The King, to make an end of all this, ordered him to accompany the troops which the Dutch were transferring to Fyen, and thence he returned in November with the news of the victory at Nyborg. He resumed his place at the court and in the favor of the King, and seemed to be quite his old self.
[CHAPTER VII]
MARIE GRUBBE was now seventeen.
On the afternoon when she fled in terror from the death-bed of Ulrik Christian Gyldenlöve, she had rushed up to her own chamber and paced the floor, wringing her hands, and moaning as with intense bodily pain, until Lucie had run to Mistress Rigitze and breathlessly begged her for God’s sake to come to Miss Marie, for she thought something had gone to pieces inside of her. Mistress Rigitze came, but could not get a word out of the child. She had thrown herself before a chair with face hidden in the cushions, and to all Mistress Rigitze’s questions answered only that she wanted to go home, she wanted to go home, she wouldn’t stay a moment longer, and she had wept and sobbed, rocking her head from side to side. Mistress Rigitze had finally given her a good beating and scolded Lucie, saying that between them they had nearly worried the life out of her with their nonsense, and therewith she left the two to themselves.
Marie took the beating with perfect indifference. Had any one offered her blows in the happy days of her love, it would have seemed the blackest calamity, the deepest degradation, but now it no longer mattered. In one short hour, her longings, her faith, and her hopes had all been withered, shrivelled up, and blown away. She remembered once at Tjele when she had seen the men stone to death a dog that had ventured within the high railing of the duck-park. The wretched animal swam back and forth, unable to get out, the blood running from many wounds, and she remembered how she had prayed to God at every stone that it might strike deep, since the dog was so miserable that to spare it would have been the greatest cruelty. She felt like poor Diana, and welcomed every sorrow, only wishing that it would strike deep, for she was so unhappy that the deathblow was her only hope.
Oh, if that was the end of all greatness—slavish whimpering, lecherous raving, and craven terror!—then there was no such thing as greatness. The hero she had dreamed of, he rode through the portals of death with ringing spurs and shining mail, with head bared and lance at rest, not with fear in witless eyes and whining prayers on trembling lips. Then there was no shining figure that she could dream of in worshipping love, no sun that she could gaze on till the world swam in light and rays and color before her blinded eyes. It was all dull and flat and leaden, bottomless triviality, lukewarm commonplace, and nothing else.
Such were her first thoughts. She seemed to have been transported for a short time to a fairy-land, where the warm, life-pregnant air had made her whole being unfold like an exotic flower, flashing sunlight from every petal, breathing fragrance in every vein, blissful in its own light and scent, growing and growing, leaf upon leaf and petal upon petal, in irresistible strength and fullness. But this was all past. Her life was barren and void again; she was poor and numb with cold. No doubt the whole world was like that, and all the people likewise. And yet they went on living in their futile bustle. Oh, her heart was sick with disgust at seeing them flaunt their miserable rags and proudly listen for golden music in their empty clatter.
Eagerly she reached for those treasured old books of devotion that had so often been proffered her and as often rejected. There was dreary solace in their stern words on the misery of the world and the vanity of all earthly things, but the one book that she pored over and came back to again and again was the Revelation of St. John the Divine. She never tired of contemplating the glories of the heavenly Jerusalem; she pictured it to herself down to the smallest detail, walked through every by-way, peeped in at every door. She was blinded by the rays of sardonyx and chrysolyte, chrysoprasus and jacinth; she rested in the shadow of the gates of pearl and saw her own face mirrored in the streets of gold like transparent glass. Often she wondered what she and Lucie and Aunt Rigitze and all the other people of Copenhagen would do when the first angel poured out the vial of the wrath of God upon earth, and the second poured out his vial, and the third poured out his—she never got any farther, for she always had to begin over again.
When she sat at her work she would sing one long passion hymn after another, in a loud, plaintive voice, and in her spare moments she would recite whole pages from “The Chain of Prayerful Souls” or “A Godly Voice for Each of the Twelve Months;” for these two she knew almost by heart.
Underneath all this piety there lurked a veiled ambition. Though she really felt the fetters of sin and longed for communion with God, there mingled in her religious exercises a dim desire for power, a half-realized hope that she might become one of the first in the kingdom of heaven. This brooding worked a transformation in her whole being. She shunned people and withdrew within herself. Even her appearance was changed, the face pale and thin, the eyes burning with a hard flame—and no wonder; for the terrible visions of the Apocalypse rode life-size through her dreams at night, and all day long her thoughts dwelt on what was dark and dreary in life. When Lucie had gone to sleep in the evening, she would steal out of bed and find a mystic ascetic pleasure in falling on her knees and praying, till her bones ached and her feet were numb with cold.