“Don’t be so unhappy, Fennimore! Look up and let us talk about it. Will you, or will you not? Don’t be afraid! Let us bear it together, my own love! Come, try if you can’t!”
She raised her head slightly and looked up at him. “Oh, God, what shall we do! Isn’t it terrible, Niels! Why should such a thing happen to me? And how lovely it all could have been—so happy!” and she sobbed again.
“Should I not have spoken?” he moaned. “Poor Fennimore, would you rather never have known it?”
She raised her head again and caught his hand. “I wish I knew it and were dead. I wish I were in my grave and knew it, that would be good—oh, so peaceful and good!”
“It is bitter for us both, Fennimore, that the first thing our love brings us should be only misery and tears. Don’t you think so?”
“You must not be hard on me, Niels. I can’t help it. You can’t see it as I do—I am the one that should be strong, because I am the one that is bound. I wish I could take my love and force it back into the most secret depth of my soul and lock it in and be deaf to all its wailing and its prayers, and then tell you to go far, far away; but I can’t, I have suffered so much, I can’t suffer that too—I can’t, Niels. I can’t live without you—see, can I? Do you think I can?”
She rose and flung herself on his breast.
“Here I am, and I won’t let you go; I won’t send you away, while I sit here alone in the old darkness. It is like a bottomless pit of loathing and misery. I won’t throw myself into it. I would rather jump into the fjord, Niels. Even if the new life brings other agonies, at least they are new agonies, and haven’t the dull sting of the old, and can’t stab home like the old, which know my heart so cruelly well. Am I talking wildly? Yes, of course I am, but it is so good to talk to you without any reserve and without having to be careful not to say what I have no right to. For now you have the first right of all! I wish you could take me wholly, so that I could belong to you utterly and not to any one else at all. I wish you could lift me out of all relations that hedge me in!”
“We must break through them, Fennimore. I will arrange everything as well as possible. Don’t be afraid! Some day, before any one suspects anything, we shall be far away.”
“No, no, we mustn’t run away, anything but that, anything else rather than have my parents hear their daughter had run away. It is impossible! I will never do it. By God in heaven, Niels, I will never do it.”