“No, Marie, my love is not dead, it is risen again. Hear me, dear heart, hear me! for I have been stricken with blindness and with a mad distemper, but now, Marie, I kneel at your feet, and look, I woo you again with prayers and beseechings. Alack, my love has been like a wilful child, but now it is grown to man’s estate. Pray give yourself trustingly to its arms, and I swear to you by the cross and the honor of a gentleman that it will never let you go again.”
“Peace, peace, what help is in that!”
“Pray, pray believe me, Marie!”
“By the living God, I believe you. There is no shred nor thread of doubt in my soul. I believe you fully, I believe that your love is great and strong, but mine you have strangled with your own hands. It is a corpse, and however loudly your heart may call, you can never wake it again.”
“Say not so, Marie, for those of your sex—I know there are among you those who when they love a man, even though he spurn them with his foot, come back ever and ever again; for their love is proof against all wounds.”
“’Tis so indeed, my lord, and I—I am such a woman, I would have you know, but you—are not the right kind of man.”
May God in his mercy keep you, my dearly beloved sister, and be to you a good and generous giver of all those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as for the soul, that I wish you from my heart.
To you, my dearly beloved sister, my one faithful friend from the time of my childhood, will I now relate what fine fruits I have of my elevation, which may it be cursed from the day it began; for it has, God knows, brought me naught but trouble and tribulation in brimming goblets.
Ay, it was an elevation for the worse, as you, my dearly beloved sister, shall now hear, and as is probably known to you in part. For it cannot fail that you must have learned from your dear husband how, even at the time of our dwelling in Sjælland, there was a coolness between me and my noble lord and spouse. Now here at Aggershus, matters have in no way mended, and he has used me scurvily that it is past all belief, but is what I might have looked for in so dainty a junker. Not that I care a rush about his filthy gallantries; it is all one to me, and he may run amuck with the hangman’s wife, if so be his pleasure. All I ask is that he do not come too near me with his tricks, but that is precisely what he is now doing, and in such manner that one might fain wonder whether he were stricken with madness or possessed of the devil. The beginning of it was on a day when he came to me with fair words and fine promises and would have all be as before between us, whereas I feel for him naught but loathing and contempt, and told him in plain words that I held myself far too good for him. Then hell broke loose, for wenn’s de Düvel friert, as the saying is, macht er sein Hölle glühn, and he made it hot for me by dragging into the castle swarms of loose women and filthy jades and entertaining them with food and drink in abundance, ay, with costly sweetmeats and expensive stand-dishes as at any royal banquet. And for this my flowered damask tablecloths, which I have gotten after our blessed mother, and my silk bolsters with the fringes were to have been laid out, but that did not come to pass, inasmuch as I put them all under lock and key, and he had to go borrowing in the town for wherewithal to deck both board and bench.