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?”