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

There he stands again on the cliff of Naxos and wishes to steal the beloved for himself. Nor, not steal! Why not honorably and manfully step forward and say: “I am your rival, Maurits. Your betrothed must choose between us. You are not married; there is no sin in trying to win her from you. Look well after her. I mean to use every expedient.”

Then he would be warned, and she would know what alternative lay before her.

His knuckles cracked when he clenched his fists again. How Maurits would laugh at his old uncle when he stepped forward and explained that! And what would be the good of it? Would he frighten her, so that he would not even be allowed to help them in the future?

But how will it go now when she approaches to say goodbye to him? He almost screams to her to take care, to keep three paces away from him.

He remains at the window and turns his back on them all, while they are busy with their wraps and their luncheon-basket. Will they never be ready to go? He has already lived it through a thousand times. He has taken her hand, kissed her, helped her into the chaise. He has done it so many times that he believes she is already gone.

He has also wished her happiness. Happiness⁠—Can she be happy with Maurits? She has not looked happy this morning. Oh yes, certainly she has. She wept with joy.

While he is standing there Maurits suddenly says to Anne-Marie: “What a dunce I am! I am quite forgetting to speak to Uncle about father’s shares.”

“I think it would be best if you did not,” Downie answers. “Perhaps it is not right.”

“Nonsense, Anne-Marie. The shares do not pay anything just now. But who knows if they will not be better some day? And besides, what does it matter to Uncle? Such a little thing⁠—”

She interrupts with unusual eagerness, almost anxiously. “I beg of you, Maurits, do not do it. Give in to me this once.”

He looks at her, a little offended. “This once!⁠—as if I were a tyrant over you. No, do you see, I cannot; just for that word I think that I ought not to yield.”

“Do not cling to a word, Maurits. This means more than polite phrases. I think it is not well of you to wish to cheat Uncle now when he has been so good to us.”

“Be quiet, Anne-Marie, be quiet! What do you understand of business?” His whole manner is now irritatingly calm and superior. He looks at her as a schoolmaster looks at a good pupil who is making a fool of himself at his examination.

“That you do not at all understand what is at stake!” she cries. And she strikes out despairingly with her hands.

“I really must talk to Uncle now,” says Maurits, “if for nothing else, to show him that there is no question of any deceit. You behave so that Uncle can believe that I and my father are veritable cheats.”

And he comes forward to his uncle and explains to him what these shares which his father wishes to sell him are. Uncle Theodore listens to him as well as he can. He understands instantly that his brother has made a bad speculation and wishes to protect himself from loss. But what of it, what of it? He is accustomed to render to the whole family connection such services. But he is not thinking of that, but of Downie. He wonders what is the meaning of that look of resentment she casts upon Maurits. It was not exactly love.

And so in the midst of his despair over the sacrifice he has to make, a faint glimmer of hope begins to rise up before him. He stands and stares at it like a man who is sleeping in a haunted room and sees a light mist rise from the floor and condense and grow and become a tangible reality.

“Come with me into my room, Maurits,” he says; “you shall have the money immediately.”

But while he speaks his eyes rest on Downie to see if the ghost can be prevailed upon to speak. But as yet he sees only dumb despair in her.

But he has hardly sat down by the desk in his room when the door opens and Anne-Marie comes in.

“Uncle Theodore,” she says, very firmly and decidedly, “do not buy those papers!”

Ah, such courage, Downie! Who would have believed it of you who had seen you three days ago, when you sat at Maurits’s side in the chaise and seemed to shrink and grow smaller for every word he said.

Now she needs all her courage, for Maurits is angry in earnest.

“Hold your tongue!” he hisses at her, and then roars to make himself heard by Uncle Theodore, who is sitting at his desk and counting notes.

“What is the matter with you? The shares give no interest now; I have told Uncle that; but Uncle knows as well as I that they will pay. Do you think Uncle will let himself be cheated by one like me? Uncle surely understands those things better than any of us. Has it ever been my intention to give out these shares as good? Have I said anything but that for him who can wait it may be a good affair?”

Uncle Theodore says nothing; he only hands a package of notes to Maurits. He wonders if this will make the ghost speak.

“Uncle,” says the little intractable proclaimer of the truth, for it is a known fact that no one can be more intractable than those soft, delicate creature when they are in the right, “these shares are not worth a shilling and will never be. We all know it at home there.”

“Anne-Marie, you make me out a scoundrel!”

She surveys him all over as if her eyes were the moving blades of a pair of scissors, and she cuts off him bit by bit everything in which she