Marie Grubbe, a Lady of the Seventeenth Century

by J. P. Jacobsen

When Marie met Ulrik Christian again, she no longer felt timid. Her secret buoyed her up with a sense of her own importance, and the fear of revealing it gave her manner a poise that made her seem almost a woman. They were happy days that followed, fantastic, wonderful days! Was it not joy enough when Ulrik Christian went, to throw a hundred kisses after him, unseen by him and all others, or when he came, to fancy how her beloved would take her in his arms and call her by every sweet name she could think of, how he would sit by her side, while they looked long into each other’s eyes, and how she would run her hand through his soft, wavy brown hair? What did it matter that none of these things happened? She blushed at the very thought that they might happen.

They were fair and happy days, but toward the end of November Ulrik Christian fell dangerously ill. His health, long undermined by debauchery of every conceivable kind, had perhaps been unable to endure the continued strain of night-watches and hard work in connection with his post. Or possibly fresh dissipations had strung the bow too tightly. A wasting disease, marked by intense pain, wild fever dreams, and constant restlessness, attacked him, and soon took such a turn that none could doubt the name of the sickness was death.

On the eleventh of December, Pastor Hans Didrichsen Bartskjær, chaplain to the royal family, was walking uneasily up and down over the fine straw mattings that covered the floor in the large leather-brown room outside of Ulrik Christian’s sick-chamber. He stopped absentmindedly before the paintings on the walls, and seemed to examine with intense interest the fat, naked nymphs, outstretched under the trees, the bathing Susannas, and the simpering Judith with bare, muscular arms. They could not hold his attention long, however, and he went to the window, letting his gaze roam from the gray-white sky to the wet, glistening copper roofs and the long mounds of dirty, melting snow in the castle park below. Then he resumed his nervous pacing, murmuring, and gesticulating.

Was that the door opening? He stopped short to listen. No! He drew a deep breath and sank down into a chair, where he sat, sighing and rubbing the palms of his hands together, until the door really opened. A middle-aged woman wearing a huge flounced cap of red-dotted stuff appeared and beckoned cautiously to him. The pastor pulled himself together, stuck his prayer-book under his arm, smoothed his cassock, and entered the sick-chamber.

The large oval room was wainscoted in dark wood from floor to ceiling. From the central panel, depressed below the surface of the wall, grinned a row of hideous, white-toothed heads of blackamoors and Turks, painted in gaudy colors. The deep, narrow lattice-window was partially veiled by a sash-curtain of thin, blue-gray stuff, leaving the lower part of the room in deep twilight, while the sunbeams played freely on the painted ceiling, where horses, weapons, and naked limbs mingled in an inextricable tangle, and on the canopy of the four-poster bed, from which hung draperies of yellow damask fringed with silver.

The air that met the pastor, as he entered, was warm, and so heavy with the scent of salves and nostrums that for a moment he could hardly breathe. He clutched a chair for support, his head swam, and everything seemed to be whirling around him—the table covered with flasks and phials, the window, the nurse with her cap, the sick man on the bed, the sword-rack, and the door opening into the adjoining room where a fire was blazing in the grate.

“The peace of God be with you, my lord!” he greeted in a trembling voice as soon as he recovered from his momentary dizziness.

“What the devil d’ye want here?” roared the sick man, trying to lift himself in bed.

“Gemach, gnädigster Herr, gemach!” Shoemaker’s Anne, the nurse, hushed him, and coming close to the bed, gently stroked the coverlet. “’Tis the venerable Confessionarius of his Majesty, who has been sent hither to give you the sacrament.”

“Gracious Sir, noble Lord Gyldenlöve!” began the pastor, as he approached the bed. “Though ’tis known to me that you have not been among the simple wise or the wisely simple who use the Word of the Lord as their rod and staff and who dwell in His courts, and although that God whose cannon is the crashing thunderbolt likewise holds in His hand the golden palm of victory and the blood-dripping cypresses of defeat, yet men may understand, though not justify, the circumstance that you, whose duty it has been to command and set a valiant example to your people, may for a moment have forgotten that we are but as nothing, as a reed in the wind, nay, as the puny grafted shoot in the hands of the mighty Creator. You may have thought foolishly: This have I done, this is a fruit that I have brought to maturity and perfection. Yet now, beloved lord, when you lie here on your bed of pain, now God who is the merciful God of love hath surely enlightened your understanding and turned your heart to Him in longing with fear and trembling to confess your uncleansed sins, that you may trustfully accept the grace and forgiveness which His loving hands are holding out to you. The sharp-toothed worm of remorse—”