And thus was this marriage determined on, this bargain concluded, in which was bartered away a young girl's future happiness, to secure for her some insignificant worldly advantages. The sacrifice was accomplished with festive pomp, with flowers, smiles, and songs on one side, with smothered sighs and suppressed tears on the other. The same wedding-bells that rang to announce Gregers Daa's happiness rang Jeanné's freedom of soul and happiness into the grave.
The first few weeks after the wedding were spent in society, visiting, and all the round of amusements which it was more the fashion to offer to newly-married people at that period than in our days. Gregers objected to this dissipation in vain, the Baroness insisted on it, and the complaisant son-in-law allowed her to take her own way. The Baroness Rysé hoped, by these means, to procure her daughter some diversion, which might lead her to forget: she had herself never felt any other than these small sorrows that vanish amidst wax-lights and noise in a ball-room; she could not, therefore, conceive that Jeanné might, indeed, be stupified by all the entertainments provided for her, but that solitude is the only comfort in deep sorrow, and the great physician for suffering.
Betwixt the mother and daughter, these such opposite characters, the principal difference was simply this--that the Baroness thought only of marriage, and Jeanné of love.
As to the general, he found, to his great surprise, that all those feelings, so new to him, which had begun to be so softening and so pleasant, had suddenly changed their nature. That love, which had wiled his heart out of its accustomed torpor, which had come like a sunbeam on a late day in autumn, unexpectedly, and all of a sudden, had been as hastily enjoyed as if its loss were feared. He tried in vain to acquire the affection he coveted; but how could he think that an old man's measured and bashful love could be able to chase away the clouds of lassitude and grief which rested on Jeanné's beautiful but pale brow, or dislodge the remembrance of what she had lost by what she had won? When at last, after long and fruitless struggles, he perceived the impossibility of attaining the desired object, which seemed always to draw back from him like the obscure and misty images on a wide heath, he shut himself up in his own study--but not with his former peace of mind; and he bore the marks of his internal battles in his hollow sunken cheeks and whitened hair. From this time forward Gregers endured his sorrows in silence, as Jeanné did hers: the only difference between them was--the cause of the unhappiness of each.
Thus passed some years: Gregers Daa felt that no blessing had attended his marriage. He was childless. There lay a little embalmed corpse in his family vault in the cathedral of Viborg, with an inscription full of grief on the lid of the coffin--that was his only child; it had died soon after its birth.
The only person who never appeared to remark the cold and comfortless terms on which Gregers and Jeanné lived was the Baroness. She resided for some months every summer in her son-in-law's house at Hald, drove about in his carriage, received visits from all her acquaintances; in short, she seemed to be the real mistress of the mansion, exactly as on every alteration and improvement at Rysensteen she showed herself to have unlimited command over the general's money.
War at length broke out again, after the short and enforced peace Denmark had been obliged to put up with. King Frederick IV. had secretly entered into an alliance with Poland and Saxony against Sweden. Reventlow was fighting in Scania; shortly after was heard, for the first time, that one of the most ancient and most honoured names among the Danish nobility was coupled with a lost battle--a name from which heroism and victory, until then, had appeared to be inseparable. Jörgen Ranzau was defeated by Steenbock on the outside of the gates of Helsingborg, and the scene of war after that was removed into Germany. Gregers Daa was ordered to join the army. One evening in the month of November this intelligence reached Hald.
II.
THE FAREWELL.
Gregers Daa received the letter when he was sitting in the same room as Jeanné. His pale cheeks flushed as he read it; Jeanné remarked his emotion. She sat working near the fireplace, and at a little distance from her was a third person, a guest that evening--this person was Captain Krusé.