"Just listen to him," said Bertila bitterly. "I knew it; he runs after fame even to the grave. A peaceful death or a peaceful life is an abomination to him; but you, Larsson, tell me: have you a desire to give away the axe and take the ring?"
"H'm!" thoughtfully replied the captain; "if the ring were of gold, I might sell it in town and get a good cask of ale for the money. But as it is only of copper ... pshaw! I send it to the deuce, and keep the axe, which is at least useful for cutting wood."
"Well done!" said Bertila; "you are sprinkling water on fire, as your father said. It is not I who have made fire and water eternally hostile to each other. Come, Larsson, you, the sound, common-sense, practical man, be my son, and one day take my farms when I am no longer here. My blessing on you and your descendants. May they multiply, and work like ants on the land, and may there be eternal hostility between them and the nobility, the people with the fiery temperament. May there be war and not peace between them and you until the useless glitter disappears from humanity. May the axe and the ring live in open feud until both are melted in the same heat. When this happens after a century or more, then it will be time to say, class distinctions have seen their last days, and a man's merit is his only coat of arms."
"But, my father," exclaimed Bertel in an entreating voice, "have you then no blessing to give me, and my posterity, at the moment when we separate for ever?"
"You!" repeated the old man, in still angry tones. "Go, you lost, vain, worm-eaten branch of the people's great trunk; go in your pitiful parade to certain ruin. Until the day when, as I said, the axe and the ring, the false gold and the true steel melt together ... until then I give you my curse as an inheritance, even unto the tenth generation, and with it shall follow dissension, hatred, war, and finally a despicable fall."
"Hold there, Father Bertila," cried Larsson the younger. "Grace for Bertel!"
"No grace for nobility," replied the peasant king.
"Beware, unnatural father!" cried Larsson the elder. "The doom may fall on your own head."
"I no longer ask any grace," said Bertel, pale, but apparently calm. "Farewell, my former father! Farewell, my Fatherland! I go never to see you again!"
"One moment," interrupted Meri, who with a violent effort placed herself in his way. "You go! yes, go ... my heart's darling, my hope, my life, my all ... go, I shall no longer stand in your way. But before you leave me, you shall take with you the secret which has been both my life's highest joy and its greatest agony..."