In the open gable window up above, Niels sat gazing after him. He had heard the whole conversation from beginning to end. His face had a frightened look, and a nervous trembling passed through his body. For the first time he was afraid of life. For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvellous rescue at the last moment, no awakening as from a bad dream.
He felt it as a foreboding which struck him with terror.
Edele did not have a good autumn, and the winter drained her strength completely. Spring, when it came, did not find one poor little life-germ that it could warm and coax into growth; it found only a withering, which no gentleness and no warmth could arrest or even retard. But it could at least pour a flood of light over the paling life and caress the ebbing strength with fragrant, balmy air, as the evening crimson follows slowly in the wake of dying day.
The end came in May, on a day flooded with sunshine, one of the days when the lark is never silent, and you can almost see the rye grow. The great cherry-trees outside of her window were white with flowers—nosegays of snow, wreaths of snow, cupolas, arches, garlands, a fairy architecture against the bluest of skies.
She was very weak that day, and withal she felt a strange sense of lightness. She knew what was coming, for that morning she had sent for Bigum and said good-by to him.
Her uncle had come over from Copenhagen, and all that afternoon the handsome, white-haired man sat by her bedside with his hand folded in her hands. He did not speak, but once in a while he would move his hand, and she would press it; she would look up, and he would smile to her. Her brother, too, was in the room, gave her medicine, and helped her in other ways.
She lay very still with closed eyes, while familiar pictures from life over there flitted past her. Sorgenfri with hanging birches, the red church at Lyngby standing on a foundation of graves, and the white country house with the bit of sunken road leading down to the sea, where the paling always was green as if painted by the water,—the images took shape before her, grew clear, melted away, and vanished. And other pictures came. There was Bredgade when the sun went down, and the darkness closed in around the houses. There was the queer Copenhagen you found when you came in from the country in the forenoon. It seemed so weird with its hurry and bustle in the sunlight, with the whitened window-panes and the streets smelling of fruit. There was something unreal about the houses in the strong light; the noise and rattle of wheels could not chase away the silence that seemed to enfold them.... Then came the dim, quiet drawing-room in the autumn evenings, when she was dressed for the theatre, and the others were not down yet—the smell of incense, the wood fire from the stove lighting up the carpet—the rain whipping the windows—the horses stamping at the door—the melancholy cry of the mussel-venders ... and back of all this the theatre awaiting her with light and music and festive glow.
With such pictures the afternoon wore away.
Niels and his mother were in the parlor. Niels knelt by the sofa with his face pressed down against its brown velvet and his hands clasped over his head. He wept and wailed aloud, giving himself up to his grief without any attempt at self-control. Mrs. Lyhne sat beside him. The hymn-book lay on the table in front of her, open at the hymns usually sung at funerals. Now and then she read a few verses, and sometimes she would bend down over her son to speak a word of soothing or chiding, but Niels would not be comforted, and she could not stop his weeping or the wild prayers born of his despair.