Did ye but feel, O stars! who see
The whole earth's silent misery,
Then never would your glances rest
With such calm radiance on her breast.
Henr Wergeland.
As Susanna withdrew from Harald, and from the water of discord, she was quite in an excited and bad temper; but as soon however as she approached the wing of the house which Mrs. Astrid inhabited, she became calmer. She looked up to her window, and saw there her noble but gloomy profile. It was bent down, and her head seemed as it were depressed by dark thoughts. At this sight, Susanna forgot all her own ill humour. "Oh!" sighed she, "if I could only make her happier!"
This was Susanna's daily subject of thought, but it became to her every day a darker riddle. Mrs. Astrid appeared to be indifferent to everything around her here. Never did she give an order about anything in the house, but let Susanna scold there and govern just as she would. Susanna took all the trouble she could to provide the table of her mistress with everything good and delicious which lay in her power; but to her despair the lady ate next to nothing, and never appeared to notice whether it was prepared well or ill.
Now before Susanna went into the house, she gathered several of the most beautiful flowers which the autumn frost had spared, made a nosegay of them, and with these in her hand stept softly into Mrs. Astrid's room.
"Bowed with grief," is the expression which describes Mrs. Astrid's whole being. The sickly paleness of her noble countenance, the depressed seldom-raised eyelids, the inanimate languor of her movements, the gloomy indifference in which her soul seemed to be wrapped,—like her body in its black mourning habiliments, when she sate for hours in her easy-chair, often without occupation, the head bowed down upon the breast; all this indicated a soul which was severely fettered by long suffering.
Suffering in the north has its own peculiar character. In the south it burns and consumes. In the north it kills slowly; it freezes, it petrifies by degrees. This has been acknowledged for untold ages, when our forefathers sought for images of that which they felt to be the most terrible in life; thus originated the fable of the subterranean dwelling of Hela, of the terrors of the shore of corpses—in one word, the "Hell of the North, with its infinite, treeless wildernesses; with cold, darkness, mist, clammy rivers, chill, distilling poison, cities resembling clouds filled with rain, feetless hobgoblins," and so on.
In the Grecian Tartarian dance of the Furies there is life and wild strength, there is in its madness a certain intoxication which deprives it of its feeling of deep misery. The heart revolts not so much from these pictures of terror, as from the cold, clammy, dripping ones which the chill north exhibits—ah! not alone in poetry.
As Susanna entered the apartment of Mrs. Astrid, she found her sitting, as usual, sunk in deep melancholy. Upon a table before her lay paper and pens, and a book, in which she appeared to have been reading. It was the Bible; it lay open at the book of Job, and the following passages were underlined:
My soul is weary of my life, for my days are vanity.
Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.
Mrs. Astrid's eyes were riveted upon these last words, as Susanna softly, and with a warm heart, approached her, and with a cordial "Ah! be so good," presented to her the nosegay.