“. . . tousiours l’Empire d’amourEst plein de troubles et d’alarmes.”
“. . . tousiours l’Empire d’amourEst plein de troubles et d’alarmes.”
Sofie looked at him innocently. How lovely she was! The intense, irresistible night of her eyes, where day welled out in myriad light-points like a black diamond flashing in the sun, the poignantly beautiful arch of her lips, the proud lily paleness of her cheeks melting slowly into a rose-golden flush like a white cloud kindled by the morning glow, the delicate temples, blue-veined like flower-petals, shaded by the mysterious darkness of her hair....
Her hand trembled in his, cold as marble. Gently she drew it away, and her eyelids dropped. The embroidery slipped from her lap. Ulrik Frederik stooped to pick it up, bent one knee to the ground, and remained kneeling before her.
“Mistress Sofie!” he said.
She laid her hand over his mouth and looked at him with gentle seriousness, almost with pain.
“Dear Ulrik Frederik,” she begged, “do not take it ill that I beseech you not to be led by a momentary sentiment to attempt a change in the pleasant relations that have hitherto existed between us. It serves no purpose but tobring trouble and vexation to us both. Rise from this foolish position and take a seat in mannerly fashion here on this bench so that we may converse in all calmness.”
“No, I want the book of my fate to be sealed in this hour,” said Ulrik Frederik without rising. “You little know the great and burning passion I feel for you, if you imagine I can be content to be naught but your good friend. For the bloody sweat of Christ, put not your faith in anything so utterly impossible! My love is no smouldering spark that will flame up or be extinguished according as you blow hot or cold on it.Par dieu!’Tis a raging and devouring fire, but it’s for you to say whether it is to run out and be lost in a thousand flickering flames and will-o’-the-wisps, or burn forever, warm and steady, high and shining toward heaven.”
“But, dear Ulrik Frederik, have pity on me! Don’t draw me into a temptation that I have no strength to withstand! You must believe that you are dear to my heart and most precious, but for that very reason I would to the uttermost guard myself against bringing you into a false and foolish position that you cannot maintain with honor. You are nearly six years younger than I, and that which is now pleasing to you in my person, age may easily mar or distort to ugliness. You smile, but suppose that when you are thirty you find yourself saddled with an old wrinkled hag of a wife, who has brought you but little fortune, and not otherwise aided in your preferment! Would you not then wish that at twenty you had married a young royal lady, your equal in age and birth, who could have advanced you better than a common gentlewoman? Dear Ulrik Frederik, go speak to your noble kinsmen, they will tell you the same. But what they cannot tell you is this: if you brought to your home such a gentlewoman, older than yourself, shewould strangle you with her jealousy. She would suspect your every look, nay the innermost thoughts of your heart. She would know how much you had given up for her sake, and therefore she would strive the more to have her love be all in all to you. Trust me, she would encompass you with her idolatrous love as with a cage of iron, and if she perceived that you longed to quit it for a single instant, she would grieve day and night and embitter your life with her despondent sorrow.”
She rose and held out her hand. “Farewell, Ulrik Frederik! Our parting is bitter as death, but after many years, when I am a faded old maid, or the middle-aged wife of an aged man, you will know that Sofie Urne was right. May God the Father keep thee! Do you remember the Spanish romance book where it tells of a certain vine of India which winds itself about a tree for support, and goes on encircling it, long after the tree is dead and withered, until at last it holds the tree that else would fall? Trust me, Ulrik Frederik, in the same manner my soul will be sustained and held up by your love, long after your sentiment shall be withered and vanished.”
She looked straight into his eyes and turned to go, but he held her hand fast.
“Would you make me raving mad? Then hear me! Now I know that thou lovest me, no power on earth can part us! Does nothing tell thee that ’tis folly to speak of what thou wouldst or what I would?—when my blood is drunk with thee and I am bereft of all power over myself! I am possessed with thee, and if thou turnest away thy heart from me in this very hour, thou shouldst yet be mine, in spite of thee, in spite of me! I love thee with a love like hatred—I think nothing of thy happiness. Thy weal or woe isnothing to me—only that I be in thy joy, I be in thy sorrow, that I—”
He caught her to him violently and pressed her against his breast.
Slowly she lifted her face and looked long at him with eyes full of tears. Then she smiled. “Have it as thou wilt, Ulrik Frederik,” and she kissed him passionately.
Three weeks later their betrothal was celebrated with much pomp. The King had readily given his consent, feeling that it was time to make an end of Ulrik Frederik’s rather too convivial bachelorhood.
AFTER the main sallies against the enemy on the second of September and the twentieth of October, the town rang with the fame of Ulrik Christian Gyldenlöve. Colonel Satan, the people called him. His name was on every lip. Every child in Copenhagen knew his sorrel, Bellarina, with the white socks, and when he rode past—a slim, tall figure in the wide-skirted blue uniform of the guard with its enormous white collar and cuffs, red scarf, and broad sword-belt—the maidens of the city peeped admiringly after him, proud when their pretty faces won them a bow or a bold glance from the audacious soldier. Even the sober fathers of families and their matrons in beruffled caps, who well knew how naughty he was and had heard the tales of all his peccadillos, would nod to each other with pleasure in meeting him, and would fall to discussing the difficult question of what would have happened to the city if it had not been for Gyldenlöve.
The soldiers and men on the ramparts idolized him, and no wonder, for he had the same power of winning the common people that distinguished his father, King Christian the Fourth. Nor was this the only point of resemblance. He had inherited his father’s hot-headedness and intemperance, but also much of his ability, his gift of thinking quickly and taking in a situation at a glance. He was extremely blunt. Several years at European courts had not made him a courtier, nor even passably well mannered. In daily intercourse, he was taciturn to the point of rudeness, and in the service, he never opened his mouth without cursing and swearing like a common sailor.
With all this, he was a genuine soldier. In spite of hisyouth—for he was but eight-and-twenty—he conducted the defence of the city, and led the dangerous but important sallies, with such masterful insight and such mature perfection of plan that the cause could hardly have been in better hands with any one else among the men who surrounded Frederik the Third.
No wonder, therefore, that his name outshone all others, and that the poetasters, in their versified accounts of the fighting, addressed him as “thou vict’ry-crowned Gyldenlöv’, thou Denmark’s saviour brave!” or greeted him: “Hail, hail, thou Northern Mars, thou Danish David bold!” and wished that his life might be as a cornucopia, yea, even as a horn of plenty, full and running over with praise and glory, with health, fortune, and happiness. No wonder that many a quiet family vespers ended with the prayer that God would preserve Mr. Ulrik Christian, and some pious souls added a petition that his foot might be led from the slippery highways of sin, and his heart be turned from all that was evil, to seek the shining diadem of virtue and truth, and that he, who had in such full measure won the honor of this world, might also participate in the only true and everlasting glory.
Marie Grubbe’s thoughts were much engrossed by this kinsman of her aunt. As it happened, she had never met him either at Mistress Rigitze’s or in society, and all she had seen of him was a glimpse in the dusk when Lucie had pointed him out in the street.
All were speaking of him. Nearly every day some fresh story of his valor was noised abroad. She had heard and read that he was a hero, and the murmur of enthusiasm that went through the crowds in the streets, as he rode past, had given her an unforgettable thrill.
The hero-name lifted him high above the ranks of ordinary human beings. She had never supposed that a hero could be like other people. King Alexander of Macedonia, Holger the Dane, and Chevalier Bayard were tall, distant, radiant figures—ideals rather than men. Just as she had never believed, in her childhood, that any one could form letters with the elegance of the copy-book, so it had never occurred to her that one could become a hero. Heroes belonged to the past. To think that one might meet a flesh-and-blood hero riding in Store-Færgestræde was beyond anything she had dreamed of. Life suddenly took on a different aspect. So it was not all dull routine! The great and beautiful and richly colored world she had read of in her romances and ballads was something she might actually see with her own eyes. There was really something that one could long for with all one’s heart and soul; all these words that people and books were full of had a meaning. They stood for something. Her confused dreams and longings took form, since she knew that they were not hers alone, but that grown people believed in such things. Life was rich, wonderfully rich and radiant.
It was nothing but an intuition, which she knew to be true, but could not yet see or feel. He was her only pledge that it was so, the only thing tangible. Hence her thoughts and dreams circled about him unceasingly. She would often fly to the window at the sound of horse’s hoofs, and, when out walking, she would persuade the willing Lucie to go round by the castle, but they never saw him.
Then came a day toward the end of October, when she was plying her bobbins by the afternoon light, at a window in the long drawing-room where the fireplace was. Mistress Rigitze sat before the fire, now and then takinga pinch of dried flowers or a bit of cinnamon bark from a box on her lap and throwing it on a brazier full of live coals that stood near her. The air in the low-ceilinged room was hot and close and sweet. But little light penetrated between the full curtains of motley, dark-flowered stuff. From the adjoining room came the whirr of a spinning-wheel, and Mistress Rigitze was nodding drowsily in her cushioned chair.
Marie Grubbe felt faint with the heat. She tried to cool her burning cheeks against the small, dewy window-pane and peeped out into the street, where a thin layer of new-fallen snow made the air dazzlingly bright. As she turned to the room again, it seemed doubly dark and oppressive. Suddenly Ulrik Christian came in through the door, so quickly that Mistress Rigitze started. He did not notice Marie, but took a seat before the fire. After a few words of apology for his long absence, he remarked that he was tired, leaned forward in his chair, his face resting on his hand, and sat silent, scarcely hearing Mistress Rigitze’s lively chatter.
Marie Grubbe had turned pale with excitement, when she saw him enter. She closed her eyes for an instant with a sense of giddiness, then blushed furiously and could hardly breathe. The floor seemed to be sinking under her, and the chairs, tables, and people in the room falling through space. All objects appeared strangely definite and yet flickering, for she could hold nothing fast with her eyes, and moreover everything seemed new and strange.
So this was he. She wished herself far away or at least in her own room, her peaceful little chamber. She was frightened and could feel her hands tremble. If he would only not see her! She shrank deeper into the window recess and tried to fix her eyes on her aunt’s guest.
Was this the way he looked?—not very, very much taller? And his eyes were not fiery black, they were blue—such dear blue eyes, but sad—that was something she could not have imagined. He was pale and looked as if he were sorry about something. Ah, he smiled, but not in a really happy way. How white his teeth were, and what a nice mouth he had, so small and finely formed!
As she looked, he grew more and more handsome in her eyes, and she wondered how she could ever have fancied him larger or in any way different from what he was. She forgot her shyness and thought only of the eulogies of him she had heard. She saw him storming at the head of his troops, amid the exultant cries of the people. All fell back before him, as the waves are thrown off, when they rise frothing around the broad breast of a galleon. Cannon thundered, swords flashed, bullets whistled through dark clouds of smoke, but he pressed onward, brave and erect, and on his stirrup Victory hung—in the words of a chronicle she had read.
Her eyes shone upon him full of admiration and enthusiasm.
He made a sudden movement and met her gaze, but turned his head away, with difficulty repressing a triumphant smile. The next moment he rose as though he had just caught sight of Marie Grubbe.
Mistress Rigitze said this was her little niece, and Marie made her courtesy.
Ulrik Christian was astonished and perhaps a trifle disappointed to find that the eyes that had given him such a look were those of a child.
“Ma chère,” he said with a touch of mockery, as he looked down at her lace, “you’re a past mistress in the artof working quietly and secretly; not a sound have I heard from your bobbins in all the time I’ve been here.”
“No,” replied Marie, who understood him perfectly; “when I saw you, Lord Gyldenlöve,”—she shoved the heavy lace-maker’s cushion along the window-sill,—“it came to my mind that in times like these ’twere more fitting to think of lint and bandages than of laced caps.”
“Faith, I know that caps are as becoming in war-times as any other day,” he said, looking at her.
“But who would give them a thought in seasons like the present!”
“Many,” answered Ulrik Christian, who began to be amused at her seriousness, “and I for one.”
“I understand,” said Marie, looking up at him gravely; “’tis but a child you are addressing.” She courtesied ceremoniously and reached for her work.
“Stay, my little maid!”
“I pray you, let me no longer incommode you!”
“Hark’ee!” He seized her wrists in a hard grip and drew her to him across the little table. “By God, you’re a thorny person, but,” he whispered, “if one has greeted me with a look such as yours a moment ago, I will not have her bid me so poor a farewell—I will not have it! There—now kiss me!”
Her eyes full of tears, Marie pressed her trembling lips against his. He dropped her hands, and she sank down over the table, her head in her arms. She felt quite dazed. All that day and the next she had a dull sense of bondage, of being no longer free. A foot seemed to press on her neck and grind her helplessly in the dust. Yet there was no bitterness in her heart, no defiance in her thoughts, no desire for revenge. A strange peace had come over her soul and hadchased away the flitting throng of dreams and longings. She could not define her feeling for Ulrik Christian; she only knew that if he said Come, she must go to him, and if he said Go, she must quit him. She did not understand it, but it was so and had always been so, thus and not otherwise.
With unwonted patience she worked all day long at her sewing and her lace-making, meanwhile humming all the mournful ballads she had ever known, about the roses of love which paled and never bloomed again, about the swain who must leave his truelove and go to foreign lands, and who never, never came back any more, and about the prisoner who sat in the dark tower such a long dreary time, and first his noble falcon died, and then his faithful dog died, and last his good steed died, but his faithless wife Malvina lived merrily and well and grieved not for him. These songs and many others she would sing, and sometimes she would sigh and seem on the point of bursting into tears, until Lucie thought her ill and urged her to put way-bread leaves in her stockings.
When Ulrik Christian came in, a few days later, and spoke gently and kindly to her, she too behaved as though nothing had been between them, but she looked with childlike curiosity at the large white hands that had held her in such a hard grip, and she wondered what there could be in his eyes or his voice that had so cowed her. She glanced at the mouth, too, under its narrow, drooping moustache, but furtively and with a secret thrill of fear.
In the weeks that followed he came almost every day, and Marie’s thoughts became more and more absorbed in him. When he was not there, the old house seemed dull and desolate, and she longed for him as the sleepless longfor daylight, but when he came, her joy was never full and free, always timid and doubting.
One night she dreamed that she saw him riding through the crowded streets as on that first evening, but there were no cheers, and all the faces seemed cold and indifferent. The silence frightened her. She dared not smile at him, but hid behind the others. Then he glanced around with a strange questioning, wistful look, and this look fastened on her. She forced her way through the mass of people and threw herself down before him, while his horse set its cold, iron-shod hoof on her neck.
She awoke and looked about her, bewildered, at the cold, moonlit chamber. Alas, it was but a dream! She sighed; she did want so much to show him how she loved him. Yes, that was it. She had not understood it before, but she loved him. At the thought, she seemed to be lying in a stream of fire, and flames flickered before her eyes, while every pulse in her heart throbbed and throbbed and throbbed. She loved him. How wonderful it was to say it to herself! She loved him! How glorious the words were, how tremendously real, and yet how unreal! Good God, what was the use, even if she did love him? Tears of self-pity came into her eyes—and yet! She huddled comfortably under the soft, warm coverlet of down,—after all it was delicious to lie quite still and think of him and of her great, great love.
When Marie met Ulrik Christian again, she no longer felt timid. Her secret buoyed her up with a sense of her own importance, and the fear of revealing it gave her manner a poise that made her seem almost a woman. They were happy days that followed, fantastic, wonderful days! Was it not joy enough when Ulrik Christian went, to throw a hundred kisses after him, unseen by him and all others, orwhen he came, to fancy how her beloved would take her in his arms and call her by every sweet name she could think of, how he would sit by her side, while they looked long into each other’s eyes, and how she would run her hand through his soft, wavy brown hair? What did it matter that none of these things happened? She blushed at the very thought that they might happen.
They were fair and happy days, but toward the end of November Ulrik Christian fell dangerously ill. His health, long undermined by debauchery of every conceivable kind, had perhaps been unable to endure the continued strain of night-watches and hard work in connection with his post. Or possibly fresh dissipations had strung the bow too tightly. A wasting disease, marked by intense pain, wild fever dreams, and constant restlessness, attacked him, and soon took such a turn that none could doubt the name of the sickness was death.
On the eleventh of December, Pastor Hans Didrichsen Bartskjær, chaplain to the royal family, was walking uneasily up and down over the fine straw mattings that covered the floor in the large leather-brown room outside of Ulrik Christian’s sick-chamber. He stopped absentmindedly before the paintings on the walls, and seemed to examine with intense interest the fat, naked nymphs, outstretched under the trees, the bathing Susannas, and the simpering Judith with bare, muscular arms. They could not hold his attention long, however, and he went to the window, letting his gaze roam from the gray-white sky to the wet, glistening copper roofs and the long mounds of dirty, melting snow in the castle park below. Then he resumed his nervous pacing, murmuring, and gesticulating.
Was that the door opening? He stopped short to listen.No! He drew a deep breath and sank down into a chair, where he sat, sighing and rubbing the palms of his hands together, until the door really opened. A middle-aged woman wearing a huge flounced cap of red-dotted stuff appeared and beckoned cautiously to him. The pastor pulled himself together, stuck his prayer-book under his arm, smoothed his cassock, and entered the sick-chamber.
The large oval room was wainscoted in dark wood from floor to ceiling. From the central panel, depressed below the surface of the wall, grinned a row of hideous, white-toothed heads of blackamoors and Turks, painted in gaudy colors. The deep, narrow lattice-window was partially veiled by a sash-curtain of thin, blue-gray stuff, leaving the lower part of the room in deep twilight, while the sunbeams played freely on the painted ceiling, where horses, weapons, and naked limbs mingled in an inextricable tangle, and on the canopy of the four-poster bed, from which hung draperies of yellow damask fringed with silver.
The air that met the pastor, as he entered, was warm, and so heavy with the scent of salves and nostrums that for a moment he could hardly breathe. He clutched a chair for support, his head swam, and everything seemed to be whirling around him—the table covered with flasks and phials, the window, the nurse with her cap, the sick man on the bed, the sword-rack, and the door opening into the adjoining room where a fire was blazing in the grate.
“The peace of God be with you, my lord!” he greeted in a trembling voice as soon as he recovered from his momentary dizziness.
“What the devil d’ye want here?” roared the sick man, trying to lift himself in bed.
“Gemach, gnädigster Herr, gemach!” Shoemaker’s Anne,the nurse, hushed him, and coming close to the bed, gently stroked the coverlet. “’Tis the venerableConfessionariusof his Majesty, who has been sent hither to give you the sacrament.”
“Gracious Sir, noble Lord Gyldenlöve!” began the pastor, as he approached the bed. “Though ’tis known to me that you have not been among the simple wise or the wisely simple who use the Word of the Lord as their rod and staff and who dwell in His courts, and although that God whose cannon is the crashing thunderbolt likewise holds in His hand the golden palm of victory and the blood-dripping cypresses of defeat, yet men may understand, though not justify, the circumstance that you, whose duty it has been to command and set a valiant example to your people, may for a moment have forgotten that we are but as nothing, as a reed in the wind, nay, as the puny grafted shoot in the hands of the mighty Creator. You may have thought foolishly: This have I done, this is a fruit that I have brought to maturity and perfection. Yet now, beloved lord, when you lie here on your bed of pain, now God who is the merciful God of love hath surely enlightened your understanding and turned your heart to Him in longing with fear and trembling to confess your uncleansed sins, that you may trustfully accept the grace and forgiveness which His loving hands are holding out to you. The sharp-toothed worm of remorse—”
“Cross me fore and cross me aft! Penitence, forgiveness of sins, and life eternal!” jeered Ulrik Christian and sat up in bed. “Do you suppose, you sour-faced baldpate, do you suppose, because my bones are rotting out of my body in stumps and slivers, that gives me more stomach for your parson-palaver?”
“Most gracious lord, you sadly misuse the privilege which your high rank and yet more your pitiable condition give you to berate a poor servant of the Church, who is but doing his duty in seeking to turn your thoughts toward that which is assuredly to you the one thing needful. Oh, honored lord, it avails but little to kick against the pricks! Has not the wasting disease that has struck your body taught you that none can escape the chastisements of the Lord God, and that the scourgings of heaven fall alike on high and low?”
Ulrik Christian interrupted him, laughing: “Hell consume me, but you talk like a witless school-boy! This sickness that’s eating my marrow I’ve rightfully brought on myself, and if you suppose that heaven or hell sends it, I can tell you that a man gets it by drinking and wenching and revelling at night. You may depend on’t. And now take your scholastic legs out of this chamber with all speed, or else I’ll—”
Another attack seized him, and as he writhed and moaned with the intense pain, his oaths and curses were so blasphemous and so appalling in their inventiveness that the scandalized pastor stood pale and aghast. He prayed God for strength and power of persuasion, if mayhap he might be vouchsafed the privilege of opening this hardened soul to the truth and glorious consolation of religion. When the patient was quiet again he began: “My lord, my lord, with tears and weeping I beg and beseech you to cease from such abominable cursing and swearing! Remember, the axe is laid unto the root of the tree, and it shall be hewn down and cast into the fire, if it continues to be unfruitful and does not in the eleventh hour bring forth flowers and good fruit! Cease your baleful resistance, andthrow yourself with penitent prayers at the feet of our Saviour—”
When the pastor began his speech, Ulrik Christian sat up at the headboard of the bed. He pointed threateningly to the door and cried again and again: “Begone, parson! Begone, march! I can’t abide you any longer!”
“Oh, my dear lord,” continued the clergyman, “if mayhap you are hardening yourself because you misdoubt the possibility of finding grace, since the mountain of your sins is overwhelming, then hear with rejoicing that the fountain of God’s grace is inexhaustible—”
“Mad dog of a parson, will you go!” hissed Ulrik Christian between clenched teeth; “one—two!”
“And if your sins were red as blood, ay, as Tyrian purple—”
“Right about face!”
“He shall make them white as Lebanon’s—”
“Now by St. Satan and all his angels!” roared Ulrik Christian as he jumped out of bed, caught a rapier from the sword-rack, and made a furious lunge after the pastor, who, however, escaped into the adjoining room, slamming the door after him. In his rage, Ulrik Christian flung himself at the door, but sank exhausted to the floor, and had to be lifted into bed, though he still held the sword.
The forenoon passed in a drowsy calm. He suffered no pain, and the weakness that came over him seemed a pleasant relief. He lay staring at the points of light penetrating the curtain, and counted the black rings in the iron lattice. A pleased smile flitted over his face when he thought of his onslaught on the pastor, and he grew irritable only when Shoemaker’s Anne would coax him to close his eyes and try to sleep.
In the early afternoon a loud knock at the door announced the entrance of the pastor of Trinity Church, Dr. Jens Justesen. He was a tall, rather stout man, with coarse, strong features, short black hair, and large, deep-set eyes. Stepping briskly up to the bed, he said simply: “Good-day!”
As soon as Ulrik Christian became aware that another clergyman was standing before him, he began to shake with rage, and let loose a broadside of oaths and railing against the pastor, against Shoemaker’s Anne, who had not guarded his peace better, against God in heaven and all holy things.
“Silence, child of man!” thundered Pastor Jens. “Is this language meet for one who has even now one foot in the grave? ’Twere better you employed the flickering spark of life that still remains to you in making your peace with the Lord, instead of picking quarrels with men. You are like those criminals and disturbers of peace who, when their judgment is fallen and they can no longer escape the red-hot pincers and the axe, then in their miserable impotence curse and revile the Lord our God with filthy and wild words. They seek thereby courage to drag themselves out of that almost brutish despair, that craven fear and slavish remorse without hope, into which such fellows generally sink toward the last, and which they fear more than death and the tortures of death.”
Ulrik Christian listened quietly, until he had managed to get his sword out from under the coverlet. Then he cried: “Guard yourself, priest-belly!” and made a sudden lunge after Pastor Jens, who coolly turned the weapon aside with his broad prayer-book.
“Leave such tricks to pages!” he said contemptuously. “They’re scarce fitting for you or me. And now thiswoman”—turning to Shoemaker’s Anne—“had best leave us private.”
Anne quitted the room, and the pastor drew his chair up to the bed, while Ulrik Christian laid his sword on the coverlet.
Pastor Jens spoke fair words about sin and the wages of sin, about God’s love for the children of men, and about the death on the cross.
Ulrik Christian lay turning his sword in his hand, letting the light play on the bright steel. He swore, hummed bits of ribald songs, and tried to interrupt with blasphemous questions, but the pastor went on speaking about the seven words of the cross, about the holy sacrament of the altar, and the bliss of heaven.
Then Ulrik Christian sat up in bed and looked the pastor straight in the face.
“’Tis naught but lies and old wives’ tales,” he said.
“May the devil take me where I stand, if it isn’t true!” cried the pastor,—“every blessed word!” He hit the table with his fist, till the jars and glasses slid and rattled against one another, while he rose to his feet and spoke in a stern voice: “’Twere meet that I should shake the dust from my feet in righteous anger and leave you here alone, a sure prey to the devil and his realm, whither you are most certainly bound. You are one of those who daily nail our Lord Jesus to the gibbet of the cross, and for all such the courts of hell are prepared. Do not mock the terrible name of hell, for it is a name that contains a fire of torment and the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the damned! Alas, the anguish of hell is greater than any human mind can conceive; for if one were tortured to death and woke in hell, he would long for the wheel and the red-hot pincers as for Abraham’sbosom. ’Tis true that sickness and disease are bitter to the flesh of man when they pierce like a draught, inch by inch, through every fibre of the body, and stretch the sinews till they crack, when they burn like salted fire in the vitals, and gnaw with dull teeth in the innermost marrow! But the sufferings of hell are a raging storm racking every limb and joint, a whirlwind of unthinkable woe, an eternal dance of anguish; for as one wave rolls upon another, and is followed by another and another in all eternity, so the scalding pangs and blows of hell follow one another ever and everlastingly, without end and without pause.”
The sick man looked around bewildered. “I won’t!” he said, “I won’t! I’ve nothing to do with your heaven or hell. I would die, only die and nothing more!”
“You shall surely die,” said the pastor, “but at the end of the dark valley of death are two doors, one leading to the bliss of heaven and one to the torments of hell. There is no other way, no other way at all.”
“Yes, there is, pastor, there must be—tell me, is there not?—a deep, deep grave hard by for those who went their own way, a deep black grave leading down to nothing—to no earthly thing?”
“They who went their own way are headed for the realm of the devil. They are swarming at the gate of hell; high and low, old and young, they push and scramble to escape the yawning abyss, and cry miserably to that God whose path they would not follow, begging Him to take them away. The cries of the pit are over their heads, and they writhe in fear and agony, but the gates of hell shall close over them as the waters close over the drowning.”
“Is it the truth you’re telling me? On your word as an honest man, is it anything but a tale?”
“It is.”
“But I won’t! I’ll do without your God! I don’t want to go to heaven, only to die!”
“Then pass on to that horrible place of torment, where those who are damned for all eternity are cast about on the boiling waves of an endless sea of sulphur, where their limbs are racked by agony, and their hot mouths gasp for air, among the flames that flicker over the surface. I see their bodies drifting like white gulls on the sea, yea, like a frothing foam in a storm, and their shrieks are like the noise of the earth when the earthquake tears it, and their anguish is without a name. Oh, would that my prayers might save thee from it, miserable man! But grace has hidden its countenance, and the sun of mercy is set forever.”
“Then help me, pastor, help me!” groaned Ulrik Christian. “What are you a parson for, if you can’t help me? Pray, for God’s sake, pray! Are there no prayers in your mouth? Or give me your wine and bread, if there’s salvation in ’em as they say! Or is it all a lie—a confounded lie? I’ll crawl to the feet of your God like a whipped boy, since He’s so strong—it is not fair—He’s so mighty, and we’re so helpless! Make Him kind, your God, make Him kind to me! I bow down—I bow down—I can do no more!”
“Pray!”
“Ay, I’ll pray, I’ll pray all you want—indeed!” he knelt in bed and folded his hands. “Is that right?” he asked, looking toward Pastor Jens. “Now, what shall I say?”
The pastor made no answer.
For a few moments Ulrik Christian knelt thus, his large, bright, feverish eyes turned upward. “There are no words, pastor,” he whimpered. “Lord Jesu, they’re all gone,” and he sank down, weeping.
Suddenly he sprang up, seized his sword, broke it, and cried: “Lord Jesu Christ, see, I break my sword!” and he lifted the shining pieces of the blade. “Pardon, Jesu,pardon!”
The pastor then spoke words of consolation to him and gave him the sacrament without delay, for he seemed not to have a long time left. After that Pastor Jens called Shoemaker’s Anne and departed.
The disease was believed to be contagious, hence none of those who had been close to the dying man attended him in his illness, but in the room below a few of his family and friends, the physician in ordinary to the King, and two or three gentlemen of the court were assembled to receive the noblemen, foreign ministers, officers, courtiers, and city councilmen who called to inquire about him. So the peace of the sick-chamber was not disturbed, and Ulrik Christian was again alone with Shoemaker’s Anne.
Twilight fell. Anne threw more wood on the fire, lit two candles, took her prayer-book, and settled herself comfortably. She pulled her cap down to shade her face and very soon was asleep. A barber-surgeon and a lackey had been posted in the ante-room to be within call, but they were both squatting on the floor near the window, playing dice on the straw matting to deaden the sound. They were so absorbed in their game that they did not notice some one stealing through the room, until they heard the door of the sick-chamber close.
“It must have been the doctor,” they said, looking at each other in fright.
It was Marie Grubbe. Noiselessly she stole up to the bed and bent over the patient, who was dozing quietly. In the dim, uncertain light, he looked very pale and unlike himself,the forehead had a deathly whiteness, the eyelids were unnaturally large, and the thin wax-yellow hands were groping feebly and helplessly over the dark blue bolster.
Marie wept. “Art thou so ill?” she murmured. She knelt, supporting her elbows on the edge of the bed, and gazed at his face.
“Ulrik Christian,” she called, and laid her hand on his shoulder.
“Is any one else here?” he moaned weakly.
She shook her head. “Art thou very ill?” she asked.
“Yes, ’tis all over with me.”
“No, no, it must not be! Whom have I if you go? No, no, how can I bear it!”
“To live?—’tis easy to live, but I have had the bread of death and the wine of death, I must die—yes, yes,—bread and wine—body and blood—d’you believe they help? No, no, in the name of Jesus Christ, in the name of Jesus Christ! Say a prayer, child, make it a strong one!”
Marie folded her hands and prayed.
“Amen, amen! Pray again! I’m such a great sinner, child, it needs so much! Pray again, a long prayer with many words—many words! Oh, no, what’s that? Why is the bed turning?—Hold fast, hold fast! ’Tis turning—like a whirlwind of unthinkable woe, a dance of eternal anguish, and—ha, ha, ha! Am I drunk again? What devilry is this—what have I been drinking? Wine! Ay, of course, ’twas wine I drank, ha, ha! We’re gaily yet, we’re gaily—Kiss me, my chick!
Herzen und KüssenIst Himmel auf Erd—
Herzen und KüssenIst Himmel auf Erd—
Kiss me again, sweetheart, I’m so cold, but you’re roundand warm. Kiss me warm! You’re white and soft, white and smooth—”
He had thrown his arms around Marie, and pressed the terrified child close to him. At that moment, Shoemaker’s Anne woke and saw her patient sitting up and fondling a strange woman. She lifted her prayer-book threateningly and cried: “H’raus, thou hell-born wench! To think of the shameless thing sitting here and wantoning with the poor dying gentleman before my very eyes!H’raus, whoever ye are—handmaid of the wicked one, sent by the living Satan!”
“Satan!” shrieked Ulrik Christian and flung away Marie Grubbe in horror. “Get thee behind me! Go, go!” he made the sign of the cross again and again. “Oh, thou cursed devil! You would lead me to sin in my last breath, in my last hour, when one should be so careful. Begone, begone, in the blessed name of the Lord, thou demon!” His eyes wide open, fear in every feature, he stood up in bed and pointed to the door.
Speechless and beside herself with terror, Marie rushed out. The sick man threw himself down and prayed and prayed, while Shoemaker’s Anne read slowly and in a loud voice prayer after prayer from her book with the large print.
A few hours later Ulrik Christian was dead.
AFTER the attempt to storm Copenhagen in February of fifty-nine, the Swedes retired, and contented themselves with keeping the city invested. The beleaguered townspeople breathed more freely. The burdens of war were lightened, and they had time to rejoice in the honors they had won and the privileges that had been conferred on them. It is true, there were some who had found a zest in the stirring scenes of war, and felt their spirits flag, as they saw dull peace unfold its tedious routine, but the great mass of people were glad and light at heart. Their happiness found vent in merry routs, for weddings, christenings, and betrothals, long postponed while the enemy was so oppressively near, gathered gay crowds in every court and alley of the city.
Furthermore, there was time to take note of the neighbors and make the mote in their eyes into a beam. There was time to backbite, to envy and hate. Jealousies, whether of business or love, shot a powerful growth again, and old enmity bore fruit in new rancor and new vengeance. There was one who had lately augmented the number of his enemies, until he had drawn well-nigh the hate of the whole community upon his head. This man was Corfitz Ulfeldt. He could not be reached, for he was safe in the camp of the Swedes, but certain of his relatives and those of his wife, who were suspected of a friendly regard for him, were subjected to constant espionage and annoyance, while the court knew them not.
There were but few such, but among them was Sofie Urne, Ulrik Frederik’s betrothed. The Queen, who hated Ulfeldt’s wife more than she hated Ulfeldt himself, hadfrom the first been opposed to Ulrik Frederik’s alliance with a gentlewoman so closely related to Eleonore Christine, and since the recent actions of Ulfeldt had placed him in a more sinister light than ever, she began to work upon the King and others, in order to have the engagement annulled.
Nor was it long before the King shared the Queen’s view. Sofie Urne, who was in fact given to intrigue, had been painted as so wily and dangerous, and Ulrik Frederik as so flighty and easily led, that the King clearly saw how much trouble might come of such an alliance. Yet he had given his consent, and was too sensitive about his word of honor to withdraw it. He therefore attempted to reason with Ulrik Frederik, and pointed out how easily his present friendly footing at court might be disturbed by a woman who was so unacceptable to the King and Queen, and justly so, as her sympathies were entirely with the foes of the royal house. Moreover, he said, Ulrik Frederik was standing in his own light, since none could expect important posts to be entrusted to one who was constantly under the influence of the enemies of the court. Finally, he alluded to the intriguing character of Mistress Sofie, and even expressed doubt of the sincerity of her regard. True love, he said, would have sacrificed itself rather than bring woe upon its object, would have hidden its head in sorrow rather than exulted from the housetops. But Mistress Sofie had shown no scruples; indeed, she had used his youth and blind infatuation to serve her own ends.
The King talked long in this strain, but could not prevail upon Ulrik Frederik, who still had a lively recollection of the pleading it had cost him to make Mistress Sofie reveal her affection. He left the King, more than ever resolvedthat nothing should part them. His courtship of Mistress Sofie was the first serious step he had ever taken in his life, and it was a point of honor with him to take it fully. There had always been so many hands ready to lead and direct him, but he had outgrown all that; he was old enough to walk alone, and he meant to do it. What was the favor of the King and the court, what were honor and glory, compared to his love? For that alone he would strive and sacrifice; in that alone he would live.
The King, however, let it be known to Christoffer Urne that he was opposed to the match, and the house was closed to Ulrik Frederik, who henceforth could see Mistress Sofie only by stealth. At first this merely fed the flame, but soon his visits to his betrothed grew less frequent. He became more clear-sighted where she was concerned, and there were moments when he doubted her love, and even wondered whether she had not led him on, that summer day, while she seemed to hold him off.
The court, which had hitherto met him with open arms, was cold as ice. The King, who had taken such a warm interest in his future, was indifference itself. There were no longer any hands stretched out to help him, and he began to miss them; for he was by no means man enough to go against the stream. When it merely ceased to waft him along, he lost heart instantly. At his birth, a golden thread had been placed in his hand, and he had but to follow it upward to happiness and honor. He had dropped this thread to find his own way, but he still saw it glimmering. What if he were to grasp it again? He could neither stiffen his back to defy the King nor give up Sofie. He had to visit her in secret, and this was perhaps the hardest of all for his pride to stomach. Accustomed to move in pomp and display, totake every step in princely style, he winced at crawling through back alleys. Days passed, and weeks passed, filled with inactive brooding and still-born plans. He loathed his own helplessness, and began to despise himself for a laggard. Then came the doubt: perhaps his dawdling had killed her love, or had she never loved him? They said she was clever, and no doubt she was, but—as clever as they said? Oh, no! What was love, then, if she did not love, and yet—and yet....
Behind Christoffer Urne’s garden ran a passage just wide enough for a man to squeeze through. This was the way Ulrik Frederik had to take when he visited his mistress, and he would usually have Hop-o’-my-Thumb mounted on guard at the end of the passage, lest people in the street should see him climbing the board fence.
On a balmy, moonlit summer night, three or four hours after bedtime, Daniel had wrapped himself in his cloak and found a seat for himself on the remains of a pig’s trough, which some one had thrown out from a neighboring house. He was in a pleasant frame of mind, slightly drunk, and chuckling to himself at his own merry conceits. Ulrik Frederik had already scaled the fence and was in the garden. It was fragrant with elder-blossoms. Linen laid out to bleach made long white strips across the grass. There was a soft rustling in the maples overhead and the rose-bushes at his side; their red blossoms looked almost white in the moonlight. He went up to the house, which stood shining white, the windows in a yellow glitter. How quiet everything was—radiant and calm! Suddenly the glassy whirr of a cricket shivered the stillness. The sharp, blue-black shadows of the hollyhocks seemed painted on the wall behind them. A faint mist rose from the bleach-linen. There!—helifted the latch, and the next moment he was in the darkness within. Softly he groped his way up the rickety staircase until he felt the warm, spice-scented air of the attic. The rotten boards of the floor creaked under his step. The moon shone through a small window overhead, throwing a square of light on the flat top of a grain-pile. Scramble over—the dust whirling in the column of light! Now—the gable-room at last! The door opened from within, and threw a faint reddish glow that illuminated for a second the pile of grain, the smoke-yellowed, sloping chimney, and the roof-beams. The next moment they were shut out, and he stood by Sofie’s side in the family clothes-closet.
The small, low room was almost filled with large linen-presses. From the loft hung bags full of down and feathers. Old spinning-wheels were flung into the corners, and the walls were festooned with red onions and silver-mounted harness. The window was closed with heavy wooden shutters, but on a brass-trimmed chest beneath it stood a small hand-lantern. Sofie opened its tiny horn-pane to get a brighter light. Her loosened hair hung down over the fur-edged broadcloth robe she had thrown over her homespun dress. Her face was pale and grief-worn, but she smiled gaily and poured out a stream of chatter. She was sitting on a low stool, her hands clasped around her knees, looking up merrily at Ulrik Frederik, who stood silent above her, while she talked and talked, lashed on by the fear his ill-humor had roused in her.
“How now, Sir Grumpy?” she said. “You’ve nothing to say? In all the hundred hours that have passed, have you not thought of a hundred things you wanted to whisper to me? Oh, then you have not longed as I have!” Shetrimmed the candle with her fingers, and threw the bit of burning wick on the floor. Instinctively Ulrik Frederik took a step forward, and put it out with his foot.
“That’s right!” she went on. “Come here, and sit by my side; but first you must kneel and sigh and plead with me to be fond again, for this is the third night I’m watching. Yester eve and the night before I waited in vain, till my eyes were dim.” She lifted her hand threateningly. “To your knees, Sir Faithless, and pray as if for your life!” She spoke with mock solemnity, then smiled, half beseeching, half impatient. “Come here and kneel, come!”
Ulrik Frederik looked around almost grudgingly. It seemed too absurd to fall on his knees there in Christoffer Urne’s attic. Yet he knelt down, put his arm around her waist, and hid his face in her lap, though without speaking.
She too was silent, oppressed with fear; for she had seen Ulrik Frederik’s pale, tormented face and uneasy eyes. Her hand played carelessly with his hair, but her heart beat violently in apprehension and dread.
They sat thus for a long time.
Then Ulrik Frederik started up.
“No, no!” he cried. “This can’t go on! God our Father in heaven is my witness, that you’re dear to me as the innermost blood of my heart, and I don’t know how I’m to live without you. But what does it avail? What can come of it? They’re all against us—every one. Not a tongue will speak a word of cheer, but all turn from me. When they see me, ’tis as though a cold shadow fell over them, where before I brought a light. I stand so utterly alone, Sofie, ’tis bitter beyond words. True, I know you warned me, but I’m eaten up in this strife. It sucks my courage and my honor, and though I’m consumed with shame, I mustask you to set me free. Dearest girl, release me from my word!”
Sofie had risen and stood cold and unflinching like a statue, eyeing him gravely, as he spoke.
“I am with child,” she said quietly and firmly.
If she had consented, if she had given him his freedom, Ulrik Frederik felt that he would not have taken it. He would have thrown himself at her feet. Sure of her, he would have defied the King and all. But she did not. She but pulled his chain to show him how securely he was bound. Oh, she was clever as they said! His blood boiled, he could have fallen upon her, clutched her white throat to drag the truth out of her and force her to open every petal and lay bare every shadow and fold in the rose of her love, that he might know the truth at last! But he mastered himself and said with a smile: “Yes, of course, I know—’twas nothing but a jest, you understand.”
Sofie looked at him uneasily. No, it had not been a jest. If it had been, why did he not come close to her and kiss her? Why did he stand there in the shadow? If she could only see his eyes! No, it was no jest. He had asked as seriously as she had answered. Ah, that answer! She began to see what she had lost by it. If she had only said yes, he would never have left her! “Oh, Ulrik Frederik,” she said, “I was but thinking of our child, but if you no longer love me, then go, go at once and build your own happiness! I will not hold you back.”
“Did I not tell you that ’twas but a jest? How can you think that I would ask you to release me from my word and sneak off in base shame and dishonor! Whenever I lifted my head again,” he went on, “I must fear lest the eye that had seen my ignominy should meet mine and force it to theground.” And he meant what he said. If she had loved him as passionately as he loved her, then perhaps, but now—never.
Sofie went to him and laid her head on his shoulder, weeping.
“Farewell, Ulrik Frederik,” she said. “Go, go! I would not hold you one hour after you longed to be gone, no, not if I could bind you with a hair.”
He shook his head impatiently. “Dear Sofie,” he said, winding himself out of her arms, “let us not play a comedy with each other. I owe it both to you and to myself that the pastor should join our hands; it cannot be too soon. Let it be in two or three days—but secretly, for it is of no use to set the world against us more than has been done already.” Sofie dared not raise any objection. They agreed on the time and the place, and parted with tender good-nights.
When Ulrik Frederik came down into the garden, it was dark, for the moon had veiled itself, and a few heavy raindrops fell from the inky sky. The early cocks were crowing in the mews, but Daniel had fallen asleep on his post.
A week later his best parlor was the scene of Mistress Sofie’s and Ulrik Frederik’s private marriage by an obscure clergyman. The secret was not so well guarded, however, but that the Queen could mention it to the King a few days later. The result was that in a month’s time the contract was annulled by royal decree, and Mistress Sofie was sent to the cloister for gentlewomen at Itzehoe.
Ulrik Frederik made no attempt to resist this step. Although he felt deeply hurt, he was weary, and bowed in dull dejection to whatever had to be. He drank toomuch almost every day, and when in his cups would weep and plaintively describe to two or three boon companions, who were his only constant associates, the sweet, peaceful, happy life he might have led. He always ended with mournful hints that his days were numbered, and that his broken heart would soon be carried to that place of healing where the bolsters were of black earth and the worms were chirurgeon.
The King, to make an end of all this, ordered him to accompany the troops which the Dutch were transferring to Fyen, and thence he returned in November with the news of the victory at Nyborg. He resumed his place at the court and in the favor of the King, and seemed to be quite his old self.
MARIE GRUBBEwas now seventeen.
On the afternoon when she fled in terror from the death-bed of Ulrik Christian Gyldenlöve, she had rushed up to her own chamber and paced the floor, wringing her hands, and moaning as with intense bodily pain, until Lucie had run to Mistress Rigitze and breathlessly begged her for God’s sake to come to Miss Marie, for she thought something had gone to pieces inside of her. Mistress Rigitze came, but could not get a word out of the child. She had thrown herself before a chair with face hidden in the cushions, and to all Mistress Rigitze’s questions answered only that she wanted to go home, she wanted to go home, she wouldn’t stay a moment longer, and she had wept and sobbed, rocking her head from side to side. Mistress Rigitze had finally given her a good beating and scolded Lucie, saying that between them they had nearly worried the life out of her with their nonsense, and therewith she left the two to themselves.
Marie took the beating with perfect indifference. Had any one offered her blows in the happy days of her love, it would have seemed the blackest calamity, the deepest degradation, but now it no longer mattered. In one short hour, her longings, her faith, and her hopes had all been withered, shrivelled up, and blown away. She remembered once at Tjele when she had seen the men stone to death a dog that had ventured within the high railing of the duck-park. The wretched animal swam back and forth, unable to get out, the blood running from many wounds, and she remembered how she had prayed to God at every stone that it might strike deep, since the dog was so miserable that tospare it would have been the greatest cruelty. She felt like poor Diana, and welcomed every sorrow, only wishing that it would strike deep, for she was so unhappy that the deathblow was her only hope.
Oh, if that was the end of all greatness—slavish whimpering, lecherous raving, and craven terror!—then there was no such thing as greatness. The hero she had dreamed of,herode through the portals of death with ringing spurs and shining mail, with head bared and lance at rest, not with fear in witless eyes and whining prayers on trembling lips. Then there was no shining figure that she could dream of in worshipping love, no sun that she could gaze on till the world swam in light and rays and color before her blinded eyes. It was all dull and flat and leaden, bottomless triviality, lukewarm commonplace, and nothing else.
Such were her first thoughts. She seemed to have been transported for a short time to a fairy-land, where the warm, life-pregnant air had made her whole being unfold like an exotic flower, flashing sunlight from every petal, breathing fragrance in every vein, blissful in its own light and scent, growing and growing, leaf upon leaf and petal upon petal, in irresistible strength and fullness. But this was all past. Her life was barren and void again; she was poor and numb with cold. No doubt the whole world was like that, and all the people likewise. And yet they went on living in their futile bustle. Oh, her heart was sick with disgust at seeing them flaunt their miserable rags and proudly listen for golden music in their empty clatter.
Eagerly she reached for those treasured old books of devotion that had so often been proffered her and as often rejected. There was dreary solace in their stern words on the misery of the world and the vanity of all earthly things,but the one book that she pored over and came back to again and again was the Revelation of St. John the Divine. She never tired of contemplating the glories of the heavenly Jerusalem; she pictured it to herself down to the smallest detail, walked through every by-way, peeped in at every door. She was blinded by the rays of sardonyx and chrysolyte, chrysoprasus and jacinth; she rested in the shadow of the gates of pearl and saw her own face mirrored in the streets of gold like transparent glass. Often she wondered what she and Lucie and Aunt Rigitze and all the other people of Copenhagen would do when the first angel poured out the vial of the wrath of God upon earth, and the second poured out his vial, and the third poured out his—she never got any farther, for she always had to begin over again.
When she sat at her work she would sing one long passion hymn after another, in a loud, plaintive voice, and in her spare moments she would recite whole pages from “The Chain of Prayerful Souls” or “A Godly Voice for Each of the Twelve Months;” for these two she knew almost by heart.
Underneath all this piety there lurked a veiled ambition. Though she really felt the fetters of sin and longed for communion with God, there mingled in her religious exercises a dim desire for power, a half-realized hope that she might become one of the first in the kingdom of heaven. This brooding worked a transformation in her whole being. She shunned people and withdrew within herself. Even her appearance was changed, the face pale and thin, the eyes burning with a hard flame—and no wonder; for the terrible visions of the Apocalypse rode life-size through her dreams at night, and all day long her thoughts dwelt onwhat was dark and dreary in life. When Lucie had gone to sleep in the evening, she would steal out of bed and find a mystic ascetic pleasure in falling on her knees and praying, till her bones ached and her feet were numb with cold.
Then came the time when the Swedes raised the siege, and all Copenhagen divided its time between filling glasses as host and draining them as guest. Marie’s nature, too, rebounded from the strain, and a new life began for her, on a certain day when Mistress Rigitze, followed by a seamstress, came up to her room and piled the tables and chairs high with the wealth of sacks, gowns, and pearl-embroidered caps that Marie had inherited from her mother. It was considered time that she should wear grown-up clothes.
She was in raptures at being the centre of all the bustle that broke in on her quiet chamber, all this ripping and measuring, cutting and basting. How perfectly dear that pounce-red satin, glowing richly where it fell in long, heavy folds, or shining brightly where it fitted smoothly over her form! How fascinating the eager parley about whether this silk chamelot was too thick to show the lines of her figure or that Turkish green too crude for her complexion! No scruples, no dismal broodings could stand before this joyous, bright reality. Ah, if she could but once sit at the festive board—for she had begun to go to assemblies—wearing this snow-white, crisp ruff, among other young maidens in just as crisp ruffs, all the past would become as strange to her as the dreams of yesternight, and if she could but once tread the saraband and pavan in sweeping cloth of gold and lace mitts and broidered linen, those spiritual excesses would make her cheeks burn with shame.
It all came about: she was ashamed, and she did tread the saraband and pavan; for she was sent twice a week,with other young persons of quality, to dancing-school in Christen Skeel’s great parlor, where an old Mecklenburger taught them steps and figures and a gracious carriage according to the latest Spanish mode. She learned to play on the lute, and was perfected in French; for Mistress Rigitze had her own plans.
Marie was happy. As a young prince who has been held captive is taken straight from the gloomy prison and harsh jailer to be lifted to the throne by an exultant people, to feel the golden emblem of power and glory pressed firmly upon his curls, and see all bowing before him in smiling homage, so she had stepped from her quiet chamber into the world, and all had hailed her as a queen indeed, all had bowed, smiling, before the might of her beauty.
There is a flower called the pearl hyacinth; as that is blue so were her eyes in color, but their lustre was that of the falling dewdrop, and they were deep as a sapphire resting in shadow. They could fall as softly as sweet music that dies, and glance up exultant as a fanfare. Wistful—ay, as the stars pale at daybreak with a veiled, tremulous light, so was her look when it was wistful. It could rest with such smiling intimacy that many a man felt it like a voice in a dream, far away but insistent, calling his name, but when it darkened with grief it was full of such hopeless woe that one could almost hear the heavy dripping of blood.
Such was the impression she made, and she knew it, but not wholly. Had she been older and fully conscious of her beauty, it might have turned her to stone. She might have come to look upon it as a jewel to be kept burnished and in a rich setting, that it might be the desire of all; she might have suffered admiration coldly and quietly. Yet it was not so. Her beauty was so much older than herselfand she had so suddenly come into the knowledge of its power, that she had not learned to rest upon it and let herself be borne along by it, serene and self-possessed. Rather, she made efforts to please, grew coquettish and very fond of dress, while her ears drank in every word of praise, her eyes absorbed every admiring look, and her heart treasured it all.
She was seventeen, and it was Sunday, the first Sunday after peace had been declared. In the morning she had attended the thanksgiving service, and in the afternoon she was dressing for a walk with Mistress Rigitze.
The whole town was astir with excitement; for peace had opened the city gates, which had been closed for twenty-two long months. All were rushing to see where the suburb had stood, where the enemy had been encamped, and where “ours” had fought. They had to go down into the trenches, climb the barricades, peep into the necks of the mines, and pluck at the gabions. This was the spot where such a one had been posted, and here so-and-so had fallen, and over there another had rushed forward and been surrounded. Everything was remarkable, from the wheel-tracks of the cannon-carriages and the cinders of the watch-fires to the bullet-pierced board-fences and the sun-bleached skull of a horse. And so the narrating and explaining, the supposing and debating, went on, up the ramparts and down the barricades.
Gert Pyper was strutting about with his whole family. He stamped the ground at least a hundred times and generally thought he noticed a strangely hollow sound, while his rotund spouse pulled him anxiously by the sleeve and begged him not to be too foolhardy, but Master Gert only stamped the harder. The grown-up son showed his littlebetrothed where he had been standing on the night when he got a bullet-hole through his duffel great-coat, and where the turner’s boy had had his head shot off. The smaller children cried, because they were not allowed to keep the rifle-ball they had found; for Erik Lauritzen, who was also there, said it might be poisoned. He was poking the half-rotten straw where the barracks had stood, for he remembered a story of a soldier who had been hanged outside of Magdeburg, and under whose pillow seven of his comrades had found so much money that they had deserted before the official looting of the city began.
The green fields and grayish white roads were dotted black with people coming and going. They walked about, examining the well-known spots like a newly discovered world or an island suddenly shot up from the bottom of the sea, and there were many who, when they saw the country stretching out before them, field behind field and meadow behind meadow, were seized withwanderlustand began to walk on and on as though intoxicated with the sense of space, of boundless space.
Toward supper time, however, the crowds turned homeward, and as moved by one impulse, sought the North Quarter, where the graveyard of St. Peter’s Church lay surrounded by spacious gardens; for it was an old-time custom to take the air under the green trees, after vespers on summer Sundays. While the enemy was encamped before the ramparts, the custom naturally fell into disuse, and the churchyard had been as empty on Sundays as on week days; but this day old habits were revived, and people streamed in through both entrances from Nörregade: nobles and citizens, high and low, all had remembered the full-crowned linden trees of St. Peter’s churchyard.
On the grassy mounds and the broad tombstones sat merry groups of townspeople, man and wife, children and neighbors, eating their supper, while in the outskirts of the party stood the ’prentice boy munching the delicious Sunday sandwich, as he waited for the basket. Tiny children tripped with hands full of broken food for the beggar youngsters that hung on the wall. Lads thirsting for knowledge spelled their way through the lengthy epitaphs, while father listened full of admiration, and mother and the girls scanned the dresses of the passers-by: for by this time the gentlefolk were walking up and down in the broad paths. They usually came a little later than the others, and either supped at home or in one of the eating-houses in the gardens round about.
Stately matrons and dainty maids, old councillors and young officers, stout noblemen and foreign ministers, passed in review. There went bustling, gray-haired Hans Nansen, shortening his steps to the pace of the wealthy Villem Fiuren and listening to his piping voice. There came Corfits Trolle and the stiff Otto Krag. Mistress Ide Daa, famed for her lovely eyes, stood talking to old Axel Urup, who showed his huge teeth in an everlasting smile, while the shrunken form of his lady, Mistress Sidsel Grubbe, tripped slowly by the side of Sister Rigitze and the impatient Marie. There were Gersdorf and Schack and Thuresen of the tow-colored mane and Peder Retz with Spanish dress and Spanish manners.
Ulrik Frederik was among the rest, walking with Niels Rosenkrands, the bold young lieutenant-colonel, whose French breeding showed in his lively gestures. When they met Mistress Rigitze and her companions, Ulrik Frederik would have passed them with a cold, formal greeting,for ever since his separation from Sofie Urne he had nursed a spite against Mistress Rigitze, whom he suspected, as one of the Queen’s warmest adherents, of having had a finger in the matter. But Rosenkrands stopped, and Axel Urup urged them so cordially to sup with the party in Johan Adolph’s garden that they could not well refuse.
A few minutes later they were all sitting in the little brick summer-house, eating the simple country dishes that the gardener set before them.
“Is it true, I wonder,” asked Mistress Ide Daa, “that the Swedish officers have so bewitched the maidens of Sjælland with their pretty manners that they have followed them in swarms out of land and kingdom?”
“Marry, it’s true enough at least of that minx, Mistress Dyre,” replied Mistress Sidsel Grubbe.
“Of what Dyres is she?” asked Mistress Rigitze.
“The Dyres of Skaaneland, you know, sister, those who have such light hair. They’re all intermarried with the Powitzes. The one who fled the country she’s a daughter of Henning Dyre of West Neergaard, he who married Sidonie, the eldest of the Ove Powitzes, and she went bag and baggage—took sheets, bolsters, plate, and ready money from her father.”
“Ay,” smiled Axel Urup, “strong love draws a heavy load.”
“Faith,” agreed Oluf Daa, who always struck out with his left hand when he talked, “love—as a man may say—love is strong.”
“Lo-ove,” drawled Rosenkrands, daintily stroking his moustache with the back of his little finger, “is like Hercules in female dress, gentle and charming in appearance and seeming all weak-ness and mild-ness, yet it hasstre-ength and craftiness to complete all the twelve labors of Hercules.”