Her pride was roused too. If he no longer cared for her, it was such a terrible humiliation to beg for his love.
Sometimes her good sense told her that she ought to be glad to escape from the connection with Gösta, and all the deplorable circumstances which it had brought with it.
Her heart’s pain was still so terrible that her emotions finally conquered. Three days after she had become conscious of her love, she enclosed the verses and wrote Gösta Berling’s name on the cover. But they were never sent. Before she could find a suitable messenger she heard such things of Gösta Berling that she understood it was too late to win him back.
But it was the sorrow of her life that she had not sent the verses in time, while she could have won him.
All her pain fastened itself on that point: “If I only had not waited so long, if I had not waited so many days!”
The happiness of life, or at any rate the reality of life, would have been won to her through those written words. She was sure they would have brought him back to her.
Grief, however, did her the same service as love. It made her a whole being, potent to devote herself to good as well as evil. Passionate feelings filled her soul, unrestrained by self-consciousness’s icy chill. And she was, in spite of her plainness, much loved.
But they say that she never forgot Gösta Berling. She mourned for him as one mourns for a wasted life.
And her poor verses, which at one time were much read, are forgotten long ago. I beg of you to read them and to think of them. Who knows what power they might have had, if they had been sent? They are impassioned enough to bear witness of a real feeling. Perhaps they could have brought him back to her.
They are touching enough, tender enough in their awkward formlessness. No one can wish them different. No one can want to see them imprisoned in the chains of rhyme and metre, and yet it is so sad to think that it was perhaps just this imperfection which prevented her from sending them in time.
I beg you to read them and to love them. It is a person in great trouble who has written them.
“Child, thou hast loved once, but nevermore Shalt thou taste of the joys of love! A passionate storm has raged through thy soul Rejoice thou hast gone to thy rest! No more in wild joy shall thou soar up on high Rejoice, thou hast gone to thy rest! No more shalt thou sink in abysses of pain, Oh, nevermore.