump. Peter lifted the lid of the well and peeped down. It was a shallow well and was now almost dried up from the long drought of the dog days. He saw at once that the bottom was covered with newspapers, dirty rags and unspeakable filth.
Peter got up dizzy and sick. “Majängen!” he thought. “The apple thief! Frida Öberg’s boy. That was what the Count got for drinking water! That’s what he got for his sanatorium!”
With a groan and a push of his massive body, Peter seized the pump and pump-house in a mighty grip and threw it down so that all might see that the well was poisoned. Then he fled head over heels down the hill to his boat and out towards the bays of Lake Mälare.
Count von Borgk’s condition did not at first cause much anxiety. His temperature was comparatively low and his strength seemed to hold out.