The Story of Gösta Berling by Selma Lagerlöf (readnow txt) 📕

in the forest. Is it my duty to risk my life for her, because she has made me a pensioner at Ekeby? Do you think much credit goes with that profession?”

The young countess turns away from him without answering. She is angry.

She goes back to her place thinking bitter thoughts of the pensioners. They have come tonight with horns and fiddles, and mean to let the bows scrape the strings until the horsehair is worn through, without thinking that the merry tunes ring in the prisoner’s miserable room. They come here to dance until their shoes fall to pieces, and do not remember that their old benefactress can see their shadows whirling by the misty windowpanes. Alas, how gray and ugly the world was! Alas, what a shadow trouble and hardness had cast over the young countess’s soul!

After a while Gösta comes to ask her to dance.

She refuses shortly.

“Will you not dance with me, countess?” he asks, and grows very red.

“Neither with you nor with any other of the Ekeby pensioners,” she says.

“We are not worthy of such an honor.”

“It is no honor, Herr Berling. But it gives me no pleasure to dance with those who forget the precepts of gratitude.”

Gösta has already turned on his heel.

This scene is heard and seen by many. All think the countess is right. The pensioners’ ingratitude and heartlessness had waked general indignation.

But in these days Gösta Berling is more dangerous than a wild beast in the forest. Ever since he came home from the hunt and found Marianne gone, his heart has been like an aching wound. He longs to do someone a bloody wrong and to spread sorrow and pain far around.

If she wishes it so, he says to himself, it shall be as she wishes. But she shall not save her own skin. The young countess likes abductions. She shall get her fill. He has nothing against adventure. For eight days he has mourned for a woman’s sake. It is long enough. He calls Beerencreutz the colonel, and Christian Bergh the great captain, and the slow Cousin Christopher, who never hesitates at any mad adventure, and consults with them how he shall avenge the pensioners’ injured honor.

It is the end of the party. A long line of sledges drive up into the yard. The men are putting on their fur cloaks. The ladies look for their wraps in the dreadful confusion of the dressing-room.

The young countess has been in great haste to leave this hateful ball. She is ready first of all the ladies. She stands smiling in the middle of the room and looks at the confusion, when the door is thrown open, and Gösta Berling shows himself on the threshold.

No man has a right to enter this room. The old ladies stand there with their thin hair no longer adorned with becoming caps; and the young ones have turned up their skirts under their cloaks, that the stiff ruffles may not be crushed on the way home.

But without paying any attention to the warning cries, Gösta Berling rushes up to the countess and seizes her.

He lifts her in his arms and rushes from the room out into the hall and then on to the steps with her.

The astonished women’s screams could not check him. When they hurry after, they only see how he throws himself into a sledge with the countess in his arms.

They hear the driver crack his whip and see the horse set off. They know the driver: it is Beerencreutz. They know the horse: it is Don Juan. And in deep distress over the countess’s fate they call their husbands.

And these waste no time in questions, but hasten to their sledges. And with the count at their head they chase after the ravisher.

But he lies in the sledge, holding the young countess fast. He has forgotten all grief, and mad with adventure’s intoxicating joy, he sings at the top of his voice a song of love and roses.

Close to him he presses her; but she makes no attempt to escape. Her face lies, white and stiffened, against his breast.

Ah, what shall a man do when he has a pale, helpless face so near his own, when he sees the fair hair which usually shades the white, gleaming forehead, pushed to one side, and when the eyelids have closed heavily over the gray eyes’ roguish glance?

What shall a man do when red lips grow pale beneath his eyes?

Kiss, of course, kiss the fading lips, the closed eyes, the white forehead.

But then the young woman awakes. She throws herself back. She is like a bent spring. And he has to struggle with her with his whole strength to keep her from throwing herself from the sledge, until finally he forces her, subdued and trembling, down in the corner of the sledge.

“See,” says Gösta quite calmly to Beerencreutz, “the countess is the third whom Don Juan and I have carried off this winter. But the others hung about my neck with kisses, and she will neither be kissed by me nor dance with me. Can you understand these women, Beerencreutz?”

But when Gösta drove away from the house, when the women screamed and the men swore, when the sleigh-bells rang and the whips cracked, and there was nothing but cries and confusion, the men who guarded the major’s wife were wondering.

“What is going on?” they thought. “Why are they screaming?”

Suddenly the door is thrown open, and a voice calls to them.

“She is gone. He is driving away with her.”

They rush out, running like mad, without waiting to see if it was the major’s wife or who it was who was gone. Luck was with them, and they came up with a hurrying sledge, and they drove both far and fast, before they discovered whom they were pursuing.

But Berg and Cousin Christopher went quietly to the door, burst the lock, and opened it for the major’s wife.

“You are free,” they said.

She came out. They stood straight as ramrods on either side