“But are you all raving, or have you drunk away your wits? Do you believe it is true? Do you believe that that thing is the devil? Don’t you see that it’s all a confounded lie?”
“Tut, tut, tut,” says the black one; “he does not see that he will soon be ready, and yet he has been seven years at Ekeby. He does not see how far advanced he is.”
“Begone, man! I myself have helped to shove you into the oven there.”
“As if that made any difference; as if I were not as good a devil as another. Yes, yes, Gösta Berling, you are in for it. You have improved, indeed, under her treatment.”
“It was she who saved me,” says Gösta. “What had I been without her?”
“As if she did not know what she was about when she kept you here at Ekeby. You can lure others to the trap; you have great gifts. Once you tried to get away from her; you let her give you a cottage, and you became a laborer; you wished to earn your bread. Every day she passed your cottage, and she had lovely young girls with her. Once it was Marianne Sinclair; then you threw aside your spade and apron, Gösta Berling, and came back as pensioner.”
“It lay on the highway, you fool.”
“Yes, yes, of course; it lay on the highway. Then you came to Borg, were tutor there to Henrik Dohna, and might have been Countess Märta’s son-in-law. Who was it who managed that the young Ebba Dohna should hear that you were only a dismissed priest, so that she refused you? It was the major’s wife, Gösta Berling. She wanted you back again.”
“Great matter!” says Gösta. “Ebba Dohna died soon afterwards. I would never have got her anyway.”
Then the devil came close up to him and hissed right in his face: “Died! yes, of course she died. Killed herself for your sake, did she? But they never told you that.”