having married as having caused his wife grief and humiliation. After seventeen years of domestic infelicity, when Anna von Wachenfeldt could endure no more, she died. Then misfortunes of all sorts befell him. The creditors showed no further indulgence, but took away his home. He had to give up gambling, for now he lost as soon as he touched a card. The gout had also come, and the gray cataract. Before he had reached sixty he was white-haired, stiff-jointed, half-blind, helpless, and poverty-stricken. It would have been no small comfort to him now to have had his good, loving wife still with him.
Since her death he had been cut off from all social intercourse. No one cared whether he lived or died. None invited him to their homes. It looked as if people had merely tolerated him for his wife's sake. When he yearns for laughter and merriment, when he would like to sit down to a well-served dinner and talk with cultured people, he has no place to go. When the holidays come round, with their long leisure hours, when he would like to escape from the deadly monotony of the farmhouse, he does not know what to do with himself.
There is just one place in the world where he can go for a bit of a taste of the old life, and that place is Mårbacka, whence he had brought his wife. He knows what they think and feel there—that he had made her life very unhappy. They actually believe that he tormented her to death. Nevertheless, he journeys
