Dear Father would kill her if she had frittered away his sled. She bit the beggar on the finger and clawed him in the face, all the while shrieking in despair.

Then someone came driving up the road.

“Who the hell is it who’s shrieking?” came a gruff voice.

“I want to know what this fellow has done with my flour sack and my sled,” sobbed the child, pounding with clenched fists on the beggar’s chest.

“Are you clawing a frozen person like that? Up with you, wildcat!”

The rider was a tall, heavyset woman. She got out of the sledge and walked over to the drift. She took the child by the neck and tossed her up on the road. After that she leaned over, stuck her arms under the beggar’s body, and lifted him up. Then she carried him to the sledge and laid him in it.

“Come along into the inn, wildcat,” she called to the minister’s daughter, “so we can hear what you know about this business.”

 

An hour later the beggar was sitting on a chair by the door in the best room of the inn, and the commanding woman who had rescued him from the snowdrift was standing in front of him.

The way Gösta Berling saw her now, on the way home from a charcoal run in the forest, with sooty hands and a chalk pipe in her mouth, dressed in a short, unlined sheepskin and striped, handwoven wool skirt, with brogues on her feet and a knife sheath across her chest, the way he saw her with gray hair brushed straight back over an aged, beautiful face, this was the way he had heard her described a thousand times, and he realized that he had met up with the renowned majoress of Ekeby.

She was the most powerful woman in Värmland, the sovereign of seven ironworks, accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed; and he was only a wretched man under a death sentence, bereft of everything, knowing that every road was too heavy for him, every room too confined. His body shivered with terror, while her gaze rested upon him.

She stood silently, looking at the human wretchedness before her: the swollen red hands, the emaciated countenance, and the splendid head, which even in decline and negligence radiated a wild beauty.

“So this is Gösta Berling, the mad minister,” she said inquiringly.

The beggar sat motionless.

“I am the majoress at Ekeby.”

A shiver passed through the beggar’s body. He clasped his hands, raising his eyes in a longing gaze. What would she do with him? Would she force him to live? He shuddered before her strength. And yet he had been so close to reaching the peace of the endless forests.

She began the struggle by telling him that the daughter of the Broby minister had got back her sled and flour sack, and that she, the majoress, had a refuge for him, as for many another homeless wretch, in the cavaliers’ wing at Ekeby. She offered him a life of play and pleasure, but he replied that he must die.

Then she struck the table with her fist and let him hear her unvarnished thoughts.

“So then, he wants to die, so that’s what he wants. I wouldn’t wonder much about that, if only he were alive. Look, such an emaciated body and such powerless limbs and such dull eyes, and he thinks he has something left to kill. Do you think you have to be lying stiff and cold, nailed under a coffin lid, to be dead? Don’t you think I can see how dead you are, Gösta Berling?

“I see that you have a skull for a head, and I can picture the worms creeping out of your eye sockets. Don’t you feel that your mouth is full of dirt? Don’t you hear how your bones rattle, when you move?

“You have drowned yourself in liquor, Gösta Berling, and dead you are.

“The only life left in you is in your skeleton, and you won’t begrudge those bones the chance to live, if you call that living. It’s as if you would begrudge the dead a dance over the grave mounds in the starlight.

“Are you ashamed of having been defrocked, since you now want to die? I will tell you, there would be more honor in using your gifts and becoming something useful on God’s green earth. Why didn’t you come to me at once—then I would have put everything right again for you. Yes, I suppose you must be expecting great honor from being shrouded and laid out on sawdust and called a beautiful corpse?”

The beggar sat calm, almost smiling, while she thundered out her angry words. No danger, he rejoiced, no danger. The endless forests are waiting, and she has no power to turn my soul away from there.

But the majoress fell silent and paced a few times back and forth in the room; then she took a seat by the stove, put her feet up on the hearth, and rested her elbows on her knees.

“Hell’s bells,” she said, chuckling to herself. “What I’m saying is truer than I realize myself. Don’t you think, Gösta Berling, that most people in this world are dead, or half dead? Do you think I’m living? Oh my, no! Oh my, no!

“Yes, look at me, you! I am the majoress at Ekeby, and I am no doubt the most powerful woman in Värmland. If I wave my finger, the governor comes running, if I wave two fingers, the bishop comes running, and if I wave three, then consistory and aldermen and all the mill owners in Värmland dance a polska on the square in Karlstad. Hell’s bells, lad, I’m telling you that I am nothing more than a dressed-up corpse. God knows how little life there is in me.”

The beggar leaned forward on the chair and listened with senses alert. The old majoress sat rocking before the fire. She did not look at him as she spoke.

“Don’t you think,” she continued, “that if I were a living person, who saw you sitting there, worthless and wretched, contemplating suicide, don’t you think I could take those thoughts from you in a breath? Then I would have tears for you, and prayers going up one side and down the other, and I would save your soul—but I am dead.

“Have you heard that I was once the beautiful Margareta Celsing? That wasn’t yesterday, but I can still cry my old eyes out over her. Why should Margareta Celsing be dead, and Margareta Samzelius live; why should the majoress at Ekeby live, tell me, Gösta Berling?

“Do you know what Margareta Celsing was like? She was slim and slender and shy and innocent, Gösta Berling. She was the sort on whose grave the angels weep.

“She knew nothing of evil, no one had done her sorrow, she was good to everyone. And she was beautiful, truly beautiful.

“There was a stately man, his name was Altringer.