[MARIE GRUBBE]
A LADY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
BY
JENS PETER JACOBSEN

TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH
BY HANNA ASTRUP LARSEN

NEW YORK
BONI & LIVERIGHT
1918

Copyright, 1917, by The American Scandinavian Foundation

[INTRODUCTION]

“LANGUAGE is like an instrument that requires to be tuned occasionally. A few times in the course of a century the literary language of a country needs to be tuned afresh; for as no generation can be satisfied to think the thoughts of the preceding one, so no group of men in the world of letters can use the language of the school that went before them.” With these words Georg Brandes begins his discussion[1] of the influence of J. P. Jacobsen. As Brandes himself was the critic who found new paths, Jacobsen was the creative artist who moulded his native language into a medium fit for modern ideas. At the time when Denmark and Norway had come to a parting of ways intellectually, and the great Norwegians were forming their own rugged style, Jacobsen gave the Danes a language suited to their needs, subtle, pliant, and finely modulated. He found new methods of approach to truth and even a new manner of seeing nature and humanity. In an age that had wearied of generalities, he emphasized the unique and the characteristic. To a generation that had ceased to accept anything because it was accepted before, he brought the new power of scientific observation in the domain of the mind and spirit. In order to understand him it is necessary to follow the two currents, the one poetic, the other scientific, that ran through his life.

[ [1] Det moderne Gennembruds Mænd.

Jens Peter Jacobsen was born in Jutland, in the little town of Thisted, on April 7, 1847, and was the son of a merchant in moderate circumstances. From his mother he inherited a desire to write poetry, which asserted itself while he was yet a boy. His other chief interest was botany, then a new feature of the school curriculum. He had a fervent love of all plant-life and enjoyed keenly the fairy-tales of Hans Christian Andersen, in which flowers are endowed with personality. At twenty, Jacobsen wrote in his diary that he did not know whether to choose science or poetry for his life-work, since he felt equally drawn to both. He added: “If I could bring into the realm of poetry the eternal laws of nature, its glories, its riddles, its miracles, then I feel that my work would be more than ordinary.”

He was one of the first in Scandinavia to realize the importance of Darwin, and translated The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, besides writing magazine articles elucidating the principles of evolution. Meanwhile he carried on his botanical research faithfully and, in 1872, won a gold medal in the University at Copenhagen for a thesis on the Danish desmidiaciae, a microscopic plant growing in the marshes. In the same year, he made his literary debut with a short story, Mogens, which compelled attention by the daring originality of its style. From that time on, he seems to have had no doubt that his life-work was literature, though he became primarily a master of prose and not, as he had dreamed in his boyhood, a writer of verse.

In the spring of 1873, he wrote from Copenhagen to Edvard Brandes:[2] “Just think, I get up every morning at eleven and go to the Royal Library, where I read old documents and letters and lies and descriptions of murder, adultery, corn rates, whoremongery, market prices, gardening, the siege of Copenhagen, divorce proceedings, christenings, estate registers, genealogies, and funeral sermons. All this is to become a wonderful novel to be called ‘Mistress Marie Grubbe, Interiors from the Seventeenth Century.’ You remember, she is the one who is mentioned in Holberg’s Epistles and in The Goose Girl by Andersen, and who was first married to U. F. Gyldenlöve and afterwards to a ferryman.”

[ [2] Breve fra J. P. Jacobsen. Med Forord udgivne af Edvard Brandes.

When the first two chapters were finished, an advance honorarium from his publisher enabled him to follow his longing and make a trip to the south of Europe, but his stay there was cut short by an attack of the insidious lung disease that was, eventually, to end his life. At Florence, he had a hemorrhage and was obliged to return home to Thisted, where the family physician

declared his illness to be mortal. He recovered partially and lived to write his great works, but for eleven years his life was a constant struggle with physical disability.

Marie Grubbe cost him nearly four years of labor, during which time he published nothing except a short story, Et Skud i Taagen (“A Shot in the Mist”), and a few poems. The first two chapters of his novel appeared under the title Marie Grubbes Barndom (“The Childhood of Marie Grubbe”), and were printed in October, 1873, in a monthly magazine, Det nittende Aarhundrede, edited by Edvard and Georg Brandes. The completed book was published in December, 1876, and had sufficient popular success to warrant a second edition in February. Conservative critics, however, needed time to adjust themselves to so startling a novelty, and one reviewer drew from Georg Brandes the retort that certain people ought to wear blue goggles when looking at a style so full of color.

Long before he had finished Marie Grubbe, Jacobsen felt a new novel taking shape in his mind. It was to be the story of a modern youth and be called Niels Lyhne. It was written, bit by bit, in Thisted and abroad, and did not appear until December, 1880, four years after Marie Grubbe. In the latter, he had written of Renaissance types, sensual, full-blooded, and impulsive; only in Sti Högh, who was always cutting up the timber of life into thought-shavings, had he foreshadowed that modern reflectiveness which Heidenstam calls the curse of the nineteenth century. Niels Lyhne is the embodiment of this spirit, and is generally accepted as Jacobsen’s self-portrait, although the events of the story are not those of the author’s life. F. Hansen calls it[3] “a casting up of accounts with life by a man whom death had marked. Thence its Pindaric elevation of thought and expression. It is instinct with a spirit like a swan that rises and rises, on broad, slow wings, till it is lost to sight.” It expresses Jacobsen’s struggle, not only against the bodily weakness that laid its paralyzing hand on his faculties, but also against the sluggish, dreamy blood he had inherited, which made all creative work an agonizing effort.

[ [3] Illustreret Dansk Litteraturhistorie.

Niels Lyhne is an outsider from life. He seems never to fill any particular place in his world. He has a poetic gift and high artistic ideals, but never writes. Two women leave him for other men less fine and lovable. Finally, he returns to his old home and family traditions, to manage his father’s estate, and to marry a sweet young girl, the daughter of an old neighbor. She and her child are taken away from him by death, and in her last illness she forsakes the atheism he has taught her and turns to the old religion, leaving Niels with a baffled sense that her spirit has left him even before the parting in death. At last Niels himself dies “the difficult death”—the closing words of the book.

This is perhaps the place to say a few words about the atheism that is a dreary side of Jacobsen’s rich and brilliant personality. Early in life, he became convinced that human beings must rid themselves of the idea that any supernatural power would interfere between themselves and their deeds. He saw a supreme moral value in the doctrine of evolution with its principle of a universe governed by laws of cause and effect. In Niels Lyhne he emphasized again and again the bitter theory that no one ever added an inch to his height by dreams, or changed the consequences of good and evil by wishes and aspirations. Niels tries to instill into himself and his wife the courage to face life as it is, without taking refuge from realities in a world of dreams. Further than this, Jacobsen attacked no sincere faith. It would be interesting to search out how far, since his day, his principle of the immutability of law has penetrated religious thought, but that would be beyond the scope of this sketch.

For eight years, while writing his two novels, Jacobsen had lived in his little native town in Jutland with occasional trips to the south. After the completion of Niels Lyhne, he resumed his place in the literary circles of Copenhagen, which he had shunned—so he humbly confessed—because he was ashamed of never getting anything finished. His old diffidence seemed to have left him; to the sweetness and quiet whimsicality that had always endeared him to his friends he added a new poise and assurance. He was deeply gratified by the reception given Niels Lyhne by people whose opinion he valued, and when he was told that Ibsen was reading it aloud to his evening circle, and had pronounced it the best book of its kind in modern literature, he characteristically remarked that this was pleasant to hear, even though John Poulson (Ibsen’s friend and biographer) no doubt exaggerated a little.

This period of Jacobsen’s life was in many ways a happy one, in spite of his declining health. He had his old lodgings and lived there with the same puritanic simplicity as in his student days, and indeed his books never brought him enough money to live otherwise, but he revelled in a luxurious couch, the gift of anonymous women admirers, and in the flowers with which his friends kept his rooms filled. He wrote at this time a few short stories, among them Pesten i Bergamo (“The Plague at Bergamo”) and Fru Fönss. The latter tells of a woman in middle life who had the courage to grasp the happiness that youth had denied her. She dies, and her farewell letter to her children gives Jacobsen the opportunity to express the longing to be remembered which he could never have brought himself to utter in his own person. “Those who are about to die are always poor. I am poor; for all this beautiful world, which has been my rich, blessed home for so many years, is to be taken from me. My chair will be empty; the door will be closed after me, and I shall never set my foot there again. Therefore I look on everything with a prayer in my eyes that it will love me; therefore I come to you and beg you to love me with all the love you once gave me. Remember that to be loved is all the part I shall have in the world of men. Only to be remembered, nothing more.”

With the last remnant of his strength, Jacobsen recast his poems, which were published after his death. Finally, when his illness could no longer be fought off, he went home to Thisted to be cared for by his mother and brother. There he died, on April 30, 1885, as quietly and bravely as he had lived.

The importance of the two short volumes that contain Jacobsen’s complete works has been more fully realized as they have been seen in the perspective of time. His poems, though few in number, are exquisite. With Niels Lyhne, he introduced the psychological novel in Denmark. While at work on it, he wrote a friend that after all the only interesting thing was “the struggle of one or more human beings for existence, that is their struggle against the existing order of things for their right to exist in their own way.” Vilhelm Andersen points[4] to these casual words as marking the cleavage between the old and the new, saying: “Before Niels Lyhne, the poetic was the general; after this book, the poetic became the personal. The literature whose foremost representative is Adam Oehlenschläger had for its aim the exaltation of the things common to humanity; the art in which J. P. Jacobsen became the first master has only one purpose, the presentation and elucidation of the individual.”

[ [4] Litteraturbilleder, II.

Jacobsen has himself told us his ideal of style in a paragraph of Niels Lyhne, where he lets Fru Boye attack the generalities of Oehlenschläger’s description in his poem The Mermaid visits King Helge. “I want a luxuriant, glowing picture,” she exclaims. “I want to be initiated into the mysterious beauty of such a mermaid body, and I ask of you, what can I make of lovely limbs with a piece of gauze spread over them?—Good God!—No, she should have been naked as a wave and with the wild lure of the sea about her. Her skin should have had something of the phosphorescence of the summer ocean and her hair something of the black, tangled horror of the seaweed. Am I not right? Yes, and a thousand tints of the water should come and go in the changeful glitter of her eyes. Her pale breast must be cool with a voluptuous coolness, and her limbs have the flowing lines of the waves. The power of the maelstrom must be in her kiss, and the yielding softness of the foam in the embrace of her arms.” In the same passage, Jacobsen praises the vitality of Shakespeare’s style as a contrast to that of the Danish romanticists.

His search for unique and characteristic expressions had free play in Marie Grubbe, where he could draw on the store of quaint archaic and foreign words he unearthed in his preliminary studies. To avoid the harsh staccato of the North, he made full use of the redundant words and unaccented syllables that were more common in the old Danish than in the modern, and thereby he gained the effect of prose rhythm. While discarding outworn phrases, he often coins new words, as for instance when he is not satisfied to let the sunlight play on the wings of the doves circling around Frederiksborg castle, or even to make the sunlight golden, but must needs fashion the word “sungold” (solguld), which in two syllables is the concentrated essence of what he wishes to say. Sometimes he gives a sharper edge to a common expression merely by changing the usual order of two coupled words, as when he speaks of Ulrik Christian as slim and tall, instead of tall and slim—a minute touch that really adds vividness to the picture.

The habit of looking for characteristic features, which he had acquired in his botanical studies, became an apt tool of his creative faculty. Sometimes his descriptions seem overloaded with details, as when he uses two pages to tell about the play of the firelight in the little parlor at Aggershus, where Marie Grubbe sits singing to the tones of her lute. Yet the images never blur nor overlap one another. Every word deepens the central idea: the sport of the storm with the fire and the consequent struggle between light and darkness in the room. Not only that, but the entire description ministers subtly to the allurement of the woman at the hearth. Almost any writer except J. P. Jacobsen would have told us how the light played on Marie Grubbe’s hair and face, but he prefers to let us feel her personality through her environment. This is true also of his outdoor pictures, where he uses his flower-lore to good advantage, as in the first chapter of Marie Grubbe, where we find the lonely, wayward child playing in the old luxuriant, neglected garden full of a tangle of quaint old-fashioned flowers. But when she returns to the home of her childhood, we hear no more of the famous Tjele garden except as a place to raise vegetables in; her later history is sketched on a background of heathery hill, permeated with a strong smell of sun-scorched earth, which somehow suggests the harsh, physical realities of life in the class she has entered.

Another means in his favorite method of indirect approach to a personality is through woman’s dress. Marie Grubbe’s attire—from the lavender homespun and billowing linen ruffles of the young maiden to the more sophisticated daintiness of Ulrik Frederik’s bride in madder red robe and clocked stockings, the slovenly garb of Palle Dyre’s wife, and finally the neat simple gown marred by a tawdry brocaded cap which she dons when she falls in love with Sören—is a complete index to her moral fall and rise. Sofie Urne’s shabby velvet, her trailing plumes and red-nosed shoes, are equally characteristic of her tarnished attractions, and when her lover bends rapturously over the slim, white hand which is “not quite clean” we know exactly the nature of the charm she exercises, though Jacobsen never comments on her character, as an author of the older school would have done. Nor does he ask our sympathy for Marie Grubbe, but he lets us feel all the promise and the tragedy of her life in the description of her eyes as a young girl—a paragraph of marvellous poignant beauty.

Jacobsen once jestingly compared himself to the sloth (det berömte Dovendyr Ai-ai) which needed two years to climb to the top of a tree. It was necessary for him to withdraw absolutely from the world and to retire, as it were, within the character he wished to portray before he could set pen to paper. It cannot be denied that the laboriousness of the process is sometimes perceptible in his finished work. His style became too gorgeous in color, too heavy with fragrance. Yet there were signs that Jacobsen’s genius was freeing itself from the faults of over-richness. The very last prose that came from his hand, Fru Fönss, has a clarified simplicity that has induced critics to place it at the very head of his production. Indeed, it is difficult to say to what heights of artistic accomplishment he might have risen had his life been spared beyond the brief span of thirty-eight years. As it is, the books he left us are still, of their kind, unsurpassed in the North.

The translation of Marie Grubbe (a book which Brandes has called one of the greatest tours de force in Danish literature) was a task to be approached with diffidence. The author does not reconstruct exactly, in his dialogue, the language of the period; nor have I attempted it. Even had I been able to do so, the racy English of the Restoration would have been an alien medium for the flourishes and pomposities of Jacobsen’s Danish. On the other hand, it would clearly have been unfair to the author to turn his work into ordinary modern English and so destroy that stiff, rich fabric of curious, archaic words and phrases which he had been at such pains to weave. There seemed only one course open: to follow the original, imitating as far as possible its color and texture, even though the resultant language may not be of any particular time or place. The translation has been a task, but also a pleasure. To live intimately for months with Jacobsen’s style is to find beauty within beauty and truth within truth like “rose upon rose in flowering splendor.”

H. A. L.

New York, July 1, 1917.

MARIE GRUBBE
BY
JENS PETER JACOBSEN

To avoid confusion, care should be taken to distinguish between two characters in the book bearing similar names. Ulrik Frederik Gyldenlöve and Ulrik Christian Gyldenlöve.

MARIE GRUBBE

[CHAPTER I]

THE air beneath the linden crowns had flowed in across brown heath and parched meadow. It brought the heat of the sun and was laden with dust from the road, but in the cool, thick foliage it had been cleansed and freshened, while the yellow linden flowers had given it moisture and fragrance. In the blissful haven of the green vault it lay quivering in light waves, caressed by the softly stirring leaves and the flutter of white-gold butterfly wings.

The human lips that breathed this air were full and fresh; the bosom it swelled was young and slight. The bosom was slight, and the foot was slight, the waist small, the shape slim, and there was a certain lean strength about the whole figure. Nothing was luxuriant except the partly loosened hair of dull gold, from which the little dark blue cap had slipped until it hung on her back like a tiny cowl. Otherwise there was no suggestion of the convent in her dress. A wide, square-cut collar was turned down over a frock of lavender homespun, and from its short, slashed sleeves billowed ruffles of fine holland. A bow of red ribbon was on her breast, and her shoes had red rosettes.

Her hands behind her back, her head bent forward, she went slowly up the path, picking her steps daintily. She did not walk in a straight line, but meandered, sometimes almost running into a tree at her left, then again seeming on the point of strolling out among the bushes to her right. Now and then, she would stop, shake the hair from her cheeks, and look up to the light. The softened glow gave her child-white face a faint golden sheen and made the blue shadows under the eyes less marked. The scarlet of her lips deepened to red-brown, and the great blue eyes seemed almost black. She was lovely—lovely!—a straight forehead, faintly arched nose, short, clean-cut upper lip, a strong, round chin and finely curved cheeks, tiny ears, and delicately pencilled eyebrows....

She smiled as she walked, lightly and carelessly, thought of nothing, and smiled in harmony with everything around her. At the end of the path, she stopped and began to rock on her heel, first to the right, then to the left, still with her hands behind her back, head held straight, and eyes turned upward, as she hummed fitfully in time with her swaying.

Two flagstones led down into the garden, which lay glaring under the cloudless, whitish-blue sky. The only bit of shade hugged the feet of the clipped box-hedge. The heat stung the eyes, and even the hedge seemed to flash light from the burnished leaves. The amber-bush trailed its white garlands in and out among thirsty balsamines, nightshade, gillyflowers, and pinks, which stood huddling like sheep in the open. The peas and beans flanking the lavender border were ready to fall from their trellis with heat. The marigolds had given up the struggle and stared the sun straight in the face, but the poppies had shed their large red petals and stood with bared stalks.

The child in the linden lane jumped down the steps, ran through the sun-heated garden, with head lowered as one crosses a court in the rain, made for a triangle of dark yew-trees, slipped behind them, and entered a large arbor, a relic from the days of the Belows. A wide circle of elms had been woven together at the top as far as the branches would reach, and a framework of withes closed the round opening in the centre. Climbing roses and Italian honeysuckle, growing wild in the foliage, made a dense wall, but on one side they had failed, and the hopvines planted instead had but strangled the elms without filling the gap.

Two white seahorses were mounted at the door. Within the arbor stood a long bench and table made of a stone slab, which had once been large and oval, but now lay in three fragments on the ground, while only one small piece was unsteadily poised on a corner of the frame. The child sat down before it, pulled her feet up under her on the bench, leaned back, and crossed her arms. She closed her eyes and sat quite still. Two fine lines appeared on her forehead, and sometimes she would lift her eyebrows, smiling slightly.

“In the room with the purple carpets and the gilded alcove, Griselda lies at the feet of the margrave, but he spurns her. He has just torn her from her warm bed. Now he opens the narrow, round-arched door, and the cold air blows in on poor Griselda, who lies on the floor weeping, and there is nothing between the cold night air and her warm, white body except the thin, thin linen. But he turns her out and locks the door on her. And she presses her naked shoulder against the cold, smooth door, and sobs, and she hears him walking inside on the soft carpet, and through the keyhole the light from the scented taper falls and makes a little sun on her bare breast. And she steals away, and goes down the dark staircase, and it is quite still, and she hears nothing but the soft patter of her own feet on the ice-cold steps. Then she goes out into the snow—no, it’s rain, pouring rain, and the heavy cold water splashes on her shoulders. Her shift clings to her body, and the water runs down her bare legs, and her tender feet press the soft, chilly mud, which oozes out beside them. And the wind—the bushes scratch her and tear her frock,—but no, she hasn’t any frock on,—just as they tore my brown petticoat! The nuts must be ripe in Fastrup Grove—such heaps of nuts there were at Viborg market! God knows if Anne’s teeth have stopped aching.

“No, Brynhild!—the wild steed comes galloping... Brynhild and Grimhild—Queen Grimhild beckons to the men, then turns, and walks away. They drag in Queen Brynhild, and a squat, black yokel with long arms—something like Bertel in the turnpike house—catches her belt and tears it in two, and he pulls off her robe and her underkirtle, and his huge black hands brush the rings from her soft white arms, and another big, half-naked, brown and shaggy churl puts his hairy arm around her waist, and he kicks off her sandals with his clumsy feet, and Bertel winds her long black locks around his hands, and drags her along, and she follows with body bent forward, and the big fellow puts his sweaty palms on her naked back and shoves her over to the black, fiery stallion, and they throw her down in the gray dust in the road, and they tie the long tail of the horse around her ankles—”

The lines came into her forehead again and stayed there a long time. She shook her head and looked more and more vexed. At last she opened her eyes, half rose, and glanced around her wearily.

Mosquitoes swarmed in the gap between the hopvines, and from the garden came puffs of fragrance from mint and common balm, mingling sometimes with a whiff of sow-thistle or anise. A dizzy little yellow spider ran across her hand, tickling her, and made her jump up. She went to the door and tried to pick a rose growing high among the leaves, but could not reach it. Then she began to gather the blossoms of the climbing rose outside, and getting more and more eager, soon filled her skirt with flowers, which she carried into the arbor. She sat down by the table, took them from her lap, and laid one upon the other until the stone was hidden under a fragrant cover of pale rose.

When the last flower had been put in its place, she smoothed the folds of her frock, brushed off the loose petals and green leaves that had caught in the nap, and sat with hands in her lap gazing at the blossoming mass.

This bloom of color, curling in sheen and shadow, white flushing to red and red paling to blue, moist pink that is almost heavy, and lavender light as wafted on air, each petal rounded like a tiny vault, soft in the shadow, but gleaming in the sun with thousands of fine light-points; with all its fair blood-of-rose flowing in the veins, spreading through the skin—and the sweet, heavy fragrance, rising like vapor from that red nectar that seethes in the flower-cup....

Suddenly she turned back her sleeves, and laid her bare arms in the soft, moist coolness of the flowers. She turned them round and round under the roses, until the loosened petals fluttered to the ground, then jumped up and with one motion swept everything from the table, and went out into the garden, pulling down her sleeves as she walked. With flushed cheeks and quickened step, she followed the path to the end, then skirted the garden toward the turnpike. A load of hay had just been overturned and was blocking the way to the gate. Several other wagons halted behind it, and she could see the brown polished stick of the overseer gleaming in the sun, as he beat the unlucky driver.

She put her fingers in her ears to shut out the sickening sound of the blows, ran toward the house, darted within the open cellar door, and slammed it after her.

The child was Marie Grubbe, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Squire Erik Grubbe of Tjele Manor.

The blue haze of twilight rested over Tjele. The falling dew had put a stop to the haymaking. The maids were in the stable milking, while the men busied themselves about the wagons and harness in the shed. The tenant farmers, after doing their stint of work for the squire, were standing in a group outside the gate, waiting for the call to supper.

Erik Grubbe stood at an open window, looking out into the court. The horses, freed from harness and halter, came slowly, one by one, from the stable and went up to the watering-trough. A red-capped boy was hard at work putting new tines in a rake, and two greyhounds played around the wooden horse and the large grindstone in one corner of the yard.

It was growing late. Every few minutes the men would come out of the stable door and draw back, whistling or humming a tune. A maid, carrying a full bucket of milk, tripped with quick, firm steps across the yard, and the farmers were straggling in, as though to hasten the supper-bell. The rattling of plates and trenchers grew louder in the kitchen, and presently some one pulled the bell violently, letting out two groups of rusty notes, which soon died away in the clatter of wooden shoes and the creaking of doors. In a moment the yard was empty, except for the two dogs barking loudly out through the gate.

Erik Grubbe drew in the window and sat down thoughtfully. The room was known as the winter-parlor, though it was in fact used all the year round for dining-room and sitting-room, and was practically the only inhabited part of the house. It was a large room with two windows and a high oak panelling. Glazed Dutch tiles covered the walls with a design of blue nosegays on a white ground. The fireplace was set with burned bricks, and a chest of drawers had been placed before it as a screen against the draught that came in whenever the door was opened. A polished oak table with two rounded leaves hanging almost to the floor, a few high-backed chairs with seats of leather worn shiny, and a small green cupboard set high on the wall—that was all there was in the parlor.

As Erik Grubbe sat there in the dusk, his housekeeper, Anne Jensdaughter, entered, carrying in one hand a lighted candle and in the other a mug of milk, warm from the udder. Placing the mug before him, she seated herself at the table. One large red hand still held the candlestick, and as she turned it round and round, numerous rings and large brilliants glittered on her fingers.

“Alack-a-day!” she groaned.

“What now?” asked Erik Grubbe, glancing up.

“Sure, I may well be tired after stewing ’roun’ till I’ve neither stren’th nor wit left.”

“Well, ’tis busy times. Folks have to work up heat in summer to sit in all winter.”

“Busy—ay, but there’s reason in everythin’. Wheels in ditch an’ coach in splinters’s no king’s drivin’, say I. None but me to do a thing! The indoor wenches’re nothin’ but draggle-tails,—sweethearts an’ town-talk’s all they think of. Ef they do a bit o’ work, they boggle it, an’ it’s fer me to do over. Walbor’s sick, an’ Stina an’ Bo’l—the sluts—they pother an’ pother till the sweat comes, but naught else comes o’t. I might ha’ some help from M’ree, ef you’d speak to her, but you won’t let her put a finger to anything.”

“Hold, hold! You run on so fast you lose your breath and the King’s Danish too. Don’t blame me, blame yourself. If you’d been patient with Marie last winter, if you’d taught her gently the right knack of things, you might have had some help from her now, but you were rough and cross-grained, she was sulky, and the two of you came nigh to splitting each other alive. ’Tis to be more than thankful for there’s an end on’t.”

“Ay, stand up fer M’ree! You’re free to do it, but ef you stand up fer yours, I stand up fer mine, and whether you take it bad or not, I tell you M’ree’s more sperrit than she can carry through the world. Let that be fer the fault it is, but she’s bad. You may say ‘No,’ but I say she is. She can never let little Anne be—never. She’s a-pinchin’ and a-naggin’ her all day long and a-castin’ foul words after her, till the poor child might wish she’d never been born,—and I wish she hadn’t, though it breaks my heart. Alack-a-day, may God have mercy upon us! Ye’re not the same father to the two children, but sure it’s right that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation—and the sins of the mother too, and little Anne’s nothin’ but a whore’s brat—ay, I tell ye to yer face, she’s nothin’ but a whore’s brat, a whore’s brat in the sight of God and man,—but you, her father!—shame on ye, shame!—yes, I tell ye, even ’f ye lay hands on me, as ye did two years ago come Michaelmas, shame on ye! Fie on ye that ye let yer own child feel she’s conceived in sin! ye do let her feel it, you and M’ree both of ye let her feel it,—even ef ye hit me, I say ye let her feel it—”

Erik Grubbe sprang up and stamped the floor.

“Gallows and wheel! Are you spital-mad, woman? You’re drunk, that’s what you are. Go and lie down on your bed and sleep off your booze and your spleen too! ’Twould serve you right if I boxed your ears, you shrew! No—not another word! Marie shall be gone from here before to-morrow is over. I want peace—in times of peace.”

Anne sobbed aloud.

“O Lord, O Lord, that such a thing should come to pass—an everlastin’ shame! Tell me I’m tipsy! In all the time we’ve ben together or all the time before, have ye seen me in the scullery with a fuddled head? Have y’ ever heard me talkin’ drivel? Show me the spot where ye’ve seen me o’ercome with drink! That’s the thanks I get. Sleep off my booze! Would to God I might sleep! would to God I might sink down dead before you, since ye put shame upon me—”

The dogs began to bark outside, and the beat of horses’ hoofs sounded beneath the windows.

Anne dried her eyes hastily, and Erik Grubbe opened the window to ask who had come.

“A messenger riding from Fovsing,” answered one of the men about the house.

“Then take his horse and send him in,” and with these words the window was closed.

Anne straightened herself in her chair and held up one hand to shade her eyes, red with weeping.

The messenger presented the compliments of Christian Skeel of Fovsing and Odden, Governor of the Diocese, who sent to apprise Erik Grubbe of the notice he had that day received by royal courier, saying that war had been declared on June first. Since it became necessary that he should travel to Aarhus and possibly even to Copenhagen, he made inquiry of Erik Grubbe whether he would accompany him on the road so far as served his convenience, for they might at least end the suit they were bringing against certain citizens of Aarhus. With regard to Copenhagen, the Governor well knew that Erik Grubbe had plenty of reasons for going thither. At all events, Christian Skeel would arrive at Tjele about four hours after high noon on the following day.

Erik Grubbe replied that he would be ready for the journey, and the messenger departed with this answer.

Anne and Erik Grubbe then discussed at length all that must be done while he was away, and decided that Marie should go with him to Copenhagen and remain for a year or two with her Aunt Rigitze.

The impending farewells had calmed them both, though the quarrel was on the point of blazing out again when it came to the question of letting Marie take with her sundry dresses and jewels that had belonged to her dead mother. The matter was settled amicably at last, and Anne went to bed early, for the next day would be a long one.

Again the dogs announced visitors, but this time it was only the pastor of Tjele and Vinge parish, Jens Jensen Paludan.

“Good even to the house!” he said as he stepped in.

He was a large-boned, long-limbed man, with a stoop in his broad shoulders. His hair was rough as a crow’s nest, grayish and tangled, but his face was of a deep yet clear pink, seemingly out of keeping with his coarse, rugged features and bushy eyebrows.

Erik Grubbe invited him to a seat and asked about his haymaking. The conversation dwelt on the chief labors of the farm at that season and died away in a sigh over the poor harvest of last year. Meanwhile the pastor was casting sidelong glances at the mug and finally said: “Your honor is always temperate—keeping to the natural drinks. No doubt they are the healthiest. New milk is a blessed gift of heaven, good both for a weak stomach and a sore chest.”

“Indeed the gifts of God are all good, whether they come from the udder or the tap. But you must taste a keg of genuine mum that we brought home from Viborg the other day. She’s both good and German, though I can’t see that the customs have put their mark on her.”

Goblets and a large ebony tankard ornamented with silver rings were brought in and set before them.

They drank to each other.

“Heydenkamper! Genuine, peerless Heydenkamper!” exclaimed the pastor in a voice that trembled with emotion. He leaned back blissfully in his chair and very nearly shed tears of enthusiasm.

“You are a connoisseur,” smirked Erik Grubbe.

“Ah, connoisseur! We are but of yesterday and know nothing,” murmured the pastor absent-mindedly, “though I’m wondering,” he went on in a louder voice, “whether it be true what I have been told about the brew-house of the Heydenkampers. ’Twas a free-master who related it in Hanover, the time I travelled with young Master Jörgen. He said they would always begin the brew on a Friday night, but before any one was allowed to put a finger to it he had to go to the oldest journeyman and lay his hand on the great scales and swear by fire and blood and water that he harbored no spiteful or evil thoughts, for such might harm the beer. The man also told me that on Sundays, when the church-bells sounded, they would open all the doors and windows to let the ringing pass over the beer. But the most important of all was what took place when they set the brew aside to ferment; for then the master himself would bring a splendid chest, from which he would take heavy gold rings and chains and precious stones inscribed with strange signs, and all these would be put into the beer. In truth, one may well believe that these noble treasures would impart to it something of their own secret potency given them by nature.”

“That is not for us to say,” declared Erik Grubbe. “I have more faith, I own, in the Brunswick hops and the other herbs they mix.”

“Nay,” said the pastor, “it were wrong to think so, for there is much that is hidden from us in the realm of nature,—of that there can be no doubt. Everything, living or dead, has its miraculum within it, and we need but patience to seek and open eyes to find. Alas, in the old days when it was not so long since the Lord had taken his hands from the earth, then all things were still so engirded with his power that they exhaled healing and all that was good for time and eternity. But now the earth is no longer new nor fine: it is defiled with the sins of many generations. Now it is only at particular times that these powers manifest themselves, at certain places and certain seasons, when strange signs may be seen in the heavens,—as I was saying to the blacksmith, when we spoke of the awful flaming light that has been visible in half the heavens for several nights recently.... That reminds me, a mounted courier passed us just then; he was bound this way, I think.”

“So he was, Pastor Jens.”

“I hope he rode with none but good tidings?”

“He rode with the tidings that war has been declared.”

“Lord Jesu! Alas the day! Yet it had to come some time.”

“Ay, but when they’d waited so long, they might as well have waited till folks had their harvest in.”

“’Tis the Skaanings who are back of it, I make no doubt. They still feel the smart of the last war and would seek balm in this.”

“Oh, it’s not only the Skaanings. The Sjælland people are ever spoiling for war. They know it will pass them by as usual. Well, it’s a good time for neats and fools, when the Councillors of the Realm have gone mad one and all!”

“’Tis said the Lord High Constable did not desire war.”

“May the devil believe that! Perhaps not—but there’s little to be made of preaching quiet in an ant-hill. Well, the war’s here, and now it’s every man for himself. We shall have our hands full.”

The conversation turned to the journey of the morrow, passed on to the bad roads, lingered on fatted oxen and stall-feeding, and again reverted to the journey. Meanwhile they had not neglected the tankard. The beer had gone to their heads, and Erik Grubbe, who was just telling about his voyage to Ceylon and the East Indies in the “Pearl,” had difficulty in making headway through his own laughter, whenever a new joke came to his mind.

The pastor was getting serious. He had collapsed in his chair, but once in a while he would turn his head, look fiercely around, and move his lips as though to speak. He was gesticulating with one hand, growing more and more excited, until at last he happened to strike the table with his fist, and sank down again with a frightened look at Erik Grubbe. Finally, when the squire had got himself quite tangled up in a story of an excessively stupid scullery lad, the pastor rose and began to speak in a hollow, solemn voice.

“Verily,” he said, “verily, I will bear witness with my mouth—with my mouth—that you are an offence and one by whom offence cometh—that it were better for you that you were cast into the sea—verily, with a millstone and two barrels of malt—the two barrels of malt that you owe me, as I bear witness solemnly with my mouth—two heaping full barrels of malt in my own new sacks. For they were not my sacks, never kingdom without end, ’twas your own old sacks, and my new ones you kept,—and it was rotten malt—verily! See the abomination of desolation, and the sacks are mine, and I will repay—vengeance is mine, I say. Do you not tremble in your old bones—you old whoremonger? You should live like a Christian—but you live with Anne Jensdaughter and make her cheat a Christian pastor. You’re a—you’re a—Christian whoremonger—yes—”

During the first part of the pastor’s speech, Erik Grubbe sat smiling fatuously and holding out his hand to him across the table. He thrust out his elbow as though to poke an invisible auditor in the ribs and call his attention to how delightfully drunk the parson was. But at last some sense of what was being said appeared to pierce his mind. His face suddenly became chalky white; he seized the tankard and threw it at the pastor, who fell backward from his chair and slipped to the floor. It was nothing but fright that caused it, for the tankard failed to reach its mark. It merely rolled to the edge of the table and lay there, while the beer flowed in rivulets down on the floor and the pastor.

The candle had burned low and was flaring fitfully, sometimes lighting the room brightly for a moment, then leaving it almost in darkness, while the blue dawn peeped in through the windows.

The pastor was still talking, his voice first deep and threatening, then feeble, almost whining.

“There you sit in gold and purple, and I’m laid here, and the dogs lick my sores,—and what did you drop in Abraham’s bosom? What did you put on the contribution plate? You didn’t give so much as a silver eightpenny bit in Christian Abraham’s bosom. And now you are in torments—but no one shall dip the tip of his finger in water for you,”—and he struck out with his hand in the spilled beer,—“but I wash my hands—both hands—I have warned you—hi!—there you go—yes, there you go in sackcloth and ashes—my two new sacks—malt—”

He mumbled yet a while, then dropped asleep. Meanwhile Erik Grubbe tried to take revenge. He caught the arm of his chair firmly, stretched to his full length, and kicked the leg of the chair with all his might, in the hope that it was the pastor.

Presently all was still. There was no sound but the snoring of the two old gentlemen and the monotonous drip, drip of the beer running from the table.

[CHAPTER II]

MISTRESS RIGITZE GRUBBE, relict of the late lamented Hans Ulrik Gyldenlöve, owned a house on the corner of Östergade and Pilestræde. At that time, Östergade was a fairly aristocratic residence section. Members of the Trolle, Sehested, Rosencrantz, and Krag families lived there; Joachim Gersdorf was Mistress Rigitze’s neighbor, and one or two foreign ministers usually had lodgings in Carl van Mandern’s new red mansion. Only one side of the street was the home of fashion, however; on the other side, Nikolaj Church was flanked by low houses, where dwelt artisans, shopkeepers, and shipmasters. There were also one or two taverns.

On a Sunday morning, early in September, Marie Grubbe stood looking out of the dormer window in Mistress Rigitze’s house. Not a vehicle in sight! Nothing but staid footsteps, and now and then the long-drawn cry of the oyster-monger. The sunlight, quivering over roofs and pavements, threw sharp, black, almost rectangular shadows. The distance swam in a faint bluish heat mist.

“At-tention!” called a woman’s voice behind her, cleverly mimicking the raucous tones of one accustomed to much shouting of military orders.

Marie turned. Her aunt’s maid, Lucie, had for some time been sitting on the table, appraising her own well-formed feet with critical eyes. Tired of this occupation, she had called out, and now sat swinging her legs and laughing merrily.

Marie shrugged her shoulders with a rather bored smile and would have returned to her window-gazing, but Lucie jumped down from the table, caught her by the waist, and forced her down on a small rush-bottomed chair.

“Look here, Miss,” she said, “shall I tell you something?”

“Well?”

“You’ve forgot to write your letter, and the company will be here at half-past one o’clock, so you’ve scarce four hours. D’you know what they’re going to have for dinner? Clear soup, flounder or some such broad fish, chicken pasty, Mansfeld tart, and sweet plum compote. Faith, it’s fine, but not fat! Your sweetheart’s coming, Miss?”

“Nonsense!” said Marie crossly.

“Lord help me! It’s neither banns nor betrothal because I say so! But, Miss, I can’t see why you don’t set more store by your cousin. He is the pret-tiest, most be-witching man I ever saw. Such feet he has! And there’s royal blood in him—you’ve only to look at his hands, so tiny and shaped like a mould, and his nails no larger than silver groats and so pink and round. Such a pair of legs he can muster! When he walks it’s like steel springs, and his eyes blow sparks—”

She threw her arms around Marie and kissed her neck so passionately and covetously that the child blushed and drew herself out of the embrace.

Lucie flung herself down on the bed, laughing wildly.

“How silly you are to-day,” cried Marie. “If you carry on like this, I’ll go downstairs.”

“Merciful! Let me be merry once in a while! Faith, there’s trouble enough, and I’ve more than I can do with. With my sweetheart in the war, suffering ill and worse—it’s enough to break one’s heart. What if they’ve shot him dead or crippled! God pity me, poor maid, I’d never get over it.” She hid her face in the bedclothes and sobbed: “Oh, no, no, no, my own dear Lorens—I’d be so true to you, if the Lord would only bring you back to me safe and sound! Oh, Miss, I can’t bear it!”

Marie tried to soothe her with words and caresses, and at last she succeeded in making Lucie sit up and wipe her eyes.

“Indeed, Miss,” she said, “no one knows how miserable I am. You see, I can’t possibly behave as I should all the time. ’Tis no use I resolve to set no store by the young men. When they begin jesting and passing compliments, my tongue’s got an itch to answer them back, and then ’tis true more foolery comes of it than I could answer for to Lorens. But when I think of the danger he’s in, oh, then I’m more sorry than any living soul can think. For I love him, Miss, and no one else, upon my soul I do. And when I’m in bed, with the moon shining straight in on the floor, I’m like another woman, and everything seems so sad, and I weep and weep, and something gets me by the throat till I’m like to choke—it’s terrible! Then I keep tossing in my bed and praying to God, though I scarce know what I’m praying for. Sometimes I sit up in bed and catch hold of my head and it seems as if I’d lose my wits with longing. Why, goodness me, Miss, you’re crying! Sure you’re not longing for any one in secret—and you so young?”

Marie blushed and smiled faintly. There was something flattering in the idea that she might be pining for a lover.

“No, no,” she said, “but what you say is so sad. You make it seem as if there’s naught but misery and trouble.”

“Bless me, no, there’s a little of other things too,” said Lucie, rising in answer to a summons from below, and nodding archly to Marie, as she went.

Marie sighed and returned to the window. She looked down into the cool, green graveyard of St. Nikolaj, at the red walls of the church, over the tarnished copper roof of the castle, past the royal dockyard and ropewalk around to the slender spire of East Gate, past the gardens and wooden cottages of Hallandsaas, to the bluish Sound melting into the blue sky, where softly moulded cloud-masses were drifting to the Skaane shore.

Three months had passed since she came to Copenhagen. When she left home she had supposed that life in the residential city must be something vastly different from what she had found. It had never occurred to her that she might be more lonely there than at Tjele Manor, where, in truth, she had been lonely enough. Her father had never been a companion to her, for he was too entirely himself to be anything to others. He never became young when he spoke to fourteen years nor feminine when he addressed a little maid. He was always on the shady side of fifty and always Erik Grubbe.

As for his concubine, who ruled as though she were indeed mistress of the house, the mere sight of her was enough to call out all there was of pride and bitterness in Marie. This coarse, domineering peasant woman had wounded and tortured her so often that the girl could hardly hear her step without instantly and half unconsciously hardening into obstinacy and hatred. Little Anne, her half-sister, was sickly and spoiled, which did not make it easier to get along with her, and to crown all, the mother made the child her excuse for abusing Marie to Erik Grubbe.

Who, then, were her companions?

She knew every path and road in Bigum woods, every cow that pastured in the meadows, every fowl in the hencoop. The kindly greeting of the servants and peasants when she met them seemed to say: Our young lady suffers wrong, and we know it. We are sorry, and we hate the woman up there as much as you do.

But in Copenhagen?

There was Lucie, and she was very fond of her, but after all she was a servant. Marie was in Lucie’s confidence and was pleased and grateful for it, but Lucie was not in her confidence. She could not tell her troubles to the maid. Nor could she bear to have the fact of her unfortunate position put into words or hear a servant discuss her unhappy family affairs. She would not even brook a word of criticism against her aunt, though she certainly did not love her father’s kinswoman and had no reason to love her.

Rigitze Grubbe held the theories of her time on the salutary effects of harsh discipline, and she set herself to bring up Marie accordingly. She had never had any children of her own, and she was not only a very impatient foster-mother, but also clumsy, for mother love had never taught her the useful little arts that smooth the way for teacher and pupil. Yet a severe training might have been very good for Marie. The lack of watchful care in her home had allowed one side of her nature to grow almost too luxuriantly, while the other had been maimed and stunted by capricious cruelty, and she might have felt it a relief to be guided in the way she should go by the hard and steady hand of one who in all common sense could wish her nothing but good.

Yet she was not so guided. Mistress Rigitze had so many irons in the fire of politics and court intrigue that she was often away for days, and when at home she would be so preoccupied that Marie did with herself and her time what she pleased. When Mistress Rigitze had a moment to spare for the child, the very consciousness of her own neglect made her doubly irritable. The whole relation therefore wore to Marie an utterly unreasonable aspect, and was fitted to give her the notion that she was an outcast whom all hated and none loved.

As she stood at the window looking out over the city, this sense of forlornness came over her again. She leaned her head against the casement and lost herself in contemplation of the slowly gliding clouds.

She understood what Lucie had said about the pain of longing. It was like something burning inside of you, and there was nothing to do but to let it burn and burn—how well she knew it! What would come of it all?—One day just like another—nothing, nothing,—nothing to look forward to. Could it last? Yes, for a long time yet! Even when she had passed sixteen?—But things did happen to other people! At least she wouldn’t go on wearing a child’s cap after she was sixteen; sister Anne Marie hadn’t—she had been married. Marie remembered the noisy carousing at the wedding long after she had been sent to bed—and the music. Well, at least she could be married. But to whom? Perhaps to the brother of her sister’s husband. To be sure, he was frightfully ugly, but if there was nothing else for it—No, that certainly was nothing to look forward to. Was there anything? Not that she could see.

She left the window, sat down by the table thoughtfully, and began to write:

My loving greeting always in the name of Our Lord, dear Anne Marie, good sister and friend! God keep you always and be praised for His mercies. I have taken upon myself to write pour vous congratuler inasmuch as you have been fortunately delivered of child and are now restored to good health. Dear sister, I am well and hearty. Our Aunt, as you know, lives in much splendor, and we often have company, chiefly gentlemen of the court, and with the exception of a few old dames, none visit us but men folks. Many of them have known our blessed mother and praise her beauty and virtue. I always sit at table with the company, but no one speaks to me except Ulrik Frederik, whom I would prefer to do without, for he is ever given to bantering and raillerie rather than sensible conversation. He is yet young and is not in the best repute; ’tis said he frequents both taverns and ale-houses and the like. Now I have nothing new to tell except that to-day we have an assembly, and he is coming. Whenever I speak French he laughs very much and tells me that it is a hundred years old, which may well be, for Pastor Jens was a mere youth at the time of his travels. Yet he gives me praise because I put it together well, so that no lady of the court can do it better, he says, but this I believe to be but compliments, about which I care nothing. I have had no word from Tjele. Our Aunt cannot speak without cursing and lamenting of the enormity that our dear father should live as he does with a female of such lowly extraction. I grieve sorely, but that gives no boot for bane. You must not let Stycho see this letter, but give him greeting from my heart. September, 1657.

Your dear sister,

MARIE GRUBBE.

The honorable Mistress Anne Marie Grubbe, consort of Stycho Höegh of Gjordslev, my good friend and sister, written in all loving-kindness.

The guests had risen from the table and entered the drawing-room, where Lucie was passing the golden Dantzig brandy. Marie had taken refuge in a bay-window, half hidden by the full curtains. Ulrik Frederik went over to her, bowed with exaggerated deference, and with a very grave face expressed his disappointment at having been seated so far from mademoiselle at the table. As he spoke, he rested his small brown hand on the window-sill. Marie looked at it and blushed scarlet.

“Pardon, Mademoiselle, I see that you are flushing with anger. Permit me to present my most humble service! Might I make so bold as to ask how I have had the misfortune to offend you?”

“Indeed I am neither flushed nor angry.”

“Ah, so ’tis your pleasure to call that color white? Bien! But then I would fain know by what name you designate the rose commonly known as red!”

“Can you never say a sensible word?”

“Hm—let me see—ay, it has happened, I own, but rarely—

Doch Chloë, Chloë zürne nicht!
Toll brennet deiner Augen Licht
Mich wie das Hundsgestirn die Hunde,
Und Worte schäumen mir vom Munde
Dem Geifer gleich der Wasserscheu—”

“Forsooth, you may well say that!”

“Ach, Mademoiselle, ’tis but little you know of the power of Eros! Upon my word, there are nights when I have been so lovesick I have stolen down through the Silk Yard and leaped the balustrade into Christen Skeel’s garden, and there I’ve stood like a statue among fragrant roses and violets, till the languishing Aurora has run her fingers through my locks.”

“Ah, Monsieur, you were surely mistaken when you spoke of Eros; it must have been Evan—and you may well go astray when you’re brawling around at night-time. You’ve never stood in Skeel’s garden; you’ve been at the sign of Mogens in Cappadocia among bottles and Rhenish wineglasses, and if you’ve been still as a statue, it’s been something besides dreams of love that robbed you of the power to move your legs.”

“You wrong me greatly! Though I may go to the vintner’s house sometimes, ’tis not for pleasure nor revelry, but to forget the gnawing anguish that afflicts me.”

“Ah!”

“You have no faith in me; you do not trust to the constancy of my amour! Heavens! Do you see the eastern louver-window in St. Nikolaj? For three long days have I sat there gazing at your fair countenance, as you bent over your broidery frame.”

“How unlucky you are! You can scarce open your mouth, but I can catch you in loose talk. I never sit with my broidery frame toward St. Nikolaj. Do you know this rigmarole?—

’Twas black night,
Troll was in a plight;
For man held him tight.
To the troll said he:
‘If you would be free,
Then teach me quick,
Without guile or trick,
One word of perfect truth.’
Up spake the troll: ‘In sooth!’
Man let him go.
None on earth, I trow,
Could call troll liar for saying so.”

Ulrik Frederik bowed deferentially and left her without a word.

She looked after him, as he crossed the room. He did walk gracefully. His silk hose fitted him without fold or wrinkle. How pretty they were at the ankle, where they met the long, narrow shoe! She liked to look at him. She had never before noticed that he had a tiny pink scar in his forehead.

Furtively she glanced at her own hands and made a slight grimace,—the fingers seemed to her too short.

[CHAPTER III]

WINTER came with hard times for the beasts of the forest and the birds of the fields. It was a poor Christmas within mud-walled huts and timbered ships. The Western Sea was thickly studded with wrecks, icy hulks, splintered masts, broken boats, and dead ships. Argosies were hurled upon the coast, shattered to worthless fragments, sunk, swept away, or buried in the sand; for the gale blew toward land with a high sea and deadly cold, and human hands were powerless against it. Heaven and earth were one reek of stinging, whirling snow that drifted in through cracked shutters and ill-fitting hatches to poverty and rags, and pierced under eaves and doors to wealth and fur-bordered mantles. Beggars and wayfaring folk froze to death in the shelter of ditches and dikes; poor people died of cold on their bed of straw, and the cattle of the rich fared not much better.

The storm abated, and after it came a clear, tingling frost, which brought disaster on the land—winter pay for summer folly! The Swedish army walked over the Danish waters. Peace was declared, and spring followed with green budding leaves and fair weather, but the young men of Sjælland did not ride a-Maying that year; for the Swedish soldiers were everywhere. There was peace indeed, but it carried the burdens of war and seemed not likely to live long. Nor did it. When the May garlands had turned dark and stiff under the midsummer sun, the Swedes went against the ramparts of Copenhagen.

During vesper service on the second Sunday in August, the tidings suddenly came: “The Swedes have landed at Korsör.” Instantly the streets were thronged. People walked about quietly and soberly, but they talked a great deal; they all talked at once, and the sound of their voices and footsteps swelled to a loud murmur that neither rose nor fell and never ceased, but went on with a strange, heavy monotony.

The rumor crept into the churches during the sermon. From the seats nearest the door it leaped in a breathless whisper to some one sitting in the next pew, then on to three people in the third, then past a lonely old man in the fourth on to the fifth, and so on till the whole congregation knew it. Those in the centre turned and nodded meaningly to people behind them; one or two who were sitting nearest the pulpit rose and looked apprehensively toward the door. Soon there was not a face lifted to the pastor. All sat with heads bent as though to fix their thoughts on the sermon, but they whispered among themselves, stopped for a tense moment and listened in order to gauge how far it was from the end, then whispered again. The muffled noise from the crowds in the streets grew more distinct: it was not to be borne any longer! The churchpeople busied themselves putting their hymn-books in their pockets.

“Amen!”

Every face turned to the preacher. During the litany prayer, all wondered whether the pastor had heard anything. He read the supplication for the Royal House, the Councillors of the Realm, and the common nobility, for all who were in authority or entrusted with high office,—and at that tears sprang to many eyes. As the prayer went on, there was a sound of sobbing, but the words came from hundreds of lips: “May God in His mercy deliver these our lands and kingdoms from battle and murder, pestilence and sudden death, famine and drouth, lightning and tempest, floods and fire, and may we for such fatherly mercy praise and glorify His holy name!”

Before the hymn had ended, the church was empty, and only the voice of the organ sang within it.

On the following day, the people were again thronging the streets, but by this time they seemed to have gained some definite direction. The Swedish fleet had that night anchored outside of Dragör. Yet the populace was calmer than the day before; for it was generally known that two of the Councillors of the Realm had gone to parley with the enemy, and were—so it was said—entrusted with powers sufficient to ensure peace. But when the Councillors returned on Tuesday with the news that they had been unable to make peace, there was a sudden and violent reaction.

This was no longer an assemblage of staid citizens grown restless under the stress of great and ominous tidings. No, it was a maelstrom of uncouth creatures, the like of which had never been seen within the ramparts of Copenhagen. Could they have come out of these quiet, respectable houses bearing marks of sober every-day business? What raving in long-sleeved sack and great-skirted coat! What bedlam noise from grave lips and frenzied gestures of tight-dressed arms! None would be alone, none would stay indoors, all wanted to stand in the middle of the street with their despair, their tears, and wailing. See that stately old man with bared head and bloodshot eyes! He is turning his ashen face to the wall and beating the stones with clenched fists. Listen to that fat tanner cursing the Councillors of the Realm and the miserable war! Feel the blood in those fresh cheeks burning with hatred of the enemy who brings the horrors of war, horrors that youth has already lived through in imagination! How they roar with rage at their own fancied impotence, and God in heaven, what prayers! What senseless prayers!

Vehicles are stopping in the middle of the street. Servants are setting down their burdens in sheds and doorways. Here and there, people come out of the houses dressed in their best attire, flushed with exertion, look about in surprise, then glance down at their clothes, and dart into the crowd as though eager to divert attention from their own finery. What have they in mind? And where do all these rough, drunken men come from? They crowd; they reel and shriek; they quarrel and tumble; they sit on doorsteps and are sick; they laugh wildly, run after the women, and try to fight the men.

It was the first terror, the terror of instinct. By noon it was over. Men had been called to the ramparts, had labored with holiday strength, and had seen moats deepen and barricades rise under their spades. Soldiers were passing. Artisans, students, and noblemen’s servants were standing at watch, armed with all kinds of curious weapons. Cannon had been mounted. The King had ridden past, and it was announced that he would stay. Life began to look reasonable, and people braced themselves for what was coming.

In the afternoon of the following day, the suburb outside of West Gate was set on fire, and the smoke, drifting over the city, brought out the crowds again. At dusk, when the flames reddened the weatherbeaten walls of Vor Frue Church tower and played on the golden balls topping the spire of St. Peter’s, the news that the enemy was coming down Valby Hill stole in like a timid sigh. Through avenues and alleys sounded a frightened “The Swedes! The Swedes!” The call came in the piercing voices of boys running through the streets. People rushed to the doors, booths were closed, and the iron-mongers hastily gathered in their wares. The good folk seemed to expect a huge army of the enemy to pour in upon them that very moment.

The slopes of the ramparts and the adjoining streets were black with people looking at the fire. Other crowds gathered farther away from the centre of interest, at the Secret Passage and the Fountain. Many matters were discussed, the burning question being: Would the Swedes attack that night or wait till morning?

Gert Pyper, the dyer from the Fountain, thought the Swedes would be upon them as soon as they had rallied after the march. Why should they wait?

The Icelandic trader, Erik Lauritzen of Dyers’ Row, thought it might be a risky matter to enter a strange city in the dead of night, when you couldn’t know what was land and what was water.

“Water!” said Gert Dyer. “Would to God we knew as much about our own affairs as the Swede knows! Don’t trust to that! His spies are where you’d least think. ’Tis well enough known to Burgomaster and Council, for the aldermen have been round since early morning hunting spies in every nook and corner. Fool him who can! No, the Swede’s cunning—especially in such business. ’Tis a natural gift. I found that out myself—’tis some half-score years since, but I’ve never forgotten that mummery. You see, indigo she makes black, and she makes light blue, and she makes medium blue, all according to the mordant. Scalding and making the dye-vats ready—any ’prentice can do that, if he’s handy, but the mordant—there’s the rub! That’s an art! Use too much, and you burn your cloth or yarn so it rots. Use too little, and the color will ne-ever be fast—no, not if it’s dyed with the most pre-cious logwood. Therefore the mordant is a closed geheimnis which a man does not give away except it be to his son, but to the journeymen—never! No—”

“Ay, Master Gert,” said the trader, “ay, ay!”

“As I was saying,” Gert went on, “about half a score of years ago I had a ’prentice whose mother was a Swede. He’d set his mind on finding out what mordant I used for cinnamon brown, but as I always mixed it behind closed doors, ’twas not so easy to smoke it. So what does he do, the rascal? There’s so much vermin here round the Fountain, it eats our wool and our linen, and for that reason we always hang up the stuff people give us to dye in canvas sacks under the loft-beams. So what does he do, the devil’s gesindchen, but gets him one of the ’prentices to hang him up in a sack. And I came in and weighed and mixed and made ready and was half done, when it happened so curiously that the cramp got in one of his legs up there, and he began to kick and scream for me to help him down. Did I help him? Death and fire! But ’twas a scurvy trick he did me, yes, yes, yes! And so they are, the Swedes; you can never trust ’em over a doorstep.”

“Faith, they’re ugly folk, the Swedes,” spoke Erik Lauritzen. “They’ve nothing to set their teeth in at home, so when they come to foreign parts they can never get their bellyful. They’re like poor-house children; they eat for today’s hunger and for to-morrow’s and yesterday’s all in one. Thieves and cut-purses they are, too—worse than crows and corpse-plunderers—and so murderous. It’s not for nothing people say: Quick with the knife like Lasse Swede!”

“And so lewd,” added the dyer. “It never fails, if you see the hangman’s man whipping a woman from town, and you ask who’s the hussy, but they tell you she’s a Swedish trull.”

“Ay, the blood of man is various, and the blood of beasts, too. The Swede is to other people what the baboon is among the dumb brutes. There’s such an unseemly passion and raging heat in the humors of his body that the natural intelligence which God in His mercy hath given all human creatures cannot hinder his evil lusts and sinful desires.”

The dyer nodded several times in affirmation of the theories advanced by the trader. “Right you are, Erik Lauritzen, right you are. The Swede is of a strange and peculiar nature, different from other people. I can always smell, when an outlandish man comes into my booth, whether he’s a Swede or from some other country. There’s such a rank odor about the Swedes—like goats or fish-lye. I’ve often turned it over in my mind, and I make no doubt ’tis as you say, ’tis the fumes of his lustful and bestial humors. Ay, so it is.”

“Sure, it’s no witchcraft if Swedes and Turks smell different from Christians!” spoke up an old woman who stood near them.

“You’re drivelling, Mette Mustard,” interrupted the dyer. “Don’t you know that Swedes are Christian folks?”

“Call ’em Christian, if you like, Gert Dyer, but Finns and heathens and troll-men have never been Christians by my prayer-book, and it’s true as gold what happened in the time of King Christian, God rest his soul! when the Swedes were in Jutland. There was a whole regiment of ’em marching one night at new moon, and at the stroke o’ midnight they ran one from the other and howled like a pack of werewolves or some such devilry, and they scoured like mad round in the woods and fens and brought ill luck to men and beasts.”

“But they go to church on Sunday and have both pastor and clerk just like us.”

“Ay, let a fool believe that! They go to church, the filthy gang, like the witches fly to vespers, when the Devil has St. John’s mass on Hekkenfell. No, they’re bewitched, an’ nothing bites on ’em, be it powder or bullets. Half of ’em can cast the evil eye, too, else why d’ye think the smallpox is always so bad wherever those hell-hounds’ve set their cursed feet? Answer me that, Gert Dyer, answer me that, if ye can.”

The dyer was just about to reply, when Erik Lauritzen, who for some time had been looking about uneasily, spoke to him: “Hush, hush, Gert Pyper! Who’s the man talking like a sermon yonder with the people standing thick around him?”

They hurried to join the crowd, while Gert Dyer explained that it must be a certain Jesper Kiim, who had preached in the Church of the Holy Ghost, but whose doctrine, so Gert had been told by learned men, was hardly pure enough to promise much for his eternal welfare or clerical preferment.

The speaker was a small man of about thirty with something of the mastiff about him. He had long, smooth black hair, a thick little nose on a broad face, lively brown eyes, and red lips. He was standing on a doorstep, gesticulating forcefully and speaking with quick energy though in a somewhat thick and lisping voice.

“The twenty-sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew,” he said, “from the fifty-first to the fifty-fourth verse, reads as follows: ‘And, behold, one of them which were with Jesus stretched out his hand, and drew his sword, and struck a servant of the high priest’s, and smote off his ear. Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?’

“Ay, my beloved friends, thus it must be. The poor walls and feeble garrison of this city are at this moment encompassed by a strong host of armed warriors, and their king and commander has ordered them, by fire and sword, by attack and siege, to subdue this city and make us all his servants.

“And those who are in the city and see their peace threatened and their ruin contrary to all feelings of humanity determined upon, they arm themselves, they bring catapults and other harmful implements of war to the ramparts, and they say to one another: Should not we with flaming fire and shining sword fall upon the destroyers of peace who would lay us waste? Why has God in heaven awakened valor and fearlessness in the heart of man if not for the purpose of resisting such an enemy? And, like Peter the Apostle, they would draw their glaive and smite off the ear of Malchus. But Jesus says: ‘Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’ ’Tis true, this may seem like a strange speech to the unreason of the wrathful and like foolishness to the unseeing blindness of the spiteful. But the Word is not like a tinkle of cymbals, for the ear only. No, like the hull of a ship, which is loaded with many useful things, so the Word of God is loaded with reason and understanding. Let us therefore examine the Word and find, one by one, the points of true interpretation. Wherefore should the sword remain in his place and he who takes the sword perish with the sword? This is for us to consider under three heads:

“Firstly, man is a wisely and beyond all measure gloriously fashioned microcosm, or as it may be interpreted, a small earth, a world of good and evil. For does not the Apostle James say that the tongue alone is a world of iniquity among our members? How much more then the whole body—the lustful eyes, the hastening feet, the covetous hands, the insatiable belly, but even so the prayerful knees, and the ears quick to hear! And if the body is a world, how much more, then, our precious and immortal soul! Ay, it is a garden full of sweet and bitter herbs, full of evil lusts like ravening beasts and virtues like white lambs. And is he who lays waste such a world to be regarded as better than an incendiary, a brawler, or a field-robber? And ye know what punishment is meted out to such as these.”

Darkness had fallen, and the crowd around the preacher appeared only as a large, dark, slowly shifting and growing mass.

“Secondly, man is a microtheos, that is a mirror and image of the Almighty God. Is not he who lays hands on the image of God to be regarded as worse than he who merely steals the holy vessels or vestments of the church or who profanes the sanctuary? And ye know what punishment is meted out to such a one.

“Thirdly and lastly, it is the first duty of man to do battle for the Lord, without ceasing, clothed in the shining mail of a pure life and girded about with the flaming sword of truth. Armed thus, it behooves him to fight as a warrior before the Lord, rending the throat of hell and trampling upon the belly of Satan. Therefore the sword of the body must remain in its place, for verily we have enough to strive with that of the spirit!”

Meanwhile stragglers came from both ends of the street, stopped, and took their place in the outskirts of the crowd. Many were carrying lanterns, and finally the dark mass was encircled with an undulating line of twinkling lights that flickered and shifted with the movements of the people. Now and then a lantern would be lifted and its rays would move searchingly over whitewashed walls and black window-panes till they rested on the earnest face of the preacher.

“But how is this? you would say in your hearts: Should we deliver ourselves bound hand and foot into the power of the oppressor, into a bitter condition of thralldom and degradation? Oh, my well-beloved, say not so! For then you will be counted among those who doubt that Jesus could pray his Father and He should send twelve legions of angels. Oh, do not fall into despair! Do not murmur in your hearts against the counsel of the Lord, and make not your liver black against His will! For he whom the Lord would destroy is struck down, and he whom the Lord would raise abides in safety. He has many ways by which He can guide us out of the wilderness of our peril. Has He not power to turn the heart of our enemy, and did He not suffer the angel of death to go through the camp of Sennacherib? And have you forgotten the engulfing waters of the Red Sea and the sudden destruction of Pharaoh?”

At this point Jesper Kiim was interrupted.

The crowd had listened quietly except for a subdued angry murmur from the outskirts, but suddenly Mette’s voice pierced through: “Faugh, you hell-hound! Hold your tongue, you black dog! Don’t listen to him! It’s Swede money speaks out of his mouth!”

An instant of silence, then bedlam broke loose! Oaths, curses, and foul names rained over him. He tried to speak, but the cries grew louder, and those nearest to the steps advanced threateningly. A white-haired little man right in front, who had wept during the speech, made an angry lunge at the preacher with his long, silver-knobbed cane.

“Down with him, down with him!” the cry sounded. “Let him eat his words! Let him tell us what money he got for betraying us! Down with him! Send him to us, we’ll knock the maggots out of him!”

“Put him in the cellar!” cried others. “In the City Hall cellar! Hand him down! hand him down!”

Two powerful fellows seized him. The wretch was clutching the wooden porch railing with all his might, but they kicked both railing and preacher down into the street, where the mob fell upon him with kicks and blows from clenched fists. The women were tearing his hair and clothes, and little boys, clinging to their fathers’ hands, jumped with delight.

“Bring Mette!” cried some one in the back of the crowd. “Make way! Let Mette try him.”

Mette came forward. “Will you eat your devil’s nonsense? Will you, Master Rogue?”

“Never, never! We ought to obey God rather than men, as it is written.”

“Ought we?” said Mette, drawing off her wooden shoe and brandishing it before his eyes. “But men have shoes, and you’re in the pay of Satan and not of God. I’ll give you a knock on the pate! I’ll plaster your brain on the wall!” She struck him with the shoe.

“Commit no sin, Mette,” groaned the scholar.

“Now may the Devil—” she shrieked.

“Hush, hush!” some one cried. “Have a care, don’t crowd so! There’s Gyldenlöve, the lieutenant-general.”

A tall figure rode past.

“Long live Gyldenlöve! The brave Gyldenlöve!” bellowed the mob. Hats and caps were swung aloft, and cheer upon cheer sounded, until the rider disappeared in the direction of the ramparts. It was the lieutenant-general of the militia, colonel of horse and foot, Ulrik Christian Gyldenlöve, the King’s half-brother.

The mob dispersed little by little, till only a few remained.

“Say what you will, ’tis a curious thing,” said Gert the dyer: “here we’re ready to crack the head of a man who speaks of peace, and we cry ourselves hoarse for those who’ve brought this war upon us.”

“I give you good-night, Gert Pyper!” said the trader hastily. “Good-night and God be with you!” He hurried away.

“He’s afraid of Mette’s shoe,” murmured the dyer, and at last he too turned homeward.

Jesper Kiim sat on the steps alone, holding his aching head. The watchman on the ramparts paced slowly back and forth, peering out over the dark land where all was wrapped in silence, though thousands of enemies were encamped round about.

[CHAPTER IV]

FLAKES of orange-colored light shot up from the sea-gray fog-bank in the horizon, and lit the sky overhead with a mild, rose-golden flame that widened and widened, grew fainter and fainter, until it met a long, slender cloud, caught its waving edge, and fired it with a glowing, burning radiance. Violet and pale pink, the reflection from the sunrise clouds fell over the beaches of Kallebodstrand. The dew sparkled in the tall grass of the western rampart; the air was alive and quivering with the twitter of sparrows in the gardens and on the roofs. Thin strips of delicate mist floated over the orchards, and the heavy, fruit-laden branches of the trees bent slowly under the breezes from the Sound.

A long-drawn, thrice-repeated blast of the horn was flung out from West Gate and echoed from the other corners of the city. The lonely watchmen on the ramparts began to pace more briskly on their beats, shook their mantles, and straightened their caps. The time of relief was near.

On the bastion north of West Gate, Ulrik Frederik Gyldenlöve stood looking at the gulls, sailing with white wings up and down along the bright strip of water in the moat. Light and fleeting, sometimes faint and misty, sometimes colored in strong pigments or clear and vivid as fire, the memories of his twenty years chased one another through his soul. They brought the fragrance of heavy roses and the scent of fresh green woods, the huntsman’s cry and the fiddler’s play and the rustling of stiff, billowy silks. Distant but sunlit, the life of his childhood in the red-roofed Holstein town passed before him. He saw the tall form of his mother, Mistress Margrethe Pappen, a black hymn-book in her white hands. He saw the freckled chamber-maid with her thin ankles and the fencing-master with his pimpled, purplish face and his bow-legs. The park of Gottorp castle passed in review, and the meadows with fresh hay-stacks by the fjord, and there stood the gamekeeper’s clumsy boy Heinrich, who knew how to crow like a cock and was marvellously clever at playing ducks and drakes. Last came the church with its strange twilight, its groaning organ, its mysterious iron-railed chapel, and its emaciated Christ holding a red banner in his hand.

Again came a blast of the horn from West Gate, and in the same moment the sun broke out, bright and warm, routing all mists and shadowy tones.

He remembered the chase when he had shot his first deer, and old von Dettmer had made a sign in his forehead with the blood of the animal, while the poor hunters’ boys blew their blaring fanfares. Then there was the nosegay to the castellan’s Malene and the serious interview with his tutor, then his first trip abroad. He remembered his first duel in the fresh, dewy morning, and Annette’s cascades of ringing laughter, and the ball at the Elector’s, and his lonely walk outside of the city gates with head aching, the first time he had been tipsy. The rest was a golden mist, filled with the tinkling of goblets and the scent of wine, and there were Lieschen and Lotte, and Martha’s white neck and Adelaide’s round arms. Finally came the journey to Copenhagen and the gracious reception by his royal father, the bustling futilities of court duties by day and the streams of wine and frenzied kisses at night, broken by the gorgeous revelry of the chase or by nightly trysts and tender whisperings in the shelter of Ibstrup park or the gilded halls of Hilleröd castle.

Yet clearer than all these he saw the black, burning eyes of Sofie Urne; more insistent than aught else her voice sounded in his spell-bound memory—beautiful and voluptuously soft, its low notes drawing like white arms, or rising like a flitting bird that soars and mocks with wanton trills, while it flees....

A rustling among the bushes of the rampart below waked him from his dreams.

“Who goes there!” he cried.

“None but Daniel, Lord Gyldenlöve, Daniel Knopf,” was the answer, as a little crippled man came out from the bushes, bowing.

“Ha! Hop-o’-my-Thumb? A thousand plagues, what are you doing here?”

The man stood looking down at himself sadly.

“Daniel, Daniel!” said Ulrik Frederik, smiling. “You didn’t come unscathed from the ‘fiery furnace’ last night. The German brewer must have made too hot a fire for you.”

The cripple began to scramble up the edge of the rampart. Daniel Knopf, because of his stature called Hop-o’-my-Thumb, was a wealthy merchant of some and twenty years, known for his fortune as well as for his sharp tongue and his skill in fencing. He was boon companion with the younger nobility, or at least with a certain group of gallants, le cercle des mourants, consisting chiefly of younger men about the court. Ulrik Frederik was the life and soul of this crowd, which, though convivial rather than intellectual, and notorious rather than beloved, was in fact admired and envied for its very peccadillos.

Half tutor and half mountebank, Daniel moved among these men. He did not walk beside them on the public streets, or in houses of quality, but in the fencing-school, the wine-cellar, and the tavern he was indispensable. No one else could discourse so scientifically on bowling and dog-training or talk with such unction of feints and parrying. No one knew wine as he did. He had worked out profound theories about dicing and love-making, and could speak learnedly and at length on the folly of crossing the domestic stud with the Salzburger horses. To crown all, he knew anecdotes about everybody, and—most impressive of all to the young men—he had decided opinions about everything.

Moreover, he was always ready to humor and serve them, never forgot the line that divided him from the nobility, and was decidedly funny when, in a fit of drunken frolic, they would dress him up in some whimsical guise. He let himself be kicked about and bullied without resenting it, and would often good-naturedly throw himself into the breach to stop a conversation that threatened the peace of the company.

Thus he gained admittance to circles that were to him as the very breath of life. To him, the citizen and cripple, the nobles seemed like demigods. Their cant alone was human speech. Their existence swam in a shimmer of light and a sea of fragrance, while common folk dragged out their lives in drab-colored twilight and stuffy air. He cursed his citizen birth as a far greater calamity than his lameness, and grieved over it, in solitude, with a bitterness and passion that bordered on insanity.

“How now, Daniel,” said Ulrik Frederik, when the little man reached him. “’Twas surely no light mist that clouded your eyes last night, since you’ve run aground here on the rampart, or was the clary at flood tide, since I find you high and dry like Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat?”

“Prince of the Canaries, you rave if you suppose I was in your company last night!”

“A thousand devils, what’s the matter then?” cried Ulrik Frederik impatiently.

“Lord Gyldenlöve,” said Daniel, looking up at him with tears in his eyes, “I’m an unhappy wretch.”

“You’re a dog of a huckster! Is it a herring-boat you’re afraid the Swede will catch? Or are you groaning because trade has come to a standstill, or do you think the saffron will lose its strength and the mildew fall on your pepper and paradise grain? You’ve a ha’penny soul! As if good citizens had naught else to think about than their own trumpery going to the devil,—now that we may look for the fall of both King and realm!”

“Lord Gyldenlöve—”

“Oh, go to the devil with your whining!”

“Not so, Lord Gyldenlöve,” said Daniel solemnly, stepping back a pace. “For I don’t fret about the stoppage of trade, nor the loss of money and what money can buy. I care not a doit nor a damn for herring and saffron, but to be turned away by officers and men like one sick with the leprosy or convicted of crime, that’s a sinful wrong against me, Lord Gyldenlöve. That’s why I’ve been lying in the grass all night like a scabby dog that’s been turned out, that’s why I’ve been writhing like a miserable crawling beast and have cried to God in heaven, asking Him why I alone should be utterly cast away, why my arm alone should be too withered and weak to wield a sword, though they’re arming lackeys and ’prentice boys—”

“But who the shining Satan has turned you away?”

“Faith, Lord Gyldenlöve, I ran to the ramparts like the others, but when I came to one party they told me they had room for no more, and they were only poor citizens anyway and not fit to be with the gentry and persons of quality. Some parties said they would have no crooked billets, for cripples drew the bullets and brought ill luck, and none would hazard life and limb unduly by having amongst them one whom the Lord had marked. Then I begged Major-General Ahlefeldt that he would order me to a position, but he shook his head and laughed: things hadn’t come to such a pass yet that they had to stuff the ranks with stunted stumps who’d give more trouble than aid.”

“But why didn’t you go to the officers whom you know?”

“I did so, Lord Gyldenlöve. I thought at once of the cercle and spoke to one or two of the mourants—King Petticoat and the Gilded Knight.”

“And did they give you no help?”

“Ay, Lord Gyldenlöve, they helped me—Lord Gyldenlöve, they helped me, may God find them for it! ‘Daniel,’ they said, ‘Daniel, go home and pick the maggots out of your damson prunes!’ They had believed I had too much tact to come here with my buffoonery. ’Twas all very well if they thought me fit to wear cap and bells at a merry bout, but when they were on duty I was to keep out of their sight. Now, was that well spoken, Lord Gyldenlöve? No, ’twas a sin, a sin! Even if they’d made free with me in the wine-cellars, they said, I needn’t think I was one of them, or that I could be with them when they were at their post. I was too presumptuous for them, Lord Gyldenlöve! I’d best not force myself into their company, for they needed no merry-andrew here. That’s what they told me, Lord Gyldenlöve! And yet I asked but to risk my life side by side with the other citizens.”

“Oh, ay,” said Ulrik Frederik, yawning, “I can well understand that it vexes you to have no part in it all. You might find it irksome to sweat over your desk while the fate of the realm is decided here on the ramparts. Look you, you shall be in it! For—” He broke off and looked at Daniel with suspicion. “There’s no foul play, sirrah?”

The little man stamped the ground in his rage and gritted his teeth, his face pale as a whitewashed wall.

“Come, come,” Ulrik Frederik went on, “I trust you, but you can scarce expect me to put faith in your word as if ’twere that of a gentleman. And remember, ’twas your own that scorned you first. Hush!”

From a bastion at East Gate boomed a shot, the first that had been fired in this war. Ulrik Frederik drew himself up, while the blood rushed to his face. He looked after the white smoke with eager, fascinated eyes, and when he spoke there was a strange tremor in his voice.

“Daniel,” he said, “toward noon you can report to me, and think no more of what I said.”

Daniel looked admiringly after him, then sighed deeply, sat down in the grass, and wept as an unhappy child weeps.

In the afternoon of the same day, a fitful wind blew through the streets of the city, whirling up clouds of dust, whittlings, and bits of straw, and carrying them hither and thither. It tore the tiles from the roofs, drove the smoke down the chimneys, and wrought sad havoc with the tradesmen’s signs. The long, dull-blue pennants of the dyers were flung out on the breeze and fell down again in spirals that tightened around their quivering staffs. The turners’ spinning-wheels rocked and swayed; hairy tails flapped over the doors of the furriers, and the resplendent glass suns of the glaziers swung in a restless glitter that vied with the polished basins of the barber-surgeons. Doors and shutters were slamming in the back-yards. The chickens hid their heads under barrels and sheds, and even the pigs grew uneasy in their pens, when the wind howled through sunlit cracks and gaping joints.

The storm brought an oppressive heat. Within the houses the people were gasping for breath, and only the flies were buzzing about cheerfully in the sultry atmosphere. The streets were unendurable, the porches were draughty, and hence people who possessed gardens preferred to seek shelter there.

In the large enclosure behind Christoffer Urne’s house in Vingaardsstræde, a young girl sat with her sewing under a Norway maple. Her tall, slender figure was almost frail, yet her breast was deep and full. Luxuriant waves of black hair and almost startlingly large dark eyes accented the pallor of her skin. The nose was sharp, but finely cut, the mouth wide though not full, and with a morbid sweetness in its smile. The lips were scarlet, the chin somewhat pointed, but firm and well rounded. Her dress was slovenly: an old black velvet robe embroidered in gold that had become tarnished, a new green felt hat from which fell a snowy plume, and leather shoes that were worn to redness on the pointed toes. There was lint in her hair, and neither her collar nor her long, white hands were immaculately clean.

The girl was Christoffer Urne’s niece, Sofie. Her father, Jörgen Urne of Alslev, Councillor of the Realm, Lord High Constable, and Knight of the Elephant, had died when she was yet a child, and a few years ago her mother, Mistress Margrethe Marsvin, had followed him. The elderly uncle, with whom she lived, was a widower, and she was therefore, at least nominally, the mistress of his household.

She hummed a song as she worked, and kept time by swinging one foot on the point of her toe.

The leafy crowns over her head rustled and swayed in the boisterous wind with a noise like the murmur of many waters. The tall hollyhocks, swinging their flower-topped stems back and forth in unsteady circles, seemed seized with a sudden tempestuous madness, while the raspberry bushes, timidly ducking their heads, turned the pale inner side of their leaves to the light and changed color at every breath. Dry leaves sailed down through the air, the grass lay flat on the ground, and the white bloom of the spirea rose and fell froth-like upon the light-green, shifting waves of the foliage.

There was a moment of stillness. Everything seemed to straighten and hang breathlessly poised, still quivering in suspense, but the next instant the wind came shrieking again and caught the garden in a wild wave of rustling and glittering and mad rocking and endless shifting as before.

“In a boat sat Phyllis fair;
Corydon beheld her there,
Seized his flute, and loudly blew it.
Many a day did Phyllis rue it;
For the oars dropped from her hands,
And aground upon the sands,
And aground—”

Ulrik Frederik was approaching from the other end of the garden. Sofie looked up for a moment in surprise, then bent her head over her work and went on humming. He strolled slowly up the walk, sometimes stopping to look at a flower, as though he had not noticed that there was any one else in the garden. Presently he turned down a side-path, paused a moment behind a large white syringa to smooth his uniform and pull down his belt, took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair, then walked on. The path made a turn and led straight to Sofie’s seat.

“Ah, Mistress Sofie! Good-day!” he exclaimed as though in surprise.

“Good-day!” she replied with calm friendliness. She carefully disposed of her needle, smoothed her embroidery with her hands, looked up with a smile, and nodded. “Welcome, Lord Gyldenlöve!”

“I call this blind luck,” he said, bowing. “I expected to find none here but your uncle, madam.”

Sofie threw him a quick glance and smiled. “He’s not here,” she said, shaking her head.

“I see,” said Ulrik Frederik, looking down.

There was a moment’s pause. Then Sofie spoke: “How sultry it is to-day!”

“Ay, we may get a thunderstorm, if the wind goes down.”

“It may be,” said Sofie, looking thoughtfully toward the house.

“Did you hear the shot this morning?” asked Ulrik Frederik, drawing himself up as though to imply that he was about to leave.

“Ay, and we may look for heart-rending times this summer. One may well-nigh turn light-headed with the thought of the danger to life and goods, and for me with so many kinsmen and good friends in this miserable affair, who are like to lose both life and limb and all they possess, there’s reason enough for falling into strange and gloomy thoughts.”

“Nay, sweet Mistress Sofie! By the living God, you must not shed tears!? You paint all in too dark colors—

Tousiours Mars ne met pas au jour
Des objects de sang et de larmes,
Mais”—

and he seized her hand and lifted it to his lips—

“. . . tousiours l’Empire d’amour
Est 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 to bring 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, she would 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.