The major’s wife interrupts her and strokes the curly, light hair back from her forehead.
“Child, child,” she says, “how could you marry that stupid Henrik Dohna?”
“But I love him.”
“I see how it is, I see how it is,” says the major’s wife. “A kind child and nothing more; weeps with those in sorrow, and laughs with those who are glad. And obliged to say ‘yes’ to the first man who says, ‘I love you.’ Yes, of course. Go back now and dance, my dear young countess. Dance and be happy! There is nothing bad in you.”
“But I want to do something for you.”
“Child,” says the major’s wife, solemnly, “an old woman lived at Ekeby who held the winds of heaven prisoners. Now she is caught and the winds are free. Is it strange that a storm goes over the land?
“I, who am old, have seen it before, countess. I know it. I know that the storm of the thundering God is coming. Sometimes it rushes over great kingdoms, sometimes over small out-of-the-way communities. God’s storm forgets no one. It comes over the great as well as the small. It is grand to see God’s storm coming.
“Anguish shall spread itself over the land. The small birds’ nests shall fall from the branches. The hawk’s nest in the pine-tree’s top shall be shaken down to the earth with a great noise, and even the eagle’s nest in the mountain cleft shall the wind drag out with its dragon tongue.
“We thought that all was well with us; but it was not so. God’s storm is needed. I understand that, and I do not complain. I only wish that I might go to my mother.”