CHAPTER VII

MARIE GRUBBE was now seventeen.

On the afternoon when she fled in terror from the death-bed of Ulrik Christian Gyldenl?ve, 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 to - 85 - spare 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, he rode 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, - 86 - 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 on - 87 - what 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, - 88 - 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 herself - 89 - and 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 little - 90 - betrothed 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 with wanderlust and 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 N?rregade: nobles and citizens, high and low, all had remembered the full-crowned linden trees of St. Peter’s churchyard.

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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, - 92 - 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 Sj?lland 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 has - 93 - stre-ength and craftiness to complete all the twelve labors of Hercules.”

“Indeed,” broke in Mistress Ide Daa, “that is plainly to be seen from the love of Mistress Dyre, which at least completed one of the labors of Hercules, inasmuch as it cleaned out chests and presses, even as he cleaned the stable of Uriah—or whatever his name was—you know.”

“I would rather say”—Ulrik Frederik turned to Marie Grubbe—“that love is like falling asleep in a desert and waking in a balmy pleasure-garden, for such is the virtue of love that it changes the soul of man, and that which was barren now seems a very wonder of delight. But what are your thoughts about love, fair Mistress Marie?”

“Mine?” she asked. “I think love is like a diamond; for as a diamond is beautiful to look upon, so is love fair, but as the diamond is poison to any one who swallows it, in the same manner love is a kind of poison and produces a baneful raging distemper in those who are infected by it—at least if one is to judge by the strange antics one may observe in amorous persons and by their curious conversation.”

“Ay,” whispered Ulrik Frederik gallantly, “the candle may well talk reason to the poor moth that is crazed by its light!”

“Forsooth, I think you are right, Marie,” began Axel Urup, pausing to smile and nod to her. “Yes, yes, we may well believe that love is but a poison, else how can we explain that coldblooded persons may be fired with the most burning passion merely by giving them miracle-philtres and love-potions?”

“Fie!” cried Mistress Sidsel; “don’t speak of such terrible godless business—and on a Sunday, too!”

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“My dear Sidse,” he replied, “there’s no sin in that—none at all. Would you call it a sin, Colonel Gyldenl?ve? No? Surely not. Does not even Holy Writ tell of witches and evil sorceries? Indeed and indeed it does. What I was about to say is that all our humors have their seat in the blood. If a man is fired with anger, can’t he feel the blood rushing up through his body and flooding his eyes and ears? And if he’s frightened o’ the sudden, does not the blood seem to sink down into his feet and grow cold all in a trice? Is it for nothing, do you think, that grief is pale and joy red as a rose? And as for love, it comes only after the blood has ripened in the summers and winters of seventeen or eighteen years; then it begins to ferment like good grape-wine; it seethes and bubbles. In later years it clears and settles as do other fermenting juices; it grows less hot and fierce. But as good wine begins to effervesce again when the grape-vine is in bloom, so the disposition of man, even of the old, is more than ordinarily inclined to love at certain seasons of the year, when the blood, as it were, remembers the springtime of life.”

“Ay, the blood,” added Oluf Daa, “as a man may say, the blood—’tis a subtle matter to understand—as a man may say.”

“Indeed,” nodded Mistress Rigitze, “everything acts on the blood, both sun and moon and approaching storm, that’s as sure as if ’twere printed.”

“And likewise the thoughts of other people,” said Mistress Ide. “I saw it in my eldest sister. We lay in one bed together, and every night, as soon as her eyes were closed, she would begin to sigh and stretch her arms and legs and try to get out of bed as some one were calling her. And ’twas but her betrothed, who was in Holland, and was so - 95 - full of longing for her that he would do nothing day and night but think of her, until she never knew an hour’s peace, and her health—don’t you remember, dear Mistress Sidsel, how weak her eyesight was all the time J?rgen Bille was from home?”

“Do I remember? Ah, the dear soul! But she bloomed again like a rosebud. Bless me, her first lying-in—” and she continued the subject in a whisper.

Rosenkrands turned to Axel Urup. “Then you believe,” he said, “that an elixir d’am-our is a fermenting juice poured into the blood? That tallies well with a tale the late Mr. Ulrik Christian told me one day we were on the ramparts together. ’Twas in Antwerp it happened—in the Hotellerie des Trois Brochets, where he had lodgings. That morning at ma-ass he had seen a fair, fair maid-en, and she had looked quite kind-ly at him. All day long she was not in his thoughts, but at night when he entered his chamber, there was a rose at the head of the bed. He picked it up and smelled it, and in the same mo-ment the coun-ter-feit of the maiden stood before him as painted on the wall, and he was seized with such sudden and fu-rious longing for her that he could have cried aloud. He rushed out of the house and into the street, and there he ran up and down, wail-ing like one be-witched. Something seemed to draw and draw him and burn like fire, and he never stopped till day dawned.”

So they talked until the sun went down, and they parted to go home through the darkening streets. Ulrik Frederik joined but little in the general conversation; for he was afraid that if he said anything about love, it might be taken for reminiscences of his relation with Sofie Urne. Nor was he in the mood for talking, and when he and Rosenkrands - 96 - were alone he made such brief, absentminded replies that his companion soon wearied of him and left him to himself.

Ulrik Frederik turned homeward to his own apartments, which this time were at Rosenborg. His valet being out, there was no light in the large parlor, and he sat alone there in the dark till almost midnight.

He was in a strange mood, divided between regret and foreboding. It was one of those moods when the soul seems to drift as in a light sleep, without will or purpose, on a slowly gliding stream, while mist-like pictures pass on the background of dark trees, and half-formed thoughts rise from the sombre stream like great dimly-lit bubbles that glide—glide onward and burst. Bits of the conversation that afternoon, the motley crowds in the churchyard, Marie Grubbe’s smile, Mistress Rigitze, the Queen, the King’s favor, the King’s anger that other time,—the way Marie moved her hands, Sofie Urne, pale and far away,—yet paler and yet farther away,—the rose at the head of the bed and Marie Grubbe’s voice, the cadence of some word,—he sat listening and heard it again and again winging through the silence.

He rose and went to the window, opened it, and leaned his elbows on the wide casement. How fresh it all was—so cool and quiet! The bittersweet smell of roses cooled with dew, the fresh, pungent scent of new-mown hay, and the spicy fragrance of the flowering maple were wafted in. A mist-like rain spread a blue, tremulous dusk over the garden. The black boughs of the larch, the drooping leafy veil of the birch, and the rounded crowns of the beech stood like shadows breathed on a background of gliding mist, while the clipped yew-trees shot upward like the black columns of a roofless temple.

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The stillness was that of a deep grave, save for the raindrops, falling light as thistledown, with a faint, monotonous sound like a whisper that dies and begins again and dies there behind the wet, glistening trunks.

What a strange whisper it was when one listened! How wistful!—like the beating of soft wings when old memories flock. Or was it a low rustle in the dry leaves of lost illusions? He felt lonely, drearily alone and forsaken. Among all the thousands of hearts that beat round about in the stillness of the night, not one turned in longing to him! Over all the earth there was a net of invisible threads binding soul to soul, threads stronger than life, stronger than death; but in all that net not one tendril stretched out to him. Homeless, forsaken! Forsaken? Was that a sound of goblets and kisses out there? Was there a gleam of white shoulders and dark eyes? Was that a laugh ringing through the stillness?—What then? Better the slow-dripping bitterness of solitude than that poisonous, sickly sweetness.... Oh, curses on it! I shake your dust from my thoughts, slothful life, life for dogs, for blind men, for weaklings.... As a rose! O God, watch over her and keep her through the dark night! Oh, that I might be her guard and protector, smooth every path, shelter her against every wind—so beautiful—listening like a child—as a rose!...