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“We ate our dinner, we two—but the men around
us sat silent and dared hardly touch knife and fork.
“She remained a day with me, and then drove
home again. But all the time I never felt her to be
my mother. It seemed to me my mother was dead.
“When she was leaving, Gösta Berling, and I
stood beside her on the steps, and the carriage had
driven up, she said to me: ‘I have been here a whole
day, and you have not recognized me as your mother.
I have travelled a long and lonely road to see
you—a hundred and forty miles in three days—and I
tremble for shame of you, as if I had been beaten.
May you be disowned as I have been, cast out as I
have been! May the roadside be your home, straw
be your bed, and the lime-kiln your fireside! May
shame and insult be your wage, and may others
smite you as I smite you!’
“And she gave me a hard blow on my cheek.
“But I lifted her in my arms, carried her down,
and placed her in the carriage.
“‘Who are you,’ I cried, ‘to dare to curse me?
Who are you to strike me? I will endure it from
no one!’
“And I gave her back the blow again. The carriage
drove away at that moment, and that was the
first time, Gösta Berling, I felt that Margarita
Celsing was dead. She had been good and guileless.
Angels wept at her death. If she had lived, she
would never have struck her mother.”
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