“Father, father!” she called. “Let me come in! I freeze, I tremble. It is terrible out here!”
“Mother, mother! You who have gone so many steps to serve me, you who have watched so many nights over me, why do you sleep now? Mother, mother, wake just this one night, and I will never give you pain again!”
She calls, and falls into breathless silence to listen for an answer. But no one heard her, no one obeyed her, no one answered.
Then she wrings her hands in despair, but there are no tears in her eyes.
The long, dark house with its closed doors and darkened windows lay awful and motionless in the night. What would become of her, who was homeless? Branded and dishonored was she, as long as she encumbered the earth. And her father himself pressed the red-hot iron deeper into her shoulders.
“Father,” she called once more, “what will become of me? People will believe the worst of me.”
She wept and suffered; her body was stiff with cold.
Alas, that such misery can reach one, who but lately stood so high! It is so easy to be plunged into the deepest suffering! Should we not fear life? Who sails in a safe craft? Round about us swell sorrows like a heaving ocean; see how the hungry waves lick the ship’s sides, see how they rage up over her. Ah, no safe anchorage, no solid ground, no steady ship, as far as the eye can see; only an unknown sky over an ocean of sorrow!
But hush! At last, at last! A light step comes through the hall.
“I have run in the snow-drifts in my thin shoes all the way from Ekeby. I have stood here an hour and knocked and called. I am freezing to death out here. Why did you drive away and leave me?”
“My child, my child, why did you kiss Gösta Berling?”
“But father must have seen that I do not like him for that. It was in fun. Does he think that I will marry Gösta?”
“Go to the gardener’s house, Marianne, and beg that you pass the night there. Your father is drunk. He will not listen to reason. He has kept me a prisoner up there. I crept out when I thought he was asleep. He will kill me, if you come in.”
“Mother, mother, shall I go to strangers when I have a home? Are you as hard as father? How can you allow me to be shut out? I will lay myself in the drift out here, if you do not let me in.”