“He is really an impossible person,” said Stellan. “His father came to Sweden on foot with a bundle on his back.”
Peter wanted to add his straw to the heap too, though he did it in a somewhat strange way:
“If I had followed that scoundrel’s advice I should still have had Tord’s shares,” he muttered. “He advised me to transfer the shares in his name, then we two and Hedvig would have been able to outvote you. But I thought it was too devilish.”
This was a lie, a clumsy lie. Hedvig knew it and still she remained silent and allowed her mind to be poisoned. Yes, she sat there with a face that shrank in pale, shivering misery and allowed them to thrust the sting into her love. Their cold malicious joy even gave her a sort of miserable relief. It soothed her wound. At last she managed to rise and go out. At the door she suddenly turned round:
“I don’t know why you make such a fuss about Levy,” she mumbled. “I think he is useful to run errands.”
In the car Hedvig sat and repeated these words to herself as if she had been afraid of losing them. She got out in town and walked about for hours in the streets. She would have turned to a statue of ice if anyone had whispered to her that she did so in the secret hope of meeting Levy. But when she came home she kept near the telephone the whole evening. “If he rings up now and reproaches me,” she thought, “how shall I make him understand that it is quite hopeless to expect anything of me.” It was late when, with a sigh Hedvig tore herself away from the telephone. Then she lay on her bed in the cool green half light of the summer night. “Tomorrow he will come of course,” she thought. “He will be pale, bitter, sarcastic. He stops in front of me without stretching out his hand. ‘What do you mean? Have I deserved this treatment? Are you so ungrateful and hard? Or do you mistrust me? Have they told you I want your money? But that is a lie, you know it is! I love you Hedvig! I can’t live without you! You must be my wife.’”
Hedvig lay quite still and felt the blood burning in her veins as in a fever after an ague. “Yes, then I must tell him—that I can never be his wife,” she thought. But it was a strange trembling “never.” She longed with every fibre of her being to hear those reproaches, that prayer which she thought to refuse.
It was not Levy who came the following day but a letter from the firm of solicitors Levy & Östring, containing a bill for thirty-five thousand crowns for winding-up costs and various other commissions.
Poor Levy. There was a sort of helplessness in this revenge. His thoughts were cast almost exclusively in terms of money. He could not grow furious without figures buzzing in his ears. That’s why his wounded pride and aching love found expression in a heavy bill of costs. Yes, for he had really loved Hedvig with a passion that was not less because it was embittered and clear-sighted.
Levy’s revenge had much more effect than he had suspected. He had as a matter of fact sent Hedvig a bull of excommunication that was to part her completely from life and mankind.