A FEW days later, Ulrik Frederik was spending the morning at Lynge. He was crawling on all fours in the little garden outside of the house where Karen Fiol lived. One hand was holding a rose wreath, while with the other he was trying to coax or drag a little white lapdog from under the hazel bushes in the corner.

“Bonc?ur! Petit, petit Bonc?ur! Come, you little rogue, oh, come, you silly little fool! Oh, you brute, you—Bonc?ur, little dog,—you confounded obstinate creature!”

Karen was standing at the window laughing. The dog would not come, and Ulrik Frederik wheedled and swore.
“Amy des morceaux délicats,”

sang Karen, swinging a goblet full of wine:
“Et de la débauche polie Viens noyer dans nos Vins Muscats Ta soif et ta mélancolie!”

She was in high spirits, rather heated, and the notes of her song rose louder than she knew. At last Ulrik Frederik caught the dog. He carried it to the window in triumph, pressed the rose chaplet down over its ears, and, kneeling, presented it to Karen.

“Adorable Venus, queen of hearts, I beg you to accept from your humble slave this little innocent white lamb crowned with flowers—”

At that moment, Marie Grubbe opened the wicket. When she saw Ulrik Frederik on his knees, handing a rose garland, or whatever it was, to that red, laughing woman, she - 140 - turned pale, bent down, picked up a stone, and threw it with all her might at Karen. It struck the edge of the window, and shivered the glass in fragments, which fell rattling to the ground.

Karen darted back, shrieking. Ulrik Frederik looked anxiously in after her. In his surprise he had dropped the dog, but he still held the wreath, and stood dumbfounded, angry, and embarrassed, turning it round in his fingers.

“Wait, wait!” cried Marie. “I missed you this time, but I’ll get you yet! I’ll get you!” She pulled from her hair a long, heavy steel pin set with rubies, and holding it before her like a dagger, she ran toward the house with a queer tripping, almost skipping gait. It seemed as though she were blinded, for she steered a strange meandering course up to the door.

There Ulrik Frederik stopped her.

“Go away!” she cried, almost whimpering, “you with your chaplet! Such a creature”—she went on, trying to slip past him, first on one side, then on the other, her eyes fixed on the door—“such a creature you bind wreaths for—rose-wreaths, ay, here you play the lovesick shepherd! Have you not a flute, too? Where’s your flute?” she repeated, tore the wreath from his hand, hurled it to the ground, and stamped on it. “And a shepherd’s crook—Amaryllis—with a silk bow? Let me pass, I say!” She lifted the pin threateningly.

He caught both her wrists and held her fast. “Would you sting again?” he said sharply.

Marie looked up at him.

“Ulrik Frederik!” she said in a low voice, “I am your wife before God and men. Why do you not love me any more? Come with me! Leave the woman in there for what - 141 - she is, and come with me! Come, Ulrik Frederik, you little know what a burning love I feel for you, and how bitterly I have longed and grieved! Come, pray come!”

Ulrik Frederik made no reply. He offered her his arm and conducted her out of the garden to her coach, which was waiting not far away. He handed her in, went to the horses’ heads and examined the harness, changed a buckle, and called the coachman down, under pretence of getting him to fix the couplings. While they stood there he whispered: “The moment you get into your seat, you are to drive on as hard as your horses can go, and never stop till you get home. Those are my orders, and I believe you know me.”

The man had climbed into his seat, Ulrik Frederik caught the side of the coach as though to jump in, the whip cracked and fell over the horses, he sprang back, and the coach rattled on.

Marie’s first impulse was to order the coachman to stop, to take the reins herself, or to jump out, but then a strange lassitude came over her, a deep unspeakable loathing, a nauseating weariness, and she sat quite still, gazing ahead, never heeding the reckless speed of the coach.

Ulrik Frederik was again with Karen Fiol.

When Ulrik Frederik returned to the castle that evening, he was, in truth, a bit uneasy—not exactly worried, but with the sense of apprehension people feel when they know there are vexations and annoyances ahead of them that cannot be dodged, but must somehow be gone through with. Marie had, of course, complained to the King. The King would give him a lecture, and he would have to listen to it all. Marie would wrap herself in the majestic silence of - 142 - offended virtue, which he would be at pains to ignore. The whole atmosphere would be oppressive. The Queen would look fatigued and afflicted—genteelly afflicted—and the ladies of the court, who knew nothing and suspected everything, would sit silently, now and then lifting their heads to sigh meekly and look at him with gentle upbraiding in large, condoning eyes. Oh, he knew it all, even to the halo of noble-hearted devotion with which the Queen’s poor groom of the chambers would try to deck his narrow head! The fellow would place himself at Ulrik Frederik’s side with ludicrous bravado, overwhelming him with polite attentions and respectfully consoling stupidities, while his small pale-blue eyes and every line of his thin figure would cry out as plainly as words: “See, all are turning from him, but I, never! Braving the King’s anger and the Queen’s displeasure, I comfort the forsaken! I put my true heart against—” Oh, how well he knew it all—everything—the whole story!

Nothing of all this happened. The King received him with a Latin proverb, a sure sign that he was in a good humor. Marie rose and held out her hand to him as usual, perhaps a little colder, a shade more reserved, but still in a manner very different from what he had expected. Not even when they were left alone together did she refer with so much as a word to their encounter at Lynge, and Ulrik Frederik wondered suspiciously. He did not know what to make of this curious silence; he would almost rather she had spoken.

Should he draw her out, thank her for not saying anything, give himself up to remorse and repentance, and play the game that they were reconciled again?

Somehow he did not quite dare to try it; for he had - 143 - noticed that, now and then, she would gaze furtively at him with an inscrutable expression in her eyes, as if she were looking through him and taking his measure, with a calm wonder, a cool, almost contemptuous curiosity. Not a gleam of hatred or resentment, not a shadow of grief or reproach, not one tremulous glance of repressed sadness! Nothing of that kind, nothing at all!

Therefore he did not venture, and nothing was said. Once in a while, as the days went by, his thoughts would dwell on the matter uneasily, and he would feel a feverish desire to have it cleared up. Still it was not done, and he could not rid himself of a sense that these unspoken accusations lay like serpents in a dark cave, brooding over sinister treasures, which grew as the reptiles grew, blood-red carbuncles rising on stalks of cadmium, and pale opal in bulb upon bulb slowly spreading, swelling, and breeding, while the serpents lay still but ceaselessly expanding, gliding forth in sinuous bend upon bend, lifting ring upon ring over the rank growth of the treasure.

She must hate him, must be harboring secret thoughts of revenge; for an insult such as he had dealt her could not be forgotten. He connected this imagined lust for vengeance with the strange incident when she had lifted her hand against him and with Burrhi’s warning. So he avoided her more than ever, and wished more and more ardently that their ways might be parted.

But Marie was not thinking of revenge. She had forgotten both him and Karen Fiol. In that moment of unutterable disgust her love had been wiped out and left no traces, as a glittering bubble bursts and is no more. The glory of it is no more, and the iridescent colors it lent to every tiny picture mirrored in it are no more. They are - 144 - gone, and the eye which was held by their splendor and beauty is free to look about and gaze far out over the world which was once reflected in the glassy bubble.

The number of guests in the castle increased day by day. The rehearsals of the ballet were under way, and the dancing-masters and play-actors, Pilloy and Kobbereau, had been summoned to give instruction as well as to act the more difficult or less grateful r?les.

Marie Grubbe was to take part in the ballet and rehearsed eagerly. Since that day at Slangerup, she had been more animated and sociable and, as it were, more awake. Her intercourse with those about her had always before been rather perfunctory. When nothing special called her attention or claimed her interest, she had a habit of slipping back into her own little world, from which she looked out at her surroundings with indifferent eyes; but now she entered into all that was going on, and if the others had not been so absorbed by the new and exciting events of those days, they would have been astonished at her changed manner. Her movements had a quiet assurance, her speech an almost hostile subtlety, and her eyes observed everything. As it was, no one noticed her except Ulrik Frederik, who would sometimes catch himself admiring her as if she were a stranger.

Among the guests who came in August was Sti H?gh, the husband of Marie’s sister. One afternoon, not long after his arrival, she was standing with him on a hillock in the woods, from which they could look out over the village and the flat, sun-scorched land beyond. Slow, heavy clouds were forming in the sky, and from the earth rose a dry, bitter smell like a sigh of drooping, withering plants for the - 145 - life-giving water. A faint wind, scarcely strong enough to move the windmill at the cross-road below, was soughing forlornly in the tree-tops like a timid wail of the forest burning under summer heat and sun-glow. As a beggar bares his pitiful wound, so the parched, yellow meadows spread their barren misery under the gaze of heaven.

The clouds gathered and lowered, and a few raindrops fell, one by one, heavy as blows on the leaves and straws, which would bend to one side, shake, and then be suddenly still again. The swallows flew low along the ground, and the blue smoke of the evening meal drooped like a veil over the black thatched roofs in the village near by.

A coach rumbled heavily over the road, and from the walks at the foot of the hill came the sound of low laughter and merry talk, rustling of fans and silk gowns, barking of tiny lapdogs, and snapping and crunching of dry twigs. The court was taking its afternoon promenade.

Marie and Sti H?gh had left the others to climb the hill, and were standing quite breathless after their hurried ascent of the steep path.

Sti H?gh was then a man in his early thirties, tall and lean, with reddish hair and a long, narrow face. He was pale and freckled, and his thin, yellow-white brows were arched high over bright, light gray eyes, which had a tired look as if they shunned the light, a look caused partly by the pink color that spread all over the lids, and partly by his habit of winking more slowly, or rather of keeping his eyes closed longer, than other people did. The forehead was high, the temples well rounded and smooth. The nose was thin, faintly arched, and rather long, the chin too long and too pointed, but the mouth was exquisite, the lips fresh in color and pure in line, the teeth small and white. Yet it was not - 146 - its beauty that drew attention to this mouth; it was rather the strange, melancholy smile of the voluptuary, a smile made up of passionate desire and weary disdain, at once tender as sweet music and bloodthirsty as the low, satisfied growl in the throat of the beast of prey when its teeth tear the quivering flesh of its victim.

Such was Sti H?gh—then.

“Madam,” said he, “have you never wished that you were sitting safe in the shelter of convent walls, such as they have them in Italy and other countries?”

“Mercy, no! How should I have such mad fancies!”

“Then, my dear kinswoman, you are perfectly happy? Your cup of life is clear and fresh, it is sweet to your tongue, warms your blood, and quickens your thoughts? Is it, in truth, never bitter as lees, flat and stale? Never fouled by adders and serpents that crawl and mumble? If so, your eyes have deceived me.”

“Ah, you would fain bring me to confession!” laughed Marie in his face.

Sti H?gh smiled and led her to a little grass mound, where they sat down. He looked searchingly at her.

“Know you not,” he began slowly and seeming to hesitate whether to speak or be silent, “know you not, madam, that there is in the world a secret society which I might call ‘the melancholy company’? It is composed of people who at birth have been given a different nature and constitution from others, who yearn more and covet more, whose passions are stronger, and whose desires burn more wildly than those of the vulgar mob. They are like Sunday children, with eyes wider open and senses more subtle. They drink with the very roots of their hearts that delight and joy of life which others can only grasp between coarse hands.”

- 147 -

He paused a moment, took his hat in his hand, and sat idly running his fingers through the thick plumes.

“But,” he went on in a lower voice as speaking to himself, “pleasure in beauty, pleasure in pomp and all the things that can be named, pleasure in secret impulses and in thoughts that pass the understanding of man—all that which to the vulgar is but idle pastime or vile revelry—is to these chosen ones like healing and precious balsam. It is to them the one honey-filled blossom from which they suck their daily food, and therefore they seek flowers on the tree of life where others would never think to look, under dark leaves and on dry branches. But the mob—what does it know of pleasure in grief or despair?”

He smiled scornfully and was silent.

“But wherefore,” asked Marie carelessly, looking past him, “wherefore name them ‘the melancholy company,’ since they think but of pleasure and the joy of life, but never of what is sad and dreary?”

Sti H?gh shrugged his shoulders and seemed about to rise, as though weary of the theme and anxious to break off the discussion.

“But wherefore?” repeated Marie.

“Wherefore!” he cried impatiently, and there was a note of disdain in his voice. “Because all the joys of this earth are hollow and pass away as shadows. Because every pleasure, while it bursts into bloom like a flowering rosebush, in the selfsame hour withers and drops its leaves like a tree in autumn. Because every delight, though it glow in beauty and the fullness of fruition, though it clasp you in sound arms, is that moment poisoned by the cancer of death, and even while it touches your mouth you feel it quivering in the throes of corruption. Is it joyful to feel thus? Must it - 148 - not rather eat like reddest rust into every shining hour, ay, like frost nip unto death every fruitful sentiment of the soul and blight ............