The following day the children at Selambshof lost their mother. Both she and the newborn baby died before their father reached home. He had been kept late during a shoot at Kolsnäs.
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The children were playing up in the big attic at Selambshof. The rain pattered against the tiles of the roof and rushed down the spouts. But inside it was dry and dusty and mysterious in the twilight among the roof-timbers and the chimney pipes. And there were heaps of things that the grown-ups had thrown aside, but which for that very reason were so tempting: old, worn-out things which had reached their second childhood, and just for that reason suited the children’s games so well.
It was only with great difficulty that Stellan could open the lock of the iron-bound oak chest. Triumphant, he pulled out a torn black skirt and spread it over the pram in which Hedvig lay on her back, pale and with her legs hanging over the edge. He called to Peter, who was the hearse-horse, and the melancholy procession was just about to start, when Hedvig began to sneeze because the skirt was full of red pepper.
“Can’t you pretend to be dead, you silly girl,” shouted Stellan impatiently.
And Laura bent down and giggled in the midst of the procession. Besides these two, the mourners were Herman Hermansson from Ekbacken and little Tord. But Tord did not want to take part in the game any longer, so he crept into a corner and sulked. The outlook was not very promising.
Creakily the pram began to move. They were playing “Mamma’s funeral” for the hundredth time.
The procession stopped before the church, which was the triangle under the staircase up to the ceiling. Herman, with an air of deadly earnest on his open face, stood and chimed a nail on a stove ring. But Stellan drew the black skirt over his shoulders and climbed up on a wooden box and pretended to be the clergyman. He threw his head back and laying his hands on his chest began to hold forth: “From the earth you come, and wipe your feet, and honour your father and mother and sister and brother, and don’t hang on to people’s skirts, and don’t balance yourself on your chair because you will fall, fallevall, appala, mesala, mesinka, meso, sebedi, sebede, and get away now you silly, for now you are dead.”