Rather against his will, he fell in love with Mrs. Boye, but he did not tell her so, for his was not a young and open love, nor a hopeful one. He loved her as a creature of another, a finer and happier race than his own, and there was in his love a rancor, an instinctive rage against everything in her that bore the marks of race.
He looked with hostile, jealous eyes upon her sentiments and opinions, her tastes and views of life. He fought with every weapon he possessed, with subtle eloquence, with heartless logic and harsh authority, with derision wrapped in pity, to bring her over to his side, and he won. But when truth had conquered, and she had become like him, he saw that the victory was too complete, that he had loved her as she was, with her illusions and prejudices, her dreams and her errors, and not as she had now become. Dissatisfied with himself, with her, and with everything in his own country, he went away and did not return. But then she had just begun to love him.
This relationship, of course, gave people food for talk, and they made the most of it. The Councillor’s wife told Niels about it in the tone that aged virtue uses in speaking of young error, but Niels took it in a manner that offended and horrified the old lady. He replied in a high strain about the tyranny of society and the freedom of the individual, about the plebeian respectability of the mob and the nobility of passion.
From that day on he went but seldom to the home of his solicitous relatives, but Mrs. Boye saw him all the more frequently.
Chapter VII
It was an evening in spring; the sun threw a red light into the room, as it sank toward the horizon. The wings of the windmill on the embankment drew shadows over the window-panes and the walls, coming, going, in a monotonous swinging from darkness to light: a moment of darkness, two moments of light.
At the window, Niels Lyhne sat gazing through the darkly burnished elms on the embankment to the fiery clouds beyond. He had been in the country, walking under blossoming beeches, past green rye-fields, over flower-decked meadows. Everything had been so fair and light, the sky so blue, the Sound so bright, the women he met so wondrously beautiful. Singing, he had followed the forest path, but soon the words had died out of his song, then the rhythm was lost, at last the tones were muted, and silence came over him like a fit of giddiness. He closed his eyes, and still he felt how his body drank the light, and his nerves vibrated with it. Every breath he drew of the cool, intoxicating air sent his blood rushing more wildly through the quivering, helpless veins. He felt as though all the teeming, budding, growing, germinating forces of spring were mysteriously striving to vent themselves through him in a mighty cry, and he thirsted for this cry, listened for it, till his listening grew into a vague, turgid longing.
Now, as he sat there by the window, the longing awoke in him again.
He yearned for a thousand tremulous dreams, for cool and delicate images, transparent tints, fleeting scents, and exquisite music from streams of highly strung, tensely drawn silvery strings—and then silence, the innermost heart of silence, where the waves of air never bore a single stray tone, but where all was rest unto death, steeped in the calm glow of red colors and the languid warmth of fiery fragrance.—This was not what he longed for, but the images glided forth from his mood and submerged all else until he turned from them to follow his own train of thought again.