Marie Grubbe, Jens Peter Jacobsen [historical books to read .TXT] 📗
- Author: Jens Peter Jacobsen
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wetting his fingers and wrist and falling in clear drops from his full
white lace ruffles. His cheeks were flushed with wine, his eyes shone,
and he spoke in an unsteady voice.
“Beauty! Are you blind, one and all, or have you never even seen the
Lady from Denmark—not so much as seen Mistress Marie! Her hair is
like the sunlight on a field when the grain is ripe. Her eyes are
bluer than a steel blade, and her lips are like the bleeding grape.
She walks like a star in the heavens, and she is straight as a sceptre
and stately as a throne, and all, all charms and beauties of person
are hers like rose upon rose in flowering splendor. But there is that
about her loveliness which makes you feel when you see her as on a
holy morn when they blow the trumpets from the tower of the cathedral.
A stillness comes over you, for she is like the sacred Mother of
Sorrows on the beauteous painting; there is the same noble grief in
her clear eyes and the same hopeless, patient smile around her lips.”
He was quite moved. Tears came to his eyes, and he tried to speak but
could not and remained standing, struggling with his voice to utter
the words. A man sitting near him laid a friendly hand on his shoulder
and made him sit down. They drank together goblet after goblet until
all was well. The mirth of the old fellows rose high as before, and
nothing was heard but laughter and song and revelry. Marie Grubbe was
at Nurnberg. After the parting from Sti Hogh she had roamed about
from place to place for almost a year and had finally settled there.
She was very much changed since the night she danced in the ballet at
Frederiksborg park. Not only had she entered upon her thirtieth year,
but the affair with Sti Hogh had made a strangely deep impression upon
her. She had left Ulrik Frederik urged on partly by accidental events
but chiefly because she had kept certain dreams of her early girlhood
of the man a woman should pay homage to, one who should be to her like
a god upon earth from whose hands she could accept, lovingly and
humbly, good and evil according to his pleasure. And now, in a moment
of blindness, she had taken Sti for that god, him who was not even a
man. These were her thoughts. Every weakness and every unmanly doubt
in Sti she felt as a stain upon herself that could never be wiped out.
She loathed herself for that short-lived love and called it base and
shameful names. The lips that had kissed him, would that they might
wither! The eyes that had smiled on him, would that they might be
dimmed! The heart that had loved him, would that it might break! Every
virtue of her soul—she had smirched it by this love; every
feeling—she had desecrated it. She lost all faith in herself, all
confidence in her own worth, and as for the future, it kindled no
beacon of hope.
Her life was finished, her course ended. A quiet nook where she could
lay down her head, never to lift it again was the goal of all her
desires.
Such was her state of mind when she came to Nurnberg. By chance she
met the golden Remigius, and his fervent though diffident
adoration—the idolatrous worship of fresh youth—his exultant faith
in her and his happiness in this faith—were to her as the cool dew to
a flower that has been trodden under foot. Though it cannot rise
again, neither does it wither; it still spreads delicate, brightly
tinted petals to the sun and is still fair and fragrant in lingering
freshness. So with her. There was balm in seeing herself pure and holy
and unsullied in the thoughts of another person. It well-nigh made her
whole again to know that she could rouse that clear-eyed trust, that
fair hope and noble longing which enriched the soul of him in whom
they awoke. There was comfort and healing in hinting of her sorrows in
shadowy images and veiled words to one who, himself untried by grief,
would enter into her suffering with a serene joy, grateful to share
the trouble he guessed but did not understand and yet sympathized
with. Ay, it was a comfort to pour out her grief where it met
reverence and not pity, where it became a splendid queenly robe around
her shoulders and a tear-sparkling diadem around her brow.
Thus Marie little by little grew reconciled to herself, but then it
happened one day, when Remigius was out riding that his horse shied,
threw him from the saddle, and dragged him to death by the stirrups.
When the news was brought to Marie, she sank into a dull, heavy,
tearless misery. She would sit for hours staring straight before her
with a weary, empty look, silent as if she had been bereft of the
power of speech and refusing to exert herself in any way. She could
not even bear to be spoken to; if anyone tried it, she would make a
feeble gesture of protest and shake her head as if the sound pained
her.
Time passed, and her money dwindled until there was barely enough left
to take them home. Lucie never tired of urging this fact upon her, but
it was long before she could make Marie listen.
At last they started. On the way Marie fell ill, and the journey
dragged out much longer than they had expected. Lucie was forced to
sell one rich gown and precious trinket after the other to pay their
way. When they reached Aarhus Marie had hardly anything left but the
clothes she wore. There they parted; Lucie returned to Mistress
Rigitze, and Marie went back to Tjele.
This was in the spring of seventy-three.
After she came back to Tjele, Mistress Marie Grubbe remained in her
father’s household until sixteen hundred and seventy-nine, when she
was wedded to Palle Dyre, counsellor of justice to his Majesty the
King, and with him she lived in a marriage that offered no shadow of
an event until sixteen hundred and eighty-nine. This period of her
life lasted from the time she was thirty till she was forty-six—full
sixteen years.
Full sixteen years of petty worries, commonplace duties, and dull
monotony with no sense of intimacy or affection to give warmth, no
homelike comfort to throw a ray of light. Endless brawling about
nothing, noisy hectoring for the slightest neglect, peevish
fault-finding, and coarse jibes were all that met her ears. Every
sunlit day of life was coined into dollars and shillings and pennies;
every sigh uttered was a sigh for loss; every wish a wish for gain;
every hope, a hope of more. All around her was shabby parsimony; in
every nook and corner, busyness that chased away all pleasure; from
every hour stared the wakeful eye of greed. Such was the existence
Marie Grubbe led.
In the early days she would sometimes forget the hubbub and bustle all
around her and sink into waking dreams of beauty, changing as clouds,
teeming as light. There was one that came oftener than others. It was a
dream of a sleeping castle hidden behind roses. Oh, the quiet garden
of that castle with stillness in the air and in the leaves, with
silence brooding over all like a night without darkness! There the
odors slept in the flower-cups and the dewdrops on the bending blades
of grass. There the violet drowsed with mouth half open under the
curling leaves of the fern while a thousand bursting buds had been
lulled to sleep in the fullness of spring at the very moment when they
quickened on the branches of the moss green trees. She came up to the
palace. From the thorny vines of the rose bushes, a flood of green
billowed noiselessly down over walls and roofs, and the flowers fell
like silent froth, sometimes in masses of bloom, sometimes flecking
the green like pale pink foam. From the mouth of the marble lion a
fountain jet shot up like a tree of crystal with boughs of cobweb, and
shining horses mirrored breathless mouths and closed eyes in the
dormant waters of the porphyry basin while the page rubbed his eyes in
sleep.
She feasted her eyes on the tranquil beauty of the old garden where
fallen petals lay like a rose-flushed snowdrift high against walls and
doors, hiding the marble steps. Oh, to rest! To let the days glide
over her in blissful peace hour after hour and to feel all memories,
longings, and dreams flowing away out of her mind in softly lapping
waves—that was the most beautiful of all the dreams she knew.
This was true at first, but her imagination tired of flying
unceasingly toward the same goal like an imprisoned bee buzzing
against the windowpane, and all other faculties of her soul wearied
too. As a fair and noble edifice in the hands of barbarians is laid
waste and spoiled, the bold spires made into squat cupolas, the
delicate, lace-like ornaments broken bit by bit, and the wealth of
pictures hidden under layer upon layer of deadening whitewash, so was
Marie Grubbe laid waste and spoiled in those sixteen years.
Erik Grubbe, her father, was old and decrepit, and age seemed to
intensify all his worst traits just as it sharpened his features and
made them more repulsive. He was grouchy and perverse, childishly
obstinate, quick to anger, extremely suspicious, sly, dishonest, and
stingy. In his later days he always had the name of God on his lips,
especially when the harvest was poor or the cattle were sick, and he
would address the Lord with a host of cringing, fawning names of his
own invention. It was impossible that Marie should either love or
respect him, and besides she had a particular grudge against him
because he had persuaded her to marry Palle Dyre by dint of promises
that were never fulfilled and by threats of disinheriting her, turning
her out of Tjele, and withdrawing all support from her. In fact her
chief motive for the change had been her hope of making herself
independent of the paternal authority, though this hope was
frustrated, for Palle Dyre and Erik Grubbe had agreed to work the
farms of Tjele and Norbaek—which latter was given Marie as a dower on
certain conditions—together, and as Tjele was the larger of the two
and Erik Grubbe no longer had the strength to look after it, Marie and
her husband spent more time under her father’s roof than under their
own.
Palle Dyre was the son of Colonel Clavs Dyre of Sandvig and Krogsdal,
later of Vinge, and his wife Edele Pallesdaughter Rodtsteen. He was a
thickset, shortnecked little man, brisk in all his motions and with a
rather forceful face, which, however, was somewhat marred by a
hemorrhage in the lungs that had affected his right cheek.
Marie despised him. He was as stingy and greedy as Erik Grubbe
himself. Yet he was really a man of some ability, sensible, energetic,
and courageous, but he simply lacked any sense of honor whatever. He
would cheat and lie whenever he had a chance and was never in the
least abashed when found out. He would allow himself to be abused like
a dog and never answer back if silence could bring him a penny’s
profit. Whenever a relative or friend commissioned him to buy or sell
anything or entrusted any other business to him, he would turn the
matter to his own advantage without the slightest scruple. Though his
marriage had been in the main a bargain, he was not without a
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