She argued her case so well that Count Henrik became furious. He wanted a divorce. He wanted to send his wife home to her father.
“No, my friend,” said Countess Märta, “that way she would only be completely consigned to what is wicked. She is spoiled and poorly brought up. But let me take care of her, let me return her to the path of duty!”
And the count called in his countess to tell her that she would now be under his mother’s command.
Oh, what a scene now ensued! A more pitiable scene has probably never been played out within this house dedicated to sorrow.
The young man let the young woman hear many angry words. He raised his hands to heaven and accused it because it had let his name be dragged in filth by a shameless woman. He shook his clenched fist before her face and asked her what punishment she thought great enough for a crime such as hers.
She was not at all afraid of the man. She still believed that she had acted rightly. She told him that she already had a dreadful cold, and that might be punishment enough.
“Elisabet,” says Countess Märta, “these are not joking matters.”
“The two of us,” answers the young woman, “have never been able to agree on the right moment for levity and seriousness.”
“But you still ought to realize, Elisabet, that no honorable woman leaves her home to wander around in the middle of the night with a known adventurer.”
Then Elisabet Dohna saw that her mother-in-law had decreed her destruction. She saw that she would have to fight to the utmost to avoid a terrible misfortune.
“Henrik,” she pleads, “do not let your mother set herself between us! Let me tell you what happened! You are just, you will not judge me unheard. Let me tell you everything, and you will see that I have only acted the way you have taught me.”
The count nodded a mute accord, and Countess Elisabet now told how she had driven Gösta Berling onto wicked pathways. She spoke of everything that had gone on in the little blue study, and how she had felt driven by her conscience to go and rescue the one she had wronged. “Of course I had no right to judge him,” she said, “and my husband himself has taught me that no sacrifice is too great if you want to make good a wrong. Is that not so, Henrik?”
The count turned to his mother.
“What do you say about that, Mother?” he asked. His little body was now completely rigid with dignity, and his high, narrow forehead was majestically furrowed.
“I say,” answered the countess, “I say that Anna Stjärnhök is a wise girl, and she knew what she was doing when she told this story to Elisabet.”
“Mother, you choose to misunderstand me,” said the count. “I am asking, Mother, what you think about this story. Has the Countess Märta Dohna attempted to convince her daughter, my sister, to marry a defrocked minister?”
Countess Märta was silent for a moment. Oh, that Henrik, so stupid, so stupid! Now of course he was pursuing the wrong tracks. Her hunting dog was pursuing the hunter herself and letting the rabbit run. But if Märta Dohna was speechless for a moment, it was not for longer than that.
“Dear friend!” she said with a shrug of her shoulders. “There is a reason for letting all these old stories about that unfortunate man rest, the same reason that I now ask you to suppress all public scandal. It is highly probable that he passed away last night.”
She spoke in a gentle, complaining tone, but there was not a word of truth in what she said.
“Elisabet has slept a long time today and therefore has not heard that people have already been sent out around the lake to inquire about Mr. Berling. He has not returned to Ekeby, and it is feared that he has drowned. The ice broke up this morning. See, the storm has split it into a thousand pieces.”
Countess Elisabet looked out. The lake was almost clear.
Then she felt sorry for herself. She wanted to escape God’s justice. She had lied and been a hypocrite. She had thrown the white mantle of innocence around herself.
The desperate woman fell to her knees before her husband, and the confession rushed out across her lips.
“Judge me, reject me! I have loved him. Do not doubt that I have loved him! I tear my hair, I rip my clothes in sorrow. I do not care about anything now, when he is dead. I do not care about protecting myself. You will find out the whole truth. I have taken the love of my heart from my husband and given it to a stranger. Oh, I am rejected, I am one of those whom forbidden love has enticed!”
You young, desperate woman, lie there at the feet of your judges, and tell them everything! Welcome, martyrdom! Welcome, ignominy, welcome! Oh, how will you be able to force the lightning bolts of heaven to flash down on your young head!
Tell your spouse how appalled you were when passion came over you, powerful and irresistible, how you shuddered at the wretchedness of your heart! You would sooner have encountered the churchyard ghosts than the demons in your own soul.
Tell them how you, banished from the face of God, felt yourself unworthy to walk the surface of the earth! In prayers and tears you have struggled. “Oh God, save me! Oh son of God, expeller of demons, save me!” you have prayed.
Tell them how you felt it best to conceal everything! No one should find out about your wretchedness. You believed that it was pleasing to God to act in that way. You also believed that you were on the path of God when you wanted to rescue the man you loved. He knew nothing about your love. He would not be lost for your sake. Did you know what was right? Did you know what was not right? God alone knew it, and he judged you. He broke the idol of your heart. He led you onto the great, healing way of penance.
Tell them that you know there is no salvation in concealment! The demons love the darkness. May your judges’ hands wrap themselves around the scourge! The punishment will fall like comforting balsam on the wounds of sin. Your heart longs for suffering.
Tell them all this, while you are on your knees on the floor, wringing your hands in violent sorrow, speaking in the wild tones of desperation, with shrill laughter welcoming the thought of punishment and dishonor, until your husband takes hold of you and jerks you up from the floor!
“Behave as befits a Countess Dohna, or I must ask my mother to punish you like a child!”
“Do with me as you wish!”
Then fell the count’s judgment.
“My mother has prayed for you. Therefore you may remain living here in my home. But from here on out it is she who commands, and you who obey.”
See the way of penance! The young countess has become the most insignificant of servants. For how long, oh, for how long?
How long is a proud heart able to submit? How long should impatient lips keep silent, how long an impatient hand be held back?
Sweet is the misery of degradation. While your back aches from heavy labor, the heart is quiet. To one who sleeps a few short hours on a hard bed of straw, sleep comes unbidden.
May the older woman be transformed into an evil spirit to be able to torment the young one sufficiently! She thanks her benefactress. The evil within her has not yet died. Rouse the sleep-deprived girl at four o’clock every morning! Set an unreasonable day’s labor on the unpracticed drill weaver! That is good. Perhaps the penitent does not have strength enough herself to swing the scourge with sufficient force.
When it is time for the big spring washing, Countess Märta lets her stand at the tub in the laundry room. She comes personally to look at her work. “The water is too cold in your tub,” she says and takes boiling water from a kettle and throws it over her bare arms.
Cold is the day when the washerwomen have to stand by the lake and rinse the clothes. Storm clouds rush forth and shower them with rain and sleet. The washerwomen’s skirts become dripping wet and heavy as lead. Working with the clothes beaters is hard. Blood spurts forth under her fine nails.
But Countess Elisabet does not complain. Praised be the goodness of God! Where does the penitent have her sweetness, except in suffering? The thorny knots of the scourge fall softly, as if they were
rose petals, on the penitent’s back.
The young woman soon finds out that Gösta Berling is alive. The old woman simply wanted to trick her into a confession. Yes, so what? See God’s path! See God’s guidance! Thus has he lured the sinful woman onto the path of reconciliation.
There is only one thing she is anxious about. How will it go for her mother-in-law, whose heart God has hardened for her sake? Oh, he will judge her with mercy. She must be evil in order to help the sinful woman win back God’s love.
She did not know how often a soul which has sampled all other sensual pleasures turns to seek its amusement in cruelty. When flattery and caresses and the whirl of the dance and the allure ment of play are lacking in the impatient, darkened soul, it dives down into its murky depths and brings up cruelty. In tormenting animals and people there is still a source of enjoyment for enervated emotions.
The old woman is not aware of any wrong. She only believes herself to be rebuking a loose-living wife. So sometimes she lies awake at night, brooding over new means of torment.
One evening she goes through the apartment and lets the countess light her way with a candle. This she carries in her hand without a candlestick.
“The candle is used up,” says the young woman.
“When the candle is done the candlestick should burn,” answers Countess Märta.
And they go further, until the smoldering wick goes out on the scorched hand.
But this is childishness. There are torments for the soul that surpass all the sufferings of the body. Countess Märta invites guests and lets the housewife herself wait on them at her own table.
See, this is the penitent’s great day. Outsiders will see her in her degradation. They will see that she is no longer worthy to sit at her husband’s table. Oh, with what scorn their cold glances will rest on her!
Worse, it is three times worse. Not a glance meets hers. Everyone at the table sits silent and dejected, men and women equally subdued.
But she gathers all this up like glowing coals to set on her head. Is her sin so terrible then? Is it shameful to be near her?
Then comes the temptation: see, Anna Stjärnhök, who has been her friend, and the sheriff of Munkerud, their neighbor at the table, take hold of her as she arrives, tear the meat platter from her, push over a chair, and will not let her flee.
“Sit there, child, sit there!” says the sheriff. “You have done no wrong.”
And with one voice all the dinner guests explain that if she does not remain sitting at the table, they must leave. They are not executioners’ helpers. They are not running Märta Dohna’s errands. They are not as easily duped as mutton-headed counts.
“Oh, you good gentlemen! Oh, beloved friends! Do not be so merciful! You force me to cry out my sin myself. There is someone whom I have held far too dear.”
“Child, you don’t know what sin is. You don’t understand how innocent you are. Of course Gösta Berling didn’t know that you liked him. Now take back your place in your home! You have done no wrong.”
They hold her courage up for a while and are themselves suddenly as merry as children. Laughter and joking resound around the table.
These passionate, easily moved people, they are so good, but nonetheless they are sent by the tempter. They want her to believe that she is a martyr, and openly mock Countess Märta as if she were a witch. But they do not understand the matter. They do not know how the soul longs for purity, how the penitent is forced by her heart to subject herself to the stones of the road and the fire of the sun.
Sometimes Countess Märta forces her to sit quietly for long days at the quilting frame, and then she tells her endless stories about Gösta Berling, this minister and adventurer. If her memory is not sufficient, she makes things up, just so his name will sound throughout the day in the young woman’s ear. It is this she fears the most. During such days she sees that her penance will never have an end. Her love will not die. She believes that she herself will die before it. Her physical strength is starting to fail her. She is often very sick.
“But where is your hero lingering?” the countess asks scornfully. “Day after day I have awaited him at the head of the cavaliers. Why doesn’t he storm Borg, set you up on the throne, and throw me and your husband tied up into the tower? Are you already forgotten?”
She would almost like to defend him and say that she herself has forbidden him to give her any aid. But no, best to keep silent, keep silent and suffer.
Day by day she is consumed more and more by the fire of over-excitation. She has a constant fever and is so weak that she can scarcely hold herself up. She only wants to die. The strong forces of life are suppressed. Love and happiness dare not make a move. No longer does she harbor any fear of suffering.
It is as if her husband no longer knows that she exists. He sits enclosed in his room all day and studies hard-to-read manuscripts and theses in old, blurred script.
He reads charters of nobility on parchment, on which hang the seal of the Svea realm, large and impressive, formed in red wax and preserved in a lathed wooden box. He inspects old armorial bearings with lilies on white fields and griffins in blue. He understands such things, and he interprets such things with ease. And he reads over and over again old funeral orations and biographies of the noble counts Dohna, in which their exploits are compared with the heroes of Israel and the gods of Hellas.
See, these old things have always made him happy. But he does not care to think about his young wife any longer.
Countess Märta has said one word, which has killed all the love inside him: “She took you for your money’s sake.” No man can bear to hear such a thing. It stifles all love. Now it was of no importance to him what happened to the young woman. If his mother brought her back to the path of duty, that was fine. Count Henrik had great admiration for his mother.
This misery went on for a month’s time. Yet this time was not as stormy and agitated as it might sound, when the events are compressed onto a few written pages. Countess Elisabet seems to have always been calm on the outside. Only once, when she found out that Gösta Berling might be dead, did she become overwhelmed by emotion. But so great was her anxiety over not being able to preserve her love for her husband that she would probably have allowed Countess Märta to torture her to death, if her old housekeeper had not spoken with her one evening.
“Countess, you should speak with the count,” she said. “Lord God, countess, you are such a child. Perhaps you don’t know what is going to happen, but I see well enough what’s going on.”
But it was just this that she could not say to her husband, while he harbored such a dark suspicion against her.
That night she got dressed silently and went out. She wore a common farm girl’s dress and had a bundle in her hand. She intended to run away from her home and never turn back.
She was not leaving to avoid torments and suffering. But now she believed that God had given her a sign, that she had leave to go, that she must preserve her bodily health and strength.
She did not head westward across the lake, for there lived the one of whom she was very fond. Neither did she go northward, for there lived many of her friends, and not toward the south, for far, far southward was her father’s home, and she did not want to take one step closer to it. But eastward she went, for there she knew that she had no home, no beloved friend, no familiar person, no help or consolation.
She did not walk with light steps, for she did not think she was reconciled with God. And yet she was happy that she would henceforth carry the burden of her sin among strangers. Their indifferent glances would rest on her, soothing as steel placed on a swollen limb.
She intended to wander until she found a poor cottage at the forest edge, where no one would know her. “You can see what has happened to me, and my parents have chased me away,” she would say. “Let me get food and a roof over my head, until I can earn my bread myself! I am not without money.”
Thus she went onward through the light June night,
for the month of May had passed during her difficult suffering. Oh, month of May, that lovely time when the birches blend their light greenery into the dark of the spruce forests, and when the south wind comes again far from the south, saturated with heat!
I must seem more ungrateful than others who have enjoyed your gifts, you beautiful month. Not a word have I used to show your beauty.
Oh May, you dear, light month, have you ever observed a child sitting in its mother’s lap, listening to stories? As long as the child hears tales of cruel giants and the bitter suffering of lovely princesses, it holds its head upright and its eyes open, but if the mother starts talking about happiness and sunshine, then it shuts its little eyes and falls asleep so quietly with its head on its mother’s breast.
See, you beautiful month, I am also such a child. May others listen to talk of flowers and sunshine, but for myself I choose dark nights, full of visions and adventures, for me the hard fates, for me the sorrow-filled passions of wild hearts.
CHAPTER17
IRON FROM EKEBY
It was spring, and iron from all the ironworks in Värmland was to be shipped to Gothenburg.
But at Ekeby they had no iron to ship. During the autumn there had been a periodic shortage of water; in the spring the cavaliers were in charge.
In their time strong, bitter beer foamed down the Björksjö falls’ broad granite stairway, and Löven’s long lake was not filled with water, but with liquor. In their time no pig iron was placed in the forge, but the smiths stood in shirts and wooden clogs before the hearths turning enormous steaks on long spits, while the smithy boys held fat capons over the coals with long tongs. In those days the dance proceeded over the hills of the ironworks. Then the planing bench was for sleeping on and the anvil was for playing cards. In those days no iron was being forged.
But spring came, and down at the trading office in Gothenburg they began to wait for iron from Ekeby. Contracts entered into with the major and the majoress, where deliveries of many hundredweights were mentioned, were examined.