Hedvig’s glance left Levy and roamed about the room. Ugh! how many eyes about her—how horribly many! There sat Stellan pretending to look at his nails, there Peter sat staring and sulking, there Laura eyed her with cold scorn. And they all waited for her confession. Go on, admit now that you are in love with Levy! Call out to anybody who cares to listen that you are in love with Levy.
Hedvig sat there as if paralysed, incapable of moving either hand or tongue.
She was silent—and condemned herself to silence for all her life.
Then Stellan’s voice sounded with cruel, calculated hardness:
“May we consider the nominations closed?”
“Yes,” said Laura.
“Does the Meeting elect the candidates proposed, Peter Selamb, Stellan Selamb and Mr. P. Sundelius?”
“Yes,” said Laura in a loud voice.
The hammer fell.
Levy rose. He was perhaps paler than before. Nobody could see whether his hands trembled, for he had put them in his trouser pockets. His voice sounded steady:
“Well, then I have nothing more to do here. The fee due to me as a member of the board you will perhaps allow me to forego for the benefit of your brother, Mr. Tord Selamb, whose circumstances I consider deserving compassion.”
And with that Levy left the annual meeting of shareholders in Selambs Ltd.
All eyes turned maliciously towards Hedvig’s corner. They forgot Levy’s sarcasm to enjoy their triumph.
“Ugh! how nice to be rid of the Jew,” laughed Laura. “It was really wise of you Hedvig not to persist in clinging to that knave of spades.”
“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.
“There!” was her first thought, “he did want to plunder me. He wanted my money and nothing else.” And she felt confirmed in all her old morbid suspicions. There were only cheats and crooks in the whole world and Levy was one of the worst of them.
But at the same time the last shreds of the veil of charity were torn from her feelings. She knew now that she had loved him; that she still loved him in spite of all; that she would never be rid of an aching pain in her heart.
That was the climax of a mute and humiliating drama in which love fought a hopeless fight against
