“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.