Stellan turned to Peter:
“It must be your … your new boarder … he amuses himself by teasing the dog. …”
“I see, is it only little Bernhard?” Peter grunted relieved. “Yes, he is not exactly a friend of watchdogs. …”
But now Hedvig’s voice sounded suddenly from the corner. She sat there looking as old-fashioned and moth-eaten as if she had hung herself away in a wardrobe out of pure meanness and then forgotten where the key was. Her voice also sounded strangely stuffy and dusty:
“You should never have taken up with that woman, Peter,” she mumbled. “You should never have taken up with that woman. …”
Peter did not seem to have noticed her before. A shiver passed over his swollen features. Hedvig, that ghost from the time of the great fear, again raised a secret anxiety in his innermost being, right in the centre of the hard annual rings of his soul.
“Aha, is it you, you crotchety old soul?” he muttered. “You are the right person to cheer up an invalid, you are.”
After a murderous look at Hedvig, Laura hurried up to Peter. Rustling with silk she came, covered with jewels, the scalps of many men embedded on her swelling bosom. Her voice sounded anxious:
“Dear little Peter, don’t make any scandal, it would be an awful scandal!”
Then Stellan came up:
“You must think of our name. Don’t believe the story is forgotten. You are confessing that you swore false. A Selamb a perjurer! You can hear for yourself that it is impossible. That creature would be a walking witness to your perjury. It is not possible that you should make such a scandal!”
Peter half rose on his elbow. His pale, puffy face derived new life from his malice. He looked at them with an angry gallows-bird expression reminiscent of the great family quarrels:
“Scandal,” he panted, “scandal! That will be for you; scandal! I shan’t suffer from it.”
That was also an advantage in its way! Peter sank back on his pillow with an expression that almost resembled peace.
The dull barking began again. Once more Stellan saw the dark shadows tumble out into the twilight of the snow-lit garden. Now he was swinging a bottle in his hand. Carefully he staggered closer to the tied-up dog. Then he stood balancing and watching with a cunning smile till he could get in a blow on the head with the bottle. The glass broke and the contents ran out over the eyes and nose of the dog so that it crept into its kennel growling and sniffing at the strong alcohol. Now the passage was clear and the shadowy figure ventured to the window to look in. The face, suddenly pressed flat against the ice-covered window pane, looked grotesque.
Peter, who did not seem to be unconscious of these happenings, beckoned to the watcher to come in. After some scraping and moving about in the hall, somebody at last groped about for the door handle. The door was slowly and cautiously pushed open as if by a burglar and the dog-fighter came in. He remained in a corner where the light was faint, made a movement as if to take off a cap that was not there, whilst his street Arab face, blue with cold, quickly sobered and assumed an insinuating and fawning expression.
You could not say that the heir presumptive was exactly pleasant to look at. But Peter seemed as pleased as ever. He introduced his son with a mien of having quite unexpectedly, in the eleventh hour, produced out of his sleeve a small dirty trump that would win the game:
“Yes, here you have the boy. A handsome lad, don’t you think so? You, Stellan, have none. And yours ran away, dear Laura. But mine stands here as big as life. And Bernhard is his name.”
Bernhard grinned, a grin, however, that faded quickly away when Peter quite unexpectedly began to shower abuse on him because he had touched the whiskey without permission.
There followed a moment’s icy silence. Stellan went slowly up to Bernhard:
“We have come here for your sake,” he said. “My poor brother, whose strength is much reduced by his illness, seems to have got it into his head for some unaccountable reason that you are a relation of his. It is of course an absurd mistake. As I don’t like mystery, I tell you so openly in his presence.”
Bernhard fidgeted but did not dare to answer. He only stared at Peter, who, with eyes half-closed, seemed to be waiting:
Stellan looked like the incarnation of impersonal authority, hard as iron and firm as a rock.
“Surely you can understand that we can find doctors and lawyers to clear up this matter,” he said.
Peter was still silent, but he began to look as he had done in days gone by when he used to do a stroke of business. He winked with his right eye at Bernhard, whose face suddenly lit up:
“No, thank you, sir—that won’t work. That was too simple.”
Peter opened both eyes.
“You ought to say ‘Uncle,’ Bernhard,” he said, “you ought to say ‘Uncle.’ ”
Laura could not suppress a little anxious snigger. But Stellan did not move a feature. He came close up to Bernhard:
“I advise you to be careful,” he said. “I have collected some information about you in Majängen and know exactly how you stand with the police.”
Bernhard bit his nails, frightened and furious. He looked again at Peter, who now blinked with both his eyes, and lay down comfortably as if to listen to music. And Bernhard did not disappoint his expectations, but stared Stellan boldly in the face:
“No, Uncle dear, don’t come in here with the police for here you see one of the family. …”
Stellan turned grey, but still controlled himself:
“I couldn’t think of bandying words with you. But if you behave decently we might perhaps compensate you for the vain hopes my brother may have raised. What would you say to a couple of thousand-crown
