It was the same now; indeed, the reserve was, if anything, stricter, at least on Niels’s part, but that did not lessen their friendship, the cornerstone of which, now as of old, was Niels Lyhne’s admiration for Erik’s spirit and audacity, his way of seeming at home with life, and his readiness to grasp and hold. Yet Niels could not conceal from himself that the friendship was extremely one-sided. Not that Erik was wanting in real affection or faith in him—far from it. No one could think more highly of Niels than Erik did; he considered him so vastly his own superior in intellect that he never dreamed of criticizing, but this blind admiration led him to place Niels and his work and interests too far beyond the horizon his own eyes could scan. He was sure that Niels would go far along the road he had chosen, but he was equally sure that his own feet had nothing to do on that path, nor did he ever attempt to set them there.
Niels felt that this was rather hard; for though Erik’s ideals were not his, and though Erik in his art tried to express a romanticism or a romantic sentimentalism with which he was not in accord, he could still feel a broader sympathy by virtue of which he faithfully followed his friend’s development, rejoiced with him when he gained a step, and helped him to hope when he stood still.
In this way their friendship was one-sided, and it was not strange that Niels should have his eyes opened to the lack in it just at the time when his own mind was struggling with new ideas, and he felt the need of pouring out his thoughts to a sympathetic listener. It made him bitter, and he began to examine more closely this friend whom he had always judged so leniently. A dreary sense of loneliness came over him as he realized how everything he had brought with him from home and from the old days seemed to fall away from him and let him go his own way, forgotten and forsaken. The door to the past was barred, and he stood outside, empty-handed and alone; whatever he needed and desired he must win for himself—new friends and new shelter, new affections and new memories.
For more than a year, Mrs. Boye had been Niels’s only real companion, when a letter from his mother, telling him that his father was dangerously ill, called him back to Lönborggaard.
When he arrived, his father was dead.
The consciousness that for several years he had longed very little for his home weighed on Niels almost like a crime. He had often enough visited it in his thoughts, but always as a guest with the dust of other lands on his clothes and the memories of other places in his heart: he had never longed for it in passionate homesickness as for the fair sanctuary of his life, nor pined to kiss its soil and rest under its roof. Now he repented that he had been faithless to his home, and, oppressed as he was by his grief, he felt his remorse darkened by a sense that in some mysterious way he was an accessory to what had happened, as though his faithlessness had called death in. He wondered how he could ever have lived contentedly away from this home which now drew him with such strange power. With every fibre of his being he clung to it, in an infinite, desolate longing, uneasy because he could not become one with it as fully as he would, miserable because the thousand memories that called from every corner and every bush, from sounds and myriad scents, from the play of light and from the silence itself,—because all these things called with such distant voices that he could not grasp them in the strength and fullness he craved; they seemed only to whisper in his soul like the rustling of leaves that fall to the ground and the lapping of waves that flow on and ever on....
Happy in his sorrow is he who at the death of one dear to him can weep all his tears over the emptiness, the desolation, and the loneliness. Sorer and bitterer are the tears with which you try to atone for the past when you have failed in love toward one who is gone and to whom you can never make amends for what you have sinned. For now they come back to you: not only the hard words, the subtly poisoned retorts, the harsh censure, and the unreasoning anger, but even unkind thoughts that were not put into words, hasty judgments that merely passed through your mind, unseen shruggings of the shoulder, and hidden smiles full of contempt and impatience, they all come back like malign arrows, sinking their barb deep in your own breast, their dull barb, for the point has been broken off in the heart that is no more. There is nothing you can expiate any more, nothing. Now there is abundance of love in your heart, now that it is too late. Go now to the cold grave with your full heart! Does it bring you any nearer? Plant flowers and bind wreaths—does that help you?
At Lönborggaard they were binding wreaths; there, too, they were haunted by memories of hours when love had been silenced by harsher voices; to them, too, the stern lines about the closed mouth of the grave spoke of remorse.
It was a dark, sad time, but it held a ray of light in that it brought mother and son more closely together than they had been for many, many years; for in spite of the great love they bore to each other, they had always been, as it were, on their guard each toward the other, and there had been a certain reserve in their intercourse, from the time when Niels grew too large to sit on his mother’s knee. He had shrunk from the excitable and high-strung side of her nature, while she had felt something alien in the timidity and hesitation of his. But now life itself, which keys up and tones down and harmonizes, had prepared their hearts, and would soon give them wholly to each other.