When the news was brought to Marie, she sank into a dull, heavy, tearless misery. She would sit for hours, staring straight before her with a weary, empty look, silent as if she had been bereft of the power of speech, and refusing to exert herself in any way. She could not even bear to be spoken to; if any one tried it, she would make a feeble gesture of protest and shake her head as if the sound pained her.
Time passed, and her money dwindled, until there was barely enough left to take them home. Lucie never tired of urging this fact upon her, but it was long before she could make Marie listen.
At last they started. On the way, Marie fell ill, and the journey dragged out much longer than they had expected. Lucie was forced to sell one rich gown and precious trinket after the other, to pay their way. When they reached Aarhus, Marie had hardly anything left but the clothes she wore. There they parted; Lucie returned to Mistress Rigitze, and Marie went back to Tjele.
This was in the spring of seventy-three.
[CHAPTER XVI]
AFTER she came back to Tjele, Mistress Marie Grubbe remained in her father’s household until sixteen hundred and seventy-nine, when she was wedded to Palle Dyre, counsellor of justice to his Majesty the King, and with him she lived in a marriage that offered no shadow of an event until sixteen hundred and eighty-nine. This period of her life lasted from the time she was thirty till she was forty-six—full sixteen years.
Full sixteen years of petty worries, commonplace duties, and dull monotony, with no sense of intimacy or affection to give warmth, no homelike comfort to throw a ray of light. Endless brawling about nothing, noisy hectoring for the slightest neglect, peevish fault-finding, and coarse jibes were all that met her ears. Every sunlit day of life was coined into dollars and shillings and pennies; every sigh uttered was a sigh for loss; every wish, a wish for gain; every hope, a hope of more. All around her was shabby parsimony; in every nook and corner, busyness that chased away all pleasure; from every hour stared the wakeful eye of greed. Such was the existence Marie Grubbe led.
In the early days, she would sometimes forget the hubbub and bustle all around her and sink into waking dreams of beauty, changing as clouds, teeming as light. There was one that came oftener than others. It was a dream of a sleeping castle hidden behind roses. Oh, the quiet garden of that castle, with stillness in the air and in the leaves, with silence brooding over all like a night without darkness! There the odors slept in the flower-cups and the dewdrops on the bending blades of grass. There the violet drowsed with mouth half open under the curling leaves of the fern, while a thousand bursting buds had been lulled to sleep, in the fullness of spring, at the very moment when they quickened on the branches of the moss-green trees. She came up to the palace. From the thorny vines of the rose-bushes, a flood of green billowed noiselessly down over walls and roofs, and the flowers fell like silent froth, sometimes in masses of bloom, sometimes flecking the green like pale-pink foam. From the mouth of the marble lion, a fountain jet shot up like a tree of crystal with boughs of cobweb, and shining horses mirrored breathless mouths and closed eyes in the dormant waters of the porphyry basin, while the page rubbed his eyes in sleep.
She feasted her eyes on the tranquil beauty of the old garden, where fallen petals lay like a rose-flushed snowdrift high against walls and doors, hiding the marble steps. Oh, to rest! To let the days glide over her in blissful peace, hour after hour, and to feel all memories, longings, and dreams flowing away, out of her mind, in softly lapping waves—that was the most beautiful of all the dreams she knew.