Short Fiction by Selma Lagerlöf (android based ebook reader txt) 📕

They were very kind to her, as far as she knew, but it really did not matter. If she had come to a palace full of everything one could most desire, that would likewise have been the same to her. No bed is soft enough to give rest unto one whose heart is full of longing.

In the beginning she had asked them every day, as modestly as she could, if they would not let her go home, now that she had had the great happiness of seeing her mother and her brothers and sisters. But the roads were really too bad. She must stay with them until the frost had disappeared. It was not a matter of life and death, they supposed, to go back to that place.

Ingrid could not understand why it annoyed people when she said she wanted to go back to Munkhyttan. But this seemed to be the case with her father and her mother and everybody else in the parish. One had no right, it appeared, to long for any other place in the world, when one was at Raglanda.

She soon saw it was best not to speak about her going away. There were so many difficulties in the way whenever she spoke about it. It was not enough that the roads were still in the same bad condition; they surrounded her with walls and ramparts and moats. She would knit and weave, and plant out in the forcing-frames. And surely she would not go away until after the large birthday party at the Dean’s? And she could not think of leaving till after Karin Landberg’s wedding.

There was nothing for her to do but to lift her hands in supplication to the spring, and beg it to make haste with its work, beg for sunshine and warmth, beg the gentle sun to do its very best for the great border forest, send small piercing rays between the fir-trees, and melt the snow beneath them. Dear, dear sun! It did not matter if the snow were not melted in the valley, if only the snow would vanish from the mountains, if only the forest paths became passable, if only the Säter girls were able to go to their huts, if only the bogs became dry, if only it became possible to go by the forest road, which was half the distance of the highroad.

Ingrid knew one who would not wait for carriage, or ask for money to drive, if only the road through the forest became passable. She knew one who would leave the Parsonage some moonlight night, and who would do it without asking a single person’s permission.

She thought she had waited for the spring before. That everybody does. But now Ingrid knew that she had never before longed for it. Oh no, no! She had never before known what it was to long. Before she had waited for green leaves and anemones, and the song of the thrush and the cuckoo. But that was childishness⁠—nothing more. They did not long for the spring who only thought of what was beautiful. One should take the first bit of earth that peeped through the snow, and kiss it. One should pluck the first coarse leaf of the nettle simply to burn into one that now the spring had come.

Everybody was very good to her. But although they did not say anything, they seemed to think that she was always thinking of leaving them.

“I can’t understand why you want to go back to that place and look after that crazy fellow,” said Karin Landberg one day. It seemed as if she could read Ingrid’s thoughts.

“Oh, she has given up thinking of that now,” said the Pastor’s wife, before the young girl had time to answer.

When Karin was gone the Pastor’s wife said:

“People wonder that you want to leave us.”

Ingrid was silent.

“They say that when Hede began to improve perhaps you fell in love with him.”

“Oh no! Not after he had begun to improve,” Ingrid said, feeling almost inclined to laugh.

“In any case, he is not the sort of person one could marry,” said her adopted mother. “Father and I have been speaking about it, and we think it is best that you should remain with us.”

“It is very good of you that you want to keep me,” Ingrid said. And she was touched that now they wanted to be so kind to her.

They did not believe her, however obedient she was. She could not understand what little bird it was that told them about her longing. Now her adopted mother had told her that she must not go back to Munkhyttan. But even then she could not leave the matter alone.

“If they really wanted you,” she said, “they would write for you.”

Ingrid again felt inclined to laugh. That would be the strangest thing of all, should there be a letter from the enchanted castle. She would like to know if her adopted mother thought that the King of the Mountain wrote for the maiden who had been swallowed by the mountain to come back when she had gone to see her mother?

But if her adopted mother had known how many messages she had received she would probably have been even more uneasy. There came messages to her in her dreams by nights, and there came messages to her in her visions by day. He let Ingrid know that he was in need of her. He was so ill⁠—so ill!

She knew that he was nearly going out of his mind again, and that she must go to him. If anyone had told her this, she would simply have answered that she knew it.

The large starlike eyes looked further and further away. Those who saw that look would never believe that she meant to stay quietly and patiently at home.

It is not very difficult either to see whether a person is content or full of longing. One only needs to see a little gleam of happiness in the eyes when