“The carriage drove away, but then, at that moment, Gösta Berling, I knew that Margareta Celsing was dead.
“She was good and innocent; she knew no evil. Angels had wept at her grave. If she had lived, she would not have struck her mother.”
The beggar by the door had listened, and the words for a moment had drowned the sound of the eternal forests’ alluring murmur. For see, this great lady, she made herself his equal in sin, his sister in perdition, to give him courage to live. For he should learn that sorrow and wrong-doing weighed down other heads than his. He rose and went over to the major’s wife.
“Will you live now? Gösta Berling?” she asked with a voice which broke with tears. “Why should you die? You could have been such a good priest, but it was never Gösta Berling whom you drowned in brandy, he as gleamingly innocent-white as that Margareta Celsing I suffocated in hate. Will you live?”
Gösta fell on his knees before her.
“Forgive me,” he said, “I cannot.”
“I am an old woman, hardened by much sorrow,” answered the major’s wife, “and I sit here and give myself as a prize to a beggar, whom I have found half-frozen in a snow-drift by the roadside. It serves me right. Let him go and kill himself; then at least he won’t be able to tell of my folly.”
“I am no suicide, I am condemned to die. Do not make the struggle too hard for me! I may not live. My body has taken possession of my soul, therefore I must let it escape and go to God.”
“And so you believe you will get there?”