Soon everything was silent in the big house. And one of the frosty “iron” nights of June fell with its devastation upon the neglected garden and fields of Selambshof.
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It was a fine warm summer afternoon, when the mosquito swarms hovered like high pillars of smoke in the avenue of Selambshof.
But in the garden on the north side of the house Oskar Selamb was sitting in his usual seat. He was sitting just where the mosses of the walls hung most heavily over the grey stone base and where the damp shade beneath the old elm tree seemed full of evil memories. His big straw hat was pushed far back on his head and his purple trembling hands were clasped round the handle of his walking stick. His beard grew like a weed round his weak half open mouth, and he stared in front of him with a lifeless, taciturn gloom that had little human left in it.
A friend of former days would scarcely have recognized him.
How had Oskar Selamb, owner of Selambshof, father of five young children, and not much past fifty, come to such a pass? The immediate cause was probably the death of his wife, but in order really to understand this tragedy one must go back to the tyranny of old Enoch. It was he who had broken his son’s spirit. Up to his thirtieth year Oskar had been little more than a sort of superior farm labourer on the estate, without any rights, without a will of his own, reviled and ill-treated by Old Hök, who kept his claws and his beak sharp till the end. It leaves a mark on a man to have his hopes in life picked piece by piece out of his breast by a father who feeds his own strong flame of life by doing so. When the hour of delivery once struck at last, Oskar Selamb had come to hate his inheritance. Yes, he hated this place of humiliation, for ever haunted by the old man’s shadow. But he had not strength to throw it all off and begin afresh. He merely absented himself as much as possible and let the estate go to ruin. And late in life he married a servant girl, whom he had raised to the rank of housekeeper at Selambshof. His friends were not surprised by this mesalliance. Even during the days of his humiliation he had been fond of the girl, for which reason of course she had at once been shown the door. And when Oskar afterwards by chance caught sight of her behind a bar, he took her into his house and married her, out of pure spite, as people said, in order to make old Enoch turn in his grave. To tell the truth, he was not in love with her. It was rather the spasmodic effort of a weak and vacillating man to kick away the past. His wife was a small, dark, thin woman with a pointed nose, and moderately capable and energetic within her domain. Her voice penetrated shrill and alert through the fumes of the kitchen or the washtub. She remained a bad-tempered but capable servant of her husband and, later, of the children. But for her the home would not have held together as well as it did, for Oskar Selamb became more and more incapable of looking after anything. And he still spent most of his time in the town. There he sat among his fellow topers, lost at whist and in business, cursed and harangued, as weak people do, between his draughts of steaming toddy, on the evils of the times. Meanwhile Selambshof decayed, Ryssvik was lost, the forest melted away and the mortgages became heavier and heavier. His wife bore him in quick succession and with eternal lamentations, five hungry and crying children. With the sixth she succumbed herself. When her husband came driving home that autumn morning she already lay dead in the big double bed.