Short Fiction Selma Lagerlöf (best book club books of all time .txt) 📖

her life who is as happy as I am? Doth one take one’s life in Paradise?”

“I do not understand it,” said King Olaf, in his gentle manner. “God will enlighten me. He will tell me if it be through any fault of mine that thou wouldest commit so great a sin.”

Astrid went up to him and stroked his cheek. The reverence she felt for King Olaf had hitherto deterred her from showing him the full tenderness of her love. Now she threw her arms passionately around him and kissed him countless times. Then she began to speak to him in gentle, birdlike tones.

“Wouldest thou know how truly my heart clings to thee?” she said.

She made the King sit down on an overturned boat. She knelt down at his feet.

“King Olaf,” she said, “I will no longer be Queen. She who loves as greatly as I love thee cannot be a Queen. I wish thou wouldest go far into the forest, and let me be thy bondwoman. Then I should have leave to serve thee every day. Then I would prepare thy food, make thy bed, and watch over thy house whilst thou slept. None other should have leave to serve thee, except I. When thou returnest from the chase in the evening, I would go to meet thee, and kneel before thee on the road and say: ‘King Olaf, my life is thine.’ And thou wouldest laugh, and lower thy spear against my breast, and say: ‘Yes, thy life is mine. Thou hast neither father nor mother; thou art mine, and thy life is mine.’ ”

As Astrid said this, she drew, as if in play, King Olaf’s sword out of its sheath. She laid the hilt in the King’s hand, but the point she directed towards her own heart.

“Say these words to me, King Olaf,” she said, “as if we were alone in the forest, and I were thy bondwoman. Say: ‘Thy life is mine.’ ”

“Thy life is God’s,” said the King.

Astrid laughed lightly.

“My life is thine,” she repeated, in the tenderest voice, and the same moment King Olaf felt that she pressed the point of the sword against her breast.

But the King held the sword with a firm hand, even when in play. He drew it to him before Astrid had time to do herself any harm. And he sprang up. For the first time in his life he trembled from fear. The Queen would die at his hand, and she had not been far from attaining her wish. At the same moment he had an inspiration, and he understood what was the cause of her despair.

“She has committed a sin,” he thought. “She has a sin upon her conscience.”

He bent down over Astrid.

“Tell me in what manner thou hast sinned,” he said.

Astrid had thrown herself down on the rough planks of the bridge, crying in utter despair.

“No one free from guilt would weep like this,” thought the King. “But how can the honourable daughter of the King have brought such a heavy burden upon her?” he asked himself. “How can the noble Ingegerd have a crime upon her conscience?”

“Ingegerd, tell me how thou hast sinned,” he asked again.

But Astrid was sobbing so violently that she could not answer, but instead she drew off her golden arm and finger rings, and handed them to the King with averted face. The King thought how unlike this was to the gentle King’s daughter of whom Hjalte had spoken.

“Is this Hjalte’s Ingegerd that lies sobbing at my feet?” he thought.

He bent down and seized Astrid by the shoulder.

“Who are thou? who art thou?” he said, shaking her arm. “I see that thou canst not be Ingegerd. Who art thou?”

Astrid was still sobbing so violently that she could not speak. But in order to give the King the answer he asked for, she let down her long hair, twisted a lock of it round her arms, and held them towards the King, and sat thus bowed and with drooping head. The King thought:

“She wishes me to understand that she belongs to those who wear chains. She confesses that she is a bondwoman.”

A thought again struck the King; he now understood everything.

“Has not the Svea-King a daughter who is the child of a bondwoman?” he asked suddenly.

He received no answer to this question either, but he heard Astrid shudder as if from cold. King Olaf asked still one more question.

“Thou whom I have made my wife,” he said, “hast thou so low a mind that thou wouldest allow thyself to be used as a means of spoiling a man’s honour? Is thy mind so mean that thou rejoicest when his enemies laugh at his discomfiture?”

Astrid could hear from the King’s voice how bitterly he suffered under the insult that had been offered him. She forgot her own sufferings, and wept no more.

“Take my life,” she said.

A great temptation came upon King Olaf.

“Slay this wicked bondwoman,” the old Adam said within him. “Show the Svea-King what it costs to make a fool of the King of Norway.”

At that moment Olaf Haraldsson felt no love for Astrid. He hated her for having been the means of his humiliation. He knew everybody would think it right when he returned evil for evil, and if he did not avenge this insult, he would be held in derision by the Bards, and his enemies would no longer fear him. He had but one wish: to slay Astrid, to take her life. His anger was so violent that it craved for blood. If a fool had dared to put his fool’s cap upon his head, would he not have torn it off, torn it to pieces, thrown it on the ground, trampled upon it? If he now laid Astrid a bloody corpse upon her ship, and sent her back to her father, people would say of King Olaf that he was a worthy descendant of Harald Haarfager.

But King Olaf still held his sword in his hand, and under his fingers he felt