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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