They had an old bird of prey up in the pensioners’ wing. He always sat in the corner by the fire and saw that it did not go out. He was rough and gray. His little head with the big nose and the sunken eyes hung sorrowfully on the long, thin neck which stuck up out of a fluffy fur collar. For the bird of prey wore furs both winter and summer.
Once he had belonged to the swarm who in the great Emperor’s train swept over Europe; but what name and title he bore no one now can say. In VÄrmland they only knew that he had taken part in the great wars, that he had risen to might and power in the thundering struggle, and that after 1815 he had taken flight from an ungrateful fatherland. He found a refuge with the Swedish Crown Prince, and the latter advised him to disappear in far away VÄrmland.
And so it happened that one whose name had caused the world to tremble was now glad that no one even knew that once dreaded name.
He had given the Crown Prince his word of honor not to leave VÄrmland and not to make known who he was. And he had been sent to Ekeby with a private letter to the major from the Crown Prince, who had given him the best of recommendations. It was then the pensioners’ wing opened its doors to him.
In the beginning people wondered much who he was who concealed his identity under an assumed name. But gradually he was transformed into a pensioner. Everybody called him Cousin Christopher, without knowing exactly how he had acquired the name.
But it is not good for a bird of prey to live in a cage. One can understand that he is accustomed to something different than hopping from perch to perch and taking food from his keeper’s hand. The excitement of the battle and of the danger of death had set his pulse on fire. Drowsy peace disgusts him.
It is true that none of the pensioners were exactly tame birds; but in none of them the blood burned so hot as in Cousin Christopher. A bear hunt was the only thing which could put life into him, a bear hunt or a woman, one single woman.
He had come to life when he, ten years ago, for the first time saw Countess MÄrta, who was already then a widow,—a woman as changeable as war, as inciting as danger, a startling, audacious creature; he loved her.
And now he sat there and grew old and gray without being able to ask her to be his wife. He had not seen her for five years. He was withering and dying by degrees, as caged eagles do. Every year he became more dried and frozen. He had to creep down deeper into his furs and move nearer the fire.
So there he is sitting, shivering, shaggy, and gray, the morning of the day, on the evening of which the Easter bullets should be shot off and the Easter witch burned. The pensioners have all gone out; but he sits in the corner by the fire.
Oh, Cousin Christopher, Cousin Christopher, do you not know?
Smiling she has come, the enchanting spring.
Nature up starts from drowsy sleep, and in the blue sky butterfly-winged spirits tumble in wild play. Close as roses on the sweet brier, their faces shine between the clouds.
Earth, the great mother, begins to live. Romping like a child she rises from her bath in the spring floods, from her douche in the spring rain.
But Cousin Christopher sits quiet and does not understand. He leans his head on his stiffened fingers and dreams of showers of bullets and of honors won on the field of battle.
One pities the lonely old warrior who sits there by the fire, without a people, without a country, he who never hears the sound of his native language, he who will have a nameless grave in the Bro churchyard. Is it his fault that he is an eagle, and was born to persecute and to kill?
Oh, Cousin Christopher, you have sat and dreamed long enough in the pensioners’ wing! Up and drink the sparkling wine of life. You must know, Cousin Christopher, that a letter has come to the major this day, a royal letter adorned with the seal of Sweden. It is addressed to the major, but the contents concern you. It is strange to see you, when you read the letter, old eagle. Your eye regains its brightness, and you lift your head. You see the cage door open and free space for your longing wings.
Cousin Christopher is burrowing deep down to the bottom of his chest. He drags out the carefully laid away gold-laced uniform and dresses himself in it. He presses the plumed hat on his head and he is soon hastening away from Ekeby, riding his excellent white horse.
This is another life than to sit shivering by the fire; he too now sees that spring has come.
He straightens himself up in his saddle and sets off at a gallop. The fur-lined dolman flutters. The plumes on his hat wave. The man has grown young like the earth itself. He has awaked from a long winter. The old gold can still shine. The bold warrior face under the cocked hat is a proud sight.
It is a wonderful ride. Brooks gush from the ground, and flowers shoot forth, as he rides by. The birds sing and warble about the freed prisoner. All nature shares in his joy.
He is like a victor. Spring rides before on a floating cloud. And round about Cousin Christopher rides a staff of old brothers-in-arms: there is Happiness, who stands on tiptoe in the saddle, and Honor on his stately charger, and Love on his fiery Arab. The ride is wonderful; wonderful is the rider. The thrush calls to him:—
“Cousin Christopher, Cousin Christopher, whither are you riding? Whither are you riding?”
“To Borg to offer myself, to Borg to offer myself,” answers Cousin Christopher.
“Do not go to Borg, do not go to Borg! An unmarried man has no sorrow,” screams the thrush after him.
But he does not listen to the warning. Up the hills and down the hills he rides, until at last he is there. He leaps from the saddle and is shown in to the countess.
Everything goes well. The countess is gracious to him. Cousin Christopher feels sure that she will not refuse to bear his glorious name or to reign in his palace. He sits and puts off the moment of rapture, when he shall show her the royal letter. He enjoys the waiting.
She talks and entertains him with a thousand stories. He laughs at everything, enjoys everything. But as they are sitting in one of the rooms where Countess Elizabeth has hung up Mamselle Marie’s curtains, the countess begins to tell the story of them. And she makes it as funny as she can.
“See,” she says at last, “see how bad I am. Here hang the curtains now, that I may think daily and hourly of my sin. It is a penance without equal. Oh, those dreadful knitted curtains!”
The great warrior, Cousin Christopher, looks at her with burning eyes.
“I, too, am old and poor,” he says, “and I have sat for ten years by the fire and longed for my mistress. Do you laugh at that too, countess?”
“Oh, that is another matter,” cries the countess.
“God has taken from me happiness and my fatherland, and forced me to eat the bread of others,” says Cousin Christopher, earnestly. “I have learned to have respect for poverty.”
“You, too,” cries the countess, and holds up her hands. “How virtuous every one is getting!”
“Yes,” he says, “and know, countess, that if God some day in the future should give me back riches and power, I would make a better use of them than to share them with such a worldly woman, such a painted, heartless monkey, who makes fun of poverty.”
“You would do quite right, Cousin Christopher.”
And then Cousin Christopher marches out of the room and rides home to Ekeby again; but the spirits do not follow him, the thrush does not call to him, and he no longer sees the smiling spring.
He came to Ekeby just as the Easter witch was to be burned. She is a big doll of straw, with a rag face, on which eyes, nose, and mouth are drawn with charcoal. She is dressed in old cast-off clothes. The long-handled oven-rake and broom are placed beside her, and she has a horn of oil hung round her neck. She is quite ready for the journey to hell.
Major Fuchs loads his gun and shoots it off into the air time after time. A pile of dried branches is lighted, the witch is thrown on it and is soon burning gayly. The pensioners do all they can, according to the old, tried customs, to destroy the power of the evil one.
Cousin Christopher stands and looks on with gloomy mien. Suddenly he drags the great royal letter from his cuff and throws it on the fire. God alone knows what he thought. Perhaps he imagined that it was Countess MÄrta herself who was burning there on the pile. Perhaps he thought that, as that woman, when all was said, consisted only of rags and straw, there was nothing worth anything any more on earth.
He goes once more into the pensioners’ wing, lights the fire, and puts away his uniform. Again he sits down at the fire, and every day he gets more rough and more gray. He is dying by degrees, as old eagles do in captivity.
He is no longer a prisoner; but he does not care to make use of his freedom. The world stands open to him. The battle-field, honor, life, await him. But he has not the strength to spread his wings in flight.
CHAPTER II
THE PATHS OF LIFE
Weary are the ways which men have to follow here on earth.
Paths through the desert, paths through the marshes, paths over the mountains.
Why is so much sorrow allowed to go undisturbed, until it loses itself in the desert or sinks in the bog, or falls on the mountain? Where are the little flower-pickers, where are the little princesses of the fairy tale about whose feet roses grow, where are they who should strew flowers on the weary ways?
GÖsta Berling has decided to get married. He is searching for a bride who is poor enough, humble enough for a mad priest.
Beautiful and high-born women have loved him, but they may not compete for his hand. The outcast chooses from among outcasts.
Whom shall he choose, whom shall he seek out?
To Ekeby a poor girl sometimes comes from a lonely forest hamlet far away among the mountains, and sells brooms. In that hamlet, where poverty and great misery exist, there are many who are not in possession of their full intellect, and the girl with the brooms is one of them.
But she is beautiful. Her masses of black hair make such thick braids that they scarcely find room on her head, her cheeks are delicately rounded, her nose straight and not too large, her eyes blue. She is of a melancholy, Madonna-like type, such as is still found among the lovely girls by the shores of LÖfven’s long lake.
Well, GÖsta has found his sweetheart; a half-crazy broom-girl is just the wife for a mad priest. Nothing can be more suitable.
All he needs to do is to go to Karlstad for the rings, and then they can once more have a merry day by LÖfven’s shore. Let them laugh at GÖsta Berling when he betroths himself to the broom-girl, when he celebrates his wedding with her! Let them laugh! Has he ever had a merrier idea?
Must not the outcast go the way of the outcasts,—the way of anger, the way of sorrow, the way of unhappiness? What does it matter if he falls, if he is ruined? Is there any one to stop him? Is there any one who would reach him a helping hand or offer him a cooling drink? Where are the little flower-pickers, where are the little princesses of the fairy-tale, where are they who should strew roses on the stony ways?
No, no, the gentle young countess at Borg will not interfere with GÖsta Berling’s plans. She must think of her reputation, she must think of her husband’s anger and her mother-in-law’s hate, she must not do anything to keep him back.
All through the long service in the SvartsjÖ church, she must bend her head, fold her hands, and only pray for him. During sleepless nights she can weep and grieve over him, but she has no flowers to strew on the way of the outcast, not a drop of water to give one who is thirsting. She does not stretch out her hand to lead him back from the edge of the precipice.
GÖsta Berling does not care to clothe his chosen bride in silk and jewels. He lets her go from farm to farm with brooms, as her habit is, but when he has gathered together all the chief men and women of the place at a great feast at Ekeby, he will make his betrothal known. He will call her in from the kitchen, just as she has come from her long wanderings, with the dust and dirt of the road on her clothes, perhaps ragged, perhaps with dishevelled hair, with wild eyes, with an incoherent stream of words on her lips. And he will ask the guests if he has not chosen a suitable bride, if the mad priest ought not to be proud of such a lovely sweetheart, of that gentle Madonna face, of those blue, dreamy eyes.
He intended that no one should know anything beforehand, but he did not succeed in keeping the secret, and one of those who heard it was the young Countess Dohna.
But what can she do to stop him? It is the engagement day, the eleventh hour has come. The countess stands at the window in the blue cabinet and looks out towards the north. She almost thinks that she can see Ekeby, although her eyes are dim with tears. She can see how the great three-storied house shines with three rows of lighted windows; she thinks how the champagne flows in the glasses, how the toast resounds and how GÖsta Berling proclaims his engagement to the broom-girl.
If she were only near him and quite gently could lay her hand on his arm, or only give him a friendly look, would he not turn back from the evil way? If a word from her had driven him to such a desperate deed, would not also a word from her check him?
She shudders at the sin he is going to commit against that poor, half-witted child. She shudders at his sin against the unfortunate creature, who shall be won to love him, perhaps only for the jest of a single day. Perhaps too—and then she shudders even more at the sin he is committing against himself—to chain fast to his life such a galling burden, which would always take from his spirit the strength to reach the highest.
And the fault was chiefly hers. She had with a word of condemnation driven him on the evil way. She, who had come to bless, to alleviate, why had she twisted one more thorn into the sinner’s crown?
Yes, now she knows what she will do. She will have the black horses harnessed into the sledge, hasten over the LÖfven and to Ekeby, place herself opposite to GÖsta Berling, and tell him that she does not despise him, that she did not know what she was saying when she drove him from her house. No, she could never do such a thing; she would be ashamed and would not dare to say a word. Now that she was married, she must take care. There would be such a scandal if she did such a thing. But if she did not do it, how would it go with him?
She must go.
Then she remembers that such a plan is impossible. No horse can go again this year over the ice. The ice is melting, it has already broken away from the land. It is broken, cracked, terrible to see. Water bubbles up through it, in some places it has gathered in black pools, in other places the ice is dazzlingly white. It is mostly gray, dirty with melting snow, and the roads look like long, black streaks on its surface.
How can she think of going? Old Countess MÄrta, her mother-in-law, would never permit such a thing. She must sit beside her the whole evening in the drawing-room and listen to those old stories which are the older woman’s delight.
At last the night comes, and her husband is away; she is free.
She cannot drive, she does not dare to call the servants, but her anxiety drives her out of her home. There is nothing else for her to do.
Weary are the ways men wander on earth; but that way by night over melting ice, to what shall I compare it? Is it not the way which the little flower-pickers have to go, an uncertain, shaking, slippery way, the way of those who wish to make amends, the way of the light foot, the quick eye, and the brave, loving heart?
It was past midnight when the countess reached the shores of Ekeby. She had fallen on the ice, she had leaped over wide fissures, she had hurried across places where her footprints were filled with bubbling water, she had slipped, she had crept on all fours.
It had been a weary wandering; she had wept as she had walked. She was wet and tired, and out there on the ice, the darkness and the loneliness had given her terrible thoughts.
At the last she had had to wade in water over her ankles to reach land. And when she had come to the shore, she had not had the courage to do more than sit down on a rock and weep from fatigue and helplessness.
This young, high-born lady was, however, a brave little heroine. She had never gone such ways in her bright mother country. She may well sit by the edge of that terrible lake, wet, tired, unhappy as she is, and think of the fair, flowery paths of her Southern fatherland.
Ah, for her it is not a question of South or North. She is not weeping from homesickness. She is weeping because she is so tired, because she will not come in time. She thinks that she has come too late.
Then people come running along the shore. They hurry by her without seeing her, but she hears what they say.
“If the dam gives way, the smithy goes,” one says. “And the mill and the work-shops and the smith’s house,” adds another.
Then she gets new courage, rises, and follows them.
Ekeby mill and smithy lay on a narrow point past which the BjÖrksjÖ River rushes. It comes roaring down towards the point, whipped white in the mighty falls above, and to protect the land a great break-water was built before the point. But the dam was old now, and the pensioners were in power. In their day the dance filled all their thoughts, and no one took the trouble to see how the current and the cold and time had worn the old stone-dam.
Now with the spring-floods the dam begins to yield.
The falls at Ekeby are like mighty granite stairs, down which the waves come rushing. Giddy with the speed, they tumble over one another and rush together. They rise up in anger and dash in spray over one another, fall again, over a rock, over a log, and rise up again, again to fall, again and again, foaming, hissing, roaring.
And now these wild, raging waves, drunken with the spring air, dizzy with their newly won freedom, storm against the old stone-wall. They come, hissing and tearing, high up on to it and then fall back again, as if they had hit their white heads. They use logs as battering-rams, they strain, they beat, they rush against that poor wall, until suddenly, just as if some one had called to them, “Look out!” they rush backwards, and after them comes a big stone, which has broken away from the dam and sinks thundering down in the stream.
But why are these wild waves allowed to rage without meeting any resistance? Is every one dead at Ekeby?
No, there are people enough there,—a wild, perplexed, helpless crowd of people. The night is dark, they cannot see one another, nor see where they are going. Loud roars the falls, terrible is the din of the breaking ice and the pounding logs; they cannot hear their own voices. They have not a thought nor an idea. They feel that the end is coming. The dam is trembling, the smithy is in danger, the mill is in danger, and their own poor houses beloved in all their lowliness.
Message after message is sent up to the house to the pensioners.
Are they in a mood to think of smithy or mill? The hundred guests are gathered in the wide walls. The broom-girl is waiting in the kitchen. The hour has come. The champagne bubbles in the glasses. Julius rises to make the speech. All the old adventurers at Ekeby are rejoicing at the petrifying amazement which will fall upon the assembly.
Out on the ice the young Countess Dohna is wandering a terrible, perilous way in order to whisper a word of warning to GÖsta Berling. Down at the waterfall the waves are storming the honor and might of Ekeby, but in the wide halls only joy and eager expectation reign, wax-candles are shining, wine is flowing; no one thinks of what is happening in the dark, stormy spring night.
Now has the moment come. GÖsta rises and goes out to bring in his sweetheart. He has to go through the hall, and its great doors are standing open; he stops, he looks out into the pitch dark night—and he hears, he hears!
He hears the bells ringing, the falls roaring. He hears the thunder of the breaking ice, the noise of the pounding logs, the rebellious waves’ rushing and threatening voice.
He hastens out into the night, forgetting everything. Let them inside stand with lifted glasses till the world’s last day; he cares nothing for them. The broom-girl can wait, Julius’s speech may die on his lips. There would be no rings exchanged that night, no paralyzing amazement would fall upon the shining assembly.
Now the waves must in truth fight for their freedom, for GÖsta Berling has come, the people have found a leader. Terrified hearts take courage, a terrible struggle begins.
Hear how he calls to the people; he commands, he sets all to work.
“We must have light, light first of all; the miller’s horn-lantern is not enough. See all those piles of branches; carry them up on the cliff and set fire to them. That is work for the women and children. Only be quick; build up a great flaming brush-pile and set fire to it! That will light up our work; that will be seen far and wide and bring more to help us. And let it never go out! Bring straw, bring branches, let the flames stream up to the sky!”
“Look, look, you men, here is work for you. Here is timber, here are planks; make a temporary dam, which we can sink in front of this breaking wall. Quick, quick to work; make it firm and solid! Get ready stones and sand-bags to sink it with! Quick! Swing your axes! To work! to work!”
“And where are the boys? Get poles, get boat-hooks, and come out here in the midst of the struggle. Out on the dam with you, boys, right in the waves. Keep off, weaken, drive back their attacks, before which the walls are cracking. Push aside the logs and pieces of ice; throw yourselves down, if nothing else helps, and hold the loosening stones with your hands; bite into them, seize them with claws of iron. Out on the wall, boys! We shall fight for every inch of land.”
GÖsta himself takes his stand farthest out on the dam and stands there covered with spray; the ground shakes under him, the waves thunder and rage, but his wild heart rejoices at the danger, the anxiety, the struggle. He laughs. He jokes with the boys about him on the dam; he has never had a merrier night.
The work of rescue goes quickly forward, the fire flames, the axes resound, and the dam stands.
The other pensioners and the hundred guests have come down to the waterfall. People come running from near and far; all are working, at the fires, at the temporary dam, at the sand-bags, out on the tottering, trembling stone-wall.
Now the temporary dam is ready, and shall be sunk in front of the yielding break-water. Have the stones and sand-bags ready, and boat-hooks and rope, that it may not be carried away, that the victory may be for the people, and the cowed waves return to their bondage.
It so happens that just before the decisive moment GÖsta catches sight of a woman who is sitting on a stone at the water’s edge. The flames from the bonfire light her up where she sits staring out over the waves; he cannot see her clearly and distinctly through the mist and spray, but his eyes are continually drawn to her. Again and again he has to look at her. He feels as if that woman had a special errand to him.
Among all these hundreds who are working and busy, she is the only one who sits still, and to her his eyes keep turning, he can see nothing else.
She is sitting so far out that the waves break at her feet, and the spray dashes over her. She must be dripping wet. Her dress is dark, she has a black shawl over her head, she sits shrunk together, her chin on her hand, and stares persistently at him out on the dam. He feels as if those staring eyes were drawing and calling, although he cannot even distinguish her face; he thinks of nothing but the woman who sits on the shore by the white waves.
“It is the sea-nymph from the LÖfven, who has come up the river to lure me to destruction,” he thinks. “She sits there and calls and calls. I must go and drive her away.”
All these waves with their white heads seem to him the black woman’s hair; it was she who set them on, who led the attack against him.
“I really must drive her away,” he says.
He seizes a boat-hook, runs to the shore, and hurries away to the woman.
He leaves his place on the end of the dam to drive the sea-nymph away. He felt, in that moment of excitement, as if the evil powers of the deep were fighting against him. He did not know what he thought, what he believed, but he must drive that black thing away from the stone by the river’s edge.
Alas, GÖsta, why is your place empty in the decisive moment? They are coming with the temporary dam, a long row of men station themselves on the break-water; they have ropes and stones and sand-bags ready to weight it down and hold it in place; they stand ready, they wait, they listen. Where is their leader? Is there no voice to command?
No, GÖsta Berling is chasing the sea-nymph, his voice is silent, his commands lead no one.
So the temporary dam has to be sunk without him. The waves rush back, it sinks into the water and after it the stones and sand-bags. But how is the work carried out without a leader? No care, no order. The waves dash up again, they break with renewed rage against this new obstacle, they begin to roll the sand-bags over, tear the ropes, loosen the stones; and they succeed, they succeed. Threatening, rejoicing, they lift the whole dam on their strong shoulders, tear and drag on it, and then they have it in their power. Away with the miserable defence, down to the LÖfven with it. And then on once more against the tottering, helpless stone-wall.
But GÖsta is chasing the sea-nymph. She saw him as he came towards her swinging the boat-hook. She was frightened. It looked as if she was going to throw herself into the water, but she changed her mind and ran to the land.
“Sea-nymph!” cries GÖsta, and brandishes the boat-hook. She runs in among the alder-bushes, gets entangled in their thick branches, and stops.
Then GÖsta throws away the boat-hook, goes forward, and lays his hand on her shoulder.
“You are out late to-night, Countess Elizabeth,” he says.
“Let me alone, Herr Berling, let me go home!”
He obeys instantly and turns away from her.
But since she is not only a high-born lady, but a really kind little woman, who cannot bear the thought that she has driven any one to despair; since she is a little flower-picker, who always has roses enough in her basket to adorn the barrenest way, she repents, goes after him and seizes his hand.
“I came,” she says, and stammers, “I came to? Oh, Herr Berling, you have not done it? Say that you have not done it! I was so frightened when you came running after me, but it was you I wanted to meet. I wanted to ask you not to think of what I said the other day, and to come to see me as usual.”
“How have you come here, countess?”
She laughs nervously. “I knew that I should come too late, but I did not like to tell any one that I was going; and besides, you know, it is impossible to drive over the ice now.”
“Have you walked across the lake, countess?”
“Yes, yes, of course; but, Herr Berling, tell me. Are you engaged? You understand; I wish so you were not. It is so wrong, you see, and I felt as if the whole thing was my fault. You should not have minded a word from me so much. I am a stranger, who does not know the customs of the country. It is so dull at Borg since you do not come any more, Herr Berling.”
It seems to GÖsta Berling, as he stands among the wet alder-bushes on the marshy ground, as if some one were throwing over him armfuls of roses. He wades in roses up to his knees, they shine before his eyes in the darkness, he eagerly drinks in their fragrance.
“Have you done that?” she repeats.
He must make up his mind to answer her and to put an end to her anxiety, although his joy is so great over it. It grows so warm in him and so bright when he thinks what a way she has wandered, how wet she is, how frozen, how frightened she must have been, how broken with weeping her voice sounds.
“No,” he says, “I am not engaged.”
Then she takes his hand again and strokes it. “I am so glad, I am so glad,” she says, and her voice is shaken with sobs.
There are flowers enough now on the poet’s way, everything dark, evil, and hateful melts from his heart.
“How good you are, how good you are!” he says.
At their side the waves are rushing against all Ekeby’s honor and glory. The people have no leader, no one to instill courage and hope into their hearts; the dam gives way, the waves close over it, and then rush triumphant forward to the point where the mill and smithy stand. No one tries any longer to resist the waves; no one thinks of anything but of saving life and property.
It seems quite natural to both the young people that GÖsta should escort the countess home; he cannot leave her alone in this dark night, nor let her again wander alone over the melting ice. They never think that he is needed up at the smithy, they are so happy that they are friends again.
One might easily believe that these young people cherish a warm love for one another, but who can be sure? In broken fragments the glowing adventures of their lives have come to me. I know nothing, or next to nothing, of what was in their innermost souls. What can I say of the motives of their actions. I only know that that night a beautiful young woman risked her life, her honor, her reputation, her health, to bring back a poor wretch to the right way. I only know that that night GÖsta Berling left the beloved Ekeby fall to follow her who for his sake had conquered the fear of death, the fear of shame, the fear of punishment.
Often in my thoughts I have followed them over the ice that terrible night, which ended so well for them. I do not think that there was anything hidden or forbidden in their hearts, as they wandered over the ice, gay and chatting of everything which had happened during their separation.
He is once more her slave, her page, who lies at her feet, and she is his lady.
They are only happy, only joyous. Neither of them speaks a word which can denote love.
Laughing they splash through the water, they laugh when they find the path, when they lose it, when they slip, when they fall, when they are up again; they only laugh.
This blessed life is once more a merry play, and they are children who have been cross and have quarrelled. Oh, how good it is to make up and begin to play again.
Rumor came, and rumor went. In time the story of the countess’s wanderings reached Anna StjÄrnhÖk.
“I see,” she said, “that God has not one string only to his bow. I can rest and stay where I am needed. He can make a man of GÖsta Berling without my help.”
CHAPTER III
PENITENCE
Dear friends, if it should ever happen that you meet a pitiful wretch on your way, a little distressed creature, who lets his hat hang on his back and holds his shoes in his hand, so as not to have any protection from the heat of the sun and the stones of the road, one without defence, who of his own free will calls down destruction on his head,—well, pass him by in silent fear! It is a penitent, do you understand?—a penitent on his way to the holy sepulchre.
The penitent must wear a coarse cloak and live on water and dry bread, even if he were a king. He must walk and not ride. He must beg. He must sleep among thistles. He must wear the hard gravestones with kneeling. He must swing the thorny scourge over his back. He can know no sweetness except in suffering, no tenderness except in grief.
The young Countess Elizabeth was once one who wore the heavy cloak and trod the thorny paths. Her heart accused her of sin. It longed for pain as one wearied longs for a warm bath. Dire disaster she brought down on herself while she descended rejoicing into the night of suffering.
Her husband, the young count with the old-man’s head, came home to Borg the morning after the night when the mill and smithy at Ekeby were destroyed by the spring flood. He had hardly arrived before Countess MÄrta had him summoned in to her and told him wonderful things.
“Your wife was out last night, Henrik. She was gone many hours. She came home with a man. I heard how he said good-night to her. I know too who he is. I heard both when she went and when she came. She is deceiving you, Henrik. She is deceiving you, the hypocritical creature, who hangs knitted curtains in all the windows only to cause me discomfort. She has never loved you, my poor boy. Her father only wanted to have her well married. She took you to be provided for.”
She managed her affair so well that Count Henrik became furious. He wished to get a divorce. He wished to send his wife home to her father.
“No, my friend,” said Countess MÄrta, “in that way she would be quite given over to evil. She is spoiled and badly brought up. But let me take her in hand, let me lead her to the path of duty.”
And the count called in his countess to tell her that she now was to obey his mother in everything.
Many angry words the young man let the young woman hear. He stretched his hands to heaven and accused it of having let his name be dragged in the dirt by a shameless woman. He shook his clenched fist before her face and asked her what punishment she thought great enough for such a crime as hers.
She was not at all afraid. She thought that she had done right. She said that she had already caught a serious cold, and that might be punishment enough.
“Elizabeth.” says Countess MÄrta, “this is not a matter to joke about.”
“We two,” answers the young woman, “have never been able to agree about the right time to joke and to be serious.”
“But you ought to understand, Elizabeth, that no honorable woman leaves her home to roam about in the middle of the night with a known adventurer.”
Then Elizabeth Dohna saw that her mother-in-law meant her ruin. She saw that she must fight to the last gasp, lest Countess MÄrta should succeed in drawing down upon her a terrible misfortune.
“Henrik,” she begs, “do not let your mother come between us! Let me tell you how it all happened. You are just, you will not condemn me unheard. Let me tell you all, and you will see that I only acted as you have taught me.”
The count nodded a silent consent, and Countess Elizabeth told how she had come to drive GÖsta Berling into the evil way. She told of everything which had happened in the little blue cabinet, and how she had felt herself driven by her conscience to go and save him she had wronged. “I had no right to judge him,” she said, “and my husband has himself taught me that no sacrifice is too great when one will make amends for a wrong. Is it not so, Henrik?”
The count turned to his mother.
“What has my mother to say about this?” he asked. His little body was now quite stiff with dignity, and his high, narrow forehead lay in majestic folds.
“I,” answered the countess,—“I say that Anna StjÄrnhÖk is a clever girl, and she knew what she was doing when she told Elizabeth that story.”
“You are pleased to misunderstand me,” said the count. “I ask what you think of this story. Has Countess MÄrta Dohna tried to persuade her daughter, my sister, to marry a dismissed priest?”
Countess MÄrta was silent an instant. Alas, that Henrik, so stupid, so stupid! Now he was quite on the wrong track. Her hound was pursuing the hunter himself and letting the hare get away. But if MÄrta Dohna was without an answer for an instant, it was not longer.
“Dear friend,” she said with a shrug, “there is a reason for letting all those old stories about that unhappy man rest,—the same reason which makes me beg you to suppress all public scandal. It is most probable that he has perished in the night.”
She spoke in a gentle, commiserating tone, but there was not a word of truth in what she said.
“Elizabeth has slept late to-day and therefore has not heard that people have already been sent out on to the lake to look for Herr Berling. He has not returned to Ekeby, and they fear that he has drowned. The ice broke up this morning. See, the storm has split it into a thousand pieces.”
Countess Elizabeth looked out. The lake was almost open.
Then in despair she threw herself on her knees before her husband and confession rushed from her lips. She had wished to escape God’s justice. She had lied and dissembled. She had thrown the white mantle of innocence over her.
“Condemn me, turn me out! I have loved him. Be in no doubt but that I have loved him! I tear my hair, I rend my clothes with grief. I do not care for anything when he is dead. I do not care to shield myself. You shall know the whole truth. My heart’s love I have taken from my husband and given to a stranger. Oh, I am one of them whom a forbidden love has tempted.”
You desperate young thing, lie there at your judges’ feet and tell them all! Welcome, martyrdom! Welcome, disgrace! Welcome! Oh, how shall you bring the bolt of heaven down on your young head!
Tell your husband how frightened you were when the pain came over you, mighty and irresistible, how you shuddered for your heart’s wretchedness. You would rather have met the ghosts of the graveyard than the demons in your own soul.
Tell them how you felt yourself unworthy to tread the earth. With prayers and tears you have struggled.
“O God, save me! O Son of God, caster out of devils, save me!” you have prayed.
Tell them how you thought it best to conceal it all. No one should know your wretchedness. You thought that it was God’s pleasure to have it so. You thought, too, that you went in God’s ways when you wished to save the man you loved. He knew nothing of your love. He must not be lost for your sake. Did you know what was right? Did you know what was wrong? God alone knew it, and he had passed sentence upon you. He had struck down your heart’s idol. He had led you on to the great, healing way of penitence.
Tell them that you know that salvation is not to be found in concealment. Devils love darkness. Let your judges’ hands close on the scourge! The punishment shall fall like soothing balm on the wounds of sin. Your heart longs for suffering.
Tell them all that, while you kneel on the floor and wring your hands in fierce sorrow, speaking in the wild accents of despair, with a shrill laugh greeting the thought of punishment and dishonor, until at last your husband seizes you and drags you up from the floor.
“Conduct yourself as it behooves a Countess Dohna, or I must ask my mother to chastise you like a child.”
“Do with me what you will!”
Then the count pronounced his sentence:—
“My mother has interceded for you. Therefore you may stay in my house. But hereafter it is she who commands, and you who obey.”
See the way of the penitent! The young countess has become the most humble of servants. How long? Oh, how long?
How long shall a proud heart be able to bend? How long can impatient lips keep silent; how long a passionate hand be held back?
Sweet is the misery of humiliation. When the back aches from the heavy work the heart is at peace. To one who sleeps a few short hours on a hard bed of straw, sleep comes uncalled.
Let the older woman change herself into an evil spirit to torture the younger. She thanks her benefactress. As yet the evil is not dead in her. Hunt her up at four o’clock every morning! Impose on the inexperienced workwoman an unreasonable day’s work at the heavy weaving-loom! It is well. The penitent has perhaps not strength enough to swing the scourge with the required force.
When the time for the great spring washing comes,[3] Countess MÄrta has her stand at the tub in the wash-house. She comes herself to oversee her work. “The water is too cold in your tub,” she says, and takes boiling water from a kettle and pours it over her bare arms.
The day is cold, the washerwomen have to stand by the lake and rinse out the clothes. Squalls rush by and drench them with sleet. Dripping wet and heavy as lead are the washerwomen’s skirts.
Hard is the work with the wooden clapper. The blood bursts from the delicate nails.
But Countess Elizabeth does not complain. Praised be the goodness of God! The scourge’s thorny knots fall softly, as if they were rose-leaves, on the penitent’s back.
The young woman soon hears that GÖsta Berling is alive. Her mother-in-law had only wanted to cheat her into a confession. Well, what of that? See the hand of God! He had won over the sinner to the path of atonement.
She grieves for only one thing. How shall it be with her mother-in-law, whose heart God for her sake has hardened? Ah, he will judge her mildly. She must show anger to help the sinner to win back God’s love.
She did not know that often a soul that has tried all other pleasures turns to delight in cruelty. In the suffering of animals and men, weakened emotions find a source of joy.
The older woman is not conscious of any malice. She thinks she is only correcting a wanton wife. So she lies awake sometimes at night and broods over new methods of torture.
One evening she goes through the house and has the countess light her with a candle. She carries it in her hand without a candlestick.
“The candle is burned out,” says the young woman.
“When there is an end to the candle, the candlestick must burn,” answers Countess MÄrta.
And they go on, until the reeking wick goes out in the scorched hand.
But that is childishness. There are tortures for the soul which are greater than any suffering of the body. Countess MÄrta invites guests and makes the mistress of the house herself wait on them at her own table.
That is the penitent’s great day. Strangers shall see her in her humiliation. They shall see that she is no longer worthy to sit at her husband’s table. Oh, with what scorn their cold eyes will rest on her!
Worse, much worse it is. Not an eye meets hers. Everybody at the table sits silent and depressed, men and women equally out of spirits.
But she gathers it all to lay it like coals of fire on her head. Is her sin so dreadful? Is it a disgrace to be near her?
Then temptation comes. Anna StjÄrnhÖk, who has been her friend, and the judge at Munkerud, Anna’s neighbor at the table, take hold of her when she comes, snatch the dish from her, push up a chair, and will not let her escape.
“Sit there, child, sit there!” says the judge. “You have done no wrong.”
And with one voice all the guests declare that if she does not sit down at the table, they must all go. They are no executioners. They will not do MÄrta Dohna’s bidding. They are not so easily deceived as that sheep-like count.
“Oh, good gentlemen! Oh, beloved friends! Do not be so charitable. You force me to cry out my sin. There is some one whom I have loved too dearly.”
“Child, you do not know what sin is. You do not understand how guiltless you are. GÖsta Berling did not even know that you liked him. Take your proper place in your home! You have done no wrong.”
They keep up her courage for a while and are themselves suddenly gay as children. Laughter and jests ring about the board.
These impetuous, emotional people, they are so good; but still they are sent by the tempter. They want to make her think that she is a martyr, and openly scoff at Countess MÄrta as if she were a witch. But they do not understand. They do not know how the soul longs for purity, nor how the penitent is driven by his own heart to expose himself to the stones of the way and the heat of the sun.
Sometimes Countess MÄrta forces her to sit the whole day long quietly in the bay window, and then she tells her endless stories of GÖsta Berling, priest and adventurer. If her memory does not hold out, she romances, only to contrive that his name the whole day shall sound in the young woman’s ears. That is what she fears most. On those days she feels that her penance will never end. Her love will not die. She thinks that she herself will die before it. Her strength begins to give way. She is often very ill.
“But where is your hero tarrying?” asks the countess, spitefully. “From day to day I have expected him at the head of the pensioners. Why does he not take Borg by storm, set you up on a throne, and throw me and your husband, bound, into a dungeon cell? Are you already forgotten?”
She is almost ready to defend him and say that she herself had forbidden him to give her any help. But no, it is best to be silent, to be silent and to suffer.
Day by day she is more and more consumed by the fire of irritation. She has incessant fever and is so weak that she can scarcely hold herself up. She longs to die. Life’s strongest forces are subdued. Love and joy do not dare to move. She no longer fears pain.
It is as if her husband no longer knew that she existed. He sits shut up in his room almost the whole day and studies indecipherable manuscripts and essays in old, stained print.
He reads charters of nobility on parchment, from which the seal of Sweden hangs, large and potent, stamped in red wax and kept in a turned wooden box. He examines old coats of arms with lilies on a white field and griffins on a blue. Such things he understands, and such he interprets with ease. And he reads over and over again speeches and obituary notices of the noble counts Dohna, where their exploits are compared to those of the heroes of Israel and the gods of Greece.
Those old things have always given him pleasure. But he does not trouble himself to think a second time of his young wife.
Countess MÄrta has said a word which killed the love in him: “She took you for your money.” No man can bear to hear such a thing. It quenches all love. Now it was quite one to him what happened to the young woman. If his mother could bring her to the path of duty, so much the better. Count Henrik had much admiration for his mother.
This misery went on for a month. Still it was not such a stormy and agitated time as it may sound when it is all compressed into a few written pages. Countess Elizabeth was always outwardly calm. Once only, when she heard that GÖsta Berling might be dead, emotion overcame her.
But her grief was so great that she had not been able to preserve her love for her husband that she would probably have let Countess MÄrta torture her to death, if her old housekeeper had not spoken to her one evening.
“You must speak to the count, countess,” she said. “Good heavens, you are such a child! You do not perhaps know yourself, countess, what you have to expect; but I see well enough what the matter is.”
But that was just what she could not say to her husband, while he cherished such a black suspicion of her.
That night she dressed herself quietly, and went out. She wore an ordinary peasant-girl’s dress, and had a bundle in her hand. She meant to run away from her home and never come back.
She did not go to escape pain and suffering. But now she believed that God had given her a sign that she might go, that she must preserve her body’s health and strength.
She did not turn to the west across the lake, for there lived one whom she loved very dearly; nor did she go to the north, for there many of her friends lived; nor towards the south, for, far, far to the south lay her father’s home, and she did not wish to come a step nearer; but to the east she went, for there she knew she had no home, no beloved friend, no acquaintance, no help nor comfort.
She did not go with a light step, for the thought that she had not yet appeased God. But still she was glad that she hereafter might bear the burden of her sin among strangers. Their indifferent glances should rest on her, soothing as cold steel laid on a swollen limb.
She meant to continue her wandering until she found a lowly cottage at the edge of the wood, where no one should know her. “You can see what has happened to me, and my parents have turned me out,” she meant to say. “Let me have food and a roof over my head here, until I can earn my bread. I am not without money.”
So she went on in the bright June night, for the month of May had passed during her suffering. Alas, the month of May, that fair time when the birches mingle their pale green with the darkness of the pine forest, and when the south-wind comes again satiated with warmth.
Ah, May, you dear, bright month, have you ever seen a child who is sitting on its mother’s knee listening to fairy stories? As long as the child is told of cruel giants and of the bitter suffering of beautiful princesses, it holds its head up and its eyes open; but if the mother begins to speak of happiness and sunshine, the little one closes its eyes and falls asleep with its head against her breast.
And see, fair month of May, such a child am I too. Others may listen to tales of flowers and sunshine; but for myself I choose the dark nights, full of visions and adventures, bitter destinies, sorrowful sufferings of wild hearts.
CHAPTER IV
THE IRON FROM EKEBY
Spring had come, and the iron from all the mines in VÄrmland was to be sent to Gothenburg.
But at Ekeby they had no iron to send. In the autumn there had been a scarcity of water, in the spring the pensioners had been in power.
In their time strong, bitter ale foamed down the broad granite slope of BjÖrksjÖ falls, and LÖfven’s long lake was filled not with water, but with brandy. In their time no iron was brought to the forge, the smiths stood in shirt-sleeves and clogs by the hearth and turned enormous roasts on long spits, while the boys on long tongs held larded capons over the coals. In those days they slept on the carpenter’s bench and played cards on the anvil. In those days no iron was forged.
But the spring came and in the wholesale office in Gothenburg they began to expect the iron from Ekeby. They looked up the contract made with the major and his wife, where there were promises of the delivery of many hundreds of tons.
But what did the pensioners care for the contract? They thought of pleasure and fiddling and feasting.
Iron came from StÖmne, iron from SÖlje. From Uddeholm it came, and from Munkfors, and from all of the many mines. But where is the iron from Ekeby?
Is Ekeby no longer the chief of VÄrmland’s iron works? Does no one watch over the honor of the old estate? Like ashes for the wind it is left in the hands of shiftless pensioners.
Well, but if the Ekeby hammers have rested, they must have worked at our six other estates. There must be there enough and more than enough iron.
So GÖsta Berling sets out to talk with the managers of the six mines.
He travelled ten miles or so to the north, till he came to LÖtafors. It is a pretty place, there can be no doubt of that. The upper LÖfven lies spread out before it and close behind it has Gurlitta cliff, with steeply rising top and a look of wildness and romance which well suits an old mountain. But the smithy, that is not as it ought to be: the swing-wheel is broken, and has been so a whole year.
“Well, why has it not been mended?”
“The carpenter, my dear friend, the carpenter, the only one in the whole district who could mend it, has been busy somewhere else. We have not been able to forge a single ton.”
“Why did you not send after the carpenter?”
“Send after! As if we had not sent after him every day, but he has not been able to come. He was busy building bowling-alleys and summer-houses at Ekeby.”
He goes further to the north to BjÖrnidet. Also a beautiful spot, but iron, is there any iron?
No, of course not. They had had no coal, and they had not been able to get any money from Ekeby to pay charcoal-burners and teamsters. There had been no work all winter.
Then GÖsta turns to the south. He comes to HÅn, and to LÖfstafors, far in in the woods, but he fares no better there. Nowhere have they iron, and everywhere it seems to be the pensioners’ own fault that such is the case.
So GÖsta turns back to Ekeby, and the pensioners with gloomy looks take into consideration the fifty tons or so, which are in stock, and their heads are weighed down with grief, for they hear how all nature sneers at Ekeby, and they think that the ground shakes with sobs, that the trees threaten them with angry gestures, and that the grass and weeds lament that the honor of Ekeby is gone.
But why so many words and so much perplexity? There is the iron from Ekeby.
There it is, loaded on barges on the Klar River, ready to sail down the stream, ready to be weighed at Karlstad, ready to be conveyed to Gothenburg. So it is saved, the honor of Ekeby.
But how is it possible? At Ekeby there was not more than fifty tons of iron, at the six other mines there was no iron at all. How is it possible that full-loaded barges shall now carry such an enormous amount of iron to the scales at Karlstad? Yes, one may well ask the pensioners.
The pensioners are themselves on board the heavy, ugly vessels; they mean to escort the iron from Ekeby to Gothenburg. They are going to do everything for their dear iron and not forsake it until it is unloaded on the wharf in Gothenburg. They are going to load and unload, manage sails and rudder. They are the very ones for such an undertaking. Is there a shoal in the Klar River or a reef in the VÄner which they do not know?
If they love anything in the world, it is the iron on those barges. They treat it like the most delicate glass, they spread cloths over it. Not a bit may lie bare. It it those heavy, gray bars which are going to retrieve the honor of Ekeby. No stranger may cast indifferent glances on them.
None of the pensioners have remained at home. Uncle Eberhard has left his desk, and Cousin Christopher has come out of his corner. No one can hold back when it is a question of the honor of Ekeby.
Every one knows that often in life occur such coincidences as that which now followed. He who still can be surprised may wonder that the pensioners should be lying with their barges at the ferry over the Klar River just on the morning after when Countess Elizabeth had started on her wanderings towards the east. But it would certainly have been more wonderful if the young woman had found no help in her need. It now happened that she, who had walked the whole night, was coming along the highway which led down to the ferry, just as the pensioners intended to push off, and they stood and looked at her while she talked to the ferryman and he untied his boat. She was dressed like a peasant girl, and they never guessed who she was. But still they stood and stared at her, because there was something familiar about her. As she stood and talked to the ferryman, a cloud of dust appeared on the highway, and in that cloud of dust they could catch a glimpse of a big yellow coach. She knew that it was from Borg, that they were out to look for her, and that she would now be discovered. She could no longer hope to escape in the ferryman’s boat, and the only hiding-place she saw was the pensioners’ barges. She rushed down to them without seeing who it was on board. And well it was that she did not see, for otherwise she would rather have thrown herself under the horses’ feet than have taken her flight thither.
When she came on board she only screamed, “Hide me, hide me!” And then she tripped and fell on the pile of iron. But the pensioners bade her be calm. They pushed off hurriedly from the land, so that the barge came out into the current and bore down towards Karlstad, just as the coach reached the ferry.
In the carriage sat Count Henrik and Countess MÄrta. The count ran forward to ask the ferryman if he had seen his countess. But as Count Henrik was a little embarrassed to have to ask about a runaway wife, he only said:—
“Something has been lost!”
“Really?” said the ferryman.
“Something has been lost. I ask if you have seen anything?”
“What are you asking about?”
“Yes, it makes no difference, but something has been lost. I ask if you have ferried anything over the river to-day?”
By these means he could find out nothing, and Countess MÄrta had to go and speak to the man. She knew in a minute, that she whom they sought was on board one of the heavily gliding barges.
“Who are the people on those barges?”
“Oh, they are the pensioners, as we call them.”
“Ah,” says the countess. “Yes, then your wife is in good keeping, Henrik. We might as well go straight home.”
On the barge there was no such great joy as Countess MÄrta believed. As long as the yellow coach was in sight, the frightened young woman shrank together on the load motionless and silent, staring at the shore.
Probably she first recognized the pensioners when she had seen the yellow coach drive away. She started up. It was as if she wanted to escape again, but she was stopped by the one standing nearest, and she sank back on the load with a faint moan.
The pensioners dared not speak to her nor ask her any questions. She looked as if on the verge of madness.
Their careless heads began verily to be heavy with responsibility. This iron was already a heavy load for unaccustomed shoulders, and now they had to watch over a young, high-born lady, who had run away from her husband.
When they had met this young woman at the balls of the winter, one and another of them had thought of a little sister whom he had once loved. When he played and romped with that sister he needed to handle her carefully, and when he talked with her he had learned to be careful not to use bad words. If a strange boy had chased her too wildly in their play or had sung coarse songs for her, he had thrown himself on him with boundless fury and almost pounded the life out of him, for his little sister should never hear anything bad nor suffer any pain nor ever be met with anger and hate.
Countess Elizabeth had been like a joyous sister to them all. When she had laid her little hands in their hard fists, it had been as if she had said: “Feel how fragile I am, but you are my big brother; you shall protect me both from others and from yourself.” And they had been courtly knights as long as they had been with her.
Now the pensioners looked upon her with terror, and did not quite recognize her. She was worn and thin, her neck was without roundness, her face transparent. She must have struck herself during her wanderings, for from a little wound on her temple blood was trickling, and her curly, light hair, which shaded her brow, was sticky with it. Her dress was soiled from her long walk on the wet paths, and her shoes were muddy. The pensioners had a dreadful feeling that this was a stranger. The Countess Elizabeth they knew never had such wild, glittering eyes. Their poor little sister had been hunted nearly to madness. It was as if a soul come down from other spaces was struggling with the right soul for the mastery of her tortured body.
But there was no need for them to worry over what they should do with her. The old thought soon waked in her. Temptation had come to her again. God wished to try her once more. See, she is among friends; does she intend to leave the path of the penitent?
She rises and cries that she must go.
The pensioners try to calm her. They told her that she was safe. They would protect her from all persecution.
She only begged to be allowed to get into the little boat, which was towed after the barge, and row to the land, to continue her wandering.
But they could not let her go. What would become of her? It was better to remain with them. They were only poor old men, but they would surely find some way to help her.
Then she wrung her hands and begged them to let her go. But they could not grant her prayer. She was so exhausted and weak that they thought that she would die by the roadside.
GÖsta Berling stood a short distance away and looked down into the water. Perhaps the young woman would not wish to see him. He did not know it, but his thoughts played and smiled. “Nobody knows where she is,” he thought; “we can take her with us to Ekeby. We will keep her hidden there, we pensioners, and we will be good to her. She shall be our queen, our mistress, but no one shall know that she is there. We will guard her so well, so well. She perhaps would be happy with us; she would be cherished like a daughter by all the old men.”
He had never dared to ask himself if he loved her. She could not be his without sin, and he would not drag her down to anything low and wretched, that he knew. But to have her concealed at Ekeby and to be good to her after others had been cruel, and to let her enjoy everything pleasant in life, ah, what a dream, what a blissful dream!
But he wakened out of it, for the young countess was in dire distress, and her words had the piercing accents of despair. She had thrown herself upon her knees in the midst of the pensioners and begged them to be allowed to go.
“God has not yet pardoned me,” she cried. “Let me go!”
GÖsta saw that none of the others meant to obey her, and understood that he must do it. He, who loved her, must do it.
He felt a difficulty in walking, as if his every limb resisted his will, but he dragged himself to her and said that he would take her on shore.
She rose instantly. He lifted her down into the boat and rowed her to the east shore. He landed at a little pathway and helped her out of the boat.
“What is to become of you, countess?” he said.
She lifted her finger solemnly and pointed towards heaven.
“If you are in need, countess—”
He could not speak, his voice failed him, but she understood him and answered:—
“I will send you word when I need you.”
“I would have liked to protect you from all evil,” he said.
She gave him her hand in farewell, and he was not able to say anything more. Her hand lay cold and limp in his.
She was not conscious of anything but those inward voices which forced her to go among strangers. She hardly knew that it was the man she loved whom she now left.
So he let her go and rowed out to the pensioners again. When he came up on the barge he was trembling with fatigue and seemed exhausted and faint. He had done the hardest work of his life, it seemed to him.
For the few days he kept up his courage, until the honor of Ekeby was saved. He brought the iron to the weighing-office on Kanike point; then for a long time he lost all strength and love of life.
The pensioners noticed no change in him as long as they were on board. He strained every nerve to keep his hold on gayety and carelessness, for it was by gayety and carelessness that the honor of Ekeby was to be saved. How should their venture at the weighing-office succeed if they came with anxious faces and dejected hearts?
If what rumor says is true, that the pensioners that time had more sand than iron on their barges, if it is true that they kept bringing up and down the same bars to the weighing-office at Kanike point, until the many hundred tons were weighed; if it is true that all that could happen because the keeper of the public scales and his men were so well entertained out of the hampers and wine cases brought from Ekeby, one must know that they had to be gay on the iron barges.
Who can know the truth now? But if it was so, it is certain that GÖsta Berling had no time to grieve. Of the joy of adventure and danger he felt nothing. As soon as he dared, he sank into a condition of despair.
As soon as the pensioners had got their certificate of weighing, they loaded their iron on a bark. It was generally the custom that the captain of the vessel took charge of the load to Gothenburg, and the VÄrmland mines had no more responsibility for their iron when they had got their certificate that the consignment was filled. But the pensioners would do nothing by halves, they were going to take the iron all the way to Gothenburg.
On the way they met with misfortune. A storm broke out in the night, the vessel was disabled, drove on a reef, and sank with all her precious load. But if one saw the matter rightly, what did it matter if the iron was lost? The honor of Ekeby was saved. The iron had been weighed at the weighing-office at Kanike point. And even if the major had to sit down and in a curt letter inform the merchants in the big town that he would not have their money, as they had not got his iron, that made no difference either. Ekeby was so rich, and its honor was saved.
But if the harbors and locks, if the mines and charcoal-kilns, if the schooners and barges begin to whisper of strange things? If a gentle murmur goes through the forests that the journey was a fraud? If it is asserted through the whole of VÄrmland that there were never more than fifty miserable tons on the barges and that the shipwreck was arranged intentionally? A bold exploit had been carried out, and a real pensioner prank accomplished. By such things the honor of the old estate is not blemished.
But it happened so long ago now. It is quite possible that the pensioners bought the iron or that they found it in some hitherto unknown store-house. The truth will never be made clear in the matter. The keeper of the scales will never listen to any tales of fraud, and he ought to know.
When the pensioners reached home they heard news. Count Dohna’s marriage was to be annulled. The count had sent his steward to Italy to get proofs that the marriage had not been legal. He had come back late in the summer with satisfactory reports. What these were,—well, that I do not know with certainty. One must treat old tales with care; they are like faded roses. They easily drop their petals if one comes too near to them. People say that the ceremony in Italy had not been performed by a real priest. I do not know, but it certainly is true that the marriage between Count Dohna and Elizabeth von Thurn was declared at the court at Borg never to have been any marriage.
Of this the young woman knew nothing. She lived among peasants in some out-of-the-way place, if she was living.
CHAPTER V
LILLIECRONA’S HOME
Among the pensioners was one whom I have often mentioned as a great musician. He was a tall, heavily built man, with a big head and bushy, black hair. He was certainly not more than forty years old at that time, but he had an ugly, large-featured face and a pompous manner. This made many think him old. He was a good man, but low-spirited.
One afternoon he took his violin under his arm and went away from Ekeby. He said no farewell to any one, although he never meant to return. He loathed the life there ever since he had seen Countess Elizabeth in her trouble. He walked without resting the whole evening and the whole night, until at early sunrise he came to a little farm, called LÖfdala, which belonged to him.
It was so early that nobody was as yet awake. Lilliecrona sat down on the green bench outside the main building and looked at his estate. A more beautiful place did not exist. The lawn in front of the house lay in a gentle slope and was covered with fine, light-green grass. There never was such a lawn. The sheep were allowed to graze there and the children to romp there in their games, but it was always just as even and green. The scythe never passed over it, but at least once a week the mistress of the house had all sticks and straws and dry leaves swept from the fresh grass. He looked at the gravel walk in front of the house and suddenly drew his feet back. The children had late in the evening raked it and his big feet had done terrible harm to the fine work. Think how everything grew there. The six mountain-ashes which guarded the place were high as beeches and wide-spreading as oaks. Such trees had never been seen before. They were beautiful with their thick trunks covered with yellow lichens, and with big, white flower-clusters sticking out from the dark foliage. It made him think of the sky and its stars. It was indeed wonderful how the trees grew there. There stood an old willow, so thick that the arms of two men could not meet about it. It was now rotten and hollow, and the lightning had taken the top off it, but it would not die. Every spring a cluster of green shoots came up out of the shattered trunk to show that it was alive. That hawthorn by the east gable had become such a big tree that it overshadowed the whole house. The roof was white with its dropping petals, for the hawthorn had already blossomed. And the birches which stood in small clumps here and there in the pastures, they certainly had found their paradise on his farm. They developed there in so many different growths, as if they had meant to imitate all other trees. One was like a linden, thick and leafy with a wide-spreading arch, another stood close and tall like a poplar, and a third drooped its branches like a weeping-willow. No one was like another, and they were all beautiful.
Then he rose and went round the house. There lay the garden, so wonderfully beautiful that he had to stop and draw a long breath. The apple-trees were in bloom. Yes, of course he knew that. He had seen it on all the other farms; but in no other place did they bloom as they did in that garden, where he had seen them blossom since he was a child. He walked with clasped hands and careful step up and down the gravel path. The ground was white, and the trees were white, here and there with a touch of pink. He had never seen anything so beautiful. He knew every tree, as one knows one’s brothers and sisters and playmates. The astrachan trees were quite white, also the winter fruit-trees. But the russet blossoms were pink, and the crab-apple almost red. The most beautiful was the old wild apple-tree, whose little, bitter apples nobody could eat. It was not stingy with its blossoms; it looked like a great snow-drift in the morning light.
For remember that it was early in the morning! The dew made every leaf shine, all dust was washed away. Behind the forest-clad hills, close under which the farm lay, came the first rays of the sun. It was as if the tops of the pines had been set on fire by them. Over the clover meadows, over rye and corn fields, and over the sprouting oat-shoots, lay the lightest of mists, like a thin veil, and the shadows fell sharp as in moonlight.
He stood and looked at the big vegetable beds between the paths. He knows that mistress and maids have been at work here. They have dug, raked, pulled up weeds and turned the earth, until it has become fine and light. After they have made the beds even and the edges straight they have taken tapes and pegs and marked out rows and squares. Then they have sowed and set out, until all the rows and squares have been filled. And the children have been with them and have been so happy and eager to be allowed to help, although it has been hard work for them to stand bent and stretch their arms out over the broad beds. And of great assistance have they been, as any one can understand.
Now what they had sown began to come up.
God bless them! they stood there so bravely, both peas and beans with their two thick cotyledons; and how thick and nice had both carrots and beets come up! The funniest of all were the little crinkled parsley leaves, which lifted a little earth above them and played bopeep with life as yet.
And here was a little bed where the lines did not go so evenly and where the small squares seemed to be an experiment map of everything which could be set or sowed. That was the children’s garden.
And Lilliecrona put his violin hastily up to his chin and began to play. The birds began to sing in the big shrubbery which protected the garden from the north wind. It was not possible for anything gifted with voice to be silent, so glorious was the morning. The fiddle-bow moved quite of itself.
Lilliecrona walked up and down the paths and played. “No,” he thought, “there is no more beautiful place.” What was Ekeby compared to LÖfdala. His home had a thatched roof and was only one story high. It lay at the edge of the wood, with the mountain above it and the long valley below it. There was nothing wonderful about it; there was no lake there, no waterfall, no park, but it was beautiful just the same. It was beautiful because it was a good, peaceful home. Life was easy to live there. Everything which in other places caused bitterness and hate was there smoothed away with gentleness. So shall it be in a home.
Within, in the house, the mistress lies and sleeps in a room which opens on the garden. She wakes suddenly and listens, but she does not move. She lies smiling and listening. Then the musician comes nearer and nearer, and at last it sounds as if he had stopped under her window. It is indeed not the first time she has heard the violin under her window. He was in the habit of coming so, her husband, when they had done something unusually wild there at Ekeby.
He stands there and confesses and begs for forgiveness. He describes to her the dark powers which tempt him away from what he loves best,—from her and the children. But he loves them. Oh, of course he loves them!
While he plays she gets up and puts on her clothes without quite knowing what she is doing. She is so taken up with his playing.
“It is not luxury and good cheer, which tempt me away,” he plays “not love for other women, nor glory, but life’s seductive changes: its sweetness, its bitterness, its riches, I must feel about me. But now I have had enough of it, now I am tired and satisfied. I shall never again leave my home. Forgive me; have mercy upon me!”
Then she draws aside the curtain and opens the window, and he sees her beautiful, kind face.
She is good, and she is wise. Her glances bring blessings like the sun’s on everything they meet. She directs and tends. Where she is, everything grows and flourishes. She bears happiness within her.
He swings himself up on to the window-sill to her, and is happy as a young lover.
Then he lifts her out into the garden and carries her down under the apple-trees. There he explains for her how beautiful everything is, and shows her the vegetable beds and the children’s garden and the funny little parsley leaves.
When the children awake, there is joy and rapture that father has come. They take possession of him. He must see all that is new and wonderful: the little nail-manufactory which pounds away in the brook, the bird’s-nest in the willow, and the little minnows in the pond, which swim in thousands near the surface of the water.
Then father, mother, and children take a long walk in the fields. He wants to see how close the rye stands, how the clover is growing, and how the potatoes are beginning to poke up their crumpled leaves.
He must see the cows when they come in from the pasture, visit the new-comers in the barn and sheep-house, look for eggs, and give all the horses sugar.
The children hang at his heels the whole day. No lessons, no work; only to wander about with their father!
In the evening he plays polkas for them, and all day he has been such a good comrade and playfellow that they fall asleep with a pious prayer that father may always stay with them.
He stays eight long days, and is joyous as a boy the whole time. He could stand it no longer, it was too much happiness for him. Ekeby was a thousand times worse, but Ekeby lay in the midst of the whirl of events. Oh, how much there was there to dream of and to play of! How could he live separated from the pensioners’ deeds, and from LÖfven’s long lake, about which adventure’s wild chase rushed onward?
On his own estate everything went on in its calm, wonted way. Everything flourished and grew under the gentle mistress’s care. Every one was happy there. Everything which anywhere else could have caused discord and bitterness passed over there without complaints or pain. Everything was as it should be. If now the master of the house longed to live as pensioner at Ekeby, what then? Does it help to complain of heaven’s sun because it disappears every evening in the west, and leaves the earth in darkness?
What is so unconquerable as submission? What is so certain of victory as patience?
CHAPTER VI
THE WITCH OF DOVRE
The witch of Dovre walks on LÖfven’s shores. People have seen her there, little and bent, in a leather skirt and a belt of silver plates. Why has she come out of the wolf-holes to a human world? What does the old creature of the mountains want in the green of the valley?
She comes begging. She is mean, greedy for gifts, although she is so rich. In the clefts of the mountain she hides heavy bars of white silver; and in the rich meadows far away on the heights feed her great flocks of black cattle with golden horns. Still she wanders about in birch-bark shoes and greasy leather skirt soiled with the dirt of a hundred years. She smokes moss in her pipe and begs of the poorest. Shame on one who is never grateful, never gets enough!
She is old. When did the rosy glory of youth dwell in that broad face with its brown greasy skin, in the flat nose and the small eyes, which gleam in the surrounding dirt like coals of fire in gray ashes? When did she sit as a young girl on the mountain-side and answer with her horn the shepherd-boy’s love-songs? She has lived several hundred years. The oldest do not remember the time when she did not wander through the land. Their fathers had seen her old when they were young. Nor is she yet dead. I who write, myself have seen her.
She is powerful. She does not bend for any one. She can summon the hail, she can guide the lightning. She can lead the herds astray and set wolves on the sheep. Little good can she do, but much evil. It is best to be on good terms with her! If she should beg for your only goat and a whole pound of wool, give it to her; if you don’t the horse will fall, or the cottage will burn, or the cow will sicken, or the child will die.
A welcome guest she never is. But it is best to meet her with smiling lips! Who knows for whose sake the bearer of disaster is roaming through the valley? She does not come only to fill her beggar’s-pouch. Evil omens go with her; the army worm shows itself, foxes and owls howl and hoot in the twilight, red and black serpents, which spit venom, crawl out of the wood up to the very threshold.
Charms can she chant, philters can she brew. She knows all herbs. Everybody trembles with fear when they see her; but the strong daughter of the wilderness goes calmly on her way among them, protected by their dread. The exploits of her race are not forgotten, nor are her own. As the cat trusts in its claws, so does she trust in her wisdom and in the strength of her divinely inspired prophecies. No king is more sure of his might than she of the kingdom of fear in which she rules.
The witch of Dovre has wandered through many villages. Now she has come to Borg, and does not fear to wander up to the castle. She seldom goes to the kitchen door. Right up the terrace steps she comes. She plants her broad birch-bark shoes on the flower-bordered gravel-walks as calmly as if she were tramping up mountain paths.
Countess MÄrta has just come out on the steps to admire the beauty of the June day. Below her two maids have stopped on their way to the store-house. They have come from the smoke-house, where the bacon is being smoked, and are carrying newly cured hams on a pole between them. “Will our gracious Countess feel and smell?” say the maids. “Are the hams smoked enough?”
Countess MÄrta, mistress at Borg at that time, leans over the railing and looks at the hams, but in the same instant the old Finn woman lays her hand on one of them.
The daughter of the mountains is not accustomed to beg and pray! Is it not by her grace that flowers thrive and people live? Frost and storm and floods are all in her power to send. Therefore she does not need to pray and beg. She lays her hand on what she wants, and it is hers.
Countess MÄrta, however, knows nothing of the old woman’s power.
“Away with you, beggar-woman!” she says.
“Give me the ham,” says the witch.
“She is mad,” cries the countess. And she orders the maids to go to the store-house with their burden.
The eyes of the old woman flame with rage and greed.
“Give me the brown ham,” she repeats, “or it will go ill with you.”
“I would rather give it to the magpies than to such as you.”
Then the old woman is shaken by a storm of rage. She stretches towards heaven her runic-staff and waves it wildly. Her lips utter strange words. Her hair stands on end, her eyes shine, her face is distorted.
“You shall be eaten by magpies yourself,” she screams at last.
Then she goes, mumbling curses, brandishing her stick. She turns towards home. Farther towards the south does she not go. She has accomplished her errand, for which she had travelled down from the mountains.
Countess MÄrta remains standing on the steps and laughs at her extravagant anger; but on her lips the laugh will soon die away, for there they come. She cannot believe her eyes. She thinks that she is dreaming, but there they come, the magpies who are going to eat her.
From the park and the garden they swoop down on her, magpies by scores, with claws ready to seize and bills stretched out to strike. They come with wild screams. Black and white wings gleam before her eyes. She sees as in delirium behind this swarm the magpies of the whole neighborhood approaching; the whole heaven is full of black and white wings. In the bright morning sun the metallic colors of the feathers glisten. In smaller and smaller circles the monsters fly about the countess, aiming with beaks and claws at her face and hands. She has to escape into the hall and shut the door. She leans against it, panting with terror, while the screaming magpies circle about outside.
From that time on she is shut in from the sweetness and green of the summer and from the joy of life. For her were only closed rooms and drawn curtains; for her, despair; for her, terror; for her, confusion, bordering on madness.
Mad this story too may seem, but it must also be true. Hundreds will recognize it and bear witness that such is the old tale.
The birds settled down on the railing and the roof. They sat as if they only waited till the countess should show herself, to throw themselves upon her. They took up their abode in the park and there they remained. It was impossible to drive them away. It was only worse if they shot them. For one that fell, ten came flying. Sometimes great flocks flew away to get food, but faithful sentries always remained behind. And if Countess MÄrta showed herself, if she looked out of a window or only drew aside the curtain for an instant, if she tried to go out on the steps,—they came directly. The whole terrible swarm whirled up to the house on thundering wings, and the countess fled into her inner room.
She lived in the bedroom beyond the red drawing-room. I have often heard the room described, as it was during that time of terror, when Borg was besieged by magpies. Heavy quilts before the doors and windows, thick carpets on the floor, softly treading, whispering people.
In the countess’s heart dwelt wild terror. Her hair turned gray. Her face became wrinkled. She grew old in a month. She could not steel her heart to doubt of hateful magic. She started up from her dreams with wild cries that the magpies were eating her. She wept for days over this fate, which she could not escape. Shunning people, afraid that the swarm of birds should follow on the heels of any one coming in, she sat mostly silent with her hands before her face, rocking backwards and forwards in her chair, low-spirited and depressed in the close air, sometimes starting up with cries of lamentation.
No one’s life could be more bitter. Can any one help pitying her?
I have not much more to tell of her now, and what I have said has not been good. It is as if my conscience smote me. She was good-hearted and cheerful when she was young, and many merry stories about her have gladdened my heart, although there has been no space to tell them here.
But it is so, although that poor wayfarer did not know it, that the soul is ever hungry. On frivolity and play it cannot live. If it gets no other food, it will like a wild beast first tear others to pieces and then itself.
That is the meaning of the story.
CHAPTER VII
MIDSUMMER
Midsummer was hot then as now when I am writing. It was the most beautiful season of the year. It was the season when Sintram, the wicked ironmaster at Fors, fretted and grieved. He resented the sun’s triumphal march through the hours of the day, and the overthrow of darkness. He raged at the leafy dress which clothed the trees, and at the many-colored carpet which covered the ground.
Everything arrayed itself in beauty. The road, gray and dusty as it was, had its border of flowers: yellow and purple midsummer blossoms, wild parsley, and asters.
When the glory of midsummer lay on the mountains and the sound of the bells from the church at Bro was borne on the quivering air even as far as Fors, when the unspeakable stillness of the Sabbath day reigned in the land, then he rose in wrath. It seemed to him as if God and men dared to forget that he existed, and he decided to go to church, he too. Those who rejoiced at the summer should see him, Sintram, lover of darkness without morning, of death without resurrection, of winter without spring.
He put on his wolfskin coat and shaggy fur gloves. He had the red horse harnessed in a sledge, and fastened bells to the shining horse-collar. Equipped as if it were thirty degrees below zero, he drove to church. He believed that the grinding under the runners was from the severe cold. He believed that the white foam on the horse’s back was hoar-frost. He felt no heat. Cold streamed from him as warmth from the sun.
He drove over the wide plain north of the Bro church. Large, rich villages lay near his way, and fields of grain, over which singing larks fluttered. Never have I heard larks sing as in those fields. Often have I wondered how he could shut his ears to those hundreds of songsters.
He had to drive by many things on the way which would have enraged him if he had given them a glance. He would have seen two bending birches at the door of every house, and through open windows he would have looked into rooms whose ceilings and walls were covered with flowers and green branches. The smallest beggar child went on the road with a bunch of lilacs in her hand, and every peasant woman had a little nosegay stuck in her neckerchief.
Maypoles with faded flowers and drooping wreaths stood in every yard. Round about them the grass was trodden down, for the merry dance had whirled there through the summer night.
Below on the LÖfven crowded the floats of timber. The little white sails were hoisted in honor of the day, although no wind filled them, and every masthead bore a green wreath.
On the many roads which lead to Bro the congregation came walking. The women were especially magnificent in the light summer-dresses, which had been made ready just for that day. All were dressed in their best.
And the people could not help rejoicing at the peace of the day and the rest from daily work, at the delicious warmth, the promising harvest, and the wild strawberries which were beginning to redden at the edge of the road. They noticed the stillness of the air and the song of the larks, and said: “It is plain that this is the Lord’s day.”
Then Sintram drove up. He swore and swung his whip over the straining horse. The sand grated horribly under the runners, the sleigh-bells’ shrill clang drowned the sound of the church bells. His brow lay in angry wrinkles under his fur cap.
The church-goers shuddered and thought they had seen the evil one himself. Not even to-day on the summer’s festival might they forget evil and cold. Bitter is the lot of those who wander upon earth.
The people who stood in the shadow of the church or sat on the churchyard wall and waited for the beginning of the service, saw him with calm wonder when he came up to the church door. The glorious day had filled their hearts with joy that they were walking the paths of earth and enjoying the sweetness of existence. Now, when they saw Sintram, forebodings of strange disaster came over them.
Sintram entered the church and sat down in his seat, throwing his gloves on the bench, so that the rattle of the wolves’ claws which were sewed into the skin was heard through the church. And several women who had already taken their places on the front benches fainted when they saw the shaggy form, and had to be carried out.
But no one dared to drive out Sintram. He disturbed the people’s devotions, but he was too much feared for any one to venture to order him to leave the church.
In vain the old clergyman spoke of the summer’s bright festival. Nobody listened to him. The people only thought of evil and cold and of the strange disaster which the wicked ironmaster announced to them.
When it was over, they saw him walk out on to the slope of the hill where the Bro church stands. He looked down on the Broby Sound and followed it with his eyes past the deanery and the three points of the west shore out into the LÖfven. And they saw how he clenched his fist and shook it over the sound and its green banks. Then his glance turned further south over the lower LÖfven to the misty shores which seemed to shut in the lake, and northward it flew miles beyond Gurlitta Cliff up to BjÖrnidet, where the lake began. He looked to the west and east, where the long mountains border the valley, and he clenched his fist again. And every one felt that if he had held a bundle of thunderbolts in his right hand, he would have hurled them in wild joy out over the peaceful country and spread sorrow and death as far as he could. For now he had so accustomed his heart to evil that he knew no pleasure except in suffering. By degrees he had taught himself to love everything ugly and wretched. He was more insane than the most violent madman, but that no one understood.
Strange stories went about the land after that day. It was said that when the sexton came to shut up the church, the bit of the key broke, because a tightly folded paper had been stuck in the keyhole. He gave it to the dean. It was, as was to be expected, a letter meant for a being in the other world.
People whispered of what had stood there. The dean had burnt the paper, but the sexton had looked on while the devil’s trash burned. The letters had shone bright red on a black ground. He could not help reading. He read, people said, that Sintram wished to lay the country waste as far as the Bro church tower was visible. He wished to see the forest grow up about the church. He wished to see bear and fox living in men’s dwellings. The fields should lie uncultivated, and neither dog nor cock should be heard in the neighborhood. He wished to serve his master by causing every man’s ruin. That was what he promised.
And the people looked to the future in silent despair, for they knew that his power was great, that he hated everything living, that he wished to see the wilderness spread through the valley, and that he would gladly take pestilence or famine or war into his service to drive away every one who loved good, joy-bringing work.
CHAPTER VIII
MADAME MUSICA
When nothing could make GÖsta Berling glad, after he had helped the young countess to escape, the pensioners decided to seek help of the good Madame Musica, who is a powerful fairy and consoles many who are unhappy.
So one evening in July they had the doors of the big drawing-room at Ekeby opened and the shutters taken down. The sun and air were let in, the late evening’s big, red sun, the cool, mild, steaming air.
The striped covers were taken off the furniture, the piano was opened, and the net about the Venetian chandelier taken away. The golden griffins under the white-marble table-tops again reflected the light. The white goddesses danced above the mirror. The variegated flowers on the silk damask glistened in the evening glow. Roses were picked and brought in. The whole room was filled with their fragrance. There were wonderful roses with unknown names, which had been brought to Ekeby from foreign lands. There were yellow ones in whose veins the blood shone red as in a human being’s, and cream-white roses with curled edges, and pink roses with broad petals, which on their outside edge were as colorless as water, and dark red with black shadows. They carried in all Altringer’s roses which had come from far distant lands to rejoice the eyes of lovely women.
The music and music-stands were brought in, and the brass instruments and bows and violins of all sizes; for good Madame Musica shall now reign at Ekeby and try to console GÖsta Berling.
Madame Musica has chosen the Oxford Symphony of Haydn, and has had the pensioners practise it. Julius conducts, and each of the others attends to his own instrument. All the pensioners can play—they would not otherwise be pensioners.
When everything is ready GÖsta is sent for. He is still weak and low-spirited, but he rejoices in the beautiful room and in the music he soon shall hear. For every one knows that for him who suffers and is in pain good Madame Musica is the best company. She is gay and playful like a child. She is fiery and captivating like a young woman. She is good and wise like the old who have lived a good life.
And then the pensioners began to play, so gently, so murmuringly soft.
It goes well, it goes brilliantly well. From the dead notes they charm Madame Musica herself. Spread out your magic cloak, dear Madame Musica, and take GÖsta Berling to the land of gladness, where he used to live.
Alas that it is GÖsta Berling who sits there pale and depressed, and whom the old men must amuse as if he were a child. There will be no more joy now in VÄrmland.
I know why the old people loved him. I know how long a winter evening can be, and how gloom can creep over the spirit in those lonely farm-houses. I understand how it felt when he came.
Ah, fancy a Sunday afternoon, when work is laid aside and the thoughts are dull! Fancy an obstinate north wind, whipping cold into the room,—a cold which no fire can relieve! Fancy the single tallow-candle, which has to be continually snuffed! Fancy the monotonous sound of psalms from the kitchen!
Well, and then bells come ringing, eager feet stamp off the snow in the hall, and GÖsta Berling comes into the room. He laughs and jokes. He is life, he is warmth. He opens the piano, and he plays so that they are surprised at the old strings. He can sing all songs, play any tune. He makes all the inmates of the house happy. He was never cold, he was never tired. The mourner forgot his sorrows when he saw him. Ah, what a good heart he had! How compassionate he was to the weak and poor! And what a genius he was! Yes, you ought to have heard the old people talk of him.
But now, just as they were playing, he burst into tears. He thinks life is so sad. He rests his head in his hands and weeps. The pensioners are dismayed. These are not mild, healing tears, such as Madame Musica generally calls forth. He is sobbing like one in despair. At their wits’ end they put their instruments away.
And the good Madame Musica, who loves GÖsta Berling, she too almost loses courage; but then she remembers that she has still a mighty champion among the pensioners.
It is the gentle LÖwenborg, he who had lost his fiancÉe in the muddy river, and who is more GÖsta Berling’s slave than any of the others. He steals away to the piano.
In the pensioners’ wing LÖwenborg has a great wooden table, on which he has painted a keyboard and set up a music-stand. There he can sit for hours at a time and let his fingers fly over the black and white keys. There he practises both scales and studies, and there he plays his Beethoven. He never plays anything but Beethoven.
But the old man never ventures on any other instrument than the wooden table. For the piano he has a respectful awe. It tempts him, but it frightens him even more. The clashing instrument, on which so many polkas have been drummed, is a sacred thing to him. He has never dared to touch it. Think of that wonderful thing with its many strings, which could give life to the great master’s works! He only needs to put his ear to it, to hear andantes and scherzos murmuring there. But he has never played on such a thing. He will never be rich enough to buy one of his own, and on this he has never dared to play. The major’s wife was not so willing either to open it for him.
He has heard how polkas and waltzes have been played on it. But in such profane music the noble instrument could only clash and complain. No, if Beethoven should come, then it would let its true, clear sound be heard.
Now he thinks that the moment is come for him and Beethoven. He will take courage and touch the holy thing, and let his young lord and master be gladdened by the sleeping harmonies.
He sits down and begins to play. He is uncertain and nervous, but he gropes through a couple of bars, tries to bring out the right ring, frowns, tries again, and puts his hands before his face and begins to weep.
Yes, it is a bitter thing. The sacred thing is not sacred. There are no clear, pure tones hidden and dreaming in it; there are no mighty thunders, no rushing hurricanes. None of the endless harmonies direct from heaven had remained there. It is an old, worn-out piano, and nothing more.
But then Madame Musica gives the colonel a hint. He takes Ruster with him and they go to the pensioners’ wing and get LÖwenborg’s table, where the keys are painted.
“See here, LÖwenborg,” says Beerencreutz, when they come back, “here is your piano. Play for GÖsta!”
Then LÖwenborg stops crying and sits down to play Beethoven for his sorrowful young friend. Now he would certainly be glad again.
In the old man’s head sound the most heavenly tones. He cannot think but that GÖsta hears how beautifully he is playing. He meets with no more difficulties. He plays his runs and trills with the greatest ease. He would have liked that the master himself could have heard him.
The longer he plays, the more he is carried away. He hears every note with unearthly clearness. He sits there glowing with enthusiasm and emotion, hearing the most wonderful tones, certain that GÖsta must hear them too and be comforted.
GÖsta sat and looked at him. At first he was angry at this foolery, but gradually he became of milder mood. He was irresistible, the old man, as he sat and enjoyed his Beethoven.
And GÖsta began to think how this man too, who now was so gentle and so careless, had been sunk in suffering, how he too had lost her whom he loved. And now he sat beamingly happy at his wooden table. Nothing more was needed to add to his bliss.
He felt humbled. “What, GÖsta,” he said to himself, “can you no longer bear and suffer? You who have been hardened by poverty all your life, you who have heard every tree in the forest, every tuft in the meadow preach of resignation and patience, you who have been brought up in a land where the winter is severe and the summer short,—have you forgotten how to endure?”
Ah GÖsta, a man must bear all that life offers with a brave heart and smiling lip, or he is no man. Regret as much as you like if you have lost what you hold dearest, let remorse tear at your vitals, but show yourself a man. Let your glance shine with gladness, and meet your friends with cheerful words!
Life is hard, nature is hard. But they both give courage and cheerfulness as compensations for their hardness, or no one could hold out.
Courage and cheerfulness! It is as if they were the first duties of life. You have never failed in them before, and shall not now.
Are you worse than LÖwenborg, who sits there at his wooden piano, than all the other pensioners? You know well enough that none of them have escaped suffering!
And then GÖsta looks at them. Oh, such a performance! They all are sitting there so seriously and listening to this music which nobody hears.
Suddenly LÖwenborg is waked from his dreams by a merry laugh. He lifts his hands from the keys and listens as if in rapture. It is GÖsta Berling’s old laugh, his good, kind, infectious laugh. It is the sweetest music the old man has heard in all his life.
“Did I not say that Beethoven would help you, GÖsta,” he cries. “Now you are yourself again.”
So did the good Madame Musica cure GÖsta Berling’s hypochondria.
CHAPTER IX
THE BROBY CLERGYMAN
Eros, all-powerful god, you know well that it often seems as if a man should have freed himself from your might. All the tender feelings which unite mankind seem dead in his heart. Madness stretches its claws after the unhappy one, but then you come in all your power, and like the great saint’s staff the dried-up heart bursts into bloom.
No one is so mean as the Broby clergyman, no one more divided by malice and uncharitableness from his fellow-men. His rooms are unheated in the winter, he sits on an unpainted wooden seat, he dresses in rags, lives on dry bread, and is furious if a beggar enters his door. He lets the horse starve in the stable and sells the hay, his cows nibble the dry grass at the roadside and the moss on the wall. The bleating of the hungry sheep can be heard far along the highway. The peasants throw him presents of food which their dogs will not eat, of clothes which their poor disdain. His hand is stretched out to beg, his back bent to thank. He begs of the rich, lends to the poor. If he sees a piece of money his heart aches with longing till he gets it into his pocket. Unhappy is he who has not his affairs in order on the day of payment!
He was married late in life, but it had been better if he had never been. Exhausted and overworked, his wife died. His daughter serves with strangers. He is old, but age grants him no relief in his struggling. The madness of avarice never leaves him.
But one fine day in the beginning of August a heavy coach, drawn by four horses, drives up Broby hill. A delicate old lady comes driving in great state, with coachman and footman and lady’s-maid. She comes to meet the Broby clergyman. She had loved him in the days of her youth.
He had been tutor at her father’s house, and they had loved one another, although her proud family had separated them. And now she is journeying up Broby hill to see him before she dies. All that is left to her in life is to see once again the beloved of her youth.
She sits in the great carriage and dreams. She is not driving up Broby hill to a poor little pastorage. She is on her way to the cool leafy arbor down in the park, where her lover is waiting. She sees him; he is young, he can kiss, he can love. Now, when she knows that she soon shall meet him his image rises before her with singular clearness. He is so handsome, so handsome! He can adore, he can burn, he fills her whole being with rapture.
Now she is sallow, withered, and old. Perhaps he will not recognize her with her sixty years, but she has not come to be seen, but to see, to see the beloved of her youth, who has gone through life untouched by time, who is ever young, beautiful, glowing.
She has come from so far away that she has not heard a word of the Broby clergyman.
The coach clatters up the hill, and at the summit the pastorage is visible.
“For the love of God,” whines a beggar at the wayside, “a copper for a poor man!”
The noble lady gives him a piece of silver and asks where the Broby pastorage is.
“The pastorage is in front of you,” he says, “but the clergyman is not at home, there is no one at the pastorage.”
The little lady seems to fade away. The cool arbor vanishes, her lover is not there. How could she expect, after forty years, to find him there?
What had the gracious lady to do at the vicarage?
She had come to meet the minister. She had known him in the old days.
Forty years and four hundred miles have separated them. And for each ten miles she has come nearer she has left behind her a year with its burden of sorrows and memories, so that when she now comes to the vicarage she is a girl of twenty again, without a care or a regret.
The beggar stands and looks at her, sees her change under his eyes from twenty to sixty, and from sixty back again to twenty.
“The minister is coming home this afternoon,” he says. The gracious lady would do best to drive down to the Broby inn and come again later. In the afternoon, the beggar can answer for it, the minister will be at home.
A moment after, the heavy coach with the little faded lady rolls down the hill to the inn, but the beggar stands trembling and looks after her. He feels that he ought to fall on his knees and kiss the wheel tracks.
Elegant, newly shaven, and washed, in shoes with shining buckles, with silk stockings, with ruffles and frills, the Broby clergyman stands at noon that same day before the dean’s wife at Bro.
“A fine lady,” he says, “a count’s daughter. Do you think that I, poor man, can ask her to come into my house? My floors are black, my drawing-room without furniture, the dining-room ceiling is green with mildew and damp. Help me! Remember that she is a noble count’s daughter!”
“Say that you have gone away!”
“My dear lady, she has come four hundred miles to see me, poor man. She does not know how it is. I have not a bed to offer her. I have not a bed for her servants!”
“Well, let her go again.”
“Dear heart! Do you not understand what I mean? I would rather give everything I possess, everything that I have gathered together by industry and striving, than that she should go without my having received her under my roof. She was twenty when I saw her last, and it is now forty years ago! Help me, that I may see her in my house! Here is money, if money can help, but here more than money is needed.”
Oh, Eros, women love you. They would rather go a hundred steps for you than one for other gods.
In the deanery at Bro the rooms are emptied, the kitchen is emptied, the larder is emptied. Wagons are piled up and driven to the vicarage. When the dean comes home from the communion service, he will find empty rooms, look in through the kitchen door to ask after his dinner and find no one there. No dinner, no wife, no maids! What was to be done?
Eros has so wished it.
A little later in the afternoon the heavy coach comes clattering up Broby hill. And the little lady sits and wonders if any new mischance shall happen, if it is really true that she is now going to meet her life’s only joy.
Then the coach swings into the vicarage, there comes some one, there he comes. He lifts her out of the carriage, he takes her on his arm, strong as ever, she is clasped in an embrace as warm as of old, forty years ago. She looks into his eyes; which glow as they did when they had only seen five and twenty summers.
A storm of emotion comes over her—warmer than ever. She remembers that he once carried her up the steps to the terrace. She, who believed that her love had lived all these years, had forgotten what it was to be clasped in strong arms, to look into young, glowing eyes.
She does not see that he is old. She only sees his eyes.
She does not see the black floors, the mildewed ceilings, she only sees his glowing eyes. The Broby clergyman is a stately man, a handsome man in that hour. He grows handsome when he looks at her.
She hears his voice, his dear, strong voice; caressingly it sounds. He only speaks so to her. Why did he need furniture from the deanery for his empty rooms; why food, why servants? The old lady would never have missed anything. She hears his voice and sees his eyes.
Never, never before has she been so happy.
She knows that he has been married, but she does not remember it. How could she remember such a thing? She is twenty, he twenty-five. Shall he become the mean Broby clergyman, that smiling youth? The wailing of the poor, the curses of the defrauded, the scornful gibes, the caricatures, the sneers, all that as yet does not exist for him. His heart burns only with a pure and innocent love. Never shall that proud youth love gold so that he will creep after it in the dirt, beg it from the wayfarer, suffer humiliation, suffer disgrace, suffer cold, suffer hunger to get it. Shall he starve his child, torture his wife, for that same miserable gold? It is impossible. Such he can never be. He is a good man like all others. He is not a monster.
The beloved of his youth does not walk by the side of a despised wretch, unworthy of the profession he has dared to undertake!
Oh, Eros, not that evening! That evening he is not the Broby clergyman, nor the next day either, nor the day after.
The day after that she goes.
What a dream, what a beautiful dream! For these three days not a cloud!
She journeyed smiling home to her castle and her memories. She never heard his name again, she never asked after him. She wanted to dream that dream as long as she lived.
The Broby clergyman sat in his lonely home and wept. She had made him young. Must he now be old again? Should the evil spirit return and he be despicable, contemptible, as he had been?
CHAPTER X
PATRON JULIUS
Patron Julius carried down his red painted wooden chest from the pensioners’ wing. He filled with fragrant brandy a green keg, which had followed him on many journeys, and in the big carved luncheon-box he put butter, bread, and seasoned cheese, deliciously shading in green and brown, fat ham, and pan-cakes swimming in raspberry jam.
Then Patron Julius went about and said farewell, with tears in his eyes, to all the glory of Ekeby. He caressed for the last time the worn balls in the bowling-alley and the round-cheeked youngsters on the estate. He went about to the arbors in the garden and the grottos in the park. He was in stable and cow-house, patted the horses’ necks, shook the angry bull’s horns, and let the calves lick his bare hand. Finally he went with weeping eyes to the main building, where the farewell breakfast awaited him.
Woe to our existence! How can it be full of so much darkness? There was poison in the food, gall in the wine.
The pensioners’ throats were compressed by emotion as well as his own. A mist of tears dimmed the eyes. The farewell speech was broken by sobs. Woe to our existence! His life would be, from now on, one long desire. He would never smile again; the ballads should die from his memory as flowers die in the autumn ground. He should grow pale and thin, wither like a frost-bitten rose, like a thirsting lily. Never more should the pensioners see poor Julius. Heavy forebodings traversed his soul, just as shadows of wind-swept clouds traverse our newly tilled fields. He would go home to die.
Blooming with health and well-being, he now stood before them. Never again should they see him so. Never more should they jestingly ask him when he last saw his feet; never more should they wish for his cheeks for bowls. In liver and lungs the disease had already settled. It was gnawing and consuming. He had felt it long. His days were numbered.
Oh, will the Ekeby pensioners but remember death? Oh, may they never forget him!
Duty called him. There in his home sat his mother and waited for him. For seventeen years she had waited for him to come home from Ekeby. Now she had written a summoning letter, and he would obey. He knew that it would be his death; but he would obey like a good son.
Oh, the glorious feasts! Oh, the fair shores, the proud falls! Oh, the wild adventures, the white, smooth floors, the beloved pensioners’ wing! Oh, violins and horns, oh, life of happiness and pleasure! It was death to be parted from all that.
Then Patron Julius went out into the kitchen and said farewell to the servants of the house. Each and all, from the housekeeper to kitchen-girl, he embraced and kissed in overflowing emotion. The maids wept and lamented over his fate: that such a kind and merry gentleman should die, that they should never see him again.
Patron Julius gave command that his chaise should be dragged out of the carriage-house and his horse taken out of the stable.
His voice almost failed him when he gave that order. So the chaise might not mould in peace at Ekeby, so old Kajsa must be parted from the well-known manger. He did not wish to say anything hard about his mother; but she ought to have thought of the chaise and Kajsa, if she did not think of him. How would they bear the long journey?
The most bitter of all was to take leave of the pensioners.
Little, round Patron Julius, more built to roll than to walk, felt himself tragic to his very fingertips. He felt himself the great Athenian, who calmly emptied the poison cup in the circle of weeping students. He felt himself the old King GÖsta, who prophesied to Sweden’s people that they some day should wish to tear him up from the dust.
Finally he sang his best ballad for them. He thought of the swan, who dies in singing. It was so, he hoped, that they would remember him,—a kingly spirit, which does not lower itself to complaining, but goes its way, borne on melody.
At last the last cup was emptied, the last song sung, the last embrace given. He had his coat on, and he held the whip in his hand. There was not a dry eye about him; his own were so filled by sorrow’s rising mist that he could not see anything.
Then the pensioners seized him and lifted him up. Cheers thundered about him. They put him down somewhere, he did not see where. A whip cracked, the carriage seemed to move under him. He was carried away. When he recovered the use of his eyes he was out on the highway.
The pensioners had really wept and been overcome by deep regret; still their grief had not stifled all the heart’s glad emotions. One of them—was it GÖsta Berling, the poet, or Beerencreutz, the card-playing old warrior, or the life-weary Cousin Christopher?—had arranged it so that old Kajsa did not have to be taken from her stall, nor the mouldering chaise from the coach-house. Instead, a big spotted ox had been harnessed to a hay-wagon, and after the red chest, the green keg, and the carved luncheon-box had been put in there, Patron Julius himself, whose eyes were dim with tears, was lifted up, not on to the luncheon-box, nor on to the chest, but on to the spotted ox’s back.
For so is man, too weak to meet sorrow in all its bitterness! The pensioners honestly mourned for their friend, who was going away to die,—that withered lily, that mortally wounded singing swan; yet the oppression of their hearts was relieved when they saw him depart riding on the big ox’s back, while his fat body was shaken with sobs, his arms, outspread for the last embrace, sank down in despair, and his eyes sought sympathy in an unkind heaven.
Out on the highway the mists began to clear for Patron Julius, and he perceived that he was sitting on the shaking back of an animal. And then people say that he began to ponder on what can happen in seventeen long years. Old Kajsa was visibly changed. Could the oats and clover of Ekeby cause so much? And he cried—I do not know if the stones in the road or the birds in the bushes heard it, but true it is that he cried—“The devil may torture me, if you have not got horns, Kajsa!”
After another period of consideration he let himself slide gently down from the back of the ox, climbed up into the wagon, sat down on the luncheon-box, and drove on, deep in his thoughts.
After a while, when he has almost reached Broby, he hears singing.
It was the merry young ladies from Berga, and some of the judge’s pretty daughters, who were walking along the road. They had fastened their lunch-baskets on long sticks, which rested on their shoulders like guns, and they were marching bravely on in the summer’s heat, singing in good time.
“Whither away, Patron Julius?” they cried, when they met him, without noticing the cloud of grief which obscured his brow.
“I am departing from the home of sin and vanity,” answered Patron Julius. “I will dwell no longer among idlers and malefactors. I am going home to my mother.”
“Oh,” they cried, “it is not true; you do not want to leave Ekeby, Patron Julius!”
“Yes,” he said, and struck his wooden chest with his fist. “As Lot fled from Sodom and Gomorrah, so do I flee from Ekeby. There is not a righteous man there. But when the earth crumbles away under them, and the sulphur rain patters down from the sky, I shall rejoice in God’s just judgment. Farewell, girls; beware of Ekeby!”
Whereupon he wished to continue on his way; but that was not at all their plan. They meant to walk up to Dunder Cliff, to climb it; but the road was long, and they felt inclined to ride in Julius’ wagon to the foot of the mountain. Inside of two minutes the girls had got their way. Patron Julius turned back and directed his course towards Dunder Cliff. Smiling, he sat on his chest, while the wagon was filled with girls. Along the road grew daisies and buttercups. The ox had to rest every now and then for a while. Then the girls climbed out and picked flowers. Soon gaudy wreaths hung on Julius’ head and the ox’s horns.
Further on they came upon bright young birches and dark alder-bushes. They got out and broke branches to adorn the wagon. It looked, soon, like a moving grove. It was fun and play the whole day.
Patron Julius became milder and brighter as the day went on. He divided his provisions among the girls, and sang ballads for them. When they stood on the top of Dunder Cliff, with the wide panorama lying below, so proud and beautiful that tears came into their eyes at its loveliness, Julius felt his heart beat violently; words poured from his lips, and he spoke of his beloved land.
“Ah, VÄrmland,” he said, “ever beautiful, ever glorious! Often, when I have seen thee before me on a map, I have wondered what thou might represent; but now I understand what thou art. Thou art an old, pious hermit, who sits quiet and dreams, with crossed legs and hands resting in his lap. Thou hast a pointed cap drawn down over thy half-shut eyes. Thou art a muser, a holy dreamer, and thou art very beautiful. Wide forests are thy dress. Long bands of blue water and parallel chains of blue hills border it. Thou art so simple that strangers do not see how beautiful thou art. Thou art poor, as the devout desire to be. Thou sittest still, while VÄnern’s waves wash thy feet and thy crossed legs. To the left thou hast thy fields of ore and thy iron-works. There is thy beating heart. To the north thou hast the dark, beautiful regions of the wilderness, of mystery. There is thy dreaming head.
“When I see thee, gigantic, serious, my eyes are filled with tears. Thou art stern in thy beauty. Thou art meditation, poverty, resignation; and yet I see in thy sternness the tender features of kindness. I see thee and worship. If I only look into the deep forest, if only the hem of thy garment touches me, my spirit is healed. Hour after hour, year after year, I have gazed into thy holy countenance. What mystery are you hiding under lowered eyelids, thou spirit of resignation? Hast thou solved the enigma of life and death, or art thou wondering still, thou holy, thou giant-like? For me thou art the keeper of great, serious thoughts. But I see people crawl on thee and about thee, creatures who never seem to see the majesty of earnestness on thy brow. They only see the beauty of thy face and thy limbs, and are so charmed by it that they forget all else.
“Woe is me, woe to us all, children of VÄrmland! Beauty, beauty and nothing else, we demand of life. We, children of renunciation, of seriousness, of poverty, raise our hands in one long prayer, and ask the one good: beauty. May life be like a rose-bush, with blossoms of love, wine, and pleasure, and may its roses be within every man’s reach! Yes, that is what we wish, and our land wears the features of sternness, earnestness, renunciation. Our land is the eternal symbol of meditation, but we have no thoughts.
“Oh, VÄrmland, beautiful and glorious!”
So he spoke, with tears in his eyes, and with voice vibrating with inspiration. The young girls heard him with wonder and not without emotion. They had little guessed the depth of feeling which was hidden under that surface, glittering with jests and laughter.
When it drew towards evening, and they once more climbed into the hay-wagon, the girls hardly knew whither Patron Julius drove them, until they stopped before the steps at Ekeby.
“Now we will go in here and have a dance, girls,” said Patron Julius.
What did the pensioners say when they saw Patron Julius come with a withered wreath round his hat, and the hay-cart full of girls?
“We might have known that the girls had carried him off,” they said; “otherwise we should have had him back here several hours earlier.” For the pensioners remembered that this was exactly the seventeenth time Patron Julius had tried to leave Ekeby, once for every departing year. Now Patron Julius had already forgotten both this attempt and all the others. His conscience slept once more its year-long sleep.
He was a doughty man, Patron Julius. He was light in the dance, gay at the card-table. Pen, pencil, and fiddle-bow lay equally well in his hand. He had an easily moved heart, fair words on his tongue, a throat full of songs. But what would have been the good of all that if he had not possessed a conscience, which made itself be felt only once a year, like the dragon-flies, which free themselves from the gloomy depths and take wings to live only a few hours in the light of day and in the glory of the sun?
CHAPTER XI
THE PLASTER SAINTS
SvartsjÖ church is white both outside and in: the walls are white, the pulpit, the seats, the galleries, the roof, the window-sashes, the altar-cloth,—everything is white. In SvartsjÖ church are no decorations, no pictures, no coats of arms. Over the altar stands only a wooden cross with a white linen cloth. But it was not always so. Once the roof was covered with paintings, and many colored images of stone and plaster stood in that house of God.
Once, many years ago, an artist in SvartsjÖ had stood and watched the summer sky and the path of the clouds across the sun. He had seen those white, shining clouds, which in the morning float low on the horizon, pile themselves up higher and higher and raise themselves to storm the heavens. They set up sails like ships. They raised standards like warriors. They encroached on the whole sky. They placed themselves before the sun, those growing monsters, and took on wonderful shapes. There was a devouring lion; it changed into a powdered lady. There was a giant with outstretched arms; he laid himself down as a dreaming sphinx. Some adorned their white nakedness with gold-bordered mantles; others spread rouge over snowy cheeks. There were plains. There were forests. There were walled castles with high towers. The white clouds were lords of the summer sky. They filled the whole blue arch. They reached up to the sun and hid it.
“Oh, how beautiful,” thought the gentle artist, “if the longing spirits could climb up on those towering mountains and be carried on those rocking ships ever higher and higher upwards!”
And all at once he understood that the white clouds were the vessels on which the souls of the blessed were carried.
He saw them there. They stood on the gliding masses with lilies in their hands and golden crowns on their heads. Space echoed with their song. Angels circled down on broad, strong wings to meet them. Oh, what a host there were! As the clouds spread out, more and more were visible. They lay on the cloud-beds like water-lilies on a pond; they adorned them, as lilies adorn the meadow. Cloud after cloud rolled up. And all were filled with heavenly hosts in armor of silver, of immortal singers in purple-bordered mantles.
That artist had afterwards painted the roof in the SvartsjÖ church. He had wished to reproduce there the mounting clouds of the summer day, which bore the blessed to the kingdom of heaven. The hand which had guided the pencil had been strong, but also rather stiff, so that the clouds resembled more the curling locks of a full-bottomed wig than mountains of soft mist. And the form the holy ones had taken for the painter’s fancy he was not able to give them again, but instead clothed them in long, red cloaks, and stiff bishops’ mitres, or in black robes with stiff ruffles. He had given them big heads and small bodies, and he had provided them with handkerchiefs and prayer-books. Latin sentences flew out of their mouths; and for them whom he meant to be the greatest, he had constructed solid wooden chairs on the backs of the clouds, so that they could be carried sitting comfortably to the everlasting life.
But every one knew that spirits and angels had never shown themselves to the poor artist, and so they were not much surprised that he had not been able to give them celestial beauty. The good master’s pious work had seemed to many wonderfully fine, and much holy emotion had it wakened. It would have been worthy to have been looked at by our eyes as well.
But during the pensioners’ year, Count Dohna had the whole church whitewashed. Then the paintings on the roof were destroyed. And all the plaster saints were also taken away.
Alas! the plaster saints!
There was a Saint Olof with crown on helm, an axe in his hand, and a kneeling giant under his feet; on the pulpit was a Judith in a red jacket and blue skirt, with a sword in one hand and an hour-glass in the other,—instead of the Assyrian general’s head; there was a mysterious Queen of Sheba in a blue jacket and red skirt, with a web-foot on one leg and her hands full of Sibylline books; there was a gray Saint GÖran lying alone on a bench in the choir, for both horse and dragon had been broken away; there was Saint Christopher with the flowering staff, and Saint Erik with sceptre and axe, dressed in a flowing brocaded cloak.
These saints were always losing their sceptres or their ears or hands and had to be mended and cleaned. The congregation wearied of it, and longed to be rid of them. But the peasants would never have done the saints any injury if Count Henrik Dohna had not existed. It was he who had them taken away.
When Count Dohna had caused his marriage to be declared null and void, instead of seeking out his wife and having it made legal, much indignation had arisen; for every one knew that his wife had left his house only not to be tortured to death. It seemed now as if he wanted to win back God’s grace and men’s respect by a good work, and so he had SvartsjÖ church repaired. He had the whole church whitewashed and the paintings torn down. He and his men carried the images out in a boat and sank them in the depths of the LÖfven.
How could he dare to lay his hand on those mighty ones of the Lord?
Did the hand which struck off Holofernes’ head no longer hold a sword? Had Sheba’s queen forgotten all secret knowledge, which wounds more deeply than a poisoned arrow? Saint Olof, Saint Olof, old viking, Saint GÖran, old dragon-killer, the noise of your deeds is, then, dead! But it was best that the saints did not wish to use force against their destroyers. Since the SvartsjÖ peasants would not pay for paint for their robes and gilding for their crowns, they allowed Count Dohna to carry them out and sink them in LÖfven’s bottomless depths. They would not stand there and disfigure God’s house.
I thought of that boat with its load of saints gliding over LÖfven’s surface on a quiet summer evening in August. The man who rowed took slow strokes, and threw timorous glances at the strange passengers which lay in the bow and stern; but Count Dohna, who was also there, was not afraid. He took them one by one and threw them into the water. His brow was clear and he breathed deep. He felt like a defender of the pure Evangelical religion. And no miracle was performed in the old saints’ honor. Silent and dejected they sank down into annihilation.
But the next Sunday morning SvartsjÖ church stood gleamingly white. No images disturbed the peace of meditation. Only with the eyes of the soul could the virtuous contemplate the glory of heaven and the faces of the blessed.
But the earth, men’s beloved dwelling, is green, the sky is blue. The world glows with colors. Why should the church be white? White as winter, naked as poverty, pale as grief! It does not glitter with hoar-frost like a wintry wood; it does not shine in pearls and lace like a white bride. The church stands in white, cold whitewash, without an image, without a picture.
That Sunday Count Dohna sat in a flower-trimmed arm-chair in the choir, to be seen and to be praised by all men. He who had had the old benches mended, destroyed the disfiguring images, had set new glass in all the broken windows, and had the whole church whitewashed, should now be honored. If he wished to soften the Almighty’s anger, it was right that he had adorned His temple as well as he knew how. But why did he take praise for it?
He, who came with implacable sternness on his conscience, ought to have fallen on his knees and begged his brothers and sisters in the church to implore God to suffer him to come into his sanctuary. It would have been better for him if he had stood there like a miserable culprit than that he should sit honored and blessed in the choir, and receive praise because he had wished to make his peace with God.
When the service was over and the last psalm sung, no one left the church, for the clergyman was to make a speech of thanks to the count. But it never went so far.
For the doors were thrown open, back into the church came the old saints, dripping with LÖfven’s water, stained with green slime and brown mud. They must have heard that here the praise of him who had destroyed them, who had driven them out of God’s holy house and sunk them in the cold, dissolving waves, should be sung. The old saints wanted to have their share in the entertainment.
They do not love the waves’ monotonous ripple. They are used to psalms and prayers. They held their peace and let it all happen, as long as they believed that it would be to the honor of God. But it was not so. Here sits Count Dohna in honor and glory in the choir and wishes to be worshipped and praised in the house of God. They cannot suffer such a thing. Therefore they have risen from their watery grave and march into the church, easily recognizable to all. There is Saint Olof, with crown on hat, and Saint Erik, with gold-brocaded cloak, and the gray Saint GÖran and Saint Christopher; no more; the Queen of Sheba and Judith had not come.
But when the people have recovered a little from their amazement, an audible whisper goes through the church,—
“The pensioners!”
Yes, of course it is the pensioners. And they go up to the count without a word, and lift his chair to their shoulders and carry him from the church and set him down on the slope outside.
They say nothing, and look neither to the right nor to the left. They merely carry Count Dohna out of the house of God, and when that is done, they go away again, the nearest way to the lake.
They used no violence, nor did they waste much time in explanations. It was plain enough: “We the Ekeby pensioners have our own opinion. Count Dohna is not worthy to be praised in God’s house. Therefore we carry him out. Let him who will carry him in again.”
But he was not carried in. The clergyman’s speech of thanks was never made. The people streamed out of the church. There was no one who did not think the pensioners had acted rightly.
They thought of the fair young countess who had been so cruelly tortured at Borg. They remembered her who had been so kind to the poor, who had been so sweet to look upon that it had been a consolation for them to see her.
It was a pity to come with wild pranks into the church; but both the clergyman and the congregation knew that they had been about to play a greater trick on the Omniscient. And they stood ashamed before the misguided old madmen.
“When man is silent, the stones must speak,” they said.
But after that day Count Henrik was not happy at Borg. One dark night in the beginning of August a closed carriage drove close up to the big steps. All the servants stationed themselves about it, and Countess MÄrta came out wrapped in shawls with a thick veil over her face. The count led her, but she trembled and shuddered. It was with the greatest difficulty that they could persuade her to go through the hall and down the steps.
At last she reached the carriage, the count sprang in after her, the doors were slammed to, and the coachman started the horses off at a gallop. The next morning, when the magpies awoke, she was gone.
The count lived from that time on far away in the South of Sweden. Borg was sold and has changed owners many times. No one can help loving it. But few have been happy in its possession.
CHAPTER XII
GOD’S WAYFARER
God’s wayfarer, Captain Lennart, came one afternoon in August wandering up to the Broby inn and walked into the kitchen there. He was on his way to his home, HelgesÄter, which lies a couple of miles northwest of Broby, close to the edge of the wood.
Captain Lennart did not then know that he was to be one of God’s wanderers on the earth. His heart was full of joy that he should see his home again. He had suffered a hard fate; but now he was at home, and all would be well. He did not know that he was to be one of those who may not rest under their own roof, nor warm themselves at their own fires.
God’s wayfarer, Captain Lennart, had a cheerful spirit. As he found no one in the kitchen, he poked about like a wild boy. He threw the cat at the dog’s head, and laughed till it rang through the house when the two comrades let the heat of the moment break through old friendship, and fought with tooth and nail and fiery eyes.
The innkeeper’s wife came in, attracted by the noise. She stopped on the threshold and looked at the man, who was laughing at the struggling animals. She knew him well; but when she saw him last, he had been sitting in the prison-van with handcuffs on his wrists. She remembered it well. Five years and a half ago, during the winter fair in Karlstad, thieves had stolen the jewels of the governor’s wife. Many rings, bracelets, and buckles, much prized by the noble lady,—for most of them were heirlooms and presents,—had then been lost. They had never been found. But a rumor spread through the land that Captain Lennart at HelgesÄter was the thief.
She had never been able to understand how such a rumor had started. He was such a good and honorable man. He lived happily with his wife, whom he had only a few years before brought home, for he had not been able to afford to marry before. Had he not a good income from his pay and his estate? What could tempt such a man to steal old bracelets and rings? And still more strange it seemed to her that such a rumor could be so believed, so proven, that Captain Lennart was discharged from the army, lost his order of the Sword, and was condemned to five years’ hard labor.
He himself had said that he had been at the market, but had left before he heard anything of the theft. On the highway he had found an ugly old buckle, which he had taken home and given to the children. The buckle, however, was of gold, and belonged to the stolen things; that was the cause of his misfortune. It had all been Sintram’s work. He had accused him, and given the condemning testimony. It seemed as if he wanted to get rid of Captain Lennart, for a short time after a law-suit was opened against himself, because it had been discovered that he had sold powder to the Norwegians during the war of 1814. People believed that he was afraid of Captain Lennart’s testimony. As it was, he was acquitted on the ground of not proven.
She could not stare at him enough. His hair had grown gray and his back bent; he must have suffered. But he still had his friendly face and his cheerful spirit. He was still the same Captain Lennart who had led her forward to the altar, as a bride, and danced at her wedding. She felt sure he would still stop and chat with everybody he met on the road and throw a copper to every child; he would still say to every wrinkled old woman that she grew younger and prettier every day; and he would still sometimes place himself on a barrel and play the fiddle for those who danced about the Maypole.
“Well, Mother Karin,” he began, “are you afraid to look at me?”
He had come especially to hear how it was in his home, and whether they expected him. They must know that he had worked out his time.
The innkeeper’s wife gave him the best of news. His wife had worked like a man. She had leased the estate from the new owner, and everything had succeeded for her. The children were healthy, and it was a pleasure to see them. And of course they expected him. His wife was a hard woman, who never spoke of what she thought, but she knew that no one was allowed to eat with Captain Lennart’s spoon or to sit in his chair while he was away. This spring, no day had passed without her coming out to the stone at the top of Broby hill and looking down the road. And she had put in order new clothes for him, home-woven clothes, on which she herself had done nearly all the work. By that one could see that he was expected, even if she said nothing.
“They don’t believe it, then?” said Captain Lennart.
“No, captain,” answered the peasant woman. “Nobody believes it.”
Then Captain Lennart would stop no longer; then he wished to go home.
It happened that outside the door he met some dear old friends. The pensioners at Ekeby had just come to the inn. Sintram had invited them thither to celebrate his birthday. And the pensioners did not hesitate a minute before shaking the convict’s hand and welcoming him home. Even Sintram did it.
“Dear Lennart,” he said, “were you certain that God had any meaning in it all?”
“Do you not think I know,” cried Captain Lennart, “that it was not our Lord who saved you from the block?”
The others laughed. But Sintram was not at all angry. He was pleased when people spoke of his compact with the devil.
Yes, then they took Captain Lennart in with them again to empty a glass of welcome; after, he could go his way. But it went badly for him. He had not drunk such treacherous things for five years. Perhaps he had eaten nothing the whole day, and was exhausted by his long journey on foot. The result was that he was quite confused after a couple of glasses.
When the pensioners had got him into a state when he no longer knew what he was doing, they forced on him glass after glass, and they meant no harm by it; it was with good intention towards him, who had not tasted anything good for five years.
Otherwise he was one of the most sober of men. It is also easy to understand that he had no intention to get drunk; he was to have gone home to wife and children. But instead he was lying on the bench in the bar-room, and was sleeping there.
While he lay there, temptingly unconscious, GÖsta took a piece of charcoal and a little cranberry-juice and painted him. He gave him the face of a criminal; he thought that most suitable for one who came direct from jail. He painted a black eye, drew a red scar across his nose, plastered his hair down on his forehead in matted tangles, and smeared his whole face.
They laughed at it for a while, then GÖsta wished to wash it off.
“Let it be,” said Sintram, “so that he can see it when he wakes. It will amuse him.”
So they left it as it was, and thought no more of the captain. The feasting lasted the whole night. They broke up at daybreak. There was more wine than sense in their heads.
The question was what they should do with Captain Lennart. “We will go home with him,” said Sintram. “Think how glad his wife will be! It will be a pleasure to see her joy. I am moved when I think of it. Let us go home with him!”
They were all moved at the thought. Heavens, how glad she would be!
They shook life into Captain Lennart and lifted him into one of the carriages which the sleepy grooms had long since driven up. And so the whole mob drove up to HelgesÄter; some of them, half-asleep, nearly fell out of the carriage, others sang to keep awake. They looked little better than a company of tramps, with dull eyes and swollen faces.
They arrived at last, left the horses in the back-yard and marched with a certain solemnity up to the steps. Beerencreutz and Julius supported Captain Lennart between them.
“Pull yourself together, Lennart,” they said to him, “you are at home. Don’t you see that you’re at home?”
He got his eyes open and was almost sober. He was touched that they had accompanied him home.
“Friends,” he said, and stopped to speak to them all, “have asked God, friends, why so much evil has passed over me.”
“Shut up, Lennart, don’t preach!” cries Beerencreutz.
“Let him go on,” says Sintram. “He speaks well.”
“Have asked Him and not understood; understand now. He wanted to show me what friends I had; friends who follow me home to see mine and my wife’s joy. For my wife is expecting me. What are five years of misery compared to that?”
Now hard fists pounded on the door. The pensioners had no time to hear more.
Within there was commotion. The maids awoke and looked out. They threw on their clothes, but did not dare to open for that crowd of men. At last the bolt was drawn. The captain’s wife herself came out.
“What do you want?” she asked.
It was Beerencreutz who answered:—
“We are here with your husband.”
They pushed forward Captain Lennart, and she saw him reel towards her, drunk, with a prize-fighter’s face; and behind him she saw the crowd of drunken, reeling men.
She took a step back; he followed with outstretched arms. “You left me as a thief,” she cried, “and come home as a vagabond.” Whereupon she turned to go in.
He did not understand. He wished to follow her, but she struck him a blow on the breast.
“Do you think that I will receive such a man as you as master in my house and over my children?”
The door slammed and the key turned in the lock.
Captain Lennart threw himself against the door and began to shake it.
The pensioners could not help it, they began to laugh. He had been so sure of his wife, and now she would have nothing to do with him. It was absurd, they thought.
When Captain Lennart heard them laughing, he rushed after them and wished to beat them. They ran away and leaped into their carriages, he after them; but in his eagerness he stumbled over a stone and fell. He got up again, but pursued them no farther. A thought struck him in his confusion. In this world nothing happens without God’s will, nothing.
“Where wilt thou lead me?” he said. “I am a feather, driven by thy breath. I am thy plaything. Whither wilt thou send me? Why dost thou shut the doors of my home to me?”
He turned away from his home, believing that it was God’s will.
When the sun rose he stood at the top of Broby hill and looked out over the valley. Ah, little did the poor people in the valley know that their rescuer was near. No mothers as yet lifted their children on their arms that they might see him as he came. The cottages were not clean and in order, with the black hearth hidden by fragrant juniper. As yet the men did not work with eager industry in the fields that his eyes might be gladdened by the sight of cared-for crops and well-dug ditches.
Alas, where he stood his sorrowful eyes saw the ravages of the drought, how the crops were burned up, and how the people scarcely seemed to trouble themselves to prepare the earth for the coming year. He looked up at the blue mountains, and the sharp morning sun showed him the blackened stretches where the forest-fires had passed. He understood by many small signs, by the tumble-down fences, by the small amount of wood which had been carted home and sawed, that the people were not looking after their affairs, that want had come, and that they sought consolation in indifference and brandy.
Captain Lennart stood there on Broby hill and began to think that God perhaps needed him. He was not called home by his wife.
The pensioners could not at all understand what their fault had been; Sintram held his tongue. His wife was much blamed through all the neighborhood, because she had been too proud to receive such a good husband. People said that any one who tried to talk to her of him was instantly interrupted. She could not bear to hear his name spoken. Captain Lennart did nothing to give her other thoughts.
It was a day later.
An old peasant is lying on his death-bed. He has taken the sacrament, and his strength is gone; he must die.
Restless as one who is to set off on a long journey, he has his bed moved from the kitchen to the bedroom and from the bedroom back to the kitchen. By that they understand, more than by the heavy rattling and the failing eyes, that his time has come.
Round about him stand his wife, his children, and servants. He has been fortunate, rich, esteemed. He is not forsaken on his death-bed. The old man speaks of himself as if he stood in the presence of God, and with sighs and confirming words those about him bear witness that he speaks the truth.
“I have been an industrious worker and a kind master,” he says. “I have loved my wife like my right hand. I have not let my children grow up without discipline and care. I have not drunk. I have not moved my boundary line. I have not hurried my horse up the hills. I have not let the cows starve in winter. I have not let the sheep be tortured by their wool in summer.”
And round about him the weeping servants repeat like an echo: “He has been a kind master. He has not hurried the horse up the hills, nor let the sheep sweat in their wool in summer.”
But through the door unnoticed a poor man has come in to ask for a little food. He also hears the words of the dying man from where he stands silent by the door.
And the sick man resumes: “I have opened up the forest, I have drained the meadows. I drove the plough in straight furrows. I built three times as big a barn for three times as big a harvest as in my father’s time. Of shining money I had three silver goblets made; my father only made one. God shall give me a good place in his heaven.”
“Our Lord will receive our master well,” say the servants.
The man by the door hears the words, and terror fills him who for five long years has been God’s plaything.
He goes up to the sick man and takes his hand.
“Friend, friend,” he says, and his voice trembles, “have you considered who the Lord is before whose face you soon must appear? He is a great God, a terrible God. The earth is his pasture. The storm his horse. Wide heavens shake under the weight of his foot. And you stand before him and say: ‘I have ploughed straight furrows, I have sowed rye, I have chopped wood.’ Will you praise yourself to him and compare yourself to him? You do not know how mighty the Lord is to whose kingdom you are going.
“Do not come before your God with big words!” continues the wayfarer. “The mighty on the earth are like threshed-out straw in his barn. His day’s work is to make suns. He has dug out oceans and raised up mountains. Bend before him! Lie low in the dust before your Lord, your God! Catch like a child at the hem of his garment and beg for protection! Humble yourself before your Creator!”
The sick man’s eyes stand wide-open, his hands are clasped, but his face lights up and the rattling ceases.
“Soul, soul,” cries the man, “as surely as you now in your last hour humble yourself before your God, will he take you like a child on his arm and carry you into the glory of his heaven.”
The old man gives a last sigh, and all is over. Captain Lennart bends his head and prays. Every one in the room prays with heavy sighs.
When they look up the old peasant lies in quiet peace. His eyes seem still to shine with the reflection of glorious visions, his mouth smiles, his face is beautiful. He has seen God.
“He has seen God,” says the son, and closes the dead man’s eyes.
“He saw heaven opening,” sob the children and servants.
The old wife lays her shaking hand on Captain Lennart’s.
“You helped him over the worst, captain.”
It was that hour which drove Captain Lennart out among the people. Else he would have gone home and let his wife see his real face, but from that time he believed that God needed him. He became God’s wayfarer, who came with help to the poor. Distress was great, and there was much suffering which good sense and kindness could help better than gold and power.
Captain Lennart came one day to the poor peasants who lived in the neighborhood of Gurlitta Cliff. Among them there was great want; there were no more potatoes, and the rye could not be sown, as they had no seed.
Then Captain Lennart took a little boat and rowed across the lake to Fors and asked Sintram to give them rye and potatoes. Sintram received him well: he took him to the big, well-stocked grain-houses and down into the cellar, where the potatoes of last year’s crop were, and let him fill all the bags and sacks he had with him.
But when Sintram saw the little boat, he thought that it was too small for such a load. He had the sacks carried to one of his big boats, and his servant, big Mons, row it across the lake. Captain Lennart had only his empty boat to attend to.
He came however after Mons, for the latter was a master of rowing and a giant in strength. Captain Lennart sits and dreams, while he rows across the beautiful lake, and thinks of the little seed-corns’ wonderful fate. They were to be thrown out on the black earth among stones and stubble, but they would sprout and take root in the wilderness. He thinks how the soft, light-green shoots will cover the earth, and how, finally, when the ears are filled with soft, sweet kernels, the scythe will pass, and the straws fall, and the flail thunder over them, and the mill crush the kernels to meal, and the meal be baked into bread,—ah, how much hunger will be satisfied by the grain in the boat in front of him!
Sintram’s servant landed at the pier of the Gurlitta people, and many hungry men came down to the boat.
Then the man said, as his master had ordered:—
“The master sends you malt and grain, peasants. He has heard that you have no brandy.”
Then the people became as mad. They rushed down to the boat and ran out into the water to seize on bags and sacks, but that had never been Captain Lennart’s meaning. He had now come, and he was furious when he saw what they were doing. He wanted to have the potatoes for food, and the rye for seed; he had never asked for malt.
He called to the people to leave the sacks alone, but they did not obey.
“May the rye turn to sand in your mouths, and the potatoes to stone in your throats!” he cried, for he was very angry because they had taken the grain.
It looked as if Captain Lennart had worked a miracle. Two women, who were fighting for a bag, tore a hole in it and found only sand; the men who lifted up the potato-sacks, felt how heavy they were, as if filled with stones.
It was all sand and stones, only sand and stones. The people stood in silent terror of God’s miracle-worker who had come to them. Captain Lennart was himself for a moment seized with astonishment. Only Mons laughed.
“Go home, fellow,” said Captain Lennart, “before the peasants understand that there has never been anything but sand in these sacks; otherwise I am afraid they will sink your boat.”
“I am not afraid,” said the man.
“Go,” said Captain Lennart, with such an imperious voice that he went.
Then Captain Lennart let the people know that Sintram had fooled them, but they would not believe anything but that a miracle had happened. The story of it spread soon, and as the people’s love of the supernatural is great, it was generally believed that Captain Lennart could work wonders. He won great power among the peasants, and they called him God’s wayfarer.
CHAPTER XIII
THE CHURCHYARD
It was a beautiful evening in August. The LÖfven lay like a mirror, haze veiled the mountains, it was the cool of the evening.
There came Beerencreutz, the colonel with the white moustaches, short, strong as a wrestler, and with a pack of cards in his coat pocket, to the shore of the lake, and sat down in a flat-bottomed boat. With him were Major Anders Fuchs, his old brother-at-arms, and little Ruster, the flute-player, who had been drummer in the VÄrmland chasseurs, and during many years had followed the colonel as his friend and servant.
On the other shore of the lake lies the churchyard, the neglected churchyard, of the SvartsjÖ parish, sparsely set with crooked, rattling iron crosses, full of hillocks like an unploughed meadow, overgrown with sedges and striped grasses, which had been sowed there as a reminder that no man’s life is like another’s, but changes like the leaf of the grass. There are no gravel walks there, no shading trees except the big linden on the forgotten grave of some old priest. A stone wall, rough and high, encloses the miserable field. Miserable and desolate is the churchyard, ugly as the face of a miser, which has withered at the laments of those whose happiness he has stolen. And yet they who rest there are blessed, they who have been sunk into consecrated earth to the sound of psalms and prayers. Acquilon, the gambler, he who died last year at Ekeby, had had to be buried outside the wall. That man, who once had been so proud and courtly, the brave warrior, the bold hunter, the gambler who held fortune in his hand, he had ended by squandering his children’s inheritance, all that he had gained himself, all that his wife had saved. Wife and children he had forsaken many years before, to lead the life of a pensioner at Ekeby. One evening in the past summer he had played away the farm which gave them their means of subsistence. Rather than to pay his debt he had shot himself. But the suicide’s body was buried outside the moss-grown wall of the miserable churchyard.
Since he died the pensioners had only been twelve; since he died no one had come to take the place of the thirteenth,—no one but the devil, who on Christmas Eve had crept out of the furnace.
The pensioners had found his fate more bitter than that of his predecessors. Of course they knew that one of them must die each year. What harm was there in that? Pensioners may not be old. Can their dim eyes no longer distinguish the cards, can their trembling hands no longer lift the glass, what is life for them, and what are they for life? But to lie like a dog by the churchyard wall, where the protecting sods may not rest in peace, but are trodden by grazing sheep, wounded by spade and plough, where the wanderer goes by without slackening his pace, and where the children play without subduing their laughter and jests,—to rest there, where the stone wall prevents the sound from coming when the angel of the day of doom wakes with his trumpet the dead within,—oh, to lie there!
Beerencreutz rows his boat over the LÖfven. He passes in the evening over the lake of my dreams, about whose shores I have seen gods wander, and from whose depths my magic palace rises. He rows by LagÖn’s lagoons, where the pines stand right up from the water, growing on low, circular shoals, and where the ruin of the tumble-down Viking castle still remains on the steep summit of the island; he rows under the pine grove on Borg’s point, where one old tree still hangs on thick roots over the cleft, where a mighty bear had been caught and where old mounds and graves bear witness of the age of the place.
He rows to the other side of the point, gets out below the churchyard, and then walks over mowed fields, which belong to the count at Borg, to Acquilon’s grave.
Arrived there, he bends down and pats the turf, as one lightly caresses the blanket under which a sick friend is lying. Then he takes out a pack of cards and sits down beside the grave.
“He is so lonely outside here, Johan Fredrik. He must long sometimes for a game.”
“It is a sin and a shame that such a man shall lie here,” says the great bear-hunter, Anders Fuchs, and sits down at his side.
But little Ruster, the flute-player, speaks with broken voice, while the tears run from his small red eyes.
“Next to you, colonel, next to you he was the finest man I have ever known.”
These three worthy men sit round the grave and deal the cards seriously and with zeal.
I look out over the world, I see many graves. There rest the mighty ones of the earth, weighed down by marble. Funeral marches thunder over them. Standards are sunk over those graves. I see the graves of those who have been much loved. Flowers, wet with tears, caressed with kisses, rest lightly on their green sods. I see forgotten graves, arrogant graves, lying resting-places, and others which say nothing, but never before did I see the right-bower and the joker with the bells in his cap offered as entertainment to a grave’s occupant.
“Johan Fredrik has won,” says the colonel, proudly. “Did I not know it? I taught him to play. Yes, now we are dead, we three, and he alone alive.”
Thereupon he gathers together the cards, rises, and goes, followed by the others, back to Ekeby.
May the dead man have known and felt that not every one has forgotten him or his forsaken grave.
Strange homage wild hearts bring to them they love; but he who lies outside the wall, he whose dead body was not allowed to rest in consecrated ground, he ought to be glad that not every one has rejected him.
Friends, children of men, when I die I shall surely rest in the middle of the churchyard, in the tomb of my ancestors. I shall not have robbed my family of their means of subsistence, nor lifted my hand against my own life, but certainly I have not won such a love, surely will no one do as much for me as the pensioners did for that culprit. It is certain that no one will come in the evening, when the sun sets and it is lonely and dreary in the gardens of the dead, to place between my bony fingers the many-colored cards.
Not even will any one come, which would please me more,—for cards tempt me little,—with fiddle and bow to the grave, that my spirit, which wanders about the mouldering dust, may rock in the flow of melody like a swan on glittering waves.
CHAPTER XIV
OLD SONGS
Marianne Sinclair sat one quiet afternoon at the end of August in her room and arranged her old letters and other papers.
Round about her was disorder. Great leather trunks and iron bound boxes had been dragged into the room. Her clothes covered the chairs and sofas. From attics and wardrobes and from the stained chests of drawers everything had been taken out, glistening silk and linen, jewels spread out to be polished, shawls and furs to be selected and inspected.
Marianne was making herself ready for a long journey. She was not certain if she should ever return to her home. She was at a turning-point in her life and therefore burned a mass of old letters and diaries. She did not wish to be weighed down with records of the past.
As she sits there, she finds a bundle of old verses. They were copies of old ballads, which her mother used to sing to her when she was little. She untied the string which held them together, and began to read.
She smiled sadly when she had read for a while; the old songs spoke strange wisdom.
Have no faith in happiness, have no faith in the appearance of happiness, have no faith in roses.
“Trust not laughter,” they said. “See, the lovely maiden Valborg drives in a golden coach, and her lips smile, but she is as sorrowful as if hoofs and wheels were passing over her life’s happiness.”
“Trust not the dance,” they said. “Many a foot whirls lightly over polished floor, while the heart is heavy as lead.”
“Trust not the jest,” they said. “Many a one goes to the feast with jesting lips, while she longs to die for pain.”
In what shall one believe? In tears and sorrow!
He who is sorrowful can force himself to smile, but he who is glad cannot weep.
But joy is only sorrow disguised. There is nothing real on earth but sorrow.
She went to the window and looked out into the garden, where her parents were walking. They went up and down the broad paths and talked of everything which met their eyes, of the grass and the birds.
“See,” said Marianne, “there goes a heart which sighs with sorrow, because it has never been so happy before.”
And she thought suddenly that perhaps everything really depended on the person himself, that sorrow and joy depended upon the different ways of looking at things. She asked herself if it were joy or sorrow which had passed over her that year. She hardly knew herself.
She had lived through a bitter time. Her soul had been sick. She had been bowed down to the earth by her deep humiliation. For when she returned to her home she had said to herself, “I will remember no evil of my father.” But her heart did not agree. “He has caused me such mortal pain,” it said; “he has parted me from him I loved; he made me desperate when he struck my mother. I wish him no harm, but I am afraid of him.” And then she noticed how she had to force herself to sit still when her father sat down beside her; she longed to flee from him. She tried to control herself; she talked with him as usual and was almost always with him. She could conquer herself, but she suffered beyond endurance. She ended by detesting everything about him: his coarse loud voice, his heavy tread, his big hands. She wished him no harm, but she could no longer be near him without a feeling of fear and repulsion. Her repressed heart revenged itself. “You would not let me love,” it said, “but I am nevertheless your master; you shall end by hating.”
Accustomed as she was to observe everything which stirred within her, she saw too well how this repulsion became stronger, how it grew each day. At the same time she seemed to be tied forever to her home. She knew that it would be best for her to go away among people, but she could not bring herself to it since her illness. It would never be any better. She would only be more and more tortured, and some day her self-control would give way, and she would burst out before her father and show him the bitterness of her heart, and then there would be strife and unhappiness.
So had the spring and early summer passed. In July she had become engaged to Baron Adrian, in order to have her own home.
One fine forenoon Baron Adrian had galloped up to the house, riding a magnificent horse. His hussar jacket had shone in the sun, his spurs and sword and belt had glittered and flashed, to say nothing of his own fresh face and smiling eyes.
Melchior Sinclair had stood on the steps and welcomed him when he came. Marianne had sat at the window and sewed. She had seen him come, and now heard every word he said to her father.
“Good-day, Sir Sunshine!” cried Melchior. “How fine you are! You are not out to woo?”
“Yes, yes, uncle, that is just what I am,” he answered, and laughed.
“Is there no shame in you, boy? What have you to maintain a wife with?”
“Nothing, uncle. Had I anything, I would never get married.”
“Do you say that, do you say that, Sir Sunshine? But that fine jacket,—you have had money enough to get you that?”
“On credit, uncle.”
“And the horse you are riding, that is worth a lot of money, I can tell you. Where did you get that?”
“The horse is not mine, uncle.”
This was more than Melchior could withstand.
“God be with you, boy,” he said. “You do indeed need a wife who has something. If you can win Marianne, take her.”
So everything had been made clear between them before Baron Adrian had even dismounted. But Melchior Sinclair knew very well what he was about, for Baron Adrian was a fine fellow.
Then the suitor had come in to Marianne and immediately burst out with his errand.
“Oh, Marianne, dear Marianne. I have already spoken to uncle. I would like so much to have you for my wife. Say that you will, Marianne.”
She had got at the truth. The old baron, his father, had let himself be cheated into buying some used-up mines again. The old baron had been buying mines all his life, and never had anything been found in them. His mother was anxious, he himself was in debt, and now he was proposing to her in order to thereby save the home of his ancestors and his hussar jacket.
His home was Hedeby; it lay on the other side of the lake, almost opposite BjÖrne. She knew him well; they were of the same age and playmates.
“You might marry me, Marianne. I lead such a wretched life. I have to ride on borrowed horses and cannot pay my tailor’s bills. It can’t go on. I shall have to resign, and then I shall shoot myself.”
“But, Adrian, what kind of a marriage would it be? We are not in the least in love with one another.”
“Oh, as for love, I care nothing for all that nonsense,” he had then explained. “I like to ride a good horse and to hunt, but I am no pensioner, I am a worker. If I only could get some money, so that I could take charge of the estate at home and give my mother some peace in her old age, I should be happy. I should both plough and sow, for I like work.”
Then he had looked at her with his honest eyes, and she knew that he spoke the truth and that he was a man to depend upon. She engaged herself to him, chiefly to get away from her home, but also because she had always liked him.
But never would she forget that month which followed the August evening when her engagement was announced,—all that time of madness.
Baron Adrian became each day sadder and more silent. He came very often to BjÖrne, sometimes several times a day, but she could not help noticing how depressed he was. With others he could still jest, but with her he was impossible, silent and bored. She understood what was the matter: it was not so easy as he had believed to marry an ugly woman. No one knew better than she how ugly she was. She had shown him that she did not want any caresses or love-making, but he was nevertheless tortured by the thought of her as his wife, and it seemed worse to him day by day. Why did he care? Why did he not break it off? She had given hints which were plain enough. She could do nothing. Her father had told her that her reputation would not bear any more ventures in being engaged. Then she had despised them both, and any way seemed good enough to get away from them. But only a couple of days after the great engagement feast a sudden and wonderful change had come.
In the path in front of the steps at BjÖrne lay a big stone, which caused much trouble and vexation. Carriages rolled over it, horses and people tripped on it, the maids who came with heavy milk cans ran against it and spilled the milk; but the stone remained, because it had already lain there so many years. It had been there in the time of Sinclair’s parents, long before any one had thought of building at BjÖrne. He did not see why he should take it up.
But one day at the end of August, two maids, who were carrying a heavy tub, tripped over the stone; they fell, hurt themselves badly, and the feeling against the stone grew strong.
It was early in the morning. Melchior was out on his morning walk, but as the workmen were about the house between eight and nine, Madame Gustava had several of them come and dig up the big stone.
They came with iron levers and spades, dug and strained, and at last got the old disturber of the peace up out of his hole. Then they carried him away to the back yard. It was work for six men.
The stone was hardly taken up before Melchior came home. You can believe that he was angry. It was no longer the same place, he thought. Who had dared to move the stone? Madame Gustava had given the order. Those women had no heart in their bodies. Did not his wife know that he loved that stone?
And then he went direct to the stone, lifted it, and carried it across the yard to the place where it had lain, and there he flung it down. And it was a stone which six men could scarcely lift. That deed was mightily admired through the whole of VÄrmland.
While he carried the stone across the yard, Marianne had stood at the dining-room window and looked at him. He was her master, that terrible man with his boundless strength,—an unreasonable, capricious master, who thought of nothing but his own pleasure.
They were in the midst of breakfast, and she had a carving-knife in her hand. Involuntarily she lifted the knife.
Madame Gustava seized her by the wrist.
“Marianne!”
“What is the matter, mother?”
“Oh, Marianne, you looked so strange! I was frightened.”
Marianne looked at her. She was a little, dry woman, gray and wrinkled already at fifty. She loved like a dog, without remembering knocks and blows. She was generally good-humored, and yet she made a melancholy impression. She was like a storm-whipped tree by the sea; she had never had quiet to grow. She had learned to use mean shifts, to lie when needed, and often made herself out more stupid than she was to escape taunts. In everything she was the tool of her husband.
“Would you grieve much if father died?” asked Marianne.
“Marianne, you are angry with your father. You are always angry with him. Why cannot everything be forgotten, since you have got a new fiancÉ?”
“Oh, mother, it is not my fault. Can I help shuddering at him? Do you not see what he is? Why should I care for him? He is violent, he is uncouth, he has tortured you till you are prematurely old. Why is he our master? He behaves like a madman. Why shall I honor and respect him? He is not good, he is not charitable. I know that he is strong. He is capable of beating us to death at any moment. He can turn us out of the house when he will. Is that why I should love him?”
But then Madame Gustava had been as never before. She had found strength and courage and had spoken weighty words.
“You must take care, Marianne. It almost seems to me as if your father was right when he shut you out last winter. You shall see that you will be punished for this. You must teach yourself to bear without hating, Marianne, to suffer without revenge.”
“Oh, mother, I am so unhappy.”
Immediately after, they heard in the hall the sound of a heavy fall.
They never knew if Melchior Sinclair had stood on the steps and through the open dining-room door had heard Marianne’s words, or if it was only over-exertion which had been the cause of the stroke. When they came out he lay unconscious. They never dared to ask him the cause. He himself never made any sign that he had heard anything. Marianne never dared to think the thought out that she had involuntarily revenged herself. But the sight of her father lying on the very steps where she had learnt to hate him took all bitterness from her heart.
He soon returned to consciousness, and when he had kept quiet a few days, he was like himself—and yet not at all like.
Marianne saw her parents walking together in the garden. It was always so now. He never went out alone, grumbled at guests and at everything which separated him from his wife. Old age had come upon him. He could not bring himself to write a letter; his wife had to do it. He never decided anything by himself, but asked her about everything and let it be as she decided. And he was always gentle and kind. He noticed the change which had come over him, and how happy his wife was. “She is well off now,” he said one day to Marianne, and pointed to Madame Gustava.
“Oh, dear Melchior,” she cried, “you know very well that I would rather have you strong again.”
And she really meant it. It was her joy to speak of him as he was in the days of his strength. She told how he held his own in riot and revel as well as any of the Ekeby pensioners, how he had done good business and earned much money, just when she thought that he in his madness would lose house and lands. But Marianne knew that she was happy in spite of all her complaints. To be everything to her husband was enough for her. They both looked old, prematurely broken. Marianne thought that she could see their future life. He would get gradually weaker and weaker; other strokes would make him more helpless, and she would watch over him until death parted them. But the end might be far distant. Madame Gustava could enjoy her happiness in peace still for a time. It must be so, Marianne thought. Life owed her some compensation.
For her too it was better. No fretting despair forced her to marry to get another master. Her wounded heart had found peace. She had to acknowledge that she was a truer, richer, nobler person than before; what could she wish undone of what had happened? Was it true that all suffering was good? Could everything be turned to happiness? She had begun to consider everything good which could help to develop her to a higher degree of humanity. The old songs were not right. Sorrow was not the only lasting thing. She would now go out into the world and look about for some place where she was needed. If her father had been in his old mood, he would never have allowed her to break her engagement. Now Madame Gustava had arranged the matter. Marianne had even been allowed to give Baron Adrian the money he needed.
She could think of him too with pleasure, she would be free from him. With his bravery and love of life he had always reminded her of GÖsta; now she should see him glad again. He would again be that sunny knight who had come in his glory to her father’s house. She would get him lands where he could plough and dig as much as his heart desired, and she would see him lead a beautiful bride to the altar.
With such thoughts she sits down and writes to give him back his freedom. She writes gentle, persuasive words, sense wrapped up in jests, and yet so that he must understand how seriously she means it.
While she writes she hears hoof-beats on the road.
“My dear Sir Sunshine,” she thinks, “it is the last time.”
Baron Adrian immediately after comes into her room.
“What, Adrian, are you coming in here?” and she looks dismayed at all her packing.
He is shy and embarrassed and stammers out an excuse.
“I was just writing to you,” she says. “Look, you might as well read it now.”
He takes the letter and she sits and watches him while he reads. She longs to see his face light up with joy.
But he has not read far before he grows fiery red, throws the letter on the floor, stamps on it, and swears terrible oaths.
Marianne trembles slightly. She is no novice in the study of love; still she has not before understood this inexperienced boy, this great child.
“Adrian, dear Adrian,” she says, “what kind of a comedy have you played with me? Come and tell me the truth.”
He came and almost suffocated her with caresses. Poor boy, so he had cared and longed.
After a while she looked out. There walked Madame Gustava and talked with her husband of flowers and birds, and here she sat and chatted of love. “Life has let us both feel its serious side,” she thought, and smiled sadly. “It wants to comfort us; we have each got her big child to play with.”
However, it was good to be loved. It was sweet to hear him whisper of the magical power which she possessed, of how he had been ashamed of what he had said at their first conversation. He had not then known what charm she had. Oh, no man could be near her without loving her, but she had frightened him; he had felt so strangely subdued.
It was not happiness, nor unhappiness, but she would try to live with this man.
She began to understand herself, and thought of the words of the old songs about the turtle-dove. It never drinks clear water, but first muddies it with its foot so that it may better suit its sorrowful spirit. So too should she never go to the spring of life and drink pure, unmixed happiness. Troubled with sorrow, life pleased her best.
CHAPTER XV
DEATH, THE DELIVERER
My pale friend, Death the deliverer, came in August, when the nights were white with moonlight, to the house of Captain Uggla. But he did not dare to go direct into that hospitable home, for they are few who love him, and he does not wish to be greeted with weeping, rather with quiet joy,—he who comes to set free the soul from the fetters of pain, he who delivers the soul from the burden of the body and lets it enjoy the beautiful life of the spheres.
Into the old grove behind the house, crept Death. In the grove, which then was young and full of green, my pale friend hid himself by day, but at night he stood at the edge of the wood, white and pale, with his scythe glittering in the moonlight.
Death stood there, and the creatures of the night saw him. Evening after evening the people at Berga heard how the fox howled to foretell his coming. The snake crawled up the sandy path to the very house. He could not speak, but they well understood that he came as a presage. And in the apple-tree outside the window of the captain’s wife the owl hooted. For everything in nature feels Death and trembles.
It happened that the judge from Munkerud, who had been at a festival at the Bro deanery, drove by Berga at two o’clock in the night and saw a candle burning in the window of the guest-room. He plainly saw the yellow flame and the white candle, and, wondering, he afterwards told of the candle which had burned in the summer night.
The gay daughters at Berga laughed and said that the judge had the gift of second sight, for there were no candles in the house, they were already burned up in March; and the captain swore that no one had slept in the guest-room for days and weeks; but his wife was silent and grew pale, for that white candle with the clear flame used to show itself when one of her family should be set free by Death.
A short time after, Ferdinand came home from a surveying journey in the northern forests. He came, pale and ill with an incurable disease of the lungs, and as soon as his mother saw him, she knew that her son must die.
He must go, that good son who had never given his parents a sorrow. He must leave earth’s pleasures and happiness, and the beautiful, beloved bride who awaited him, and the rich estates which should have been his.
At last, when my pale friend had waited a month, he took heart and went one night up to the house. He thought how hunger and privation had there been met by glad faces, so why should not he too be received with joy?
That night the captain’s wife, who lay awake, heard a knocking on the window-pane, and she sat up in bed and asked: “Who is it who knocks?”
And the old people tell that Death answered her:
“It is Death who knocks.”
Then she rose up, opened her window, and saw bats and owls fluttering in the moonlight, but Death she did not see.
“Come,” she said half aloud, “friend and deliverer! Why have you lingered so long? I have been waiting. I have called. Come and set my son free!”
The next day, she sat by her son’s sick-bed and spoke to him of the blissfulness of the liberated spirit and of its glorious life.
So Ferdinand died, enchanted by bright visions, smiling at the glory to come.
Death had never seen anything so beautiful. For of course there were some who wept by Ferdinand Uggla’s death-bed; but the sick man himself smiled at the man with the scythe, when he took his place on the edge of the bed, and his mother listened to the death-rattle as if to sweet music. She trembled lest Death should not finish his work; and when the end came, tears fell from her eyes, but they were tears of joy which wet her son’s stiffened face.
Never had Death been so fÊted as at Ferdinand Uggla’s burial.
It was a wonderful funeral procession which passed under the lindens. In front of the flower-decked coffin beautiful children walked and strewed flowers. There was no mourning-dress, no crape; for his mother had wished that he who died with joy should not be followed to the good refuge by a gloomy funeral procession, but by a shining wedding train.
Following the coffin, went Anna StjÄrnhÖk, the dead man’s beautiful, glowing bride. She had set a bridal wreath on her head, hung a bridal veil over her, and arrayed herself in a bridal dress of white, shimmering satin. So adorned, she went to be wedded at the grave to a mouldering bridegroom.
Behind her they came, two by two, dignified old ladies and stately men. The ladies came in shining buckles and brooches, with strings of milk-white pearls and bracelets of gold. Ostrich feathers nodded in their bonnets of silk and lace, and from their shoulders floated thin silken shawls over dresses of many-colored satin. And their husbands came in their best array, in high-collared coats with gilded buttons, with swelling ruffles, and in vests of stiff brocade or richly-embroidered velvet. It was a wedding procession; the captain’s wife had wished it so.
She herself walked next after Anna StjÄrnhÖk, led by her husband. If she had possessed a dress of shining brocade, she would have worn it; if she had possessed jewels and a gay bonnet, she would have worn them too to do honor to her son on his festival day. But she only had the black silk dress and the yellowed laces which had adorned so many feasts, and she wore them here too.
Although all the guests came in their best array, there was not a dry eye when they walked forward to the grave. Men and women wept, not so much for the dead, as for themselves. There walked the bride; there the bridegroom was carried; there they themselves wandered, decked out for a feast, and yet—who is there who walks earth’s green pathways and does not know that his lot is affliction, sorrow, unhappiness, and death. They wept at the thought that nothing on earth could save them.
The captain’s wife did not weep; but she was the only one whose eyes were dry.
When the prayers were read, and the grave filled in, all went away to the carriages. Only the mother and Anna StjÄrnhÖk lingered by the grave to bid their dead a last good-bye. The older woman sat down on the grave-mound, and Anna placed herself at her side.
“Anna,” said the captain’s wife, “I have said to God: ‘Let Death come and take away my son, let him take away him I love most, and only tears of joy shall come to my eyes; with nuptial pomp I will follow him to his grave, and my red rose-bush, which stands outside my chamber-window, will I move to him in the graveyard.’ And now it has come to pass my son is dead. I have greeted Death like a friend, called him by the tenderest names; I have wept tears of joy over my son’s dead face, and in the autumn, when the leaves are fallen, I shall plant my red rose-bush here. But do you know, you who sit here at my side, why I have sent such prayers to God?”
She looked questioningly at Anna StjÄrnhÖk; but the girl sat silent and pale beside her. Perhaps she was struggling to silence inward voices which already there, on the grave of the dead, began to whisper to her that now at last she was free.
“The fault is yours,” said the captain’s wife.
The girl sank down as from a blow. She did not answer a word.
“Anna StjÄrnhÖk, you were once proud and self-willed: you played with my son, took him and cast him off. But what of that? He had to accept it, as well as another. Perhaps too he and we all loved your money as much as you. But you came back, you came with a blessing to our home; you were gentle and mild, strong and kind, when you came again. You cherished us with love; you made us so happy, Anna StjÄrnhÖk; and we poor people lay at your feet.
“And yet, and yet I have wished that you had not come. Then had I not needed to pray to God to shorten my son’s life. At Christmas he could have borne to lose you, but after he had learnt to know you, such as you now are, he would not have had the strength.
“You know, Anna StjÄrnhÖk, who to-day have put on your bridal dress to follow my son, that if he had lived you would never have followed him in that attire to the Bro church, for you did not love him.
“I saw that you only came out of pity, for you wanted to relieve our hard lot. You did not love him. Do you not think that I know love, that I see it, when it is there, and understand when it is lacking. Then I thought: ‘May God take my son’s life before he has his eyes opened!’
“Oh, if you had loved him! Oh, if you had never come to us and sweetened our lives, when you did not love him! I knew my duty: if he had not died, I should have been forced to tell him that you did not love him, that you were marrying him out of pity. I must have made him set you free, and then his life’s happiness would have been gone. That is why I prayed to God that he might die, that I should not need to disturb the peace of his heart. And I have rejoiced over his sunken cheeks, exulted over his rattling breath, trembled lest Death should not complete his work.”
She stopped speaking, and waited for an answer; but Anna StjÄrnhÖk could not speak, she was still listening to the many voices in her soul.
Then the mother cried out in despair:—
“Oh, how happy are they who may mourn for their dead, they who may weep streams of tears! I must stand with dry eyes by my son’s grave, I must rejoice over his death! How unhappy I am!”
Then Anna StjÄrnhÖk pressed her hands against her breast. She remembered that winter night when she had sworn by her love to be these poor people’s support and comfort, and she trembled. Had it all been in vain; was not her sacrifice one of those which God accepts? Should it all be turned to a curse?
But if she sacrificed everything would not God then give His blessing to the work, and let her bring happiness, be a support, a help, to these people?
“What is required for you to be able to mourn for your son?” she asked.
“That I shall not believe the testimony of my old eyes. If I believed that you loved my son, then I would grieve for his death.”
The girl rose up, her eyes burning. She tore off her veil and spread it over the grave, she tore off her wreath and laid it beside it.
“See how I love him!” she cried. “I give him my wreath and veil. I consecrate myself to him. I will never belong to another.”
Then the captain’s wife rose too. She stood silent for a while; her whole body was shaking, and her face twitched, but at last the tears came,—tears of grief.
CHAPTER XVI
THE DROUGHT
If dead things love, if earth and water distinguish friends from enemies, I should like to possess their love. I should like the green earth not to feel my step as a heavy burden. I should like her to forgive that she for my sake is wounded by plough and harrow, and willingly to open for my dead body. And I should like the waves, whose shining mirror is broken by my oars, to have the same patience with me as a mother has with an eager child when it climbs up on her knee, careless of the uncrumpled silk of her dress.
The spirit of life still dwells in dead things. Have you not seen it? When strife and hate fill the earth, dead things must suffer too. Then the waves are wild and ravenous; then the fields are niggardly as a miser. But woe to him for whose sake the woods sigh and the mountains weep.
Memorable was the year when the pensioners were in power. If one could tell of everything which happened that year to the people by LÖfven’s shores a world would be surprised. For then old love wakened, then new was kindled. Old hate blazed up, and long cherished revenge seized its prey.
From Ekeby this restless infection went forth; it spread first through the manors and estates, and drove men to ruin and to crime. It ran from village to village, from cottage to cottage. Everywhere hearts became wild, and brains confused. Never did the dance whirl so merrily at the cross-roads; never was the beer-barrel so quickly emptied; never was so much grain turned into brandy. Never were there so many balls; never was the way shorter from the angry word to the knife-thrust. But the uneasiness was not only among men. It spread through all living things. Never had wolf and bear ravaged so fiercely; never had fox and owl howled so terribly, and plundered so boldly; never did the sheep go so often astray in the wood; never did so much sickness rage among the cattle.
He who will see how everything hangs together must leave the towns and live in a lonely hut at the edge of the forest; then he will learn to notice nature’s every sign and to understand how the dead things depend on the living. He will see that when there is restlessness on the earth, the peace of the dead things is disturbed. The people know it. It is in such times that the wood-nymph puts out the charcoal-kiln, the sea-nymph breaks the boat to pieces, the river-sprite sends illness, the goblin starves the cow. And it was so that year. Never had the spring freshets done so much damage. The mill and smithy at Ekeby were not the only offerings. Never had the lightning laid waste so much already before midsummer—after midsummer came the drought.
As long as the long days lasted, no rain came. From the middle of June till the beginning of September, the country was bathed in continual sunshine.
The rain refused to fall, the earth to nourish, the winds to blow. Sunshine only streamed down on the earth. The grass was not yet high and could not grow; the rye was without nourishment, just when it should have collected food in its ears; the wheat, from which most of the bread was baked, never came up more than a few inches; the late sowed turnips never sprouted; not even the potatoes could draw sustenance from that petrified earth.
At such times they begin to be frightened far away in the forest huts, and from the mountains the terror comes down to the calmer people on the plain.
“There is some one whom God’s hand is seeking!” say the people.
And each one beats his breast and says: “Is it I? Is it from horror of me that the rain holds back? Is it in wrath against me that the stern earth dries up and hardens?—and the perpetual sunshine,—is it to heap coals of fire on my head? Or if it is not I, who is it whom God’s hand is seeking?”
It was a Sunday in August. The service was over. The people wandered in groups along the sunny roads. On all sides they saw burned woods and ruined crops. There had been many forest fires; and what they had spared, insects had taken.
The gloomy people did not lack for subjects of conversation. There were many who could tell how hard it had been in the years of famine of eighteen hundred and eight and nine, and in the cold winter of eighteen hundred and twelve, when the sparrows froze to death. They knew how to make bread out of bark, and how the cows could be taught to eat moss.
There was one woman who had tried a new kind of bread of cranberries and corn-meal. She had a sample with her, and let the people taste it. She was proud of her invention.
But over them all floated the same question. It stared from every eye, was whispered by every lip: “Who is it, O Lord, whom Thy hand seeks?”
A man in the gloomy crowd which had gone westward, and struggled up Broby hill, stopped a minute before the path which led up to the house of the mean Broby clergyman. He picked up a dry stick from the ground and threw it upon the path.
“Dry as that stick have the prayers been which he has given our Lord,” said the man.
He who walked next to him also stopped. He took up a dry branch and threw it where the stick had fallen.
“That is the proper offering to that priest,” he said.
The third in the crowd followed the others’ example.
“He has been like the drought; sticks and straw are all that he has let us keep.”
The fourth said: “We give him back what he has given us.”
And the fifth: “For a perpetual disgrace I throw this to him. May he dry up and wither away like this branch!”
“Dry food to the dry priest,” said the sixth.
The people who came after see what they are doing and hear what they say. Now they get the answer to their long questioning.
“Give him what belongs to him! He has brought the drought on us.”
And each one stops, each one says his word and throws his branch before he goes on.
In the corner by the path there soon lies a pile of sticks and straw,—a pile of shame for the Broby clergyman.
That was their only revenge. No one lifted his hand against the clergyman or said an angry word to him. Desperate hearts cast off part of their burden by throwing a dry branch on the pile. They did not revenge themselves. They only pointed out the guilty one to the God of retribution.
“If we have not worshipped you rightly, it is that man’s fault. Be pitiful, Lord, and let him alone suffer! We mark him with shame and dishonor. We are not with him.”
It soon became the custom for every one who passed the vicarage to throw a dry branch on the pile of shame.
The old miser soon noticed the pile by the roadside. He had it carried away,—some said that he heated his stove with it. The next day a new pile had collected on the same spot, and as soon as he had that taken away a new one was begun.
The dry branches lay there and said: “Shame, shame to the Broby clergyman!”
Soon the people’s meaning became clear to him. He understood that they pointed to him as the origin of their misfortune. It was in wrath at him God let the earth languish. He tried to laugh at them and their branches; but when it had gone on a week, he laughed no more. Oh, what childishness! How can those dry sticks injure him? He understood that the hate of years sought an opportunity of expressing itself. What of that?—he was not used to love.
For all this he did not become more gentle. He had perhaps wished to improve after the old lady had visited him; now he could not. He would not be forced to it.
But gradually the pile grew too strong for him. He thought of it continually, and the feeling which every one cherished took root also in him. He watched the pile, counted the branches which had been added each day. The thought of it encroached upon all other thoughts. The pile was destroying him.
Every day he felt more and more the people were right. He grew thin and very old in a couple of weeks. He suffered from remorse and indisposition. But it was as if everything depended on that pile. It was as if his remorse would grow silent, and the weight of years be lifted off him, if only the pile would stop growing.
Finally he sat there the whole day and watched; but the people were without mercy. At night there were always new branches thrown on.
One day GÖsta Berling passed along the road. The Broby clergyman sat at the roadside, old and haggard. He sat and picked out the dry sticks and laid them together in rows and piles, playing with them as if he were a child again. GÖsta was grieved at his misery.
“What are you doing, pastor?” he says, and leaps out of the carriage.
“Oh, I am sitting here and picking. I am not doing anything.”
“You had better go home, and not sit here in the dust.”
“It is best that I sit here.”
Then GÖsta Berling sits down beside him.
“It is not so easy to be a priest,” he says after a while.
“It is all very well down here where there are people,” answers the clergyman. “It is worse up there.”
GÖsta understands what he means. He knows those parishes in Northern VÄrmland where sometimes there is not even a house for the clergyman, where there are not more than a couple of people in ten miles of country, where the clergyman is the only educated man. The Broby minister had been in such a parish for over twenty years.
“That is where we are sent when we are young,” says GÖsta. “It is impossible to hold out with such a life; and so one is ruined forever. There are many who have gone under up there.”
“Yes,” says the Broby clergyman; “a man is destroyed by loneliness.”
“A man comes,” says GÖsta, “eager and ardent, exhorts and admonishes, and thinks that all will be well, that the people will soon turn to better ways.”
“Yes, yes.”
“But soon he sees that words do not help. Poverty stands in the way. Poverty prevents all improvement.”
“Poverty,” repeats the clergyman,—“poverty has ruined my life.”
“The young minister comes up there,” continues GÖsta, “poor as all the others. He says to the drunkard: Stop drinking!”
“Then the drunkard answers,” interrupts the clergyman: “Give me something which is better than brandy! Brandy is furs in winter, coolness in summer. Brandy is a warm house and a soft bed. Give me those, and I will drink no more.”
“And then,” resumes GÖsta, “the minister says to the thief: You shall not steal; and to the cruel husband: You shall not beat your wife; and to the superstitious: You shall believe in God and not in devils and goblins. But the thief answers: Give me bread; and the cruel husband says: Make us rich, and we will not quarrel; and the superstitious say: Teach us better. But who can help them without money?”
“It is true, true every word,” cried the clergyman. “They believed in God, but more in the devil, and most in the mountain goblin. The crops were all turned into the still. There seemed to be no end to the misery. In most of the gray cottages there was want. Hidden sorrow made the women’s tongues bitter. Discomfort drove their husbands to drink. They could not look after their fields or their cattle. They made a fool of their minister. What could a man do with them? They did not understand what I said to them from the pulpit. They did not believe what I wanted to teach them. And no one to consult, no one who could help me to keep up my courage.”
“There are those who have stood out,” says GÖsta. “God’s grace has been so great to some that they have not returned from such a life broken men. They have had strength; they have borne the loneliness, the poverty, the hopelessness. They have done what little good they could and have not despaired. Such men have always been and still are. I greet them as heroes. I will honor them as long as I live. I was not able to stand out.”
“I could not,” added the clergyman.
“The minister up there thinks,” says GÖsta, musingly, “that he will be a rich man, an exceedingly rich man. No one who is poor can struggle against evil. And so he begins to hoard.”
“If he had not hoarded he would have drunk,” answers the old man; “he sees so much misery.”
“Or he would become dull and lazy, and lose all strength. It is dangerous for him who is not born there to come thither.”
“He has to harden himself to hoard. He pretends at first; then it becomes a habit.”
“He has to be hard both to himself and to others,” continues GÖsta; “it is hard to amass. He must endure hate and scorn; he must go cold and hungry and harden his heart: it almost seems as if he had forgotten why he began to hoard.”
The Broby clergyman looked startled at him. He wondered if GÖsta sat there and made a fool of him. But GÖsta was only eager and earnest. It was as if he was speaking of his own life.
“It was so with me,” says the old man quietly.
“But God watches over him,” interrupts GÖsta. “He wakes in him the thoughts of his youth when he has amassed enough. He gives the minister a sign when His people need him.”
“But if the minister does not obey the sign, GÖsta Berling?”
“He cannot withstand it,” says GÖsta, and smiles. “He is so moved by the thought of the warm cottages which he will help the poor to build.”
The clergyman looks down on the little heaps he had raised from the sticks of the pile of shame. The longer he talks with GÖsta, the more he is convinced that the latter is right. He had always had the thought of doing good some day, when he had enough,—of course he had had that thought.
“Why does he never build the cottages?” he asks shyly.
“He is ashamed. Many would think that he did what he always had meant to do through fear of the people.”
“He cannot bear to be forced, is that it?”
“He can however do much good secretly. Much help is needed this year. He can find some one who will dispense his gifts. I understand what it all means,” cries GÖsta, and his eyes shone. “Thousands shall get bread this year from one whom they load with curses.”
“It shall be so, GÖsta.”
A feeling of transport came over the two who had so failed in the vocation they had chosen. The desire of their youthful days to serve God and man filled them. They gloated over the good deeds they would do. GÖsta would help the minister.
“We will get bread to begin with,” says the clergyman.
“We will get teachers. We will have a surveyor come, and divide up the land. Then the people shall learn how to till their fields and tend their cattle.”
“We will build roads and open new districts.”
“We will make locks at the falls at Berg, so that there will be an open way between LÖfven and VÄner.”
“All the riches of the forest will be of double blessing when the way to the sea is opened.”
“Your head shall be weighed down by blessings,” cries GÖsta.
The clergyman looks up. They read in one another’s eyes the same burning enthusiasm.
But at the same moment the eyes of both fall on the pile of shame.
“GÖsta,” says the old man, “all that needs a young man’s strength, but I am dying. You see what is killing me.”
“Get rid of it!”
“How, GÖsta Berling?”
GÖsta moves close up to him and looks sharply into his eyes. “Pray to God for rain,” he says. “You are going to preach next Sunday. Pray for rain.”
The old clergyman sinks down in terror.
“If you are in earnest, if you are not he who has brought the drought to the land, if you had meant to serve the Most High with your hardness, pray God for rain. That shall be the token; by that we shall know if God wishes what we wish.”
When GÖsta drove down Broby hill, he was astonished at himself and at the enthusiasm which had taken hold of him. But it could be a beautiful life—yes, but not for him. Up there they would have none of his services.
In the Broby church the sermon was over and the usual prayers read. The minister was just going to step down from the pulpit, but he hesitated, finally he fell on his knees and prayed for rain.
He prayed as a desperate man prays, with few words, without coherency.
“If it is my sin which has called down Thy wrath, let me alone suffer! If there is any pity in Thee, Thou God of mercy, let it rain! Take the shame from me! Let it rain in answer to my prayer! Let the rain fall on the fields of the poor! Give Thy people bread!”
The day was hot; the sultriness was intolerable. The congregation sat as if in a torpor; but at these broken words, this hoarse despair, every one had awakened.
“If there is a way of expiation for me, give rain—”
He stopped speaking. The doors stood open. There came a violent gust of wind. It rushed along the ground, whirled into the church, in a cloud of dust, full of sticks and straw. The clergyman could not continue; he staggered down from the pulpit.
The people trembled. Could that be an answer?
But the gust was only the forerunner of the thunderstorm. It came rushing with an unheard-of violence. When the psalm was sung, and the clergyman stood by the altar, the lightning was already flashing, and the thunder crashing, drowning the sound of his voice. As the sexton struck up the final march, the first drops were already pattering against the green window-panes, and the people hurried out to see the rain. But they were not content with that: some wept, others laughed, while they let the torrents stream over them. Ah, how great had been their need! How unhappy they had been! But God is good! God let it rain. What joy, what joy!
The Broby clergyman was the only one who did not come out into the rain. He lay on his knees before the altar and did not rise. The joy had been too violent for him. He died of happiness.
CHAPTER XVII
THE CHILD’S MOTHER
The child was born in a peasant’s house east of the Klar river. The child’s mother had come seeking employment one day in early June.
She had been unfortunate, she had said to the master and mistress, and her mother had been so hard to her that she had had to run away from home. She called herself Elizabeth Karlsdotter; but she would not say from whence she came, for then perhaps they would tell her parents that she was there, and if they should find her, she would be tortured to death, she knew it. She asked for no pay, only food and a roof over her head. She could work, weave or spin, and take care of the cows,—whatever they wanted. If they wished, she could also pay for herself.
She had been clever enough to come to the farm-house bare-foot, with her shoes under her arm; she had coarse hands; she spoke the country dialect; and she wore a peasant woman’s clothes. She was believed.
The master thought she looked sickly, and did not count much on her fitness for work. But somewhere the poor thing must be. And so she was allowed to stop.
There was something about her which made every one on the farm kind to her. She had come to a good place. The people were serious and reticent. Her mistress liked her; when she discovered that she could weave, they borrowed a loom from the vicarage, and the child’s mother worked at it the whole summer.
It never occurred to any one that she needed to be spared; she had to work like a peasant girl the whole time. She liked too to have much work. She was not unhappy. Life among the peasants pleased her, although she lacked all her accustomed conveniences. But everything was taken so simply and quietly there. Every one’s thoughts were on his or her work; the days passed so uniform and monotonous that one mistook the day and thought it was the middle of the week when Sunday came.
One day at the end of August there had been haste with the oat crop, and the child’s mother had gone out with the others to bind the sheaves. She had strained herself, and the child had been born, but too soon. She had expected it in October.
Now the farmer’s wife stood with the child in the living room to warm it by the fire, for the poor little thing was shivering in the August heat. The child’s mother lay in a room beyond and listened to what they said of the little one. She could imagine how the men and maids came up and looked at him.
“Such a poor little thing,” they all said, and then followed always, without fail:—
“Poor little thing, with no father!”
They did not complain of the child’s crying: they thought a child needed to cry; and, when everything was considered, the child was strong for its age; had it but a father, all would have been well.
The mother lay and listened and wondered. The matter suddenly seemed to her incredibly important. How would he get through life, the poor little thing?
She had made her plans before. She would remain at the farm-house the first year. Then she would hire a room and earn her bread at the loom. She meant to earn enough to feed and clothe the child. Her husband could continue to believe that she was unworthy. She had thought that the child perhaps would be a better man if she alone brought it up, than if a stupid and conceited father should guide it.
But now, since the child was born, she could not see the matter in the same way. Now she thought that she had been selfish. “The child must have a father,” she said to herself.
If he had not been such a pitiful little thing, if he had been able to eat and sleep like other children, if his head had not always sunk down on one shoulder, and if he had not so nearly died when the attack of cramp came, it would not have been so important.
It was not so easy to decide, but decide she must immediately. The child was three days old, and the peasants in VÄrmland seldom wait longer to have the child baptized. Under what name should the baby be entered in the church-register, and what would the clergyman want to know about the child’s mother?
It was an injustice to the child to let him be entered as fatherless. If he should be a weak and sickly man, how could she take the responsibility of depriving him of the advantages of birth and riches?
The child’s mother had noticed that there is generally great joy and excitement when a child comes into the world. Now it seemed to her that it must be hard for this baby to live, whom every one pitied. She wanted to see him sleeping on silk and lace, as it behoves a count’s son. She wanted to see him encompassed with joy and pride.
The child’s mother began to think that she had done its father too great an injustice. Had she the right to keep him for herself? That she could not have. Such a precious little thing, whose worth it is not in the power of man to calculate, should she take that for her own? That would not be honest.
But she did not wish to go back to her husband. She feared that it would be her death. But the child was in greater danger than she. He might die any minute, and he was not baptized.
That which had driven her from her home, the grievous sin which had dwelt in her heart, was gone. She had now no love for any other than the child.
It was not too heavy a duty to try to get him his right place in life.
The child’s mother had the farmer and his wife called and told them everything. The husband journeyed to Borg to tell Count Dohna that his countess was alive, and that there was a child.
The peasant came home late in the evening; he had not met the count, for he had gone away, but he had been to the minister at SvartsjÖ, and talked with him of the matter.
Then the countess heard that her marriage had been declared invalid, and that she no longer had a husband.
The minister wrote a friendly letter to her, and offered her a home in his house.
A letter from her own father to Count Henrik, which must have reached Borg a few days after her flight, was also sent to her. It was just that letter in which the old man had begged the count to hasten to make his marriage legal, which had indicated to the count the easiest way to be rid of his wife.
It is easy to imagine that the child’s mother was seized with anger more than sorrow, when she heard the peasant’s story.
She lay awake the whole night. The child must have a father, she thought over and over again.
The next morning the peasant had to drive to Ekeby for her, and go for GÖsta Berling.
GÖsta asked the silent man many questions, but could find out nothing. Yes, the countess had been in his house the whole summer. She had been well and had worked. Now a child was born. The child was weak; but the mother would soon be strong again.
GÖsta asked if the countess knew that the marriage had been annulled.
Yes, she knew it now. She had heard it yesterday.
And as long as the drive lasted GÖsta had alternately fever and chills.
What did she want of him? Why did she send for him?
He thought of the life that summer on LÖfven’s shores. They had let the days go by with jests and laughter and pleasure parties, while she had worked and suffered.
He had never thought of the possibility of ever seeing her again. Ah, if he had dared to hope! He would have then come into her presence a better man. What had he now to look back on but the usual follies!
About eight o’clock in the evening he arrived, and was immediately taken to the child’s mother. It was dark in the room. He could scarcely see her where she lay. The farmer and his wife came in also.
Now you must know that she whose white face shone in the dimness was always the noblest and the purest he knew, the most beautiful soul which had ever arrayed itself in earthly dust. When he once again felt the bliss of being near her, he longed to throw himself on his knees and thank her for having again appeared to him; but he was so overpowered by emotion that he could neither speak nor act.
“Dear Countess Elizabeth!” he only cried.
“Good-evening, GÖsta.”
She gave him her hand, which seemed once more to have become soft and transparent. She lay silent, while he struggled with his emotion.
The child’s mother was not shaken by any violently raging feelings when she saw GÖsta. It surprised her only that he seemed to consider her of chief importance, when he ought to understand that it now only concerned the child.
“GÖsta,” she said gently, “you must help me now, as you once promised. You know that my husband has abandoned me, so that my child has no father.”
“Yes, countess; but that can certainly be changed. Now that there is a child, the count can be forced to make the marriage legal. You may be certain that I shall help you!”
The countess smiled. “Do you think that I will force myself upon Count Dohna?”
The blood surged up to GÖsta’s head. What did she wish then? What did she want of him?
“Come here, GÖsta,” she said, and again stretched out her hand. “You must not be angry with me for what I am going to say; but I thought that you who are—who are—”
“A dismissed priest, a drunkard, a pensioner, Ebba Dohna’s murderer; I know the whole list—”
“Are you already angry, GÖsta?”
“I would rather that you did not say anything more.”
But the child’s mother continued:—
“There are many, GÖsta, who would have liked to be your wife out of love; but it is not so with me. If I loved you I should not dare to speak as I am speaking now. For myself I would never ask such a thing, GÖsta; but do you see, I can do it for the sake of the child. You must understand what I mean to beg of you. Of course it is a great degradation for you, since I am an unmarried woman who has a child. I did not think that you would be willing to do it because you are worse than others; although, yes, I did think of that too. But first I thought that you could be willing, because you are kind, GÖsta, because you are a hero and can sacrifice yourself. But it is perhaps too much to ask. Perhaps such a thing would be impossible for a man. If you despise me too much, if it is too loathsome for you to give your name to another man’s child, say so! I shall not be angry. I understand that it is too much to ask; but the child is sick, GÖsta. It is cruel at his baptism not to be able to give the name of his mother’s husband.”
He, hearing her, experienced the same feeling as when that spring day he had put her on land and left her to her fate. Now he had to help her to ruin her life, her whole future life. He who loved her had to do it.
“I will do everything you wish, countess,” he said.
The next day he spoke to the dean at Bro, for there the banns were to be called.
The good old dean was much moved by his story, and promised to take all the responsibility of giving her away.
“Yes,” he said, “you must help her, GÖsta, otherwise she might become insane. She thinks that she has injured the child by depriving it of its position in life. She has a most sensitive conscience, that woman.”
“But I know that I shall make her unhappy,” cried GÖsta.
“That you must not do, GÖsta. You must be a sensible man now, with wife and child to care for.”
The dean had to journey down to SvartsjÖ and speak to both the minister there and the judge. The end of it all was that the next Sunday, the first of September, the banns were called in SvartsjÖ between GÖsta Berling and Elizabeth von Thurn.
Then the child’s mother was carried with the greatest care to Ekeby, and there the child was baptized.
The dean talked to her, and told her that she could still recall her decision to marry such a man as GÖsta Berling. She ought to first write to her father.
“I cannot repent,” she said; “think if my child should die before it had a father.”
When the banns had been thrice asked, the child’s mother had been well and up several days. In the afternoon the dean came to Ekeby and married her to GÖsta Berling. But no one thought of it as a wedding. No guests were invited. They only gave the child a father, nothing more.
The child’s mother shone with a quiet joy, as if she had attained a great end in life. The bridegroom was in despair. He thought how she had thrown away her life by a marriage with him. He saw with dismay how he scarcely existed for her. All her thoughts were with her child.
A few days after the father and mother were mourning. The child had died.
Many thought that the child’s mother did not mourn so violently nor so deeply as they had expected; she had a look of triumph. It was as if she rejoiced that she had thrown away her life for the sake of the child. When he joined the angels, he would still remember that a mother on earth had loved him.
All this happened quietly and unnoticed. When the banns were published for GÖsta Berling and Elizabeth von Thurn in the SvartsjÖ church, most of the congregation did not even know who the bride was. The clergyman and the gentry who knew the story said little about it. It was as if they were afraid that some one who had lost faith in the power of conscience should wrongly interpret the young woman’s action. They were so afraid, so afraid lest some one should come and say: “See now, she could not conquer her love for GÖsta; she has married him under a plausible pretext.” Ah, the old people were always so careful of that young woman! Never could they bear to hear anything evil of her. They would scarcely acknowledge that she had sinned. They would not agree that any fault stained that soul which was so afraid of evil.
Another great event happened just then, which also caused GÖsta’s marriage to be little discussed.
Major Samzelius had met with an accident. He had become more and more strange and misanthropic. His chief intercourse was with animals, and he had collected a small menagerie at SjÖ.
He was dangerous too; for he always carried a loaded gun, and shot it off time after time without paying much attention to his aim. One day he was bitten by a tame bear which he had shot without intending it. The wounded animal threw itself on him, and succeeded in giving him a terrible bite in the arm. The beast broke away and took refuge in the forest.
The major was put to bed and died of the wound, but not till just before Christmas. Had his wife known that he lay ill, she could have resumed her sway over Ekeby. But the pensioners knew that she would not come before their year was out.
CHAPTER XVIII
AMOR VINCIT OMNIA
Under the stairs to the gallery in the SvartsjÖ church is a lumber-room filled with the grave-diggers’ worn-out shovels, with broken benches, with rejected tin labels and other rubbish.
There, where the dust lies thickest and seems to hide it from every human eye, stands a chest, inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the most perfect mosaic. If one scrapes the dust away, it seems to shine and glitter like a mountain-wall in a fairy-tale. The chest is locked, and the key is in good keeping; it may not be used. No mortal man may cast a glance into that chest. No one knows what is in it. First, when the nineteenth century has reached its close, may the key be placed in the lock, the cover be lifted, and the treasures which it guarded be seen by men.
So has he who owned the chest ordained.
On the brass-plate of the cover stands an inscription: “Labor vincit omnia.” But another inscription would be more appropriate. “Amor vincit omnia” ought to stand there. For the chest in the rubbish room under the gallery stairs is a testimony of the omnipotence of love.
O Eros, all-conquering god!
Thou, O Love, art indeed eternal! Old are people on the earth, but thou hast followed them through the ages.
Where are the gods of the East, the strong heroes who carried weapons of thunderbolts,—they who on the shores of holy rivers took offerings of honey and milk? They are dead. Dead is Bel, the mighty warrior, and Thot, the hawk-headed champion. The glorious ones are dead who rested on the cloud banks of Olympus; so too the mighty who dwelt in the turreted Valhalla. All the old gods are dead except Eros, Eros, the all-powerful!
His work is in everything you see. He supports the race. See him everywhere! Whither can you go without finding the print of his foot? What has your ear perceived, where the humming of his wings has not been the key-note? He lives in the hearts of men and in the sleeping germ. See with trembling his presence in inanimate things!
What is there which does not long and desire? What is there which escapes his dominion? All the gods of revenge will fall, all the powers of strength and might. Thou, O Love, art eternal!
Old Uncle Eberhard is sitting at his writing-desk,—a splendid piece of furniture with a hundred drawers, with marble top and ornaments of blackened brass. He works with eagerness and diligence, alone in the pensioners’ wing.
Oh, Eberhard, why do you not wander about wood and field in these last days of the departing summer like the other pensioners? No one, you know, worships unpunished the goddess of wisdom. Your back is bent with sixty and some years; the hair which covers your head is not your own; the wrinkles crowd one another on your brow, which arches over hollow eyes; and the decay of old age is drawn in the thousand lines about your empty mouth.
Oh, Eberhard, why do you not wander about wood and field? Death parts you just so much the sooner from your desk, because you have not let life tempt you from it.
Uncle Eberhard draws a thick stroke under his last line. From the desk’s innumerable drawers he drags out yellowed, closely scribbled manuscripts, all the different parts of his great work,—that work which is to carry on Eberhard Berggren’s name through all time. But just as he has piled up manuscript on manuscript, and is staring at them in silent rapture, the door opens, and in walks the young countess.
There she is, the old men’s young mistress,—she whom they wait on and adore more than grandparents wait on and adore the first grandson. There she is whom they had found in poverty and in sickness, and to whom they had now given all the glory of the world, just as the king in the fairy tale did to the beautiful beggar girl he found in the forest. It is for her that the horn and violin now sound at Ekeby,—for her everything moves, breathes, works on the great estate.
She is well again, although still very weak. Time goes slowly for her alone in the big house, and, as she knows that the pensioners are away, she wishes to see what it looks like in the pensioners’ wing, that notorious room.
So she comes softly in and looks up at the whitewashed walls and the yellow striped bed-curtains, but she is embarrassed when she sees that the room is not empty.
Uncle Eberhard goes solemnly towards her, and leads her forward to the great pile of paper.
“Look, countess,” he says; “now my work is ready. Now shall what I have written go out into the world. Now great things are going to happen.”
“What is going to happen, Uncle Eberhard?”
“Oh, countess, it is going to strike like a thunderbolt, a bolt which enlightens and kills. Ever since Moses dragged him out of Sinai’s thunder-cloud and put him on the throne of grace in the innermost sanctuary of the temple, ever since then he has sat secure, the old Jehovah; but now men shall see what he is: Imagination, emptiness, exhalation, the stillborn child of our own brain. He shall sink into nothingness,” said the old man, and laid his wrinkled hand on the pile of manuscript. “It stands here; and when people read this, they will have to believe. They will rise up and acknowledge their own stupidity; they will use crosses for kindling-wood, churches for storehouses, and clergymen will plough the earth.”
“Oh, Uncle Eberhard,” says the countess, with a slight shudder, “are you such a dreadful person? Do such dreadful things stand there?”
“Dreadful!” repeated the old man, “it is only the truth. But we are like little boys who hide their faces in a woman’s skirt as soon as they meet a stranger: we have accustomed ourselves to hide from the truth, from the eternal stranger. But now he shall come and dwell among us, now he shall be known by all.”
“By all?”
“Not only by philosophers, but by everybody; do you understand, countess, by everybody.”
“And so Jehovah shall die?”
“He and all angels, all saints, all devils, all lies.”
“Who shall then rule the world?”
“Do you believe that any one has ruled it before? Do you believe in that Providence which looks after sparrows and the hair of your head? No one has ruled it, no one shall rule it.”
“But we, we people, what will we become—”
“The same which we have been—dust. That which is burned out can burn no longer; it is dead. We about whom the fire of life flickers are only fuel. Life’s sparks fly from one to another. We are lighted, flame up, and die out. That is life.”
“Oh, Eberhard, is there no life of the spirit?”
“None.”
“No life beyond the grave?”
“None.”
“No good, no evil, no aim, no hope?”
“None.”
The young woman walks over to the window. She looks out at the autumn’s yellowed leaves, at dahlias and asters which hang their heavy heads on broken stalks. She sees the LÖfven’s black waves, the autumn’s dark storm-clouds, and for a moment she inclines towards repudiation.
“Uncle Eberhard,” she says, “how ugly and gray the world is; how profitless everything is! I should like to lie down and die.”
But then she hears a murmur in her soul. The vigor of life and its strong emotions cry out for the happiness of living.
“Is there nothing,” she breaks out, “which can give life beauty, since you have taken from me God and immortality?”
“Work,” answers the old man.
But she looks out again, and a feeling of scorn for that poor wisdom creeps over her. The unfathomable rises before her; she feels the spirit dwelling in everything; she is sensible of the power which lies bound in seemingly dead material, but which can develop into a thousand forms of shifting life. Dizzily she seeks for a name for the presence of God’s spirit in nature.
“Oh, Eberhard,” she says, “what is work? Is it a god? Has it any meaning in itself? Name another!”
“I know no other,” answered the old man.
Then she finds the name which she is seeking,—a poor, often sullied name.
“Uncle Eberhard, why do you not speak of love?”
A smile glides over the empty mouth where the thousand wrinkles cross.
“Here,” says the philosopher, and strikes the heavy packet with his clenched hand, “here all the gods are slain, and I have not forgotten Eros. What is love but a longing of the flesh? In what does he stand higher than the other requirements of the body? Make hunger a god! Make fatigue a god! They are just as worthy. Let there be an end to such absurdities! Let the truth live!”
The young countess sinks her head. It is not so, all that is not true; but she cannot contest it.
“Your words have wounded my soul,” she says; “but still I do not believe you. The gods of revenge and violence you may be able to kill, no others.”
But the old man takes her hand, lays it on the book, and swears in the fanaticism of unbelief.
“When you have read this, you must believe.”
“May it never come before my eyes,” she says, “for if I believe that, I cannot live.”
And she goes sadly from the philosopher. But he sits for a long time and thinks, when she has gone.
Those old manuscripts, scribbled over with heathenish confessions, have not yet been tested before the world. Uncle Eberhard’s name has not yet reached the heights of fame.
His great work lies hidden in a chest in the lumber-room under the gallery stairs in the SvartsjÖ church; it shall first see the light of day at the end of the century.
But why has he done this? Was he afraid not to have proved his point? Did he fear persecutions? You little know Uncle Eberhard.
Understand it now; he has loved the truth, not his own glory. So he has sacrificed the latter, not the former, in order that a deeply loved child might die in the belief in that she has most cared for.
O Love, thou art indeed eternal!
CHAPTER XIX
THE BROOM-GIRL
No one knows the place in the lee of the mountain where the pines grow thickest and deep layers of moss cover the ground. How should any one know it? No man’s foot has ever trodden it before; no man’s tongue has given it a name. No path leads to that hidden spot. It is the most solitary tract in the forest, and now thousands of people are looking for it.
What an endless procession of seekers! They would fill the Bro church,—not only Bro, but LÖfviks and SvartsjÖ.
All who live near the road rush out and ask, “Has anything happened? Is the enemy upon us? Where are you going? Tell us where.”
“We are searching,” they answer. “We have been searching for two days. We shall go on to-day; but afterwards we can do no more. We are going to look through the BjÖrne wood and the firclad heights west of Ekeby.”
It was from NygÅrd, a poor district far away among the eastern mountains, the procession had first started. The beautiful girl with the heavy, black hair and the red cheeks had disappeared a week before. The broom-girl, to whom GÖsta Berling had wished to engage himself, had been lost in the great forests. No one had seen her for a week.
So the people started from NygÅrd to search through the wood. And everybody they met joined in the search.
Sometimes one of the new-comers asks,—
“You men from NygÅrd, how has it all happened? Why do you let that beautiful girl go alone in strange paths? The forest is deep, and God has taken away her reason.”
“No one disturbs her,” they answer; “she disturbs no one. She goes as safely as a child. Who is safer than one God himself must care for? She has always come back before.”
So have the searching crowd gone through the eastern woods, which shut in NygÅrd from the plain. Now on the third day it passes by the Bro church towards the woods west of Ekeby.
But wherever they go, a storm of wondering rages; constantly a man from the crowd has to stop to answer questions: “What do you want? What are you looking for?”
“We are looking for the blue-eyed, dark-haired girl. She has laid herself down to die in the forest. She has been gone a week.”
“Why has she laid herself down to die in the forest? Was she hungry? Was she unhappy?”
“She has not suffered want, but she had a misfortune last spring. She has seen that mad priest, GÖsta Berling, and loved him for many years. She knew no better. God had taken away her wits.”
“Last spring the misfortune happened,—before that, he had never looked at her. Then he said to her that she should be his sweetheart. It was only in jest; he let her go again, but she could not be consoled. She kept coming to Ekeby. She went after him wherever he went. He wearied of her. When she was there last, they set their dogs on her. Since then no one has seen her.”
To the rescue, to the rescue! A human life is concerned! A human being has laid herself down to die in the wood! Perhaps she is already dead. Perhaps, too, she is still wandering there without finding the right way. The forest is wide, and her reason is with God.
Come everybody, men and women and children! Who can dare to stay at home? Who knows if God does not intend to use just him? Come all of you, that your soul may not some day wander helpless in dry places, seek rest and find none! Come! God has taken her reason, and the forest is wide.
It is wonderful to see people unite for some great object. But it is not hunger, nor the fear of God, nor war which has driven these out. Their trouble is without profit, their striving without reward; they are only going to find a fool. So many steps, so much anxiety, so many prayers it all costs, and yet it will only be rewarded by the recovery of a poor, misguided girl, whose reason is with God.
Those anxious searchers fill the highway. With earnest eyes they gauge the forest; they go forward sadly, for they know that they are more probably searching for the dead than the living.
Ah, that black thing at the foot of the cliff, it is not an ant-hill after all, but a fallen tree. Praised be Heaven, only a fallen tree! But they cannot see distinctly, the pines grow so thick.
It is the third day of the search; they are used to the work. They search under the sloping rock, on which the foot can slide, under fallen trees, where arm or leg easily could have been broken, under the thick growing pines’ branches, trailing over soft moss, inviting to rest.
The bear’s den, the fox’s hole, the badger’s deep home, the red cranberry slope, the silver fir, the mountain, which the forest fire laid waste a month ago, the stone which the giant threw,—all that have they found, but not the place under the rock where the black thing is lying. No one has been there to see if it is an ant-hill, or a tree-trunk, or a human being. Alas! it is indeed a human being, but no one has been there to see her.
The evening sun is shining on the other side of the wood, but the young woman is not found. What should they do now? Should they search through the wood once more? The wood is dangerous in the dark; there are bottomless bogs and deep clefts. And what could they, who had found nothing when the sun was shining, find when it was gone?
“Let us go to Ekeby!” cries one in the crowd.
“Let us go to Ekeby!” they all cry together.
“Let us ask those pensioners why they let loose the dogs on one whose reason God had taken, why they drove a fool to despair. Our poor, hungry children weep; our clothes are torn; the potatoes rot in the ground; our horses are running loose; our cows get no care; we are nearly dead with fatigue—and the fault is theirs. Let us go to Ekeby and ask about this.
“During this cursed year we have had to suffer everything. The winter will bring us starvation. Whom does God’s hand seek? It was not the Broby clergyman. His prayers could reach God’s ear. Who, then, if not these pensioners? Let us go to Ekeby!
“They have ruined the estate, they have driven the major’s wife to beg on the highway. It is their fault that we have no work. The famine is their doing. Let us go to Ekeby!”
So the dark, embittered men crowd down to Ekeby; hungry women with weeping children in their arms follow them; and last come the cripples and the old men. And the bitterness spreads like an ever-increasing storm from the old men to the women, from the women to the strong men at the head of the train.
It is the autumn-flood which is coming. Pensioners, do you remember the spring-flood?
A cottager who is ploughing in a pasture at the edge of the wood hears the people’s mad cries. He throws himself on one of his horses and gallops down to Ekeby.
“Disaster is coming!” he cries; “the bears are coming, the wolves are coming, the goblins are coming to take Ekeby!”
He rides about the whole estate, wild with terror.
“All the devils in the forest are let loose!” he cries. “They are coming to take Ekeby! Save yourselves who can! The devils are coming to burn the house and to kill the pensioners!”
And behind him can be heard the din and cries of the rushing horde. Does it know what it wants, that storming stream of bitterness? Does it want fire, or murder, or plunder?
They are not human beings; they are wild beasts. Death to Ekeby, death to the pensioners!
Here brandy flows in streams. Here gold lies piled in the vaults. Here the storehouses are filled with grain and meat. Why should the honest starve, and the guilty have plenty?
But now your time is out, the measure is overflowing, pensioners. In the wood lies one who condemns you; we are her deputies.
The pensioners stand in the big building and see the people coming. They know already why they are denounced. For once they are innocent. If that poor girl has lain down to die in the wood, it is not because they have set the dogs on her,—that they have never done,—but because GÖsta Berling, a week ago, was married to Countess Elizabeth.
But what good is it to speak to that mob? They are tired, they are hungry; revenge drives them on, plunder tempts them. They rush down with wild cries, and before them rides the cottager, whom fear has driven mad.
The pensioners have hidden the young countess in their innermost room. LÖwenborg and Eberhard are to sit there and guard her; the others go out to meet the people. They are standing on the steps before the main building, unarmed, smiling, as the first of the noisy crowd reach the house.
And the people stop before that little group of quiet men. They had wanted to throw them down on the ground and trample them under their iron-shod heels, as the people at the Lund iron-works used to do with the manager and overseer fifty years ago; but they had expected closed doors, raised weapons; they had expected resistance and fighting.
“Dear friends,” say the pensioners; “dear friends, you are tired and hungry; let us give you a little food and first a glass of Ekeby’s own home-brewed brandy.”
The people will not listen; they scream and threaten. But the pensioners are not discouraged.
“Only wait,” they say; “only wait a second. See, Ekeby stands open. The cellar doors are open; the store-rooms are open; the dairy is open. Your women are dropping with fatigue; the children are crying. Let us get them food first! Then you can kill us. We will not run away. The attic is full of apples. Let us go after apples for the children!”
An hour later the feasting is in full swing at Ekeby. The biggest feast the big house has ever seen is celebrated there that autumn night under the shining full moon.
Woodpiles have been lighted; the whole estate flames with bonfires. The people sit about in groups, enjoying warmth and rest, while all the good things of the earth are scattered over them.
Resolute men have gone to the farmyard and taken what was needed. Calves and sheep have been killed, and even one or two oxen. The animals have been cut up and roasted in a trice. Those starving hundreds are devouring the food. Animal after animal is led out and slaughtered. It looks as if the whole barn would be emptied in one night.
They had just baked that day. Since the young Countess Elizabeth had come, there had once more been industry in-doors. It seemed as if the young woman never for an instant remembered that she was GÖsta Berling’s wife. Neither he nor she acted as if it were so; but on the other hand she made herself the mistress of Ekeby. As a good and capable woman always must do, she tried with burning zeal to remedy the waste and the shiftlessness which reigned in the house. And she was obeyed. The servants felt a certain pleasure in again having a mistress over them.
But what did it matter that she had filled the rafters with bread, that she had made cheeses and churned and brewed during the month of September?
Out to the people with everything there is, so that they may not burn down Ekeby and kill the pensioners! Out with bread, butter, cheese! Out with the beer-barrels, out with the hams from the store-house, out with the brandy-kegs, out with the apples!
How can all the riches of Ekeby suffice to diminish the people’s anger? If we get them away before any dark deed is done, we may be glad.
It is all done for the sake of her who is now mistress at Ekeby. The pensioners are brave men; they would have defended themselves if they had followed their own will. They would rather have driven away the marauders with a few sharp shots, but for her, who is gentle and mild and begs for the people.
As the night advances, the crowds become gentler. The warmth and the rest and the food and the brandy assuage their terrible madness. They begin to jest and laugh.
As it draws towards midnight, it looks as if they were preparing to leave. The pensioners stop bringing food and wine, drawing corks and pouring ale. They draw a sigh of relief, in the feeling that the danger is over.
But just then a light is seen in one of the windows of the big house. All who see it utter a cry. It is a young woman who is carrying the light.
It had only been for a second. The vision disappeared; but the people think they have recognized the woman.
“She had thick black hair and red cheeks!” they cry. “She is here! They have hidden her here!”
“Oh, pensioners, have you her here? Have you got our child, whose reason God has taken, here at Ekeby? What are you doing with her? You let us grieve for her a whole week, search for three whole days. Away with wine and food! Shame to us, that we accepted anything from your hands! First, out with her! Then we shall know what we have to do to you.”
The people are quick; quicker still are the pensioners. They rush in and bar the door. But how could they resist such a mass? Door after door is broken down. The pensioners are thrown one side; they are unarmed. They are wedged in the crowd, so that they cannot move. The people will come in to find the broom-girl.
In the innermost room they find her. No one has time to see whether she is light or dark. They lift her up and carry her out. She must not be afraid, they say. They are here to save her.
But they who now stream from the building are met by another procession.
In the most lonely spot in the forest the body of a woman, who had fallen over a high cliff and died in the fall, no longer rests. A child had found her. Searchers who had remained in the wood had lifted her on their shoulders. Here they come.
In death she is more beautiful than in life. Lovely she lies, with her long, black hair. Fair is the form since the eternal peace rests upon it.
Lifted high on the men’s shoulders, she is carried through the crowd. With bent heads all do homage to the majesty of death.
“She has not been dead long,” the men whisper. “She must have wandered in the woods till to-day. We think that she wanted to escape from us who were looking for her, and so fell over the cliff.”
But if this is the broom-girl, who is the one who has been carried out of Ekeby?
The procession from the wood meets the procession from the house. Bonfires are burning all over the yard. The people can see both the women and recognize them. The other is the young countess at Borg.
“Oh! what is the meaning of this? Is this a new crime? Why is the young countess here at Ekeby? Why have they told us that she was far away or dead? In the name of justice, ought we not to throw ourselves on the pensioners and trample them to dust under iron-shod heels?”
Then a ringing voice is heard. GÖsta Berling has climbed up on the balustrade and is speaking. “Listen to me, you monsters, you devils! Do you think there are no guns and powder at Ekeby, you madmen? Do you think that I have not wanted to shoot you like mad dogs, if she had not begged for you? Oh, if I had known that you would have touched her, not one of you should have been left alive!
“Why are you raging here to-night and threatening us with murder and fire? What have I to do with your crazy girls? Do I know where they run? I have been too kind to that one; that is the matter. I ought to have set the dogs on her,—it would have been better for us both,—but I did not. Nor have I ever promised to marry her; that I have never done. Remember that!
“But now I tell you that you must let her whom you have dragged out of the house go. Let her go, I say; and may the hands who have touched her burn in everlasting fire! Do you not understand that she is as much above you as heaven is above the earth? She is as delicate as you are coarse; as good as you are bad.
“Now I will tell you who she is. First, she is an angel from heaven,—secondly, she has been married to the count at Borg. But her mother-in-law tortured her night and day; she had to stand at the lake and wash clothes like an ordinary maid; she was beaten and tormented as none of your women have ever been. Yes, she was almost ready to throw herself into the river, as we all know, because they were torturing the life out of her. I wonder which one of you was there then to save her life. Not one of you was there; but we pensioners, we did it.
“And when she afterwards gave birth to a child off in a farm-house, and the count sent her the message: ‘We were married in a foreign land; we did not follow law and order. You are not my wife; I am not your husband. I care nothing for your child!’—yes, when that was so, and she did not want the child to stand fatherless in the church register, then you would have been proud enough if she had said to one of you: ‘Come and marry me! I must have a father for the child!’ But she chose none of you. She took GÖsta Berling, the penniless priest, who may never speak the word of God. Yes, I tell you, peasants, that I have never done anything harder; for I was so unworthy of her that I did not dare to look her in the eyes, nor did I dare say no, for she was in despair.
“And now you may believe what evil you like of us pensioners; but to her we have done what good we could. And it is thanks to her that you have not all been killed to-night. But now I tell you: let her go, and go yourselves, or I think the earth will open and swallow you up. And as you go, pray God to forgive you for having frightened and grieved one who is so good and innocent. And now be off! We have had enough of you!”
Long before he had finished speaking, those who had carried out the countess had put her down on one of the stone steps; and now a big peasant came thoughtfully up to her and stretched out his great hand.
“Thank you, and good-night,” he said. “We wish you no harm, countess.”
After him came another and shook her hand. “Thanks, and good-night. You must not be angry with us!”
GÖsta sprang down and placed himself beside her. Then they took his hand too.
So they came forward slowly, one after another, to bid them good-night before they went. They were once more subdued; again were they human beings, as they were when they left their homes that morning, before hunger and revenge had made them wild beasts.
They looked in the countess’s face, and GÖsta saw that the innocence and gentleness they saw there brought tears into the eyes of many. There was in them all a silent adoration of the noblest they had ever seen.
They could not all shake her hand. There were so many, and the young woman was tired and weak. But they all came and looked at her, and could take GÖsta’s hand,—his arm could stand a shaking.
GÖsta stood as if in a dream. That evening a new love sprang up in his heart.
“Oh, my people,” he thought, “oh, my people, how I love you!” He felt how he loved all that crowd who were disappearing into the darkness with the dead girl at the head of the procession, with their coarse clothes and evil-smelling shoes; those who lived in the gray huts at the edge of the wood; those who could not write and often not read; those who had never known the fulness and richness of life, only the struggle for their daily bread.
He loved them with a painful, burning tenderness which forced the tears from his eyes. He did not know what he wanted to do for them, but he loved them, each and all, with their faults, their vices and their weaknesses. Oh, Lord God, if the day could come when he too should be loved by them!
He awoke from his dream; his wife laid her hand on his arm. The people were gone. They were alone on the steps.
“Oh, GÖsta, GÖsta, how could you!”
She put her hands before her face and wept.
“It is true what I said,” he cried. “I have never promised the broom-girl to marry her. ‘Come here next Friday, and you shall see something funny!’ was all I ever said to her. It is not my fault that she cared for me.”
“Oh, it was not that; but how could you say to the people that I was good and pure? GÖsta, GÖsta! Do you not know that I loved you when I had no right to do it? I was ashamed, GÖsta! I was ready to die of shame!”
And she was shaken by sobs.
He stood and looked at her.
“Oh, my friend, my beloved!” he said quietly. “How happy you are, who are so good! How happy to have such a beautiful soul!”
CHAPTER XX
KEVENHÜLLER
In the year 1770, in Germany, the afterwards learned and accomplished KevenhÜller was born. He was the son of a count, and could have lived in lofty palaces and ridden at the Emperor’s side if he had so wished; but he had not.
He could have liked to fasten windmill sails on the castle’s highest tower, turn the hall into a locksmith’s workshop, and the boudoir into a watch-maker’s. He would have liked to fill the castle with whirling wheels and working levers. But when he could not do it he left all the pomp and apprenticed himself to a watch-maker. There he learned everything there was to learn about cogwheels, springs, and pendulums. He learned to make sun-dials and star-dials, clocks with singing canary-birds and horn-blowing shepherds, chimes which filled a whole church-tower with their wonderful machinery, and watch-works so small that they could be set in a locket.
When he had got his patent of mastership, he bound his knapsack on his back, took his stick in his hand, and wandered from place to place to study everything that went with rollers and wheels. KevenhÜller was no ordinary watch-maker; he wished to be a great inventor and to improve the world.
When he had so wandered through many lands, he turned his steps towards VÄrmland, to there study mill-wheels and mining. One beautiful summer morning it so happened that he was crossing the market-place of Karlstad. But that same beautiful summer morning it had pleased the wood-nymph to extend her walk as far as the town. The noble lady came also across the market-place from the opposite direction, and so met KevenhÜller.
That was a meeting for a watch-maker’s apprentice. She had shining, green eyes, and a mass of light hair, which almost reached the ground, and she was dressed in green, changeable silk. She was the most beautiful woman KevenhÜller had ever seen.
He stood as if he had lost his wits, and stared at her as she came towards him.
She came direct from the deepest thicket of the wood, where the ferns are as high as trees, where the giant firs shut out the sun, so that it can only fall in golden drops on the yellow moss.
I should like to have been in KevenhÜller’s place, to see her as she came with ferns and pine-needles tangled in her yellow hair and a little black snake about her neck.
How the people must have stared at her! Horses bolted, frightened by her long, floating hair. The street boys ran after her. The men dropped their meat-axes to gape at her.
She herself went calm and majestic, only smiling a little at the excitement, so that KevenhÜller saw her small, pointed teeth shine between her red lips.
She had hung a cloak over her shoulders so that none should see who she was; but as ill-luck would have it, she had forgotten to cover her tail. It dragged along the paving stones.
KevenhÜller saw the tail; he was sorry that a noble lady should make herself the laughing-stock of the town; so he bowed and said courteously:—
“Would it not please your Grace to lift your train?”
The wood-nymph was touched, not only by his kindness, but by his politeness. She stopped before him and looked at him, so that he thought that shining sparks passed from her eyes into his brain. “KevenhÜller,” she said, “hereafter you shall be able with your two hands to execute whatever work you will, but only one of each kind.”
She said it and she could keep her word. For who does not know that the wood-nymph has the power to give genius and wonderful powers to those who win her favor?
KevenhÜller remained in Karlstad and hired a workshop there. He hammered and worked night and day. In a week he had made a wonder. It was a carriage, which went by itself. It went up hill and down hill, went fast or slow, could be steered and turned, be stopped and started, as one wished.
KevenhÜller became famous. He was so proud of his carriage that he journeyed up to Stockholm to show it to the king. He did not need to wait for post-horses nor to scold ostlers. He proudly rode in his own carriage and was there in a few hours.
He rode right up to the palace, and the king came out with his court ladies and gentlemen and looked at him. They could not praise him enough.
The king then said: “You might give me that carriage, KevenhÜller.” And although he answered no, the king persisted and wished to have the carriage.
Then KevenhÜller saw that in the king’s train stood a court lady with light hair and a green dress. He recognized her, and he understood that it was she who had advised the king to ask him for his carriage. He was in despair. He could not bear that another should have his carriage, nor did he dare to say no to the king. Therefore he drove it with such speed against the palace wall that it was broken into a thousand pieces.
When he came home to Karlstad he tried to make another carriage. But he could not. Then he was dismayed at the gift the wood-nymph had given him. He had left the life of ease at his father’s castle to be a benefactor to many, not to make wonders which only one could use. What good was it to him to be a great master, yes, the greatest of all masters, if he could not duplicate his marvels so that they were of use to thousands.
And he so longed for quiet, sensible work that he became a stone-cutter and mason. It was then he built the great stone tower down by the west bridge, and he meant to build walls and portals and courtyards, ramparts and turrets, so that a veritable castle should stand by the Klar River.
And there he should realize his childhood’s dream. Everything which had to do with industry and handicraft should have a place in the castle halls. White millers and blacksmiths, watchmakers with green shades before their strained eyes, dyers with dark hands, weavers, turners, filers,—all should have their work-shops in his castle.
And everything went well. Of the stones he himself had hewn he had with his own hand built the tower. He had fastened windmill sails on it,—for the tower was to be a mill,—and now he wanted to begin on the smithy.
But one day he stood and watched how the light, strong wings turned before the wind. Then his old longing came over him.
He shut himself in in his workshop, tasted no food, took no rest, and worked unceasingly. At the end of a week he had made a new marvel.
One day he climbed up on the roof of his tower and began to fasten wings to his shoulders.
Two street boys saw him, and they gave a cry which was heard through the whole town. They started off; panting, they ran up the streets and down the streets, knocking on all the doors, and screaming as they ran:—
“KevenhÜller is going to fly! KevenhÜller is going to fly!”
He stood calmly on the tower-roof and fastened on his wings, and in the meantime crowds of people came running through the narrow streets of old Karlstad. Soon the bridge was black with them. The market-place was packed, and the banks of the river swarmed with people.
KevenhÜller at last got his wings on and set out. He gave a couple of flaps with them, and then he was out in the air. He lay and floated high above the earth.
He drew in the air with long breaths; it was strong and pure. His breast expanded, and the old knights’ blood began to seethe in him. He tumbled like a pigeon, he hovered like a hawk, his flight was as swift as the swallow’s, as sure as the falcon’s. If he had only been able to make such a pair of wings for every one of them! If he had only been able to give them all the power to raise themselves in this pure air! He could not enjoy it alone. Ah, that wood-nymph,—if he could only meet her!
Then he saw, with eyes which were almost blinded by the dazzling sunlight, how some one came flying towards him. Great wings like his own, and between the wings floated a human body. He saw floating yellow hair, billowy green silk, wild shining eyes. It was she, it was she!
KevenhÜller did not stop to consider. With furious speed he threw himself upon her to kiss her or to strike her,—he was not sure which,—but at any rate to force her to remove the curse from his existence. He did not look where he was going; he saw only the flying hair and the wild eyes. He came close up to her and stretched out his arms to seize her. But his wings caught in hers, and hers were the stronger. His wings were torn and destroyed; he himself was swung round and hurled down, he knew not whither.
When he returned to consciousness he lay on the roof of his own tower, with the broken flying-machine by his side. He had flown right against his own mill; the sails had caught him, whirled him round a couple of times, and then thrown him down on the tower roof.
So that was the end.
KevenhÜller was again a desperate man. He could not bear the thought of honest work, and he did not dare to use his magic power. If he should make another wonder and should then destroy it, his heart would break with sorrow. And if he did not destroy it, he would certainly go mad at the thought that he could not do good to others with it.
He looked up his knapsack and stick, let the mill stand as it was, and decided to go out and search for the wood-nymph.
In the course of his journeyings he came to Ekeby, a few years before the major’s wife was driven out. There he was well received, and there he remained. The memories of his childhood came back to him, and he allowed them to call him count. His hair grew gray and his brain slept. He was so old that he could no longer believe in the feats of his youth. He was not the man who could work wonders. It was not he who had made the automatic carriage and the flying-machine. Oh, no,—tales, tales!
But then it happened that the major’s wife was driven from Ekeby, and the pensioners were masters of the great estate. Then a life began there which had never been worse. A storm passed over the land; men warred on earth, and souls in heaven. Wolves came from Dovre with witches on their backs, and the wood-nymph came to Ekeby.
The pensioners did not recognize her. They thought that she was a poor and distressed woman whom a cruel mother-in-law had hunted to despair. So they gave her shelter, revered her like a queen, and loved her like a child.
KevenhÜller alone saw who she was. At first he was dazzled like the others. But one day she wore a dress of green, shimmering silk, and when she had that on, KevenhÜller recognized her.
There she sat on silken cushions, and all the old men made themselves ridiculous to serve her. One was cook and another footman; one reader, one court-musician, one shoemaker; they all had their occupations.
They said she was ill, the odious witch; but KevenhÜller knew what that illness meant. She was laughing at them all.
He warned the pensioners against her. “Look at her small, pointed teeth,” he said, “and her wild, shining eyes. She is the wood-nymph,—all evil is about in these terrible times. I tell you she is the wood-nymph, come hither for our ruin. I have seen her before.”
But when KevenhÜller saw the wood-nymph and had recognized her, the desire for work came over him. It began to burn and seethe in his brain; his fingers ached with longing to bend themselves about hammer and file; he could hold out no longer. With a bitter heart he put on his working-blouse and shut himself in in an old smithy, which was to be his workshop.
A cry went out from Ekeby over the whole of VÄrmland:—
“KevenhÜller has begun to work!”
A new wonder was to see the light. What should it be? Will he teach us to walk on the water, or to raise a ladder to the stars?
One night, the first or second of October, he had the wonder ready. He came out of the workshop and had it in his hand. It was a wheel which turned incessantly; as it turned, the spokes glowed like fire, and it gave out warmth and light. KevenhÜller had made a sun. When he came out of the workshop with it, the night grew so light that the sparrows began to chirp and the clouds to burn as if at dawn.
There should never again be darkness or cold on earth. His head whirled when he thought of it. The sun would continue to rise and set, but when it disappeared, thousands and thousands of his fire-wheels should flame through the land, and the air would quiver with warmth, as on the hottest summer-day. Harvests should ripen in midwinter; wild strawberries should cover the hillsides the whole year round; the ice should never bind the water.
His fire-wheel should create a new world. It should be furs to the poor and a sun to the miners. It should give power to the mills, life to nature, a new, rich, and happy existence to mankind. But at the same time he knew that it was all a dream and that the wood-nymph would never let him duplicate his wheel. And in his anger and longing for revenge, he thought that he would kill her, and then he no longer knew what he was doing.
He went to the main building, and in the hall under the stairs he put down his fire-wheel. It was his intention to set fire to the house and burn up the witch in it.
Then he went back to his workshop and sat there silently listening.
There was shouting and crying outside. Now they could see that a great deed was done.
Yes, run, scream, ring the alarm! But she is burning in there, the wood-nymph whom you laid on silken cushions.
May she writhe in torment, may she flee before the flames from room to room! Ah, how the green silk will blaze, and how the flames will play in her torrents of hair! Courage, flames! courage! Catch her, set fire to her! Witches burn! Fear not her magic, flames! Let her burn! There is one who for her sake must burn his whole life through.
Bells rang, wagons came rattling, pumps were brought out, water was carried up from the lake, people came running from all the neighboring villages. There were cries and wailings and commands; that was the roof, which had fallen in; there was the terrible crackling and roaring of a fire. But nothing disturbed KevenhÜller. He sat on the chopping-block and rubbed his hands.
Then he heard a crash, as if the heavens had fallen, and he started up in triumph. “Now it is done!” he cried. “Now she cannot escape; now she is crushed by the beams or burned up by the flames. Now it is done.”
And he thought of the honor and glory of Ekeby which had had to be sacrificed to get her out of the world,—the magnificent halls, where so much happiness had dwelt, the tables which had groaned under dainty dishes, the precious old furniture, silver and china, which could never be replaced—
And then he sprang up with a cry. His fire-wheel, his sun, the model on which everything depended, had he not put it under the stairs to cause the fire?
KevenhÜller looked down on himself, paralyzed with dismay.
“Am I going mad?” he said. “How could I do such a thing?”
At the same moment the door of the workshop opened and the wood-nymph walked in.
She stood on the threshold, smiling and fair. Her green dress had neither hole nor stain, no smoke darkened her yellow hair. She was just as he had seen her in the market-place at Karlstad in his young days; her tail hung between her feet, and she had all the wildness and fragrance of the wood about her.
“Ekeby is burning,” she said, and laughed.
KevenhÜller had the sledge-hammer lifted and meant to throw it at her head, but then he saw that she had his fire-wheel in her hand.
“See what I have saved for you,” she said.
KevenhÜller threw himself on his knees before her.
“You have broken my carriage, you have rent my wings, and you have ruined my life. Have grace, have pity on me!”
She climbed up on the bench and sat there, just as young and mischievous as when he saw her first.
“I see that you know who I am,” she said.
“I know you, I have always known you,” said the unfortunate man; “you are genius. But set me free! Take back your gift! Let me be an ordinary person! Why do you persecute me? Why do you destroy me?”
“Madman,” said the wood-nymph, “I have never wished you any harm. I gave you a great reward; but I can also take it from you if you wish. But consider well. You will repent it.”
“No, no!” he cried; “take from me the power of working wonders!”
“First, you must destroy this,” she said, and threw the fire-wheel on the ground in front of him.
He did not hesitate. He swung the sledge-hammer over the shining sun; sparks flew about the room, splinters and flames danced about him, and then his last wonder lay in fragments.
“Yes, so I take my gift from you,” said the wood-nymph. As she stood in the door and the glare from the fire streamed over her, he looked at her for the last time. More beautiful than ever before, she seemed to him, and no longer malicious, only stern and proud.
“Madman,” she said, “did I ever forbid you to let others copy your works? I only wished to protect the man of genius from a mechanic’s labor.”
Whereupon she went. KevenhÜller was insane for a couple of days. Then he was as usual again.
But in his madness he had burned down Ekeby. No one was hurt. Still, it was a great sorrow to the pensioners that the hospitable home, where they had enjoyed so many good things, should suffer such injury in their time.
CHAPTER XXI
BROBY FAIR
On the first Friday in October the big Broby Fair begins, and lasts one week. It is the festival of the autumn. There is slaughtering and baking in every house; the new winter clothes are then worn for the first time; the brandy rations are doubled; work rests. There is feasting on all the estates. The servants and laborers draw their pay and hold long conferences over what they shall buy at the Fair. People from a distance come in small companies with knapsacks on their backs and staffs in their hands. Many are driving their cattle before them to the market. Small, obstinate young bulls and goats stand still and plant their forefeet, causing much vexation to their owners and much amusement to the by-standers. The guest-rooms at the manors are filled with guests, bits of news are exchanged, and the prices of cattle discussed.
And on the first Fair day what crowds swarm up Broby hill and over the wide market-place! Booths are set up, where the tradespeople spread out their wares. Rope-dancers, organ-grinders, and blind violin-players are everywhere, as well as fortune-tellers, sellers of sweetmeats and of brandy. Beyond the rows of booths, vegetables and fruit are offered for sale by the gardeners from the big estates. Wide stretches are taken up by ruddy copper-kettles. It is plain, however, by the movement in the Fair, that there is want in SvartsjÖ and Bro and LÖfvik and the other provinces about the LÖfven: trade is poor at the booths. There is most bustle in the cattle-market, for many have to sell both cow and horse to be able to live through the winter.
It is a gay scene. If one only has money for a glass or two, one can keep up one’s courage. And it is not only the brandy which is the cause of the merriment; when the people from the lonely wood-huts come down to the market-place with its seething masses, and hear the din of the screaming, laughing crowd, they become as if delirious with excitement.
Everybody who does not have to stay at home to look after the house and cattle has come to this Broby Fair. There are the pensioners from Ekeby and the peasants from NygÅrd, horse-dealers from Norway, Finns from the Northern forests, vagrants from the highways.
Sometimes the roaring sea gathers in a whirlpool, which turns about a middle point. No one knows what is at the centre, until a couple of policemen break a way through the crowd to put an end to a fight or to lift up an overturned cart.
Towards noon the great fight began. The peasants had got it into their heads that the tradespeople were using too short yardsticks, and it began with quarrelling and disturbance about the booths; then it turned to violence.
Every one knows that for many of those who for days had not seen anything but want and suffering, it was a pleasure to strike, it made no difference whom or what. And as soon as they see that a fight is going on they come rushing from all sides. The pensioners mean to break through to make peace after their fashion, and the tradesmen run to help one another.
Big Mons from Fors is the most eager in the game. He is drunk, and he is angry; he has thrown down a tradesman and has begun to beat him, but at his calls for help his comrades hurry to him and try to make Mons let him go. Then Mons sweeps the rolls of cloth from one of the counters, and seizes the top, which is a yard broad and five yards long and made of thick planks, and begins to brandish it as a weapon.
He is a terrible man, big Mons. It was he who kicked out a wall in the Filipstad-jail, he who could lift a boat out of the water and carry it on his shoulders. When he begins to strike about him with the heavy counter, every one flies before him. But he follows, striking right and left. For him it is no longer a question of friends or enemies: he only wants some one to hit, since he has got a weapon.
The people scatter in terror. Men and women scream and run. But how can the women escape when many of them have their children by the hand? Booths and carts stand in their way; oxen and cows, maddened by the noise, prevent their escape.
In a corner between the booths a group of women are wedged, and towards them the giant rages. Does he not see a tradesman in the midst of the crowd? He raises the plank and lets it fall. In pale, shuddering terror the women receive the attack, sinking under the deadly blow.
But as the board falls whistling down over them, its force is broken against a man’s upstretched arms. One man has not sunk down, but raised himself above the crowd, one man has voluntarily taken the blow to save the many. The women and children are uninjured. One man has broken the force of the blow, but he lies now unconscious on the ground.
Big Mons does not lift up his board. He has met the man’s eye, just as the counter struck his head, and it has paralyzed him. He lets himself be bound and taken away without resistance.
But the report flies about the Fair that big Mons has killed Captain Lennart. They say that he who had been the people’s friend died to save the women and defenceless children.
And a silence falls on the great square, where life had lately roared at fever pitch: trade ceases, the fighting stops, the people leave their dinners.
Their friend is dead. The silent throngs stream towards the place where he has fallen. He lies stretched out on the ground quite unconscious; no wound is visible, but his skull seems to be flattened.
Some of the men lift him carefully up on to the counter which the giant has let fall. They think they perceive that he still lives.
“Where shall we carry him?” they ask one another.
“Home,” answers a harsh voice in the crowd.
Yes, good men, carry him home! Lift him up on your shoulders and carry him home! He has been God’s plaything, he has been driven like a feather before his breath. Carry him home!
That wounded head has rested on the hard barrack-bed in the prison, on sheaves of straw in the barn. Let it now come home and rest on a soft pillow! He has suffered undeserved shame and torment, he has been hunted from his own door. He has been a wandering fugitive, following the paths of God where he could find them; but his promised land was that home whose gates God had closed to him. Perhaps his house stands open for one who has died to save women and children.
Now he does not come as a malefactor, escorted by reeling boon-companions; he is followed by a sorrowing people, in whose cottages he has lived while he helped their sufferings. Carry him home!
And so they do. Six men lift the board on which he lies on their shoulders and carry him away from the fair-grounds. Wherever they pass, the people move to one side and stand quiet; the men uncover their heads, the women courtesy as they do in church when God’s name is spoken. Many weep and dry their eyes; others begin to tell what a man he had been,—so kind, so gay, so full of counsel and so religious. It is wonderful to see, too, how, as soon as one of his bearers gives out, another quietly comes and puts his shoulder under the board.
So Captain Lennart comes by the place where the pensioners are standing.
“I must go and see that he comes home safely,” says Beerencreutz, and leaves his place at the roadside to follow the procession to HelgesÄter. Many follow his example.
The fair-grounds are deserted. Everybody has to follow to see that Captain Lennart comes home.
When the procession reaches HelgesÄter, the house is silent and deserted. Again the colonel’s fist beats on the closed door. All the servants are at the Fair; the captain’s wife is alone at home. It is she again who opens the door.
And she asks, as she asked once before,—
“What do you want?”
Whereupon the colonel answers, as he answered once before,—
“We are here with your husband.”
She looks at him, where he stands stiff and calm as usual. She looks at the bearers behind him, who are weeping, and at all that mass of people. She stands there on the steps and looks into hundreds of weeping eyes, who stare sadly up at her. Last she looks at her husband, who lies stretched out on the bier, and she presses her hand to her heart. “That is his right face,” she murmurs.
Without asking more, she bends down, draws back a bolt, opens the hall-doors wide, and then goes before the others into the bedroom.
The colonel helps her to drag out the big bed and shake up the pillows, and so Captain Lennart is once more laid on soft down and white linen.
“Is he alive?” she asks.
“Yes,” answers the colonel.
“Is there any hope?”
“No. Nothing can be done.”
There was silence for a while; then a sudden thought comes over her.
“Are they weeping for his sake, all those people?”
“Yes.”
“What has he done?”
“The last thing he did was to let big Mons kill him to save women and children from death.”
Again she sits silent for a while and thinks.
“What kind of a face did he have, colonel, when he came home two months ago?”
The colonel started. Now he understands; now at last he understands.
“GÖsta had painted him.”
“So it was on account of one of your pranks that I shut him out from his home? How will you answer for that, colonel?”
Beerencreutz shrugged his broad shoulders.
“I have much to answer for.”
“But I think that this must be the worst thing you have done.”
“Nor have I ever gone a heavier way than that to-day up to HelgesÄter. Moreover, there are two others who are guilty in this matter.”
“Who?”
“Sintram is one, you yourself are the other. You are a hard woman. I know that many have tried to speak to you of your husband.”
“It is true,” she answers.
Then she begs him to tell her all about that evening at Broby.
He tells her all he can remember, and she listens silently. Captain Lennart lies still unconscious on the bed. The room is full of weeping people; no one thinks of shutting out that mourning crowd. All the doors stand open, the stairs and the halls are filled with silent, grieving people; far out in the yard they stand in close masses.
When the colonel has finished, she raises her voice and says,—
“If there are any pensioners here, I ask them to go. It is hard for me to see them when I am sitting by my husband’s death-bed.”
Without another word the colonel rises and goes out. So do GÖsta Berling and several of the other pensioners who had followed Captain Lennart. The people move aside for the little group of humiliated men.
When they are gone the captain’s wife says: “Will some of them who have seen my husband during this time tell me where he has lived, and what he has done?” Then they begin to give testimony of Captain Lennart to his wife, who has misjudged him and sternly hardened her heart against him.
It lasted a long time before they all were done. All through the twilight and the evening they stand and speak; one after another steps forward and tells of him to his wife, who would not hear his name mentioned.
Some tell how he found them on a sick-bed and cured them. There are wild brawlers whom he has tamed. There are mourners whom he has cheered, drunkards whom he had led to sobriety. Every one who had been in unbearable distress had sent a message to God’s wayfarer, and he had helped them, or at least he had waked hope and faith.
Out in the yard the crowd stands and waits. They know what is going on inside: that which is said aloud by the death-bed is whispered from man to man outside. He who has something to say pushes gently forward. “Here is one who can bear witness,” they say, and let him pass. And they step forward out of the darkness, give their testimony, and disappear again into the darkness.
“What does she say now?” those standing outside ask when some one comes out. “What does she say?”
“She shines like a queen. She smiles like a bride. She has moved his arm-chair up to the bed and laid on it the clothes which she herself had woven for him.”
But then a silence falls on the people. No one says it, all know it at the same time: “He is dying.”
Captain Lennart opens his eyes and sees everything.
He sees his home, the people, his wife, his children, the clothes; and he smiles. But he has only waked to die. He draws a rattling breath and gives up the ghost.
Then the stories cease, but a voice takes up a death-hymn. All join in, and, borne on hundreds of strong voices, the song rises on high.
It is earth’s farewell greeting to the departing soul.
CHAPTER XXII
THE FOREST COTTAGE
It was many years before the pensioners’ reign at Ekeby.
The shepherd’s boy and girl played together in the wood, built houses with flat stones, and picked cloud-berries. They were both born in the wood. The wood was their home and mansion. They lived in peace with everything there.
The children looked upon the lynx and the fox as their watch-dogs, the weasel was their cat, hares and squirrels their cattle, owls and grouse sat in their bird-cage, the pines were their servants, and the young birch-trees guests at their feasts. They knew the hole where the viper lay curled up in his winter rest; and when they had bathed they had seen the water-snake come swimming through the clear water; but they feared neither snake nor wild creature; they belonged to the wood and it was their home. There nothing could frighten them.
Deep in the wood lay the cottage where the boy lived. A hilly wood-path led to it; mountains closed it in and shut out the sun; a bottomless swamp lay near by and gave out the whole year round an icy mist. Such a dwelling seemed far from attractive to the people on the plain.
The shepherd’s boy and girl were some day to be married, live there in the forest cottage, and support themselves by the work of their hands. But before they were married, war passed over the land, and the boy enlisted. He came home again without wound or injured limb; but he had been changed for life by the campaign. He had seen too much of the world’s wickedness and man’s cruel activity against man. He could no longer see the good.
At first no one saw any change in him. With the love of his childhood he went to the clergyman and had the banns published. The forest cottage above Ekeby was their home, as they had planned long before; but it was not a happy home.
The wife looked at her husband as at a stranger. Since he had come from the wars, she could not recognize him. His laugh was hard, and he spoke but little. She was afraid of him.
He did no harm, and worked hard. Still he was not liked, for he thought evil of everybody. He felt himself like a hated stranger. Now the forest animals were his enemies. The mountain, which shut out the sun, and the swamp, which sent up the mist, were his foes. The forest is a terrible place for one who has evil thoughts.
He who will live in the wilderness should have bright memories. Otherwise he sees only murder and oppression among plants and animals, just as he had seen it before among men. He expects evil from everything he meets.
The soldier, Jan HÖk, could not explain what was the matter with him; but he felt that nothing went well with him. There was little peace in his home. His sons who grew up there were strong, but wild. They were hardy and brave men, but they too lived at enmity with all men.
His wife was tempted by her sorrow to seek out the secrets of the wilderness. In swamp and thicket she gathered healing herbs. She could cure sickness, and give advice to those who were crossed in love. She won fame as a witch, and was shunned, although she did much good.
One day the wife tried to speak to her husband of his trouble.
“Ever since you went to the war,” she said, “you have been so changed. What did they do to you there?”
Then he rose up, and was ready to strike her; and so it was every time she spoke of the war, he became mad with rage. From no one could he bear to hear the word war, and it soon became known. So people were careful of that subject.
But none of his brothers in arms could say that he had done more harm than others. He had fought like a good soldier. It was only all the dreadful things he had seen which had frightened him so that since then he saw nothing but evil. All his trouble came from the war. He thought that all nature hated him, because he had had a share in such things. They who knew more could console themselves that they had fought for fatherland and honor. What did he know of such things? He only felt that everything hated him because he had shed blood and done much injury.
When the major’s wife was driven from Ekeby, he lived alone in his cottage. His wife was dead and his sons away. During the fairs his house was always full of guests. Black-haired, swarthy gypsies put up there. They like those best whom others avoid. Small, long-haired horses climbed up the wood path, dragging carts loaded with children and bundles of rags. Women, prematurely old, with features swollen by smoking and drinking, and men with pale, sharp faces and sinewy bodies followed the carts. When the gypsies came to the forest cottage, there was a merry life there. Brandy and cards and loud talking followed with them. They had much to tell of thefts and horse-dealing and bloody fights.
The Broby Fair began on a Friday, and then Captain Lennart was killed. Big Mons, who gave the death-blow, was son to the old man in the forest cottage. When the gypsies on Sunday afternoon sat together there, they handed old Jan HÖk the brandy bottle oftener than usual, and talked to him of prison life and prison fare and trials; for they had often tried such things.
The old man sat on the chopping-block in the corner and said little. His big lack-lustre eyes stared at the crowd which filled the room. It was dusk, but the wood-fire lighted the room.
The door was softly opened and two women entered. It was the young Countess Elizabeth followed by the daughter of the Broby clergyman. Lovely and glowing, she came into the circle of light. She told them that GÖsta Berling had not been seen at Ekeby since Captain Lennart died. She and her servant had searched for him in the wood the whole afternoon. Now she saw that there were men here who had much wandered, and knew all the paths. Had they seen him? She had come in to rest, and to ask if they had seen him.
It was a useless question. None of them had seen him.
They gave her a chair. She sank down on it, and sat silent for a while. There was no sound in the room. All looked at her and wondered at her. At last she grew frightened at the silence, started, and tried to speak of indifferent things. She turned to the old man in the corner, “I think I have heard that you have been a soldier,” she said. “Tell me something of the war!”
The silence grew still deeper. The old man sat as if he had not heard.
“It would be very interesting to hear about the war from some one who had been there himself,” continued the countess; but she stopped short, for the Broby clergyman’s daughter shook her head at her. She must have said something forbidden. Everybody was looking at her as if she had offended against the simplest rule of propriety. Suddenly a gypsy woman raised her sharp voice and asked: “Are you not she who has been countess at Borg?”
“Yes, I am.”
“That was another thing than running about the wood after a mad priest.”
The countess rose and said farewell. She was quite rested. The woman who had spoken followed her out through the door.
“You understand, countess,” she said, “I had to say something; for it does not do to speak to the old man of war. He can’t bear to hear the word. I meant well.”
Countess Elizabeth hurried away, but she soon stopped. She saw the threatening wood, the dark mountain, and the reeking swamp. It must be terrible to live here for one whose soul is filled with evil memories. She felt compassion for the old man who had sat there with the dark gypsies for company.
“Anna Lisa,” she said, “let us turn back! They were kind to us, but I behaved badly. I want to talk to the old man about pleasanter things.”
And happy to have found some one to comfort, she went back to the cottage.
“I think,” she said, “that GÖsta Berling is wandering here in the wood, and means to take his own life. It is therefore important that he be soon found and prevented. I and my maid, Anna Lisa, thought we saw him sometimes, but then he disappeared. He keeps to that part of the mountain where the broom-girl was killed. I happened to think that I do not need to go way down to Ekeby to get help. Here sit many active men who easily could catch him.”
“Go along, boys!” cried the gypsy woman. “When the countess does not hold herself too good to ask a service of the forest people, you must go at once.”
The men rose immediately and went out to search.
Old Jan HÖk sat still and stared before him with lustreless eyes. Terrifyingly gloomy and hard, he sat there. The young woman could think of nothing to say to him. Then she saw that a child lay sick on a sheaf of straw, and noticed that a woman had hurt her hand. Instantly she began to care for the sick. She was soon friends with the gossiping women, and had them show her the smallest children.
In an hour the men came back. They carried GÖsta Berling bound into the room. They laid him down on the floor before the fire. His clothes were torn and dirty, his cheeks sunken, and his eyes wild. Terrible had been his ways during those days; he had lain on the damp ground; he had burrowed with his hands and face in bogs, dragged himself over rocks, forced his way through the thickest underbrush. Of his own will he had never come with the men; but they had overpowered and bound him.
When his wife saw him so, she was angry. She did not free his bound limbs; she let him lie where he was on the floor. With scorn she turned from him.
“How you look!” she said.
“I had never meant to come again before your eyes,” he answered.
“Am I not your wife? Is it not my right to expect you to come to me with your troubles? In bitter sorrow I have waited for you these two days.”
“I was the cause of Captain Lennart’s misfortunes. How could I dare to show myself to you?”
“You are not often afraid, GÖsta.”
“The only service I can do you, Elizabeth, is to rid you of myself.”
Unspeakable contempt flashed from under her frowning brows at him.
“You wish to make me a suicide’s wife!”
His face was distorted.
“Elizabeth, let us go out into the silent forest and talk.”
“Why should not these people hear us?” she cried, speaking in a shrill voice. “Are we better than any of them? Has any one of them caused more sorrow and injury than we? They are the children of the forest, and of the highway; they are hated by every man. Let them hear how sin and sorrow also follows the lord of Ekeby, the beloved of all, GÖsta Berling! Do you think your wife considers herself better than any one of them—or do you?”
He raised himself with difficulty onto his elbow, and looked at her with sudden defiance. “I am not such a wretch as you think.”
Then she heard the story of those two days. The first day GÖsta wandered about in the wood, driven by remorse. He could not bear to meet any one’s eye. But he did not think of dying. He meant to journey to far distant lands. On Sunday, however, he came down from the hills and went to the Bro church. Once more he wished to see the people: the poor, hungry people whom he had dreamed of serving when he had sat by the Broby clergyman’s pile of shame, and whom he had learned to love when he saw them disappear into the night with the dead broom-girl.
The service had begun when he came to the church. He crept up to the gallery, and looked down on the people. He had felt bitter agony. He had wanted to speak to them, to comfort them in their poverty and hopelessness. If he had only been allowed to speak in God’s house, hopeless as he was, he would have found words of hope and salvation for them all.
Then he left the church, went into the sacristy, and wrote the message which his wife already knew. He had promised that work should be renewed at Ekeby, and grain distributed to those in greatest need. He had hoped that his wife and the pensioners would fulfil his promises when he was gone.
As he came out, he saw a coffin standing before the parish-hall. It was plain, put together in haste, but covered with black crape and wreaths. He knew that it was Captain Lennart’s. The people had begged the captain’s wife to hasten the funeral, so that all those who had come to the Fair could be at the burial.
He was standing and looking at the coffin, when a heavy hand was laid on his shoulder. Sintram had come up to him.
“GÖsta,” he said, “if you want to play a regular trick on a person, lie down and die. There is nothing more clever than to die, nothing which so deceives an honest man who suspects no harm. Lie you down and die, I tell you!”
GÖsta listened with horror to what he said. Sintram complained of the failure of well-laid plans. He had wanted to see a waste about the shores of the LÖfven. He had made the pensioners lords of the place; he had let the Broby clergyman impoverish the people; he had called forth the drought and the famine. At the Broby Fair the decisive blow was to have fallen. Excited by their misfortunes, the people should have turned to murder and robbery. Then there should have been lawsuits to beggar them. Famine, riot, and every kind of misfortune should have ravaged them. Finally, the country would have become so odious and detestable that no one could have lived there, and it would all have been Sintram’s doing. It would have been his joy and pride, for he was evil-minded. He loved desert wastes and uncultivated fields. But this man who had known how to die at the right moment had spoiled it all for him.
Then GÖsta asked him what would have been the good of it all.
“It would have pleased me, GÖsta, for I am bad. I am the grizzly bear on the mountain; I am the snow-storm on the plain; I like to kill and to persecute. Away, I say, with people and their works! I don’t like them. I can let them slip from between my claws and cut their capers,—that is amusing too for a while; but now I am tired of play, GÖsta, now I want to strike, now I want to kill and to destroy.”
He was mad, quite mad. He began a long time ago as a joke with those devilish tricks, and now his maliciousness had taken the upper hand; now he thought he really was a spirit from the lower regions. He had fed and fostered the evil in him until it had taken possession of his soul. For wickedness can drive people mad, as well as love and brooding.
He was furious, and in his anger he began to tear the wreaths from off the coffin; but then GÖsta Berling cried: “Let the coffin be!”
“Well, well, well, so I shall not touch it! Yes; I shall throw my friend Lennart out on the ground and trample on his wreaths. Do you not see what he has done to me? Do you not see in what a fine gray coach I am riding?”
And GÖsta then saw that a couple of prison-vans with the sheriff and constables of the district stood and waited outside the churchyard wall.
“I ought to send Captain Lennart’s wife thanks that she yesterday sat herself down to read through old papers in order to find proof against me in that matter of the powder, you know? Shall I not let her know that she would have done better to occupy herself with brewing and baking, than in sending the sheriff and his men after me? Shall I have nothing for the tears I have wept to induce Scharling to let me come here and read a prayer by my good friend’s coffin?”
And he began again to drag on the crape.
Then GÖsta Berling came close up to him and seized his arms.
“I will give anything to make you let the coffin alone,” he said.
“Do what you like,” said the madman. “Call if you like. I can always do something before the sheriff gets here. Fight with me, if you like. That will be a pleasing sight here by the church. Let us fight among the wreaths and palls.”
“I will buy rest for the dead at any price. Take my life, take everything!”
“You promise much.”
“You can prove it.”
“Well, then, kill yourself!”
“I will do it; but first the coffin shall be safely under earth.”
And so it was. Sintram took GÖsta’s oath that he would not be alive twelve hours after Captain Lennart was buried. “Then I know that you can never be good for anything,” he said.
It was easy for GÖsta Berling to promise. He was glad to be able to give his wife her liberty. Remorse had made him long for death. The only thing which troubled him was, that he had promised the major’s wife not to die as long as the Broby clergyman’s daughter was a servant at Ekeby. But Sintram said that she could no longer be considered as servant, since she had inherited her father’s fortune. GÖsta objected that the Broby clergyman had hidden his treasures so well that no one had been able to find them. Then Sintram laughed and said that they were hidden up among the pigeons’ nests in the church tower. Thereupon he went away. And GÖsta went back to the wood again. It seemed best to him to die at the place where the broom-girl had been killed. He had wandered there the whole afternoon. He had seen his wife in the wood; and then he had not had the strength to kill himself.
All this he told his wife, while he lay bound on the floor of the cottage.
“Oh,” she said sadly, when he had finished, “how familiar it all is! Always ready to thrust your hands into the fire, GÖsta, always ready to throw yourself away! How noble such things seemed to me once! How I now value calmness and good sense! What good did you do the dead by such a promise? What did it matter if Sintram had overturned the coffin and torn off the crape? It would have been picked up again; there would have been found new crape, new wreaths. If you had laid your hand on that good man’s coffin, there before Sintram’s eyes, and sworn to live to help those poor people whom he wished to ruin, that I should have commended. If you had thought, when you saw the people in the church: ‘I will help them; I will make use of all my strength to help them,’ and not laid that burden on your weak wife, and on old men with failing strength, I should also have commended that.”
GÖsta Berling lay silent for a while.
“We pensioners are not free men,” he said at last. “We have promised one another to live for pleasure, and only for pleasure. Woe to us all if one breaks his word!”
“Woe to you,” said the countess, indignantly, “if you shall be the most cowardly of the pensioners, and slower to improve than any of them. Yesterday afternoon the whole eleven sat in the pensioners’ wing, and they were very sad. You were gone; Captain Lennart was gone. The glory and honor of Ekeby were gone. They left the toddy tray untouched; they would not let me see them. Then the maid, Anna Lisa, who stands here, went up to them. You know she is an energetic little woman who for years has struggled despairingly against neglect and waste.
“‘To-day I have again been at home and looked for father’s money,’ she said to the pensioners; ‘but I have not found anything. All the debts are paid, and the drawers and closets are empty.’
“‘We are sorry for you, Anna Lisa,’ said Beerencreutz.
“‘When the major’s wife left Ekeby,’ continued Anna Lisa, ‘she told me to see after her house. And if I had found father’s money, I would have built up Ekeby. But as I did not find anything else to take away with me, I took father’s shame heap; for great shame awaits me when my mistress comes again and asks me what I have done with Ekeby.’
“‘Don’t take so much to heart what is not your fault, Anna Lisa,’ said Beerencreutz again.
“‘But I did not take the shame heap for myself alone,’ said Anna Lisa. ‘I took it also for your reckoning, good gentlemen. Father is not the only one who has been the cause of shame and injury in this world.’
“And she went from one to the other of them, and laid down some of the dry sticks before each. Some of them swore, but most of them let her go on. At last Beerencreutz said, calmly:—
“‘It is well. We thank you. You may go now.’ When she had gone, he struck the table with his clenched hand till the glasses rang.
“‘From this hour,’ he said, ‘absolutely sober. Brandy shall never again cause me such shame.’ Thereupon he rose and went out.
“They followed him by degrees, all the others. Do you know where they went, GÖsta? Well, down to the river, to the point where the mill and the forge had stood, and there they began to work. They began to drag away the logs and stones and clear the place. The old men have had a hard time. Many of them have had sorrow. Now they can no longer bear the disgrace of having ruined Ekeby. I know too well that you pensioners are ashamed to work; but now the others have taken that shame on them. Moreover, GÖsta, they mean to send Anna Lisa up to the major’s wife to bring her home. But you, what are you doing?”
He found still an answer to give her.
“What do you want of me, of a dismissed priest? Cast off by men, hateful to God?”
“I too have been in the Bro church to-day, GÖsta. I have a message to you from two women. ‘Tell GÖsta,’ said Marianne Sinclair, ‘that a woman does not like to be ashamed of him she has loved.’ ‘Tell GÖsta,’ said Anna StjÄrnhÖk, ‘that all is now well with me. I manage my own estates. I do not think of love, only of work. At Berga too they have conquered the first bitterness of their sorrow. But we all grieve for GÖsta. We believe in him and pray for him; but when, when will he be a man?’
“Do you hear? Are you cast off by men?” continued the countess. “Your misfortune is that you have been met with too much love. Women and men have loved you. If you only jested and laughed, if you only sang and played, they have forgiven you everything. Whatever it has pleased you to do has seemed right to them. And you dare to call yourself an outcast! Or are you hateful to God? Why did you not stay and see Captain Lennart’s burial?
“As he had died on a Fair day, his fame had gone far and wide. After the service, thousands of people came up to the church. The funeral procession was formed by the town hall. They were only waiting for the old dean. He was ill and had not preached; but he had promised to come to Captain Lennart’s funeral. And at last he came, with head sunk on his breast, and dreaming his dreams, as he is wont to do now in his old age, and placed himself at the head of the procession. He noticed nothing unusual. He walked on the familiar path and did not look up. He read the prayers, and threw the earth on the coffin, and still noticed nothing. But then the sexton began a hymn. Hundreds and hundreds of voices joined in. Men, women, and children sang. Then the dean awoke from his dreams. He passed his hand over his eyes and stepped up on the mound of earth to look. Never had he seen such a crowd of mourners. All were singing; all had tears in their eyes,—all were mourning.
“Then the old dean began to tremble. What should he say to these people? He must say a word to comfort them.
“When the song ceased, he stretched out his arms over the people.
“‘I see that you are mourning,’ he said; ‘and sorrow is heavier to bear for one who has long to live than for me who will soon be gone.’
“He stopped dismayed. His voice was too weak, and words failed him.
“But he soon began again. His voice had regained its youthful strength, and his eyes glowed.
“First, he told all he knew of God’s wayfarer. Then he reminded us that no outward polish nor great ability had made that man so honored as he now was, but only that he had always followed God’s ways. And now he asked us to do the same. Each should love the other, and help him. Each should think well of the other. And he explained everything which had happened this year. He said it was a preparation for the time of love and happiness which now was to be expected.
“And we all felt as if we had heard a prophet speak. All wished to love one another; all wished to be good.
“He lifted his eyes and hands and proclaimed peace in the neighborhood. Then he called on a helper for the people. ‘Some one will come,’ he said. ‘It is not God’s will that you shall perish. God will find some one who will feed the hungry and lead you in His ways.’
“Then we all thought of you, GÖsta. We knew that the dean spoke of you. The people who had heard your message went home talking of you. And you wandered here in the wood and wanted to die! The people are waiting for you, GÖsta. In all the cottages they are sitting and saying that, as the mad priest at Ekeby is going to help them, all will be well. You are their hero, GÖsta.
“Yes, GÖsta, it is certain that the old man meant you, and that ought to make you want to live. But I, GÖsta, who am your wife, I say to you that you shall go and do your duty. You shall not dream of being sent by God,—any one can be that. You shall work without any heroics; you shall not shine and astonish; you shall so manage that your name is not too often heard on the people’s lips. But think well before you take back your promise to Sintram. You have now got a certain right to die, and life ought not to offer you many attractions. There was a time when my wish was to go home to Italy, GÖsta. It seemed too much happiness for me, a sinner, to be your wife, and be with you through life. But now I shall stay. If you dare to live, I shall stop; but do not await any joy from that. I shall force you to follow the weary path of duty. You need never expect words of joy or hope from me. Can a heart which has suffered like mine love again? Tearless and joyless I shall walk beside you. Think well, GÖsta, before you choose to live. We shall go the way of penance.”
She did not wait for his answer. She nodded to Anna Lisa and went. When she came out into the wood, she began to weep bitterly, and wept until she reached Ekeby. Arrived there, she remembered that she had forgotten to talk of gladder things than war to Jan HÖk, the soldier.
In the cottage there was silence when she was gone.
“Glory and honor be to the Lord God!” said the old soldier, suddenly.
They looked at him. He had risen and was looking eagerly about him.
“Wicked, wicked has everything been,” he said. “Everything I have seen since I got my eyes opened has been wicked. Bad men, bad women! Hate and anger in forest and plain! But she is good. A good woman has stood in my house. When I am sitting here alone, I shall remember her. She shall be with me in the wood.”
He bent down over GÖsta, untied his fetters, and lifted him up. Then he solemnly took his hand.
“Hateful to God,” he said and nodded. “That is just it. But now you are not any more; nor I either, since she has been in my house. She is good.”
The next day old Jan HÖk came to the bailiff Scharling. “I will carry my cross,” he said. “I have been a bad man, therefore I have had bad sons.” And he asked to be allowed to go to prison instead of his son; but that could not be.
The best of old stories is the one which tells of how he followed his son, walking beside the prison van; how he slept outside his cell; how he did not forsake him until he had suffered his punishment.
CHAPTER XXIII
MARGARETA CELSING
A few days before Christmas the major’s wife started on her journey down to the LÖfsjÖ district; but it was not till Christmas Eve that she came to Ekeby. During the whole journey she was ill. Yet, in spite of cold and fever, people had never seen her in better spirits nor heard her speak more friendly words.
The Broby clergyman’s daughter, who had been with her in the Älfdal forests ever since October, sat by her side in the sledge and wished to hasten the journey; but she could not prevent the old woman from stopping the horses and calling every wayfarer up to her to ask for news.
“How is it with you all here in LÖfsjÖ?” she asked.
“All is well,” was the answer. “Better times are coming. The mad priest there at Ekeby and his wife help us all.”
“A good time has come,” answered another. “Sintram is gone. The Ekeby pensioners are working. The Broby clergyman’s money is found in the Bro church-tower. There is so much that the glory and power of Ekeby can be restored with it. There is enough too to get bread for the hungry.”
“Our old dean has waked to new life and strength,” said a third. “Every Sunday he speaks to us of the coming of the Kingdom of God.”
And the major’s wife drove slowly on, asking every one she met: “How is it here? Do you not suffer from want here?”
And the fever and the stabbing pain in her breast were assuaged, when they answered her: “There are two good and rich women here, Marianne Sinclair and Anna StjÄrnhÖk. They help GÖsta Berling to go from house to house and see that no one is starving. And no more brandy is made now.”
It was as if the major’s wife had sat in the sledge and listened to a long divine service. She had come to a blessed land. She saw old, furrowed faces brighten, when they spoke of the time which had come. The sick forgot their pains to tell of the day of joy.
“We all want to be like the good Captain Lennart,” they said. “We all want to be good. We want to believe good of every one. We will not injure any one. It shall hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom.”
She found them all filled with the same spirit. On the larger estates free dinners were given to those who were in greatest need. All who had work to be done had it done now.
She had never felt in better health than when she sat there and let the cold air stream into her aching breast. She could not drive by a single house without stopping and asking.
“Everything is well,” they all said. “There was great distress, but the good gentlemen from Ekeby help us. You will be surprised at everything which has been done there. The mill is almost ready, and the smithy is at work, and the burned-down house ready for the roof.”
Ah, it would only last a short time! But still it was good to return to a land where they all helped one another and all wished to do good. The major’s wife felt that she could now forgive the pensioners, and she thanked God for it.
“Anna Lisa,” she said, “I feel as if I had already come into the heaven of the blessed.”
When she at last reached Ekeby, and the pensioners hurried to help her out of the sledge, they could hardly recognize her, for she was as kind and gentle as their own young countess. The older ones, who had seen her as a young girl, whispered to one another: “It is not the major’s wife at Ekeby; it is Margareta Celsing who has come back.”
Great was the pensioners’ joy to see her come so kind and so free from all thoughts of revenge; but it was soon changed to grief when they found how ill she was. She had to be carried immediately into the guest-room in the wing, and put to bed. But on the threshold she turned and spoke to them.
“It has been God’s storm,” she said,—“God’s storm. I know now that it has all been for the best!”
Then the door to the sick-room closed, and they never saw her again.
There is so much to say to one who is dying. The words throng to the lips when one knows that in the next room lies one whose ears will soon be closed for always. “Ah, my friend, my friend,” one wants to say, “can you forgive? Can you believe that I have loved you in spite of everything! Ah, my friend, thanks for all the joy you have given me!”
That will one say and so much, much more.
But the major’s wife lay in a burning fever, and the voices of the pensioners could not reach her. Would she never know how they had worked, how they had taken up her work?
After a little while the pensioners went down to the smithy. There all work was stopped; but they threw new coal and new ore into the furnace, and made ready to smelt. They did not call the smith, who had gone home to celebrate Christmas, but worked themselves at the forge. If the major’s wife could only live until the hammer got going, it would tell her their story.
Evening came and then night, while they worked. Several of them thought, how strange it was that they should again celebrate the night before Christmas in the smithy.
KevenhÜller, who had been the architect of the mill and the smithy, and Christian Bergh stood by the forge and attended to the melting iron. GÖsta and Julius were the stokers. Some of the others sat on the anvil under the raised hammer, and others sat on coal-carts and piles of pig-iron. LÖwenborg was talking to Eberhard, the philosopher, who sat beside him on the anvil.
“Sintram dies to-night,” he said.
“Why just to-night?” asked Eberhard.
“You know that we made an agreement last year. Now we have done nothing which has been ungentlemanly, and therefore he has lost.”
“You who believe in such things know very well that we have done a great deal which has been ungentlemanly. First, we did not help the major’s wife; second, we began to work; third, it was not quite right that GÖsta Berling did not kill himself, when he had promised.”
“I have thought of that too,” answered LÖwenborg; “but my opinion is, that you do not rightly comprehend the matter. To act with the thought of our own mean advantage was forbidden us; but not to act as love or honor or our own salvation demanded. I think that Sintram has lost.”
“Perhaps you are right.”
“I tell you that I know it. I have heard his sleigh-bells the whole evening, but they are not real bells. We shall soon have him here.”
And the little old man sat and stared through the smithy door, which stood open, out at the bit of blue sky studded with stars which showed through it.
After a little while he started up.
“Do you see him?” he whispered. “There he comes creeping. Do you not see him in the doorway?”
“I see nothing,” replied Eberhard. “You are sleepy, that is the whole story.”
“I saw him so distinctly against the sky. He had on his long wolfskin coat and fur cap. Now he is over there in the dark, and I cannot see him. Look, now he is up by the furnace. He is standing close to Christian Bergh; but Christian seems not to see him. Now he is bending down and is throwing something into the fire. Oh, how wicked he looks! Take care, friends, take care!”
As he spoke, a tongue of flame burst out of the furnace, and covered the smiths and their assistants with cinders and sparks. No one, however, was injured.
“He wants to be revenged,” whispered LÖwenborg.
“You too are mad!” cried Eberhard. “You ought to have had enough of such things.”
“Do you not see how he is standing there by the prop and grinning at us? But, verily, I believe that he has unfastened the hammer.”
He started up and dragged Eberhard with him. The second after the hammer fell thundering down onto the anvil. It was only a clamp which had given way; but Eberhard and LÖwenborg had narrowly escaped death.
“You see that he has no power over us,” said LÖwenborg, triumphantly. “But it is plain that he wants to be revenged.”
And he called GÖsta Berling to him.
“Go up to the women, GÖsta. Perhaps he will show himself to them too. They are not so used as I to seeing such things. They may be frightened. And take care of yourself, GÖsta, for he has a special grudge against you, and perhaps he has power over you on account of that promise.”
Afterwards they heard that LÖwenborg had been right, and that Sintram had died that night. Some said that he had hanged himself in his cell. Others believed that the servants of justice secretly had him killed, for the trial seemed to be going well for him, and it would never do to let him out again among the people in LÖfsjÖ. Still others thought that a dark visitor had driven up in a black carriage, drawn by black horses, and had taken him out of prison. And LÖwenborg was not the only one who saw him that night. He was also seen at Fors and in Ulrika Dillner’s dreams. Many told how he had shown himself to them, until Ulrika Dillner moved his body to the Bro churchyard. She also had the evil servants sent away from Fors and introduced there good order. After that it was no longer haunted.
It is said that before GÖsta Berling reached the house, a stranger had come to the wing and had left a letter for the major’s wife. No one knew the messenger, but the letter was carried in and laid on the table beside the sick woman. Soon after she became unexpectedly better; the fever decreased, the pain abated, and she was able to read the letter.
The old people believe that her improvement depended on the influence of the powers of darkness. Sintram and his friends would profit by the reading of that letter.
It was a contract written in blood on black paper. The pensioners would have recognized it. It was composed on the last Christmas Eve in the smithy at Ekeby.
And the major’s wife lay there now and read that since she had been a witch, and had sent pensioners’ souls to hell, she was condemned to lose Ekeby. That and other similar absurdities she read. She examined the date and signatures, and found the following note beside GÖsta’s name: “Because the major’s wife has taken advantage of my weakness to tempt me away from honest work, and to keep me as pensioner at Ekeby, because she has made me Ebba Dohna’s murderer by betraying to her that I am a dismissed priest, I sign my name.”
The major’s wife slowly folded the paper and put it in its envelope. Then she lay still and thought over what she had learned. She understood with bitter pain that such was the people’s thought of her. She was a witch and a sorceress to all those whom she had served, to whom she had given work and bread. This was her reward. They could not believe anything better of an adulteress.
Her thoughts flew. Wild anger and a longing for revenge flamed up in her fever-burning brain. She had Anna Lisa, who with Countess Elizabeth tended her, send a message to Hogfors to the manager and overseer. She wished to make her will.
Again she lay thinking. Her eyebrows were drawn together, her features were terribly distorted by suffering.
“You are very ill,” said the countess, softly.
“Yes, more ill than ever before.”
There was silence again, but then the major’s wife spoke in a hard, harsh voice:—
“It is strange to think that you, too, countess, you whom every one loves, are an adulteress.”
The young woman started.
“Yes, if not in deed, yet in thoughts and desire, and that makes no difference. I who lie here feel that it makes no difference.”
“I know it!”
“And yet you are happy now. You may possess him you loved without sin. That black spectre does not stand between you when you meet. You may belong to one another before the world, love one another, go side by side through life.”
“Oh, madame, madame!”
“How can you dare to stay with him?” cried the old woman, with increasing violence. “Repent, repent in time! Go home to your father and mother, before they come and curse you. Do you dare to consider GÖsta Berling your husband? Leave him! I shall give him Ekeby. I shall give him power and glory. Do you dare to share that with him? Do you dare to accept happiness and honor? I did not dare to. Do you remember what happened to me? Do you remember the Christmas dinner at Ekeby? Do you remember the cell in the bailiff’s house?”
“Oh, madame, we sinners go here side by side without happiness. I am here to see that no joy shall find a home by our hearth. Do you think I do not long for my home? Oh, bitterly do I long for the protection and support of home; but I shall never again enjoy them. Here I shall live in fear and trembling, knowing that everything I do leads to sin and sorrow, knowing that if I help one, I ruin another. Too weak and foolish for the life here, and yet forced to live it, bound by an everlasting penance.”
“With such thoughts we deceive our hearts,” cried the major’s wife; “but it is weakness. You will not leave him, that is the only reason.”
Before the countess could answer, GÖsta Berling came into the room.
“Come here, GÖsta,” said the major’s wife instantly, and her voice grew still sharper and harder. “Come here, you whom everybody praises. You shall now hear what has happened to your old friend whom you allowed to wander about the country, despised and forsaken.
“I will first tell you what happened last spring, when I came home to my mother, for you ought to know the end of that story.
“In March I reached the iron-works in the Älfdal forest, GÖsta. Little better than a beggar I looked. They told me that my mother was in the dairy. So I went there, and stood for a long while silent at the door. There were long shelves round about the room, and on them stood shining copper pans filled with milk. And my mother, who was over ninety years old, took down pan after pan and skimmed off the cream. She was active enough, the old woman; but I saw well enough how hard it was for her to straighten up her back to reach the pans. I did not know if she had seen me; but after a while she spoke to me in a curious, shrill voice.
“‘So everything has happened to you as I wished,’ she said. I wanted to speak and to ask her to forgive me, but it was a waste of trouble. She did not hear a word of it,—she was stone-deaf. But after a while she spoke again: ‘You can come and help me,’ she said.
“Then I went in and skimmed the milk. I took the pans in order, and put everything in its place, and skimmed just deep enough, and she was pleased. She had never been able to trust any of the maids to skim the milk; but I knew of old how she liked to have it.
“‘Now you can take charge of this work,’ she said. And then I knew that she had forgiven me.
“And afterwards all at once it seemed as if she could not work any more. She sat in her arm-chair and slept almost all day. She died two weeks before Christmas. I should have liked to have come before, GÖsta, but I could not leave her.”
She stopped. She began to find breathing difficult; but she made an effort and went on:—
“It is true, GÖsta, that I wished to keep you near me at Ekeby. There is something about you which makes every one rejoice to be with you. If you had shown a wish to be a settled man, I would have given you much power. I always hoped that you would find a good wife. First, I thought that it would be Marianne Sinclair, for I saw that she loved you already, when you lived as wood-cutter in the wood. Then I thought that it would be Ebba Dohna, and one day I drove over to Borg and told her that if she would have you for husband, I would leave you Ekeby in my will. If I did wrong in that, you must forgive me.”
GÖsta was kneeling by the bed with his face hidden in the blankets, and was moaning bitterly.
“Tell me, GÖsta, how you mean to live? How shall you support your wife? Tell me that. You know that I have always wished you well.” And GÖsta answered her smiling, while his heart almost burst with pain.
“In the old days, when I tried to be a laborer here at Ekeby, you gave me a cottage to live in, and it is still mine. This autumn I have put it quite in order. LÖwenborg has helped me, and we have whitewashed the ceilings and hung the walls with paper and painted them. The inner little room LÖwenborg calls the countess’s boudoir, and he has gone through all the farm-houses round about for furniture, which has come there from manor-house auctions. He has bought them, so that there we have now high-backed arm-chairs and chests of drawers with shining mountings. But in the outer big room stands the young wife’s weaving-loom and my lathe. Household utensils and all kinds of things are there, and there LÖwenborg and I have already sat many evenings and talked of how the young countess and I will have it in the cottage. But my wife did not know it till now. We wanted to tell her when we should leave Ekeby.”
“Go on, GÖsta.”
“LÖwenborg was always saying that a maid was needed in the house. ‘In the summer it is lovely here in the birch grove,’ he used to say; ‘but in winter it will be too lonely for the young wife. You will have to have a maid, GÖsta.’
“And I agreed with him, but I did not know how I could afford to keep one. Then he came one day and carried down his music, and his table with the painted keyboard, and put it in the cottage. ‘It is you, LÖwenborg, who are going to be the maid,’ I said to him. He answered that he would be needed. Did I mean the young countess to cook the food, and to carry wood and water? No, I had not meant her to do anything at all, as long as I had a pair of arms to work with. But he still thought that it would be best if there were two of us, so that she might sit the whole day on her sofa and embroider. I could never know how much waiting upon such a little woman needed, he said.”
“Go on,” said the major’s wife. “It eases my pain. Did you think that your young countess would be willing to live in a cottage?”
He wondered at her scornful tone, but continued:
“No, I did not dare to think it; but it would have been so perfect if she had been willing. It is thirty miles from any doctor. She, who has a light hand and a tender heart, would have had work enough to tend wounds and allay fevers. And I thought that everybody in trouble would find the way to the lady mistress in the forest cottage. There is so much distress among the poor which kind words and a gentle heart can help.”
“But you yourself, GÖsta Berling?”
“I shall have my work at the carpenter’s bench and lathe. I shall hereafter live my own life. If my wife will not follow me, I cannot help it. If some one should offer me all the riches of the universe, it would not tempt me. I want to live my own life. Now I shall be and remain a poor man among the peasants, and help them with whatever I can. They need some one to play the polka for them at weddings and at Christmas; they need some one to write letters to their distant sons,—and that some one I will be. But I must be poor.”
“It will be a gloomy life for you, GÖsta.”
“Oh, no, it would not be if we were but two who kept together. The rich and happy would come to us as well as the poor. It would be gay enough in our cottage. Our guests would not care if the food was cooked right before their eyes, or be shocked that two must eat from the same plate.”
“And what would be the good of it all, GÖsta? What praise would you win?”
“Great would be my reward if the poor would remember me for a year or two after my death. I should have done some good if I had planted a couple of apple-trees at the house-corners, if I had taught the country fiddlers some of the old tunes, and if the shepherd children could have learnt a few good songs to sing in the wood-paths.
“You can believe me, I am the same mad GÖsta Berling that I was before. A country fiddler is all I can be, but that is enough. I have many sins to atone for. To weep and to repent is not for me. I shall give the poor pleasure, that is my penance.”
“GÖsta,” said the major’s wife, “it is too humble a life for a man with your powers. I will give you Ekeby.”
“Oh,” he cried in terror, “do not make me rich! Do not put such duties upon me! Do not part me from the poor!”
“I will give Ekeby to you and the pensioners,” repeated the major’s wife. “You are a capable man, GÖsta, whom the people bless. I say like my mother, ‘You shall take charge of this work!’”
“No, we could not accept it,—we who have misjudged you and caused you such pain!”
“I will give you Ekeby, do you hear?”
She spoke bitterly and harshly, without kindness. He was filled with dismay.
“Do not tempt the old men! It would only make them idlers and drunkards again. God in Heaven, rich pensioners! What would become of us!”
“I will give you Ekeby, GÖsta; but then you must promise to set your wife free. Such a delicate little woman is not for you. She has had to suffer too much here in the land of the bear. She is longing for her bright native country. You shall let her go. That is why I give you Ekeby.”
But then Countess Elizabeth came forward to the major’s wife and knelt by the bed.
“I do not long any more. He who is my husband has solved the problem, and found the life I can live. No longer shall I need to go stern and cold beside him, and remind him of repentance and atonement. Poverty and want and hard work will do that. The paths which lead to the poor and sick I can follow without sin. I am no longer afraid of the life here in the north. But do not make him rich; then I do not dare to stay.”
The major’s wife raised herself in the bed.
“You demand happiness for yourselves,” she cried, and threatened them with clenched fists,—“happiness and blessing. No, let Ekeby be the pensioners’, that they may be ruined. Let man and wife be parted, that they may be ruined! I am a witch, I am a sorceress, I shall incite you to evil-doing. I shall be what my reputation is.”
She seized the letter and flung it in GÖsta’s face. The black paper fluttered out and fell on the floor. GÖsta knew it too well.
“You have sinned against me, GÖsta. You have misjudged one who has been a second mother to you. Do you dare to refuse your punishment? You shall accept Ekeby, and it shall ruin you, for you are weak. You shall send home your wife, so that there will be no one to save you. You shall die with a name as hated as mine. Margareta Celsing’s obituary is that of a witch. Yours shall be that of a spendthrift and an oppressor of the poor.”
She sank back on the pillows, and all was still. Through the silence rang a muffled blow, now one and then another. The sledge-hammer had begun its far-echoing work.
“Listen,” said GÖsta Berling, “so sounds Margareta Celsing’s obituary! That is not a prank of drunken pensioners; that is the song of the victory of labor, raised in honor of a good, old worker. Do you hear what the hammer says? ‘Thanks,’ it says; ‘thanks for good work; thanks for bread, which you have given the poor; thanks for roads, which you have opened; thanks for districts, which you have cultivated! Thanks for pleasure, with which you have filled your halls!’—‘Thanks,’ it says, ‘and sleep in peace! Your work shall live and continue. Your house shall always be a home for happy labor.’—‘Thanks,’ it says, ‘and do not judge us who have sinned! You who are now starting on the journey to the regions of peace, think gentle thoughts of us who still live.’”
GÖsta ceased, but the sledge-hammer went on speaking. All the voices which had ever spoken kindly to the major’s wife were mingled with the ring of the hammer. Gradually her features relaxed, as if the shadow of death had fallen over her.
Anna Lisa came in and announced that the gentlemen from Hogfors had come. The major’s wife let them go. She would not make any will.
“Oh, GÖsta Berling, man of many deeds,” she said, “so you have conquered once more. Bend down and let me bless you!”
The fever returned with redoubled strength. The death-rattle began. The body toiled through dreary suffering; but the spirit soon knew nothing of it. It began to gaze into the heaven which is opened for the dying.
So an hour passed, and the short death-struggle was over. She lay there so peaceful and beautiful that those about her were deeply moved.
“My dear old mistress,” said GÖsta, “so have I seen you once before. Now has Margareta Celsing come back to life. Now she will never again yield to the major’s wife at Ekeby.”
When the pensioners came in from the forge, they were met by the news of Margareta Celsing’s death.
“Did she hear the hammer?” they asked.
She had done so, and they could be satisfied.
They heard, too, that she had meant to give Ekeby to them; but that the will had never been drawn. That they considered a great honor, and rejoiced over it as long as they lived. But no one ever heard them lament over the riches they had lost.
It is also said that on that Christmas night GÖsta Berling stood by his young wife’s side and made his last speech to the pensioners. He was grieved at their fate when they now must all leave Ekeby. The ailments of old age awaited them. The old and worn-out find a cold welcome.
And so he spoke to them. Once more he called them old gods and knights who had risen up to bring pleasure into the land of iron. But he lamented that the pleasure garden where the butterfly-winged pleasure roves is filled with destructive caterpillars, and that its fruits are withered.
Well he knew that pleasure was a good to the children of the earth, and it must exist. But, like a heavy riddle, the question always lay upon the world, how a man could be both gay and good. The easiest thing and yet the hardest, he called it. Hitherto they had not been able to solve the problem. Now he wanted to believe that they had learned it, that they had all learned it during that year of joy and sorrow, of happiness and despair.
You dear old people! In the old days you gave me precious gifts. But what have I given you?
Perhaps it may gladden you that your names sound again in connection with the dear old places? May all the brightness which belonged to your life fall again over the tracts where you have lived! Borg still stands; BjÖrne still stands; Ekeby still lies by lake LÖfven, surrounded by falls and lake, by park and smiling meadows; and when one stands on the broad terraces, legends swarm about one like the bees of summer.
But, speaking of bees, let me tell one more old story. The little Ruster, who went as a drummer at the head of the Swedish army, when in 1813 it marched into Germany, could never weary of telling stories of that wonderful land in the south. The people there were as tall as church towers, the swallows were as big as eagles, the bees as geese.
“Well, but the bee-hives?”
“The bee-hives were like our ordinary bee-hives.”
“How did the bees get in?”
“Well, that they had to look out for,” said the little Ruster.
Dear reader, must I say the same? The giant bees of fancy have now swarmed about us for a year and a day; but how they are going to come into the bee-hive of fact, that they really must find out for themselves.
THE END
