Niels rose and went for the pastor at once; he was grateful that this had not come at the very last moment.
The pastor came and was left alone with Gerda.
He was a handsome, middle-aged man with finely cut, regular features and large brown eyes. He knew, of course, Niels Lyhne’s attitude to the church, and now and then some expressions of hostility that sprang from the young wife’s fanaticism had been reported to him; but he never for a moment thought of speaking to her as to a heathen or an apostate, for he understood perfectly that it was only her love that had led her astray, and he also understood the feeling that impelled her, now that love could no longer follow her, to seek reconciliation with the God she had once known. Therefore he tried in his talk with her to wake her dormant memories by reading to her the passages from the Gospels and the hymns that he thought would be most familiar to her.
He was not mistaken.
The words woke intimate and solemn echoes in her soul like the pealing of bells on Christmas morning. Instantly there was spread before her eyes the land where our fancy is first of all at home, where Joseph dreamed and David sang, and where the ladder stands that reaches from earth to heaven. It lay there with figs and mulberries, and the Jordan gleamed like clearest silver in the morning mist; Jerusalem stood red and sombre under the setting sun; but over Bethlehem there was always glorious night with great stars in the deep blue vault. How her childhood faith welled up once more! She was again the little girl who went to church clinging to her mother’s hand and sat there shivering with cold and wondering why people sinned so much. Then she grew to full stature again under the lofty words of the Sermon on the Mount, and she lay there like a prostrate sinner while the pastor spoke of the sacred mysteries of baptism and of holy communion. At last the true longing arose in her heart, the meek kneeling before the omnipotent and judging God, the bitter tears of remorse before the betrayed and reviled and tortured God, and the humbly audacious desire for the new covenant of wine and bread with the hidden God.
The pastor left her. Toward noon he came back and gave her the sacrament.
Her strength waned in a fitful flicker; yet at dusk, when Niels took her in his arms for the last time to say farewell before the shadows of death approached too near, she was fully conscious. But the love that had been the purest joy of his life had died out of her eyes; she was no longer his; even now her wings were growing, and she yearned only for her God.
At midnight she died.
They were dreary months that followed. Time seemed to swell up into something enormous and hostile; every day was an unending desert of emptiness, every night a hell of memories. The summer was almost over before the rushing, frothing torrent of his grief had hollowed out a river-bed in his soul where it could flow in a turgid, murmuring stream of sadness and longing.
Then it happened one day that he came home from the fields and found his little boy very ill. The child had been ailing for the last few days and had been restless in the night, but no one had believed it to be anything serious; now he lay in his little bed hot and cold with fever and moaning with pain.