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Title: The Old Room

Author: Carl Ewald

Translator: Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

Release date: August 8, 2020 [eBook #62883]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
        file was produced from images generously made available
        by The Internet Archive)


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Produced by D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)









THE OLD ROOM




  THE OLD ROOM

  BY
  CARL EWALD

  AUTHOR OF “MY LITTLE BOY,” “TWO-LEGS,” “THE SPIDER AND
  OTHER TALES,” ETC.

  TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH BY
  ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
  NEW YORK :: :: :: :: :: 1908




  COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

  Sole Authorized Translation

  Published March, 1908

  [Illustration]




THE AUTHOR’S DEDICATION OF THE SECOND EDITION


  NOW THAT I AM PUBLISHING, UNDER MY OWN NAME, A NEW
  EDITION OF THIS BOOK, THE FIRST TO WIN ME FRIENDS IN ANY
  NUMBER, I DEDICATE IT, GRATEFULLY AND RESPECTFULLY, TO

  FRU AGNES HENNINGSEN,

  TO WHOM MY ART OWES MORE THAN TO ANY.




CONTENTS


                                        PAGE

  THE AUTHOR’S DEDICATION                  v

  THE TRANSLATOR’S NOTE AND AUTHOR’S
    PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION          ix

  PART I--CORDT                            1

  PART II--CORDT’S SON                   143




TRANSLATOR’S NOTE


The two parts forming this story are published separately in Denmark;
and Part I, which I have called _Cordt_, was first issued anonymously
as _The Old Room_, with a preface intended to convey the idea that
the work had been written by the heroine of the story. When Part II
appeared, under the title of _Cordt’s Son_, in which Fru Adelheid has
returned to the old house and the old room, Carl Ewald suppressed this
preface. It is so beautiful that it were unfair to deprive the author’s
American readers of the joy of it. The German translator prints it at
the end of his version, by way of an appendix; I prefer to give it
here:

  PREFACE TO THE FIRST (ANONYMOUS) DANISH EDITION

  I who write this book am still young and fair to look upon and rich
  and very sad.

  My youth and my beauty fill me with horror and I know not what to
  do with the wealth which I possess. Daily my sorrow sings the same
  song in my ears. It rustles in the folds of my train; it sighs in the
  fragrant flowers at my breast. Through the long nights I sit on the
  edge of my bed thrusting away the dream that comes with glaring eyes.

  Now what I have written is a lie.

  When I wrote it, it was the truth: now, it is a lie. When I saw it
  set down on paper, I knew that my youth was my strength and my right;
  that, if I were ugly, I could not live; and that, if I were poor, I
  should die.

  And now I am glad; and there is nothing on earth but my gladness.

  I am in this case.

  But I let the words stand as I wrote them, for I know that the time
  will come--and that soon--when all of them will be true again ...
  until they once more become a lie.

  And so my book will grow, through still and stormy times, until the
  day comes when I am again what I now am.

  But that, too, is itself a lie. For I was always the same.

  But there came a moment at which HE saw me as I am; and there my book
  will end. For after that there was but little that differed from the
  stories in other books and less still that I remember.

  Be that as it may, it is true that the world contains a room in which
  the radiant light of happiness flamed up before my eyes. And the
  light went out and the door closed upon me.

  And, if any one, from what I have here written, comes to think me a
  great and abject sinner, then he is indeed right. But, if he thinks
  that I have been cast off by the world, then he is at fault.

  For I go with head erect and peacefully along the road that others
  go; and I am welcome among the best. The lights in the high hall
  stream down upon my hair; the men honour me with their desire, the
  women with their ill-will.

  There lives only one who knows my guilt and he has condemned me.

  For it was HE that stayed in the room where the light burns. And she
  that went out into the street was I.

I am indebted to the collaboration of my friend Mr. Osman Edwards--one
of the foremost linguists in Europe--for his translation of the six
songs, in which he has carefully preserved both the sense and the
exquisite rhythm, and also for many suggestions regarding the accurate
solution of such difficulties as occurred in the prose text.

                                           ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS.

  CHELSEA, ENGLAND, 10 December, 1907.




PART I

CORDT




PART I

CORDT




CHAPTER I


The room looks out upon the square, which is so big and so fashionable
that there is no business done in it.

By day there is a sound of carriages, but at a distance; for the house
that contains the room is thrust a long way back and its walls are as
thick as the walls of a castle. In the evening, the square shines with
a thousand lights; at night, you can hear the rippling of the fountain,
which never begins and never stops, cries, no one knowing what they
are, and solitary steps that approach and retreat again.

The room is built high over the square. Its window is a door and leads
to a balcony filled with red flowers. When the wind lashes them, their
petals fly right over into the basin of the fountain and rock upon the
water.

The room is long and deep.

Where the window is, the light streams in through the wide,
stained-glass panes; but, inside, where the fireplace rises to the
ceiling, it is always dark.

No one has ever seen the curtain drawn before the window. But, even if
the sun could shine right into the room, it would never have seen a
human being there. By day, the room is dead.

It is placed so strangely in the house that it seems to form no part of
it. The life of every day passes outside it; and, even when the whole
house is lighted up and the horses paw the ground in the gateway and
glasses clink and music sounds in the great drawing-room, the door of
the room remains constantly closed.

No one has ever crossed its threshold but the master of the house and
his wife and the oldest servant in their employ.

For the room is the soul of the house and its tradition and its secret
chamber.

It was destined for this purpose long ago by the man who built the
house; and so cunningly did he contrive it that no one could guess that
it was there, unless he knew of it. Then, when the work was ended, he
sealed the architect’s tongue with a solemn oath and a heavy fee and
the man kept his sworn word.

And the builder of the house decorated the room as richly as was
possible according to the means of those days, with gilt and figured
leather hangings and stained-glass window-panes and costly carpets from
the East. But he placed no furniture in it until the very last. Then
he brought two splendid armchairs which he had had made for him in
Milan.

They were odd-looking chairs. They glided so smoothly over the floor
that a child could move them, and were so large that people became
quite small when they sat in them. Their woodwork was carved into birds
and animals, whose faces grinned strangely in the dark but ceased to do
so when the lights were lit.

When everything was thus ordered for the best, he called an old
servant, who had been in the house since he was a child, gave him a key
of the room and told him to care for it faithfully. Every evening, when
it grew dusk, he was to light the candles on the mantelpiece and he was
to do this even if he knew that his master was travelling in distant
lands. Every morning, he was to adjust the room with his own hands.
None but himself was ever to cross the threshold.

On the evening of the day when he took possession of his house, the
master, having first shown her all its other beauties, brought his wife
to the room.

She looked round in wonder. But he made her sit in one of the great
chairs, seated himself in the other and spoke to her in these words:

“Sweetheart, this room is for you and me and for none other in the
world. I have placed it in the most secluded part of the house, far
from the counting-house, where we work, from the passages, along which
our servants go, and from the drawing-room, where we receive our
guests, ay, even from our marriage-bed, where you will sleep by my
side.”

She took his hand and kissed it and looked at him.

“It shall be the temple of our marriage, hallowed by our love, which is
greater than anything that we know. Here we will pray to Him Who gave
us to each other. Here we will talk gladly and earnestly every evening
when our hearts impel us to. And, when we come to die, our son shall
bring his wife here and they shall do as we did.”

Thereupon he wrote down in a document how all this had happened and
they both sealed it with their names. He hid the document in a secret
recess in the wall. And, when all this was accomplished, they fell upon
their knees and, folding their hands together, offered a simple prayer
to God before they went to rest.

These two are long since dead. But their son complied with their will
and his son after him and so on and so forth until the present day.

And, however riches might increase or diminish with the varying
fortunes of the times, the old house in the square continued in the
possession of the family. For he who was its head always lived in such
a way that he kept his ancestral home.

The room stood untouched, as was appointed, and the document grew old
and yellow in the secret recess in the wall. Once only in the time of
each master of the house was it taken out; and that was on the evening
when he first brought his young wife to the secret chamber. Then they
wrote their names upon it and put it away again.

But it became the custom for each of them that took lawful possession
of the room to adorn it with a piece of furniture after his own taste
and heart. And they were strange objects that, in the course of time,
gathered round the two great, strange chairs.

There was one of the owners of the house who was kindly and cheerful
to the end. He placed in the room, in his wife’s honor, a costly
spinning-wheel, richly inlaid, which whirred merrily every evening
for many a good year and which stood as it was, with thread upon the
spindle.

There was one whose thoughts were always roaming and never at rest and
whose intellect was obscured before he died. He presented the room with
an ingenious representation of the heavenly system. When a spring was
pressed, the spheres lit up and ran their eternal courses; and he sat
and played with the stars to his last day.

There was another whose wife dreaded the deep silence of the room and
never entered it but once. He waited for five years and then had a doll
made, a woman, life-size and beautifully dressed. He put it on a chair
in the window, so that the light fell on its vacant face. But his son,
who loved his mother, drew the doll back, so that it was hidden in the
curtain.

There was one whose wife was in the habit of singing when she was sad,
as she often was. She brought a spinet, with slender, beautiful notes,
which sang like a mother singing her child to sleep. In time, its
sound grew very thin. When it was played upon in the room at night, it
sounded over the silent square like a humming in the air; and none that
passed knew what it was.

There was also one who had his wife’s portrait painted and hung the
picture on the wall. He broke his wedding-vows and his grandson took
the picture down. But, where it had been, a light stain remained that
could not be removed.

The man who was master of the house at the time when that happened
which is related in this book had brought nothing as yet. But his wife
had set up a thing that had caught her eye more than all that she
had seen in the way of art on her long travels. This was a jar of a
preposterous shape, large and bright and of a pale tint. On one side
was the figure of a naked man writhing through thorns. It stood on a
stone pedestal hewn from a rock near Jerusalem.

That was how the room was.

Each evening, when it grew dark, the oldest servant in the house lit
the candles on the mantelpiece. Each morning, before any one was awake,
he cleaned the room with his own hands and watered the red flowers on
the balcony. When winter came, he strewed bread-crumbs for the sparrows
that gathered on the baluster and twittered.

But the name of him that owned the house was Cordt. And his wife was
Fru Adelheid.




CHAPTER II


Cordt sat in one of the armchairs by the chimney, reading.

He was in evening clothes and held his crush-hat and his gloves on his
knees. He turned the pages quickly. Every moment, he swept his thick
hair from his forehead; every moment, he looked at Fru Adelheid, who
was walking up and down the floor with her hands behind her back.

She was very tall and slender. Her face was as white as her white gown.
Her mouth was very red, her eyes looked large and strange. She wore
flowers in her hair and at her waist.

“You are not reading, Cordt,” she said; but she passed with her back to
him.

He closed the book and laid it aside. Then he moved the chair so as to
turn his face towards her. His eyes were larger than hers and steadier,
his mouth firmer.

“How beautiful you are!” he said.

She laughed softly and took his hand and kissed it:

“How charming of you!” she said.

She began to walk again. He stretched out his legs and lay with his
head back in the chair, but followed her all the time with his eyes.
Now and again, she stopped, smoothed her gown, let her fingers stray
over the keys of the spinet and then went out on the balcony through
the open door. He could not see her from where he was sitting, but the
white train of her dress lay inside the room and he looked at that.

Then she returned, sat on the arm of the other chair and swung her foot
to and fro.

“I do not like you to be in good spirits, Adelheid,” he said.

Her eyes shone. She looked at the fireplace, where a log lay glowing:

“You should drink a glass of wine, Cordt.”

“I do not care for wine.”

“No more do I. But I like its exhilaration. It makes one so
light-hearted. Then everything becomes so charming.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“But, Cordt ... what makes you ask that?”

“Because you are so light-hearted and I so charming.”

She went up to him and laid her cheek against his hair:

“Now don’t spoil it for me,” she said. “You can, with a single word,
and that would be a great, great sin. You say I am pretty; and I am
glad because you think so and because I am going out with you and
because you are handsome and belong to me. We shall be far from each
other and close together for all that. We shall nod to each other, as
we always do, and know what we know.”

He released himself from her gently:

“Sit down a little,” he said, “and talk to me.”

She kissed him and sat down in the chair and then and there forgot her
despondency. Her eyes shone as before. He raked out the embers and
threw a log upon them. They sat and watched it catch fire and saw the
smoke surround it and rise up. Her foot tapped the carpet; he shaded
his eyes with his hand and pursued his thoughts:

“In my first year at the university,” he said, “there were five of
us who were chums and we used to meet every Saturday evening. It was
generally at my rooms, for I could best afford it. We used to sit and
drink wine until bright daylight and then take one another home.”

“You must have drunk a great deal.”

“I don’t know. Perhaps we did. We talked so loud and deep. The wine
made us feel bigger, braver and cleverer. Next day, we were quite
different, more reserved and cool. But we could look one another boldly
in the face, for we had nothing to repent of. It did not matter if we
had allowed ourselves to be carried away. We knew one another so well
and trusted one another.”

She sat and looked at him as he spoke, but said nothing. Lost in
thought, he continued to throw logs on the fire until she took one out
of his hand and put it aside:

“You’ll set the house on fire!”

“One should never drink wine with strangers,” he said. “You see, it is
so degrading to be stripped bare. And that is just what happens.”

“You say that as if it meant getting drunk.”

He paid no attention to her words, but went on:

“One unbuttons one’s self, one reveals one’s self. Look at your eyes
and your smile. I have felt it in my own eyes: hundreds of times, I
have suddenly seen them all naked together round the table.”

“In good company, Cordt?”

“Where else?”

“I don’t understand that,” she said.

“I do not know the people whom you speak of.”

“You will be with them this evening, Adelheid.”

She shrugged her shoulders discontentedly and tapped her foot on the
carpet.

“Adelheid.”

She looked at him and her eyes were dark and angry. He took her hand
and held it fast in his:

“I have seen it in eyes that were looking at you, Adelheid.”

She drew her hand away:

“This is hideous, Cordt!”

She rose and went to the balcony-door. He looked after her and his eyes
gleamed:

“Adelheid.”

She stood with her back to him, leaning against the window-frame, and
buttoned her gloves. He leant forward and gripped the arms of his chair
with his hands:

“I have seen it in _your_ eyes, Adelheid.”

She did not move, uttered not a word. When she had finished buttoning
her gloves, she gathered up her train and went out on the balcony.

The May air was cold and she shivered in her thin gown. The lamps
shone dimly through the mist; many carriages drove across the square.
She could hear the tinkling of the harness-bells in the gateway; the
footman was tramping up and down below.

She turned and stood at the window and looked at Cordt. He had moved
his chair round towards the fireplace. She could see nothing of him but
one shoulder and arm, his thick hair and his legs.

“The carriage is there,” she said.

He rose and went to her.

“You must not be angry with me,” he said, gently. “I am out of sorts.”

“Are you ill?”

“Yes ... perhaps.... No, not that.”

“Well, for all that I care, we can stay at home. You have spoilt _my_
pleasure.”

“Have I?”

“Of course you have. It was for you I made myself look so nice ... it
was with you I wanted to go out.”

“Was it?”

He took her hand and drew her to the fire:

“Sit down, Adelheid ... there ... only for a minute. Shall we stay at
home to-night ... get some wine ... have a party of our own...?”

“Yes ... you’re in such a festive mood!”

“Now be good, Adelheid. You are my only dissipation.... You know you
are ... there have been hundreds of delightful days to prove it. If you
are of my mind to-night, we will do this. And you will be beautiful for
me and I for you and our eyes will sparkle together.”

She did not look at him, but shook her head:

“I will stay at home, if you wish it,” she said.

They sat silent. The candles on the mantelpiece flickered and guttered
in the draught.

“It is strange,” he said. “Do you remember the evening in London,
Adelheid, when we were to go to that great ball? Then I begged you to
stay at home and you did and you were glad.”

She lay far back in her chair, with her arms behind her neck:

“I was not glad that evening,” she said.

He raised his head and listened.

“I submitted, Cordt, but I was not glad to. I was acting a part, for
your sake.”

She met his eyes. Hers were still and sad and she did not remove them
while she spoke:

“I was wicked, Cordt. I hated you. I told you a lie. I was dancing at
the ball, hour after hour, while I sat and held your hand and laughed
so gaily.”

She slipped from her chair and crouched before him, with her hands
folded round his knee and her eyes fixed humbly on his face:

“Do not look at me so strangely, Cordt. That is how I am. I love you.
But I cannot live without the others ... without having them to see it,
to see my happiness. I want to be pretty and I want them to fall in
love with me and I want to belong to you. I only care to be pretty if I
am loved. Don’t look like that, Cordt.”

She clung to him with eyes of entreaty.

“I am not really wicked, Cordt ... am I? I was with our little baby day
and night when he was ill ... wasn’t I, Cordt?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes ... I was. But I cannot always be quiet.”

He lifted her from her chair and crossed the room with his arm round
her waist. They went out on the balcony. A carriage came across the
square at a brisk trot, followed soon after by a multitude of others.
They came from the streets all round, but drove away in the same
direction and disappeared round a street-corner. The horses’ hoofs
clattered against the pavement, the lamps shone on the glittering
carriages, coachmen and footmen sat stiff and black on their boxes.

“Come, Adelheid,” he said. “Let us go.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The candles on the mantelpiece burnt down and the faces in the big
chairs grinned in the darkness. When day dawned, the old servant came
and arranged the room. When it was evening, he lit the candles.

He did this the next day and the next and many days after. The sun rose
and the sun set. The water splashed in the fountain. The lamps shone
and the people swarmed over the square. The balcony was bright with its
red flowers and, every evening, the light fell through the open door.

But the summer passed and no one entered the room.




CHAPTER III


Fru Adelheid stood on the balcony. She plucked the red flowers and
threw them into the square below. She wore a long, white gown; her
gloves and her white boa lay on the ground. She had just come from the
theatre and had been bored.

Now she turned towards the room.

Cordt sat huddled together before the fireplace and stared in front of
him. She wanted to see his face and called to him. He pushed back his
chair and looked up:

“I was thinking of the play we have been to see,” he said.

“Yes, it was stupid.”

She drew the other chair over the floor, so that she could look at the
jar with the naked man writhing through thorns.

“There was a time when I was tired of law,” said Cordt. “I was glad
when the poet showed me a marriage that was broken for love. I used to
think that people grew greater through it and that Heaven seemed higher
and earth more green.”

She shuddered again and wrapped her skirt closer about her feet.

“Now I am so tired of lawlessness. I loathe these women and their
lovers.”

“You are married yourself now,” she answered.

“What do you say?”

He looked up. She could see that he had not caught her words and she
was glad.

“There must be a struggle, no doubt,” she said.

“Of course there must. There is. In the old days, they were not allowed
to come together and now they are not allowed to stay together.”

She said nothing, but let her hand glide over the jar.

“All these faithless wives have lowered love. I could imagine a woman
of refinement stifling her love, because she would not give it scope.”

“Because she was afraid.”

“Because she was refined.”

They sat silent for a time and looked at the live embers in the white
ashes.

“Do you think there are many who do that?”

He looked up.

“Do you think there are many faithless wives?”

“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t there be?”

He leant his head on his hands. Fru Adelheid played with the jar.

“But I can’t understand that people care to go to the theatre.”

“Where would you have them go?”

He pushed back his chair so that he could see her. She remained sitting
as she sat and thought of nothing.

“Adelheid,” he said, “I suppose you wouldn’t care to stay at home
to-night?”

She lay back in her chair and looked at her hands.

“Oh,” she said, “I wanted to go out to supper.”

“I should so much like to talk to you.”

“But I did come home from the theatre, dear,” she replied and put out
her hand to him.

He did not see it and she let it fall.

“I would rather have stayed at home after the theatre, Adelheid.”

“Yes, I see,” she answered and just shrugged her shoulders. “I did not
understand.”

“But you understood it in the theatre. And now you want to sup out all
the same.”

He bent over to her to catch her eyes. She said nothing and did not
look at him.

“Adelheid.”

Fru Adelheid knit her brow:

“I don’t go to the theatre, you see, for the sake of the play,” she
said. “That does not amuse me. But it amuses me to watch that sea of
people and to hear them clamor and then fall silent. I like the way
they clap and the way they are quite still when anything good is being
said on the stage. Then something sings inside me and I enjoy it.”

He looked at her for a moment; then he laughed and rubbed his hands.
Fru Adelheid turned her chair towards him, so close that her knees
touched his:

“What is it that you wanted to talk to me about this evening?” she
asked. “That couldn’t be postponed until the theatre was over? That
couldn’t wait for an hour, now that I feel like going out to supper?”

He looked at her and shook his head.

“_Was_ it anything? Or were you only tired and empty, as I was ...
and as the faithless wives are ... and the modern poets and ... and
everybody?”

“No, Adelheid,” he said. “No. It was nothing. Nothing at all.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said and suddenly flung herself
violently back in her chair. “There is something behind your words.”

Cordt nodded.

“You are angry with me. What is it that I do? We live no differently,
that I know of, from other people in our circle. We travel, we go to
the theatre, we go out and we receive our friends at home. We meet
amusing people, artists ... everybody who is anybody.”

“Are you always amused among amusing people?”

She looked at him a little doubtfully:

“There is no such thing as always anywhere.”

“No,” he said, “more’s the pity. There is not.”

They sat silent, both steeped in thought. Then he pushed his hair from
his forehead and said, calmly:

“Try if you can understand me, Adelheid. When a woman marries and
becomes a mother, she usually becomes quiet ... quieter, I mean. I
mean that there are victories which she cannot win, triumphs which
she cannot achieve ... which she does not trouble about. She does not
trouble about them, Adelheid, because she has deepened her life ...
because she has come so near to one man that the approach of other men
is distasteful to her. Then she becomes quiet ... quieter. And this
quietness is not empty, but just richer than all the rest.”

She looked at him with a strangely inquisitive flash in her angry eyes:

“Are you jealous?” she asked.

He shook his head and made a gesture of denial with his hand. But she
sprang from her chair and stood before him with great, proud eyes:

“You ought to be, Cordt,” she said. “You ought to be. I am yours and
I love you. You won me once: see to it that you know how to keep me.
Fight for me, Cordt. I am young, I am pretty and the world is full of
men.”

He rose deliberately and looked at her till she thought for a moment
that he would strike her.

“You will be twenty-six next month,” he said. “And, besides, we in our
family don’t fight to keep our wives.”

“Cordt.”

She sat down without knowing what she was doing. He looked at her and
she looked back at him. She could not help thinking how tall he was;
and how easily he wore his clothes; and that one of his shoulders was a
little lower than the other.

Then he crossed the room, so quickly that he nearly tripped over the
carpet. He struggled with the old spinning-wheel and pulled it over the
floor. She followed him with her eyes.

“Can you spin on my great-grandmother’s wheel, Adelheid?” he asked.

She crossed her arms on her breast and looked at him.

“Can’t you, Adelheid? Couldn’t you learn? Not if I begged you to?”

He pulled the spinning-wheel right in front of her and placed it as if
she were to use it then and there. Then he sat down in his chair again.

“Don’t you think you could, Adelheid?”

They looked hard at each other. Then they became timid and shy and
dropped their eyes.

They both thought of holding out their hands, but neither could see the
other’s. They longed to throw themselves into each other’s arms, but
they sat as stiff as statues. Their lips trembled; but they did not
look at each other and neither knew anything of the other’s thought.

“I am thinking how very small we look in these big chairs,” he said, at
last.

His voice was calm and she grew quite calm at once. It was all over;
there was peace in their souls. It was not a reconciliation, for they
remembered no quarrel. Their glances rested confidently upon each
other.

There was nothing between them and they were friends.

“I wonder if we are inferior to those who sat here before us,” she
said. “Different, yes; but inferior?”

They both rose.

“Much inferior,” said Cordt, “and much less happy.”

They crossed the room and went out on the balcony, as was their custom
before they went to bed.

The stars of the September night rode in a high sky. Most of the lamps
were extinguished and there were but few people in the square. A
drunken man was singing far away. The sound of the water falling in the
fountain swelled up in the silence.

“How beautiful it is here!” he said.

“Yes.”

“And now the summer nights are over and we have not enjoyed them.”

She laid her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes.

“I do not think that in the whole world there is a square so pretty as
this,” he said.

“Oh, yes ... in Florence....”

He sighed and led her into the room:

“We have travelled too much, Adelheid.”

She crossed the floor quickly and opened the door. He remained standing
on the balcony.

It had all seethed up in him again. He fought against it, but to no
purpose.

“Are you coming, Cordt?”

She was outside in the passage and could not see him.

“Do you go.... I will come presently.”

He forced his voice to be as calm as possible, but it sounded very
unnatural in his own ears. He stood quite still and listened. She
remained standing for a moment, as though she were considering.

Then she closed the door and went. He could hear that she went
hurriedly.




CHAPTER IV


The first snow had fallen and lay fine and white on the balcony,
embroidered by the feet of the sparrows.

The red flowers stood indoors, in the warmth, and looked pitiful. And a
big table had been placed at the back of the room, with a lamp upon it
and a pile of books.

Cordt came early.

He went straight up to the table, sat down and opened a book. Soon
after, he stood at the window and looked out.

It was growing dusk. A damp and misty evening, with a thin, reddish
light behind the mist and cold feet and dripping roofs. The snow on the
square had melted into slush. The fountain was silent, covered with
boards and pine-faggots.

He sat down again and read. He stood up, looked at his watch, went to
the window, walked up and down the floor and sat down again. He lit
a cigar and let it go out. He went away and came back in an hour and
began all over again.

A little before midnight, the carriage drove in through the gateway
and, five minutes later, Fru Adelheid stood in the room, tall and
white, with large eyes.

“Have you enjoyed yourself, Adelheid?”

She could hear that he did not care to know and she did not answer:

“I am freezing,” she said.

She drew her chair close up to the fire, nestled into it and put her
feet on the fender.

“They asked after you, Cordt.”

“I daresay.”

He turned over the leaves of his book a little, then closed it and drew
his chair beside hers. He sat resting his cheek in his hand and looked
tired.

“Do you intend to sit in this room all day, Cordt?”

“No, only in the evening. When I have nothing else to do. I love this
room.”

She pressed her hands hard together and closed her eyes.

“I hate it,” she said. “All the unkindness that has come between you
and me comes from here.”

He said nothing to this, but rose and went to the table for a cigar.
Something went through her as he slammed the lid of the box.

“Are you going with me to-morrow?”

He shook his head.

“Do you want to cut off all our acquaintance, Cordt?”

“No,” he said. “I do not. But I don’t care to go out just now.”

“What do you think our friends will say?”

“Let them say what they like.”

“Don’t you consider how unpleasant it is for me?”

“Oh, yes. But I don’t care to go out at present.”

He lit his cigar at the candle on the mantel-shelf. Then he sat down
again and smoked quietly and looked into the fire. She looked at him
and sighed.

And, without knowing how it happened and without intending it, she
suddenly felt her heart touched and her eyes grew moist:

“Are you not happy, Cordt?”

He looked up and gazed at her:

“No.”

“And it is my fault? Because your wife is a silly woman, who wants to
go out every day?”

“You are not that, Adelheid.”

“Because I am an empty, restless, modern creature?”

“You are not that.”

“What am I then, Cordt?”

He took her hand and kissed it and smiled to her:

“You are my wife, Adelheid. And we have a little baby, we two, and
perhaps will have another.”

“No,” she said and drew her hand away. “No, Cordt. That was only my
nonsense.”

He said nothing. His hand fell down slackly and he turned paler than
she could remember ever having seen him. She was afraid that he was ill
and stooped over him and called to him.

He did not see her, did not hear her.

She could not take her eyes from him. She thought he could not look
more distressed if their boy were dead. She felt it as an appalling
shame, that she herself was glad of it; and she dreaded lest he should
look at her.

Then he did and read her thoughts.

And she grew worse and worse the more she saw him grieve. She did not
understand it, felt troubled by it.

And, as there was no anger in his eyes, it grew worse for her still.
She cast about for a word that could make him move and say something,
no matter what.

But he sat still and silent and slowly turned his face away from her.
And she could find nothing to say.

She rose and went to the window and stood there for a while. Then she
came back and sat down in a chair:

“What are you thinking of, Cordt?”

“Of you.”

Again they sat silent.

“Adelheid.”

He spoke her name quite calmly and gently, but she was frightened.

“I will fight for you, Adelheid; I mean to fight for you; and the new
little baby would have helped me. Now I shall have to fight alone.”

She remembered vaguely that this phrase had once been uttered between
them, but she did not understand him.

“I will stake life and happiness to win you,” he said. “I will talk to
you and importune you and conquer you. I will take you in my arms and
close my door against you and run after you and forgive you.”

“And, if you don’t win me?”

“I shall win you.”

“But _if_?”

She looked at his mouth, while she listened for the answer. It came
quite calmly; he did not even look at her:

“Then I shall cast you off.”

Fru Adelheid closed her eyes tightly and then opened them wide:

“Better cast me off at once, Cordt. If you can.”

“I can’t. We have the baby. And we are fond of each other.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“What don’t you know?”

She did not answer, only shook her head.

“You shall have your liberty,” he said. “Go out as much as you please,
amuse yourself, fill the house with guests. Be gay and melancholy the
whole day long, as your fate decides. Go away, if you feel inclined.”

“And will you never go with me?”

“As little as possible. I will not fight for you out there. I won you
there once and I am not afraid for you ... that way. There, in any
case, I need not trouble to win you again.”

“And then?”

“Then you will know that you can find me here any evening. Here is
where I shall live.”

He rose and walked slowly through the room. Fru Adelheid let herself
slip to the floor and lay there with her cheek on the fender and stared
before her. She saw him return and stand beside her and go and come
back again.

“Cordt,” she said, “I shall never come here.”

“You can do about that as you please.”

He sat down and rested his head on his hand:

“My ancestor well knew what he was doing, when he built this sacred
nuptial secret chamber in his rich, new house ... high above the
street, far from the day’s work ... and the night’s. He saw deep and
far.”

“It is the torture-chamber of the house,” said Fru Adelheid. “I am
certain that many women have wept bitterly in here.”

He half rose in his seat and passed his hand over his forehead.

“I am frightened, Cordt. You want to ill-use me. I can’t do what you
wish. Shall we talk somewhere else ... in your room, Cordt?”

“No,” he said. “Our place is here. Here we are bound to be.”

He stood up and sat down again at once. His eyes glittered as he spoke:

“Here they all sat, the men who lived in the house and their wives ...
in joy and in sorrow. Their faces look at us from every corner, their
words whisper all around.... Can you not hear my great-grandmother’s
spinning-wheel?... Do you not hear the spinet singing?”

“Yes, Cordt.”

“Here our words become greater and weightier in the stillness. Here we
grow more powerful in our affection and our anger. Whatever we can do
we can do here. They knew something, those old, big men and women.”

She rose and stood before him, leaning against the mantel, tall and
white:

“They knew how to keep discipline in their house,” she said.

She looked at him and there was pride and fear and anger about her red
mouth and in her strange eyes.

“That they did,” he said. “God bless them for it in their graves!”

She sat down in the old chair and put her arms around the jar, where
the man writhed through thorns. She stared at the man’s face and it was
as though she were with him and felt the thorns in her flesh.

“Here also it was that we two bound ourselves to each other for good
and all, Adelheid. That evening when we put our names to the old yellow
paper there, in the wall. Then you pledged yourself to this room, which
you hate. And, when the time comes, our son will come here with the
woman who shall be his joy.”

He went out on the balcony and came back, white and wet with snow. He
brought the cold in with him and she shivered. He stood silent by the
fire and then began to walk about again. She listened to his step and
waited for a word and could find nothing to say.

Then she went to the old spinet and sat down and sang:

  My Lenore, how dark and drear
    The burden of daylight’s bringing!
  No music of chiming hours I hear,
    No birds in the sunlight singing.

  Sweet Lenore, O lady mine,
    Bright-eyed, as the day wanes weaker,
  Now pledge me deep in the golden wine
    Night pours from her fragrant beaker.

  The violets watch us, blue in the plain,
    Not a star our secret misses.
  Kiss me, Lenore, and kiss me again
    And give me a thousand kisses

The slender tones sang through the room, when she stopped.

She listened, but could not hear his footstep. He was sitting in one of
the big chairs and did not move.

She looked at him for a moment over her shoulder. Then she rose and
closed the instrument, with as much noise as she could:

“Good-night, Cordt.”

“Good-night.”

Then she turned very red and very pale and went away with moist and
angry eyes.




CHAPTER V


Fru Adelheid was icy cold and had drawn her chair as near the chimney
as she could.

It blazed and flared in there; the red glow scorched her face and her
white gown. But she kept on adding logs to the fire and could not get
warm.

Cordt sat in the other chair reading, with his book on his knees and
his head leaning on his hands. The book was a large one, with yellow
pages and old-fashioned characters.

Fru Adelheid looked at him despondently. She regretted that she had
come up to the room and would have gone away, had she had the strength
to. She sighed and looked into the fire with tired eyes.

“Adelheid ... listen.”

He pushed his hair with both hands from his forehead and read:

  “But, when the tidings came to Queen Thyre that Olav Trygvasson was
  dead, she fell into a swoon and lay thus for long. And, when, at the
  last, she came to herself again, she was so sorrowful that it was
  pity for those of her house to behold. When the day was over, she
  went to a monk who dwelled near by and was known in all that land for
  a holy man. Him she asked if folk who died by their own hands sinned
  against God’s law; since her lord and husband was dead and she had no
  more liking for life. But the monk answered and said:

  “‘Indeed it is a sin. For God has given us life and will take it back
  again when He thinks right.’

  “Then the queen wept, because she must sin so grievously. But, early
  the next morning, she came again and asked the holy man how little
  one was allowed to eat without angering God. And the monk took pity
  on her and said:

  “‘If you eat an apple every day, that will be enough.’

  “Then Queen Thyre lay down on her couch and bade all her handmaidens
  leave her, so that she might be alone with her dule and sorrow,
  bidding them that one of her maidens, whom she best loved, was to
  bring her each morning an apple in the golden cup from which she
  was wont to take her morning draught. And so it fell that, when the
  maiden came on the morning of the ninth day with the apple in the
  golden cup, the queen was in Heaven with her husband.”

He closed the book; his lips moved as though he were repeating the
words to himself. Fru Adelheid looked thoughtfully into the fire. Then
she said:

“It was all very well for those old, dead people. They always had a
holy man to whom they could go in their distress.”

But Cordt shook his head.

“You distort the chronicle, Adelheid,” he said. “It was not at all like
that. The queen wanted to die and she died. She went to the monk to be
released from sin and piously subjected herself to his command.”

“They had God, in those days,” said Fru Adelheid.

“Yes, they had. The old, strong God held them in His hands.”

He rose quickly and stood by the chimney.

“Do you believe in God, Cordt?”

“No,” he answered. “I do not. But I believe that He once existed. And
I think that it would be a good thing if He were here now.”

“I think so too.”

He put his foot on the fender and folded his hands over his knee:

“God is somewhere still. And I do not fear His mighty face. If ever
I come to look upon it, then I daresay I shall see all that was high
and glorious for me in my days, all that made my blood red and my back
straight.”

Fru Adelheid smiled:

“Is that the old, strong God, I wonder?”

He glanced at her face, but there was nothing there to rouse his anger.
Then he crossed the room and stood beside her again with the same
expression in his eyes:

“The old, strong God,” he said. “I myself can do well enough without
Him. But I need Him in my house.”

She laid her head back in her chair and laughed:

“Yes, indeed, Cordt. That you certainly do.”

And she kept on laughing and said again:

“Then I daresay that wouldn’t have happened with ... what was his name,
who robbed you down below, in the counting-house? Do you think so,
Cordt? And then your wife would kiss your hand every morning and ask to
know her stern lord’s commands.”

He walked up and down and did not answer.

Fru Adelheid understood that he paid no attention to her sally, because
her words were too small for his thoughts and she was displeased with
herself and angry with him:

“But, to come back to the story, surely there are also Hagbarth and
Signe,” she said. “Not to speak of Romeo and Juliet. And Maria Veczera
... and Elvira Madigan.”

Cordt continued his walk.

“I don’t say anything against it. It is a beautiful story. And perhaps
it is true besides. In any case, it is right to place a good example
before the young. But, as for Queen Thyre, it surely depends a little
upon how long she had been Fru Trygvasson.”

He did not so much as look at her. She felt that she was being treated
as a child whom one does not trouble to answer and she worked herself
up into a steadily increasing passion and sought for words to wound him:

“Every love passes,” she said. “That we know. It is all very well for
those who die first. They show up prettily in history; but there is
nothing to prove that they were better than the rest of us.”

Cordt was still walking. Now he stood over by the window and looked
out. Then he began to walk again.

“Cordt.”

He stopped before her chair and looked at her.

“Do you know how long King Olav and Queen Thyre were married?”

“What is the point of all this, Adelheid?”

She pushed back her chair and stood up. She was not able to say at once
what she wished, but took a step towards him and sat down again and
felt quite powerless.

Then there was something in his glance that helped her. And she drew
herself up and looked him firmly in the face:

“It means that you are sitting here and growing musty in old books and
old stuff and nonsense, while life is taking its course around you. In
time, your beard will grow fast to the table and you will never speak a
word, except once every ten years, and then it will be so wise and deep
that no one will understand it.”

“There is no danger of that, Adelheid,” he said.

“But I don’t want to be Queen Thyre or Signe or any of them,” she said;
and her voice was so hard that something gave a wrench inside him. “I
want to be the woman I am, the woman you fell in love with and took
in your arms. I am not in a book. They will never read about me in
the girls’ schools. I have no time to spare for this endless old drab
affection beyond the grave. I don’t understand it, I don’t believe in
it. I want the wild, red love....”

Cordt had turned his face from her, while she was speaking. Now he
looked at her again:

“Haven’t you got it, Adelheid?”

She lay back in her chair and gave him a strange look. He had never
seen those eyes before. Veil after veil fell over them, till they were
quite dark, and then there suddenly lighted in them a gleam that was
gone at the same moment and the veils fell again.

“I do not know,” she said.

She said it so softly that he could only just hear. He listened a
moment whether she would say any more.

Then he bowed his head, so that his thick hair fell over his forehead,
and threw it back again and turned very pale:

“Indeed?” he said.

He slowly crossed the room to the window and stood with his forehead
against the panes. And slowly Fru Adelheid turned her face to him and
back again to the fire.

It did not seem to her as though she had said it; and then, the next
moment, she heard his quiet answer and saw his face, which was so
terribly stern and white. She knew that it was not what she meant to
say and she knew that it was true. She felt a bitter remorse at having
hurt the man she loved, a senseless despair at not being able to make
amends.

Then all this was dissolved in anger that he had led her on to speak
like that. And the anger died away in a profound, soft pity for herself.

She saw deeper into her own soul than she had ever done before and
turned dizzy with what she saw. She was seized with a wild and curious
longing and bent lower over the well. Then it seemed to her as though
she were falling and she gripped the arms of the chair so tightly that
her knuckles turned white.

And behind the terror was the distant bird, that sang ... a green and
golden land, which she had never seen in her dreams....

Cordt stood before her and put out his hand:

“Good-night, Adelheid,” he said.

She sat straight up and looked at him in bewilderment:

“Are you going?” she asked.

“No. But I should like you to go to bed. I shall stay here a little
longer and read.”

He sat down and took his book. Fru Adelheid rose slowly and went across
the room.

At the door, she stood for a moment and looked at him. His face was
very still. It seemed to her as though he were far away. She wondered
whether he would look up and say good-night once more. Or only nod.

But he was reading and turning the pages of his book.




CHAPTER VI


The fire in the hearth was nearly out and the candles had burnt quite
low. It was quiet in the room and quiet outside.

Cordt sat in his chair. He had been sitting there long and had not
stirred, only pondered, with his fingers buried in his hair, and
listened for Fru Adelheid’s footsteps.

She was at home, had been at home the whole week. But she had not set
foot in the room for the last fortnight.

Cordt looked at his watch. Then he rose and left the room, left the
house.

       *       *       *       *       *

A little later, Fru Adelheid came.

She remained standing at the door, surprised to find the room empty.
She called to the balcony, but no one answered. Lingeringly, she went
to the window and looked out. There was no one there.

She turned quickly to go. Then the thought came to her of what it had
cost her to come up here; and she was annoyed that Cordt was not there.
But that was only for a moment; then she was happy again at escaping
the encounter. She felt in a lighter mood than she had for many days.

She looked about her curiously. She had never been alone in the room
and she seemed not to have seen it properly before.

She stood long in front of the old chairs, lost in contemplation of the
strange faces in the woodwork. She pushed them round the floor, placed
them opposite each other and beside each other and sat down in them
as though to try what it was like. She summoned up in her memory all
that she knew about those who had sat in them and amused herself with
imagining what one had said and the other.

Then she went to the celestial globe and looked at it. She pressed the
spring, so that the stars ran and shone. She looked with delight at the
queer plaything and, when the clockwork stopped, set it in motion again.

She pulled out the old spinning-wheel and sat down beside it and
set it going. The wheel whirred lustily in the silent room and its
whirring put Fru Adelheid in a very cheerful mood. She wished the
great-grandmother would come in at the door and praise her for being so
industrious.

She rose from the spinning-wheel and stood in the middle of the room
and looked round. She thought of an occasion when she had stood in an
Indian temple and reflected that she was examining these singular old
things just as calmly as she had contemplated the Hindu sanctuary.

It seemed to her as though she were standing in a mortuary chapel,
where old and interesting, but foolish ideas and preposterous
superstitions stared at her from the sunken faces of mummies. She felt
no terror, for she knew that all that was dead and gone and could never
return.

Her eyes fell on the light stain on the wall, where the portrait had
hung.

“Poor Fru Lykke!” she said, aloud. “You were shut out of the temple,
because your husband deceived you.”

And she lifted her arms in the air in jubilant gladness that she was
born in gentler times and still lived and felt the warm blood beating
in her heart.

Fru Adelheid went round the room and laughed aloud to think how easily
she had broken the spell of the old room. She patted the big chairs on
their stiff backs and talked kindly to them. She used to hate them; her
blood had turned to ice each time she sat in them. Now they were two
handsome, valuable chairs and nothing more.

She had torn the veil from the Holy of Holies. There was nothing behind
it.

She ran to the window and pulled the curtain aside with a jerk.

There sat the doll ... stiff and stupid.

She laid her face on its waxen cheek and kissed it with her red mouth.

Humming a tune, she sat down to the old spinet. She sought for a hymn
that should celebrate her victory over the ghost.

But, when she struck the first notes, she suddenly grew frightened.

She had an uncomfortable feeling that there was some one in the room.

She sprang up, so that the chair upset, and looked around her.

There was no one.

The candles were all burnt out but one and it was dark in every corner.
Now the last candle flickered up and struggled a little and went out.

And then there came a treacherous and threatening muttering and
whispering all round the room.

People passed over the floor ... many and heavy footsteps. The
spinning-wheel whirred, the spinet sang behind her back. The stars ran
and shone, the doll rocked at her. The faces in the old chairs raised
themselves on their long necks and pecked at her and grinned uncannily.

But the man who writhed through thorns called for help.... She could
hear him call. He grew bigger ... he came nearer.... She saw the blood
drip from his naked limbs....

Fru Adelheid crept to the door with quivering hands and fearful eyes.




CHAPTER VII


Fru Adelheid laid her hands over Cordt’s book:

“May I talk to you a little? May I tell you something? May I tell you
that what you are doing is madness?”

He moved her hands from his book and looked up:

“Sit down, Adelheid,” he said wearily. “Sit down in that chair.”

But she took the book from him and threw it on the floor:

“You are ill, Cordt. You have become ill up here in this dreadful room.”

“Have you a household remedy?” he asked.

“How can you have the heart to make a jest of it?”

“It would be a bitter jest, if it were one,” he said. “But it was not a
jest. I believe in the old household remedies.”

Fru Adelheid sat down in her chair and stared helplessly before her:

“Of course you do,” she said. “And in old books and in everything that
has ceased to exist.”

He said nothing, but yawned wearily.

“And God shall be set on His throne again and I shall sit at the
spinning-wheel and we shall enjoy a blessed married life and be happy
ever after.”

Cordt crossed his legs and looked at his nails:

“Yes ... that is my programme,” he said quietly. “Something like that.
And you have stated it in your usual affectionate manner.”

“Cordt, how can you have the heart?”

She swung her body to and fro; her hands lay folded in her lap, her
eyes were moist. She wanted to say something, but could not, because
the tears prevented her. She could not understand that he did not help
her. Then she said:

“Things are going badly with us, Cordt.”

And, as he was still silent, she pulled herself together with an effort
and spoke with closed eyes, constantly rocking to and fro:

“We must obey the law under which we were born ... must we not, Cordt?
After all, we are modern people ... both of us. Tired, empty people, if
you like. But we do think and feel otherwise than people did when ...
when they were the sort of people whom you like. And we cannot alter
ourselves. But we can be as happy as it is possible to be ... nowadays,
being what we are. Why should we not be happy, Cordt?”

“I am not happy.”

“Oh, Cordt!”

She pressed her hands together and wrung them and bent over them so
that her tears fell upon them. Then she turned her wet face to him and
asked, softly:

“Then am I no longer pretty, Cordt?”

He stood up and kissed her white forehead:

“That you are,” he said. “But that won’t help us any longer.”

He began to walk up and down. Fru Adelheid wept hard and silently. A
little later, she said:

“You are driving me away from you, Cordt. I do so want to tell you
this, while there is still time, if only I could find the right words.
Won’t you sit down a little, Cordt? My head aches so.”

He sat down in the chair. Then she rose and put some wood on the fire
and sat down again:

“I am so afraid of myself when we talk together, Cordt,” she said. “It
is not only that I am wicked and say what I do not mean. I do that,
too. But you are so good. And you show me thoughts in my mind which
are not there before you utter them. But then they come and I think
that you are right and that they have been there always. That is so
terrible, Cordt.”

They sat silent. Fru Adelheid closed her eyes; Cordt moved restlessly
in his chair:

“Adelheid,” he said.... “You told me that evening....”

“You must not say that ... you must not.”

“Do you remember, you said ... about the wild, red love ... that it was
not the love which you have?”

She shook his hand and pressed it:

“That is just it,” she said. “I am grateful to you because you were
so good. And because you did not take it ill. But that was not in me,
Cordt. I did not know it. But then you said it ... and made me say ...
what I said. But then, at that very moment, I understood that it was
so. And that made me feel so terribly bad ... as I did. But then I felt
a sort of secret joy ... a secret treasure. It seemed to me that I was
richer than before. I was no longer afraid of what may come ... for
women sometimes think of that, Cordt, while they are young, how empty
everything will be, when that is past.”

He listened, with his face turned to the fire.

“I am sure that there is not a man who can understand that,” she said.

And then she lay down on the floor, with her chin on the fender ... and
her eyes shone:

“A woman is young for so short a time,” she said. “And she is always
dreading that it will pass. Can’t you understand, when she suddenly
suspects that there is something greater than the greatest ... and
then, when she is sad and afraid ... that then it may suddenly dawn
upon her that all is not over yet?”

Cordt laughed:

“It is a poor pleasure to be the greatest when there is something
greater still,” he said.

But Fru Adelheid shook her head:

“It’s not like that, Cordt,” she said.

He pushed back his chair and walked up and down many times and it was
silent in the room. Then he sat down again beside her and said:

“What you say is true. But it _was_ in you and I am glad I showed it
to you. I could not do differently, when I once saw it. I cannot go
and wait until another man knocks at the secret door of your heart and
offers you the greatest of all.”

She laid her cheek against the fender and looked at him:

“No, Cordt,” she said. “If it is like that, then what I said was not
true.”

He waved his hand and shook his head impatiently:

“Not to-day or to-morrow,” he said. “But in a year, or two years, or
ten. And, if it does not happen, then it is only an accident.”

Then she moved nearer to him and laid her head on his knee. She looked
up to see if he minded. But he was far away in his thoughts and did not
notice it.

She suddenly felt peaceful and contented. She was glad that she had got
it said. She felt as if it was removed to a distance ... perhaps it was
quite gone ... she could not understand why he continued to speak of
it.

And what he said about another man seemed so far to her and so
impossible. She thought about it as though it concerned somebody else:

“I love you, Cordt,” she said. “And, if, one day, another man came and
I loved him ... could I help it?”

He sprang up so suddenly that she had to seize the arm of the chair
lest she should fall:

“No,” he said, scornfully. “You could not.”

He rushed through the room and repeated his words three or four times.
Fru Adelheid rose from the floor and sat down in her chair and closed
her eyes.

“The man who hit upon that excuse did a fine day’s work,” said Cordt.
“He drove out of the world a great portion of men’s strength to live
their lives.”

He threw himself so violently into his chair that Fru Adelheid started.
Then he sat long quiet and she was glad that he was silent.

“Why should one not be able to control one’s heart?” he said, at last.
“Suppose I have a wife and child; and my wife is she whom I myself
chose. Then, one day, I meet another woman, who rouses my desires. I
meet her at a party, where there are lights and wine and music ... we
are not ourselves, she and I ... we are in another mood than usual ...
everything is done to lead us from the way by which we go on ordinary
days. But why should I not be able to step aside, in loyal gratitude
for that which I possess?”

She opened her eyes at intervals and closed them again. She heard what
he said, but did not realize that he was speaking to her.

“Who is it that placed love outside the laws? If I take it into my head
to kill a fellow-creature, there is no doubt but that I am indulging a
most criminal fancy. If I have given my word and think of breaking it,
I am no gentleman. But my heart may do as it pleases.”

“Yes,” said Fru Adelheid.

She was thinking of nothing when she spoke and he did not hear her.

“There are people, we know, who have the right to send thousands to
their death,” he said. “There are people whose passion rises skywards
in red flames and devours the poor chattels that stand in its way and
lights up all the land. Poets sing about it and a wax taper burns
before its image in every human heart. But, if a man plays the Napoleon
in the Store Bröndstræde, we hang him ... Why should every second woman
be entitled to look upon herself as an Héloïse?”

He sank into his chair and stared before him:

“I am not sure either whether the radiance of the one great flame makes
up for the thousand tiny lights that are put out. Does any one know, I
wonder? Can any one measure it?”

Fru Adelheid moved and Cordt turned his face to her and looked at her
attentively. Her eyes were soft and dreamy; she smiled faintly, like a
drowsy child.

“And _if_ that be so,” he said, in a subdued voice, “if it be the
case that I am not able to control my heart....” He let his head fall
heavily on the arm of the chair. “_If_ it be the case that love makes
me happy and confident, so that I build my life and the life of my
family upon it ... if it can then expire, without my knowing how or
why, and I have to look for the mother of my children in a strange
man’s bed, then why do I let my wife go out in the street unveiled?
Why do I not lock her up, as the Turk does? Or why do we not kill the
mother when the child is born?”

He rose and walked round the room and grew calmer as he walked:

“But it is not so,” he said. “Let the great keep their greatness ...
let the poets celebrate them and the puny moderns ape them in their
wretched way. And may there always be women who cannot give themselves
more than once and men who love them.”

He stood by the fire and looked through the room. It was still on every
side; the church-clock struck two.

“See, Adelheid,” he said, “how life passes more and more into law’s
domain. Every day, the liberty of the one is taken for an encroachment
upon the rights of the other. Every day, land, hitherto free of law,
is regulated by law. Flowers beget no flowers without the gardener’s
consent; animals no longer select their own mates. But no one can
control his heart; and human beings pair like dogs in the street.”

The fire had burnt out when Cordt woke from his musings.

He saw that Fru Adelheid was asleep. He stood before her a long time,
sick with compassion for her and for himself.

Then he stroked her gently on the hair:

“It is late ... Adelheid.”




CHAPTER VIII


“I could wish we were not married, Cordt,” said Fru Adelheid.

She laid her arms across her breast and looked at him with deep, dark
eyes:

“I could wish I were your mistress. If it meant that, all would be
over and done with in the morning. Then there would be no more of this
unpleasantness. And no fear, either. And the joys we have would be all
the fairer.”

He stood by the fire and played with the keys in his pocket.

“Then your forehead would be smooth and your eyes bright, Cordt, for
then you would be making love to me.”

He looked up and said gently:

“Don’t I make love to you, Adelheid?”

She sighed and said nothing. Cordt sat down in his chair and time
passed. Then he asked:

“Do you hear what I say, Adelheid?”

“I am longing to hear what you will say next.”

“I read something similar to what you have been saying in a book
lately,” he said. “I forget what the book was called. I was looking
into it ... just where the author railed against marriage, with its
security and its habits and all that. I have read exactly the same
thing in a hundred books, I think.”

“Yes ... they all sing the same song,” she replied. “It is not
particularly entertaining. But it is true enough, I daresay.”

Cordt struck his hands together lightly:

“It is curious how little imagination the poets have nowadays,” he
said. “One would think there were only half a dozen women, whom they
have all kissed and married and run away from. I wonder that it never
occurs to one of them to glorify _custom_.”

Cordt pulled his chair forward and sat with his head in his hands and
looked into the fire:

“If I were a poet, I would sing a song in honour of sacred custom,” he
said.

“Would you, Cordt?”

“Yes, yes ... that I would.”

He laid his head back and listened to the gale whistling in the
chimney:

“Now just look, Adelheid, at two people thrown into each other’s arms
by the strongest power on earth. For them there exists neither day
nor night, neither time nor place. The whole earth is fragrant with
violets. Their joy is terror and their terror is full of exultant
gladness. Then a child lies in her lap and the light in her eyes is
deeper than before. And then the years go by ... there are fewer
violets on the earth as the years go by, Adelheid. She bears her
children in pain. And the pain sears her cheek. The children have
sucked her breast dry; her eyes are weary with the night-watches. The
stranger who passes the house sees only the faded woman. But he who
drank intoxication from her young eyes and kissed the strength of
her bosom ... he does not see it. He has grown _accustomed_ to that
woman. She has quenched the longing of his youth and given him peaceful
happiness instead.”

He was silent for a while. Then he turned his face towards her:

“He does not live in his first eager longing for the trysting-hour, but
confidently seeks his accustomed couch by her side. Custom has gently
bound the two people into one family. Is that not beautiful, Adelheid?
And good?”

“Yes,” she said. “It is beautiful, as you tell it. But it is not youth.”

“Then what is youth, Adelheid?”

“Youth is not rest.”

“Then one should not marry before one is old,” said Cordt. “For
marriage is rest. Deep, powerful, happy ... generating rest.”

“No more one should,” replied Fru Adelheid. “And that is why I could
wish I were your mistress.”

She looked at him, as she said this, and he at her.

Then he stood up and laid his hand on the back of her chair and bent
close down to her:

“How far estranged from each other we have become!” he said.

And Fru Adelheid nodded sadly and Cordt crossed the room and stood by
the fire again:

“In vain I pitch my call in every key,” he said. “It has availed me
nothing that my ancestor built this room ... his heirs have borne
witness here, generation after generation, to no purpose.”

A gust of wind came and blew the balcony-door open.

Fru Adelheid shuddered and looked that way, while Cordt went and closed
it. Then he remained standing by the celestial globe and pressed the
spring:

“I so often think of the poor man who placed this toy up here,” he
said. “He was a man who could not be content with the circle in which
he moved. So he lost his reason and devoted himself to playing with the
stars.... For us modern people it is different ... the other way round.
We go mad because the circle in which we move is too large. We leave
the stars to the babies. We play ball with bigger things. We try a fall
with God Himself, if the fancy takes us ... provided that we have not
outgrown that plaything too! We dare not speak of love and we smile at
marriage. We despise courage and do not believe in honesty and each of
us has his own opinion about virtue.”

She heard what he said even as people listen to music when it does not
so very much matter if they catch every note.

“Then it happens that we long for a fixed point in our lives ... just
one point. Something that cannot be pulled to pieces and discussed. And
something that is not past.”

Cordt sat and moved about in his chair and could not settle down:

“If I were to put anything in this room,” he said, “it would be a
little tiny house ... from far away in the country. There would be only
one door and two windows and it would be evening and the smoke would
rise up gently from the chimney. The house would have to be as small as
could be; but that would show that there was no room for doubt inside
it. Husband and wife would go in and out of the door to the end of
their days.”

Now she heard what he said and looked at him.

“That is what my marriage ought to be, Adelheid. If I had had any
talent, I daresay it would have been different. Or if I had to work
for my bread.... And I am no different from other men of to-day ... no
stronger, no braver. I know nothing about God and I have no excessive
belief in men.”

He had lowered his voice and spoke without looking at her. But she
understood that he was listening for a word from her and her heart wept
because she had nothing to say to him.

“My fixed point,” he said.

Then he was silent for a little. But, soon after, he rose and stood
with his arm on the back of her chair and spoke again:

“There was also something in what I used to see at home. Father and
mother were so kind ... and so strong. I see them before me now, as
they used to kiss each other after dinner, however numerous the company
might be. And they kissed each other good-morning and good-night until
they died. And when father and his brother met in the street, they
always kissed ... people used to laugh ... and it was such a pretty
habit.”

While he spoke, she sought for an opportunity to interrupt him.

“My family-feeling has always been too strong,” he said. “Until now.
And yet ... I once had a sweetheart....”

He stopped. Fru Adelheid sat up and looked at him. Her eyes shone.

“Or a connection, if you like....”

“You never told me about that!” she said.

Cordt raised his head and looked at her and she lowered her eyes.

“There is nothing to tell,” he said.

Then he said no more, but went to the window and stood there.

And Fru Adelheid again felt small and ill at ease in the big old chair.




CHAPTER IX


Cordt stood on the threshold and waited, but then closed the door and
went to the fire.

He was in dress-clothes and tired and pale and his eyes were bright
with wine. When he had been sitting for a little while, it grew too
warm for him and he drew his chair to the balcony-door. There he sat
and let his hands play with the red flowers.

Fru Adelheid did not see him when she entered.

She moved slowly and stopped in the middle of the room, when she
discovered that he was not by the fireplace. She was surprised at this,
but soon forgot it, in her gayety and her lingering excitement at the
evening’s entertainment, with her mind full of bright and clever
phrases and the lights gleaming in her great eyes.

She sat down to the spinet and laid her forehead against the keys.
Something was singing inside her; her foot softly beat the carpet.

Then she sought among the music and sang:

  Lenore, my heart is wrung.
  Thine is so dauntless, thine is so young.
  Tell me, Lenore, the truth confessing
  (Which never were mine by guessing):
  Whence do thy soul’s fresh fountains pour?
  Where the mountains dip or the valleys soar?
  Tell me, the truth confessing;
  Open to me youth’s door.

  Lenore, my heart is sad.
  Thine is so constant, thine is so glad.
  Teach me thine equable gait to borrow;
  Teach me laughter and sorrow.
  My heart is a desert, sterile and bare;
  My heart is thine: do thou whisper there
  Of a fount that shall flood to-morrow,
  Of a sun that shall gild God’s air.

She put one hand on the music-sheet and played with the other and
hummed the tune again.

Then Cordt clapped his hands in applause. She started and her hand fell
heavily on the keyboard:

“How you frightened me, Cordt!”

He came and stood beside the spinet. Fru Adelheid looked at his face
and sighed. Then she stood up, put the music away and went and sat in a
chair by the fireplace:

“Won’t you come here, Cordt?”

Cordt walked to and fro again and up and down.

“Sit down here for a little,” she said.

“Why should I?” he asked. “You are not here, you know.”

She looked up and met his calm eyes.

“You are still down below, among the crowd of our guests. Don’t you
know that, Adelheid? They are all empty carriages that drove out at
the gate. For, as each one came to shake hands and say good-bye, you
entreated him to stay a little longer.”

Fru Adelheid sighed and crossed her hands in her lap. He stood up by
the fireplace so that he could see her face.

“I was sitting over there among the flowers, when you came in, and I
saw it all. You entered with a gleam and a rustle, accompanied by the
whole throng ... you were the fairest of them all. By your side went
Martens, supple and handsome. A long way after came his wife ... the
woman who wears those tired eyes and that painful smile. She did not
even look to see to whom he was offering his homage.”

She puckered her forehead and looked at him angrily.

“Then he begged you to sing the song once more and they crowded round
you and added their entreaties to his. You crossed the floor ... with
your slow, sure gait.... You always walk in the same way, Adelheid ...
like one who is not to be stopped. Your white dress trailed behind you;
there was silence in the room.”

Cordt ceased for a moment. Fru Adelheid laid her head back in the chair
and closed her eyes.

“Then you sang ... his song ... the one you were singing a minute ago
at the old spinet.... Yes, you heard me applauding, Adelheid. He stood
beside you and looked at you ... deferentially, happily. And you looked
at him to read in his eyes how charming you were.”

“How wicked you make it all seem!” she said.

Cordt bent over her:

“Look at me, Adelheid.”

She looked at him and was afraid.

“How dare you come up here with your retinue?” he asked. “Up here ...
to me ... in this room? Look at me, Adelheid. Is there not room enough
in the house besides? Are there not a hundred houses in the town where
you can play the game you love?”

Fru Adelheid stretched out her hands to him:

“Cordt!”

But his eyes were large and stern and she could not bear to look into
them.

Then she rose and stood before him with bowed head:

“Shall I go, Cordt?” she asked, softly.

He did not answer, but crossed the room. And Fru Adelheid sat down on
the edge of the big chair, as if she were not at home in the room.

“Yes ... Martens,” he said.

“You were not at all friendly to him this evening, Cordt.”

She said this in order to say something and without thinking, but
regretted it at the same moment and looked at him dejectedly. But he
made a gesture with his hand and answered, calmly:

“Indeed I was. As friendly as he could wish and a great deal more so
than I feel.”

He stood by the mantel and looked down before him. She took his hand
and laid her cheek against it:

“Martens is nothing to me,” she said.

“No,” said Cordt. “Not really. It is not the man ... it is men. It has
not gone so far as that. But it has gone farther.”

“I don’t understand you,” she said, sadly.

“It is not a man, a good man or a bad one, that is wooing your heart
and has won or is trying to win it. Martens is not my rival. He does
not love you and he is not trying to make you believe that he is. He
does not lie. That is not called for nowadays, except among the lower
classes. With us, we rarely see so much as the shade of a scandal.
Whence should we derive the strength that is needed for a rupture,
a separation, a flight from society? It’s a soldier that tells his
girl that she is his only love ... a journeyman smith that kills his
faithless sweetheart ... a farm-girl that drowns herself when her lover
jilts her for another.”

He drew away his hand and folded his arms across his chest.

“Martens is no Don Juan. It is not his passion that infatuates women,
not his manly courage and strength that wins them. He carries his
desires to the back-streets; he takes his meals with his wife. He
cannot love. The women become his when he covets them, but he has
never belonged to any woman. His eyes, his words, his ditties sing
love’s praises with a charming, melancholy languor which no woman can
resist. Then he lays his head in her lap and tells her of his perpetual
yearnings and his perpetual disappointments. He unbosoms himself to her
and begs her not to betray him. Then she loves him. And she is his ...
to any extent he pleases.”

She tried to speak; but Cordt shook his head in denial and she sighed
and was silent.

“He is no longer young. But that makes no difference. He was never
young. His unbounded susceptibility, his eternal readiness make him
young in the women’s eyes, as though he were a woman in man’s clothing.
His limp sensuousness has permeated every fibre of his body and his
soul ... so much so that it affects his every word, look and thought.
He is destitute of will and insipid and sickly and untrustworthy. He is
never hungry and he is insatiable. He swallows women and spits them out
again ... with morbid longings and a despondent temper and a diminished
strength to live their lives.”

“Cordt!... Cordt!... What is he to me?... What is he to us?”

He looked at her and was silent for a moment. Then he said:

“Martens tends the garden in which you pluck your flowers. He is the
chief gardener. But he is only one of a thousand. In the main, these
passion-hunters are all alike. Shall I introduce them to you?”

“No, Cordt.”

“I can do so without hurting the feelings of any of them by mentioning
their names,” he said. “You will recognize them all. You will recognize
them at once.”

“Cordt!”

But Cordt did not hear.

“You will remember the man of whom we all know that he has many
mistresses, even though we can say nothing to his face. He often takes
a new one. Then he has one more ... that is all ... for he never lets
go the old ones.”

“That will do, Cordt.”

“Then there is the man who tells his fair friends that he has only
loved one woman in his life and that is his mother. Have you ever
observed the part which the mother plays in these worn-out men’s
imaginations? In their books ... in their love ... she is the emblem
for their morning head-aches, their impotent compunctions. Her business
it is to soothe their worm-eaten thoughts ... they whisper her name
while they kiss their lady-loves. I don’t know which is the greater
insult: that offered to the mother or to the mistress.”

Fru Adelheid tried to rise, but just then he passed so close to her
that she could not move. So she remained sitting, weary and racked, and
he went round the room and stopped here and there while he spoke:

“These are the men to whom our wives belong,” he said. “And they do
not take them away, so that we can bemoan their loss and get new wives
in their stead. They are content to nibble the crest of the tree of
love, which we have planted in our garden, and to leave it to stand and
thrive as best it can.”

Fru Adelheid stood up before him with moist eyes and quivering lips:

“Cordt!”

But Cordt’s face was white with anger and she could not find a word to
say.

“Do I amuse you, Adelheid?” he asked.

She went to her place by the chimney and sat down again:

“You are putting out all my lights,” she said.

He walked across the room and went on talking:

“A man’s honest love goes for nothing, when one of these gentry has
laid eyes on his wife. Then he is degraded to the mere husband ... a
dull and clumsy person ... the owner of something which he cannot own.
Then there awakes in my wife’s mind a longing for something which she
does not possess. Her peace has turned into weariness and the love
which her marriage offered into an empty custom. She resigns herself.
And the silly words of every silly book sing in her ears. She knows
that no love endures for ever ... that marriage is odious. Impatient
sighs rise up in her soul, embitter her days and sadden her nights.
Then she changes the gold of love for small coin and fritters it away,
while the lights shine forth and the music strikes up.”

He folded his hands about his neck and stood by her chair and looked
before him:

“Adelheid,” he said ... “I cannot understand that the men who occasion
this state of things are allowed to go free among us. And we honor them
as the most distinguished of mankind. When we see a poor cripple, a
shudder comes over us ... am I not right, Adelheid? We are disgusted
with a face full of pain. But these lepers beam before our eyes with a
radiance and a beauty that know no equal.”

He walked up and down for a while and time passed and there was silence
in the room.

Then he sat down in his chair, where it stood by the balcony-door,
among the red flowers.

He was tired and closed his eyes. Now and then, he opened them, when a
carriage drove across the square or a cry sounded. Then he closed them
again and fell into a drowsiness in which everything was present to him
and painful.

And then suddenly he started up.

Fru Adelheid was lying before him on the floor, with her cheek against
his knee. His hand was wet with her tears.

“Don’t be angry with me, Cordt!”

He looked at her, but said nothing.

“Cordt ... when you speak like that ... it is true ... true for me
also.... It is all so good and so beautiful....”

He pushed back his chair and rose to his feet:

“Be very careful what you do, Adelheid,” he said. “I am not a
fashionable preacher, working up your nerves and quieting them again
... not a poet, reading his last work to you. I am your husband,
calling you to account.”

He crossed the room and then returned and stroked her hair:

“It is beyond our strength, Adelheid,” he said, sorrowfully. “God help
us!”

She took his hand and laid it over her eyes, so firmly that it hurt her.

“If the old God were still here, then we could go down on our knees and
fold our hands together, as they did who built this room. Would that
not be good, Adelheid?”

“Yes.”

“I call upon Him, Adelheid.... And upon everything in the world that is
greater than my own power.... And upon the little child downstairs....”




CHAPTER X


Fru Adelheid lay on the floor before her chair and pulled the flowers
of her bouquet to pieces. Cordt sat with his head leaning on his hand
and looked at the flowers.

“If only you would speak, Cordt.... If only you would ask me something.
Why don’t you ask me something?”

“What can I ask you?”

“Ask me what I am thinking about. Why I have come home so early. Why I
have not been here for so long.”

“I know all that, Adelheid.”

She crossed her hands on her knee and swayed to and fro and looked at
him with dark and angry eyes:

“Is there anything you do not know, Cordt?”

“No.”

“I don’t think so either. You know the right and the wrong of
everything between heaven and earth. You are never in doubt and never
at a loss. You know at once what is good and what is bad; and then you
go away and do what is good.”

He shook his head and said nothing and she grew still more angry:

“You alone know. Whoever does not obey you is lost. There is no room in
the house for any but you and those who serve you.”

Cordt bent over her and lifted her up in the chair.

“Be silent for a little, Adelheid,” he said. “And stay quiet for a
little.”

But she slipped to the floor again and looked at him defiantly:

“I will not sit in that chair,” she said. “Never again. I am not
worthy of the honor. You do not know everything, Cordt. You do not know
me.”

He stroked her hair with his two hands and forced her head back:

“Then show yourself to me,” he said.

She released her head and her eyes grew moist:

“You must not be good to me,” she said. “You don’t know me. I am not
the woman you think.”

Then she laid her head on the chair and said, softly:

“I am so sad, Cordt.”

“You will be glad again.”

“I daresay,” she said. “But I shall always be sad.”

She took the ruined bouquet and laid it on the chair and her cheek upon
it. She closed her eyes. Cordt looked at her--she seemed so tired--and
they were long silent. Then she said:

“It is so cold in here.”

And then silence fell upon the room again.

“Cordt!”

Fru Adelheid sat with her back against the chair and stared into the
fire with strange eyes:

“Cordt ... do you know ... that sometimes, when I am merriest ...
outside ... it is as though I heard little children crying.”

He sat silent.

“I hear little children crying, Cordt. When I am dancing ... and
sometimes when I am singing. And at the theatre ... when there are
many lights and people and I am happy ... then it comes so often. Then
I hear little children crying ... far, far away, but still I can hear
them distinctly ... I can never help hearing them ... Cordt ... do you
know what it is?”

“Yes, I know, Adelheid.”

Adelheid looked at him and turned her eyes to the fireplace again:

“Sometimes it happens differently,” she said. “When I hear a child
crying ... when it is really a child crying ... a strange child, which
has nothing to do with me, which I know nothing at all about ... I
needn’t even see it, Cordt ... but then I have to cry myself.”

She was silent for a little. Then she turned her face to him and asked:

“Do you know what that is, Cordt?” And he looked at her calmly and said
again:

“Yes, I know, Adelheid.”

“I do not know,” she said and shook her head softly. “I love our little
boy and love to have him with me. Don’t I, Cordt?”

“Yes.”

“But he is much happier with old Marie. He prefers to be with her. He
puts out his little hands to me when I come in. But, when I have had
him in my arms for a while, he wants to go back to Marie. He is so
small still.”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes he will not kiss me on any account. He always kisses old
Marie.”

“When she comes to die, we will put a tombstone on her grave,” he said.
“And on the stone we will write, ‘_Here lies one whom the children in
the house kissed._’”

Fru Adelheid folded her hands behind her neck and looked up at the
ceiling:

“At one time, you used to tell me about your mother ... that is long,
long ago, Cordt. You talked of her so often, in those days ... why do
you never do so now?”

“I think only of you.”

She moved nearer to him and laid her head on his knee:

“May I lie like this, Cordt?”

He stroked her hair and left his hand lying on her shoulder.

“That’s nice,” she said.

Cordt looked at her hair and stroked it again. She closed her eyes and
nestled up against him:

“It is so quiet here,” she said. “Now I will go to sleep.”

But then she grew restless again. She half raised herself and lay on
her knees, with her hands folded in her lap. Her hair had become undone
and slipped down over her shoulders. Her eyes stared into the fire:

“You used to tell me that your mother undressed you every night when
you were a little boy,” she said. “And every morning she dressed you
... always.”

“So she did.”

“You said that it so often made her late when she was going to the
theatre ... or else she would get up from the table when there were
guests. And your father used to be so angry with her.”

He nodded.

“I think your father was right,” she said. “I think it was odd of your
mother ... not quite ... not quite natural.”

Cordt pushed the hair from his forehead, but said nothing.

“I could see quite well that you would have me do the same. But I
couldn’t do it. I can’t do it as well as old Marie does and I can’t see
that that is necessary in order to be a good mother.... Then you also
told me that, one evening, when your mother had to go out, you cried
without stopping until she came home again.”

“Yes.”

“But, if your mother had been like me and if old Marie had undressed
you every night, then it would have been she whom you would have cried
for.”

“So it would,” he replied. “But it was good for me and good for herself
that it was mother.”

“I don’t understand that,” she said.

But then she raised her head and looked at him with great, proud eyes:

“Yes ... I understand,” she said. “I understand that it is good for
a man and gives him confidence to see his wife chained to her baby’s
cradle.”

“That is so, Adelheid.”

He looked at her quietly and sadly and her defiance was broken then and
there:

“How strangely you say that,” she said. “Cordt....”

Then she laid her head on his knee again and they were silent for a
time. Then she said:

“I remember the evening when I was going to my first grown-up ball. A
lady came to dress my hair. I was so solemn and the lady so talkative.
She told me that I was pretty and that I was sure to be married soon;
therefore I must lose no time and dance as much as I could; for, once
a girl was married, she had to give up dancing. I asked her what she
meant and said that I knew many married women who danced. Then she told
me that that was true enough and that there were many fine ladies who
did, but then they danced their children dead and therefore it was a
great sin.”

He moved in his chair. She raised her head and laid it on his knee
again:

“Do you believe that we can dance our children dead, Cordt?”

He did not reply, but stroked her cheek. But she pushed his hand away
and turned her face and looked at him:

“Do you believe it, Cordt?”

He nodded.

Then Fru Adelheid rose awkwardly from the floor and stood before him.
Slowly, she raised her hands and pressed them against her temples.

Cordt sprang up and took her hands firmly in his own and drew her to
him. But she tore herself away and her eyes stared vacantly into his
and did not see him.

“Adelheid!”

“Those are your children and mine, Cordt ... the little children who
cry when I am merry ... the children who died because their mother
danced....”

“Adelheid!”

His voice was very soft and his eyes very gentle. She stared into them
and saw a gleam in their depths. She understood that he was rejoicing
within himself, because he thought that he had her as he wanted her.

He put out his hands to her and his eyes and his silent, quivering
mouth spoke a thousand loving words to her. She stood stiff and cold
and looked at him stiffly and coldly.

And, when his hands touched her, she drew from him and pushed her chair
far back, as if she could not find room enough:

“You do not understand me,” she said.

She crossed the room to the balcony-door and stood there. Then she came
back to the fireplace, where he had sat down, and looked at him as
though he were a stranger:

“Those little children who cry,” she said, “what do they cry for?”

He raised his hands and let them fall on the arms of his chair.

“Why do they cry?” she repeated. “Because they have not been brought
into a world which is closed to them at the very moment when they see
its beauty?... Because they are not born to die?”

She went away again and came back and sat in her chair with a strained
expression on her face, as though she had to explain something to one
who was slow of comprehension:

“It’s no use,” she said.

Her voice was harsh. She swung her body to and fro and her thoughts
hunted for words in which she could say what she wanted in such
a way that it would be settled once and for all and could not be
misunderstood.

Then her looks fell on Cordt, as he sat there by her side, shattered
and tired, with closed eyes and nerveless hands. She saw the pain she
was giving him. She wished to undo and repair it and the tears broke
out in her:

“Cordt!”

She took his hand and it lay lifeless in hers.

“Can’t you help me?”

“No, Adelheid.”

Then her mood changed about. She pushed herself back in her chair and
crossed her arms over her breast:

“Then I must help myself,” she said. “How could you, either, an old ...
yes, an old man like you?”

He did not answer, did not stir, did not look at her.

“An old man like you,” she repeated, “who longs for peace and quiet and
nothing else. Then you give out that that is the best happiness which
is the easiest and the cheapest and the best adapted to domestic use.”

Cordt had raised himself upright in his chair. His hands lay clenched
about his knee, his eyes blazed.

“Then you put the woman you love in your mother’s chair ... your
grandmother’s and your great-grandmother’s chair....”

He flew up and stood before her with his hands on his hips and his lips
pressed close together:

“Hold your tongue!”

Fru Adelheid started and looked at him with frightened eyes:

“You have no right to speak to me like that,” she said.

He sat down again and threw his head back in his chair, with his face
turned away from her. She was so tired, could not find the words she
wanted, said everything differently and in another tone than that in
which she thought it.

And, as he quieted down beside her, she began to think more clearly
than usual and it seemed to her that there was nothing to be done
but to say her worst. Then she clenched her fists, to give herself
strength, and closed her eyes while she spoke:

“You must know things as they are, Cordt. It is all true, as you have
seen it and as you have said it. I have lied to you, Cordt. I lied in
my words ... I lied every time I came up here and sat with you.”

Now she looked at him. He raised his head with an effort and met her
eyes. Then he turned his face away again:

“You are lying now,” he said.

She opened her mouth and closed it again, so that her teeth struck
together.

Then she crossed her hands in her lap and bent over them and wept:

“I don’t know that,” she said.

Cordt stood up and walked across the floor, slowly and wearily and
without thinking. Fru Adelheid’s tears fell into her lap.

They were in this room, each independent of the other, each without
sympathy for the other. Their hearts were dead, their thoughts
paralyzed. They were no longer two people who loved each other and who
strove to be happy, not even two who were angry or sorry because they
were to be parted. They were just two people under sentence of death,
whom chance had imprisoned in the same cell, but who had nothing else
in common.

Cordt was the first to come to his senses.

He was standing behind her chair and the scent of her hair awakened
him. He bowed deeper over her and remembered who she was. He looked at
her hands, which were wet with tears, and his heart wept with her.

Then, at that moment, he saw that he must spare his sympathy if he
wished to keep her. And, when he saw this, he at once realized that she
was lost to him for ever.

He sat down in his chair and sought for the words which he should say.
He felt like the actor who has to deliver the last sentence in the
play, while the audience is already leaving, because the end of the
performance is there and the tension over.

“Adelheid!” he said.

That was all he could say. She understood what was passing within him
and was speechless too and wept softly.

       *       *       *       *       *

And the night sped on.

She was lying on the floor again, where she had lain before, with
her cheek upon his knee. She talked ... hastily, by fits and starts,
without troubling what she said, as long as she could get it all said.

Cordt leant his head on his hand and his thick hair fell over his
forehead. He closed his eyes and opened them again, heard what she said
and forgot it again, answered from time to time and knew only that it
was over.

“There are other men for me besides yourself ... it is true ... it
is all true.... Ah, Cordt, may I say it, wicked as it is?... And you
will be kind ... you understand that it is not that ... that it is not
infidelity....”

She pressed her hands together and shook her head in despair:

“Yes ... yes ... it is infidelity, Cordt ... it is.... It is, because
it’s you ... and because I understand it now. May I tell you, Cordt ...
may I?... I love the desire in their eyes.... I am curious about it....
There is nothing in it that insults me.... I am happy in it, I even try
to kindle it....”

“Those things are not said to one’s husband, Adelheid.”

She looked at him:

“To whom shall I say them, then?”

“Those things are not said.”

“Ah ... well ... I say them. I will say them. Because you are the man
you are. And, also, you asked me about it, Cordt ... you saw it and
wanted to save me ... that was why you spoke to me about it, wasn’t
it?... I did not know what it was ... now I do know.... I am not lying
now ... but I did not know, before you said it. And it is no uglier for
me ... it is better for me.... Cordt, Cordt ... it is less ugly so.”

She hid her face in her hands and wept so that she could not speak:

“And it is worse still, Cordt ... it is worse than I have said ... why
do you not turn me out?... Ah, if you were only dead, Cordt!... Why
should you be so unhappy and why should it be I that make you so? If
you cast me away, it will be only what I deserve. For I know that it is
you I love.... I know it now as I never knew it before ... you are the
man that was destined for me....”

She seized his clothes with her hands and half raised herself, so that
her white face was close to his:

“Cordt ... can’t you wait for me?... I am coming....”

Then she released her hold and sank in a heap on the floor:

“No ... no ... I cannot do what you wish.”

He rose to his feet and stood before her and looked into the fire:

“It’s your will that is sick, Adelheid,” he said.

He walked across the room and stood at the balcony-door and looked out.
Then he came back and sat in his chair again:

“You know where the great joy lies. And you know that it would be yours
and mine, if you could reach it. But you cannot. There is no sense
of perspective in your life ... everything to you seems quite close
or quite far, quite small or quite big. You are like Martens and the
others. You belong to them, because your will is weak, like theirs. You
are becoming like them.”

“No, Cordt.”

“Yes, you are like them. You are a woman and you are refined and
therefore you dread the mire. But you belong to them. You and I are
mortal enemies. If you were she whom my son had chosen for his wife, I
should tremble for his happiness. And you had the happiness which you
seek ... nay, the happiness that exists. You set the cup to your lips
when you were young enough to stand wine and old enough to know that it
was good.”

He pushed the hair from his forehead and looked round the room:

“There is nothing more to be said. You are a child of the time and the
time claims you as its own. There was no sense in bringing you to the
old room.”

“No, Cordt.”

“But you are clever and you are refined and you have seen its great,
silent beauty. And, one day, you will see that happiness lay in the
land where you were and you sallied forth to find it in distant climes.”

“Yes, Cordt.”

“You will see that, one day. But then it will be too late. Then
the years will be gone. Then the strings of the old spinet will be
rusted and mute and the spinning-wheel will have fallen to dust and
the fire died out in the chimney. Then your fancy will be frightened
and bewildered, like the bird that keeps on flapping against the
window-pane. Your faith will be lost and your modesty turned to
unchastity.”

He rose and went across to the balcony-door. Fru Adelheid lay with her
cheek on the fender and with closed eyes.

A silence hung over the room greater than it had ever known before.
They both of them felt it and felt it as the silence when pain is
dumbed at the approach of death. They no longer fought against the
inevitable, against what was stronger than themselves; and they were
so tired that they no longer thought of the defeat which they had
suffered, but only smiled in the peace which they had won.

       *       *       *       *       *

And the night sped on.

They were sitting again in the quaint old chairs and looked at the
embers that were expiring in the hearth. The candles were nearly burnt
out.

They were both of them very gentle and very still. It seemed years
since they had last differed. Their faces were calm, their eyes clear
and sad, when they looked at each other, but without longing, without
anger or bitterness.

And they looked at each other and talked together ... of that which was
over.

Their words had lost all sting. He held her hand in his and pressed it
as that of a good friend. Once, she pushed his hair from his forehead
as she would have done to a child.

“If any one saw us sitting here, he would not understand what has
happened to us,” said Cordt.

“No.”

“And, if anyone had heard every word that fell between us in this room,
he would perhaps say that we were a pair of simpletons.”

Fru Adelheid shook her head:

“It is well that nothing more has happened to us,” she said.

“I don’t know,” replied Cordt.

Then he let go her hand and drew himself up in his seat:

“Sometimes I think it would be easier if there were an action that had
to be forgiven,” he said. “Something to be forgotten. Then it would not
be over.”

“It is not over,” she said. “We have missed happiness, because I did
not keep the measure by which I should be gauged. But our boy down
below lives and he can win a wife who shall sit in the old room with
honor.”

“No,” said Cordt. “The secret of the old room is out. It does not suit
these times and still less the times to come. Our son shall not see his
happiness shattered here.”

And, a little later, he pressed his hand hard to his temples and said
so softly that she just heard it:

“For it is hard to decrease one’s own happiness.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The candles went out ... one after the other.

“It is late, Adelheid,” he said. “We had better go.”

“Yes,” she said.

But neither of them was able to.

They looked at each other and sat steeped in the same thoughts, afraid
to end this still night, which was to be followed by bad days.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then the last candle went out.

Cordt’s lamp still burnt on the table, but it was as though everything
in the room was displaced in its glow. There was darkness where light
had been before and great shadows on the wall.

They both felt it as something uncanny and involuntarily moved closer
together.

“Sing to me, Adelheid,” he said.

She went to the spinet and sat down and looked at the keys.

“Sing the last of the Lenore songs.”

She looked over her shoulder, but could not see the expression on his
face.

Then she sang:

  When death comes, come, Lenore, too:
    Thou wert Life’s beacon rosy-red;
  And, by those glad, great eyes shot through,
    In that same instant, Death were dead.
  So am I never Death’s, but thine;
    No tears shed I, nor once complain:
  Set only thy red lips to mine
    And take thy soul again.

  I shall have seen for the last time
    The radiant, loving eyes I treasure;
  And what of song and what of crime
    I wrought let others weigh and measure.
  But thou sometimes wilt not forget,
    When evening creeps across the pane,
  The scent of shy blue violet
    That sweetened all the plain.

Cordt was standing behind her chair when the song was finished. She did
not perceive it, but sat with her hands on the keys and softly repeated
the last lines.

He looked at her hair and her hands and at the white dress that hung
over her shoulders and her lap. He knew as he had never known before
what he had lost and knew that he would never win it back. His hands
trembled, his eyes burned. He thought that he must kill her and himself.

Then he spoke her name.

She looked up and looked at him.

She forgot everything, saw nothing but him. He could see it in her
great, strange eyes and in her red mouth.

And she sprang up with a cry of happiness and he took her in his arms
and carried her away.




CHAPTER XI


The candles on the mantelpiece were lighted and their gleam fell
through the balcony-door over the square, as it had done every evening
since the house was built.

Outside, the square shone with a thousand lights. There was a sound of
carriages, but at a distance, for the house was thrust a long way back
and its walls were as thick as the walls of a castle.

And, when time passed and night came, the noise died away and you could
hear the rippling of the fountain, which never begins and never stops,
and cries, no one knowing what they are, solitary steps that approach
and retreat again.

Cordt stood by the fireplace of the empty room.

He stared at the places where the quaint old things had stood which had
seen his race pass through the room.

He remembered every single piece that had been brought there and looked
at the empty spot where each had stood. He closed his eyes and saw
everything in its place again ... the spinet sang ... Fru Adelheid’s
white train rustled over the carpet.

He thought of the man who had built the house and the room and who
had called it the soul of the house and its tradition and its secret
chamber. Of all those after him who had brought their wives in here ...
of the day when he himself stood in the room for the first time.

And he went and opened the secret recess in the wall which hid the old,
yellow document on which each of them who took possession of the room
had written his name and his wife’s.

He read the report of the builder of the house, with its plain, homely
phrases.

And, when he had read it and read it again, he struck out his own name
and Fru Adelheid’s and went away and left the door open behind him.




PART II

CORDT’S SON




CHAPTER XII


When Cordt had finished telling the story of the old room, he sat by
the window and looked across the square, where the dusk was gathering
about the newly-lighted lamps.

The servant entered noiselessly and lit the chandelier and went out
noiselessly again. And the light filled the whole of the room and fell
upon Cordt, who sat and gazed before him, and upon Finn, who stood by
him with his eyes fixed on his face.

But Finn and Cordt were not where the light found them.

They were in the wonderful mystery of the old room. They heard the
rippling of the fountain outside in the silent square; they saw the
blaze of the red flowers on the balcony. The slender notes of the
spinet sounded in their ears; Fru Adelheid’s white gown rustled over
the floor.

And, when Cordt turned his face towards his son, he appeared to Finn
as a very big, old man; and Finn seemed to Cordt the little child that
once lay and laughed in the cradle and fought with its little fat fists.

Then Cordt stood up and took Finn’s arm and they walked to and fro,
silent, overcome with what they had seen and afraid lest they should
shatter the dream by speaking.

They walked for some time. And, when, at length, they stopped before
the window, which was dewed with the heat, so that they could see
nothing through it, Cordt remembered that there was still something
which Finn ought to know and which he could not ask about.

He looked at Finn and remembered how he had loved his mother.

It was her eyes, but more restful-looking; her mouth, but paler and
tired, as though it had tried a thousand times to say something which
it never could. He had her slender waist and he was taller than Cordt,
but carried his height like a burden. Then he also had Fru Adelheid’s
pale cheeks and forehead, but Cordt’s hair, only thicker still and
blacker.

“Finn,” said Cordt and laid his hands on his shoulders.

Finn started and could not look at him. But Cordt took him under
the chin and lifted his head and looked with a sad smile into his
frightened eyes:

“There is only one thing left to tell you, Finn.... Fru Adelheid did
not take a lover.”

His smile widened when he saw his son’s sudden and great joy; and he
drew him to him and kissed him.

But then he suddenly left him and sat down somewhere in the room, with
his back to him. Finn followed him and stood by him for a while and
thought kindly and fondly of him and could find nothing to say.

The thoughts rushed through Cordt’s head.

Now that he had lived through it all anew, the scab broke which the
silence of many years had placed upon the wound in his will. His eyes
grew hard and angry, he wanted to speak as he used to speak when he
fought his hopeless fight for Fru Adelheid.

But then his glance fell upon Finn.

He sat as he liked best to sit, with bent head and his hands open upon
his knees.

And Cordt grew gentle again and said, softly:

“You are glad, of course. For, you see, she is your mother.”

He crossed the room and came back and stood with his arm over the back
of the chair and looked at Finn, who was lost in his thoughts. It was
silent in the room and silent outside, for it was Sunday. They could
hear the bells ringing for evening service.

“She never secured the red flowers in the place of the blue which she
valued so little,” said Cordt, “I don’t know ... I often thought....”

The bells rang out.

There was one that was quite close and one that was farther away, but
louder, nevertheless. And there was a sound of distant bells which
could not be distinguished from one another, but which sang in the air.

It sounded louder than it was, because they were thinking of it; and
the ringing grew and filled the room with its deafening clamor.

Then there came a rumbling in the gateway. The carriage drove out in
the soft snow, where they could not hear it.

“That’s Fru Adelheid going to church,” said Cordt.

He sat down by his son and began to talk in a low voice and without
looking at him.

The bells rang and then suddenly stopped and increased the silence a
hundredfold.

“There was a night at Landeck when the bells caught her, a night
following upon a day of sunshine and merriment and many people. She
was the gayest of us all and, in the evening, all at once, she became
silent and tired, as so often happened, without any cause that I knew
of.... You were with us. You were ten years old then; you lay and
slept. We had been standing together by your bed and looking at you and
she began to cry and I could do nothing but hold her hand in mine and
stop speaking.”

Finn listened, as he had just listened to the bells, without making
out what the words had to tell him. He only knew that his mother was
without blame and that his father had been able to tell it him all on
that day and to leave it to him to pronounce judgment between himself
and her. His joy at this sang within him and made all the rest easy and
light and indifferent.

And Cordt continued:

“Then I went out on the verandah with my cigar and she stood in
the doorway and listened to the bell of a little chapel up in the
mountains, where we had been during the day. We had heard the story
when we were there. Once, in the old days, a pious man had built the
chapel in expiation of a sin and, since then, the bell had rung two
hours after midnight every day.... She asked whether it would go on
ringing till the end of the world and we came to talk of all the
bells that ring over the earth, by day and by night, sun up and sun
down, and comfort weary mortals.... Sometimes she was silent. But the
bell rang up there constantly. And she constantly began to talk again
and constantly about the same thing. About the bells that sounded so
eternally and so identically over the whole world ... about those who
heard them for the first time, one day when they were running like wild
heathens in the endless wood ... about those whose will suddenly broke
in the midst of the modern crowd, so that they fell on their knees and
crept away where the bells summoned them.”

Finn looked up. The words now caught his mind and he woke from his
dreams.

“I see her before me still, as she stood on the night when she carried
her soul to God. Her strange eyes lifted to the stars ... her white
face ... her hands ... and her words, which came so quickly, as
though her life depended upon their coming, and so heavily, as though
every one of them caused her pain. She never gave it a thought that I
was there: she spoke as though she were doing public penance in the
church-porch.... And then she declared that it was over.... It had
become empty around her and cold and dark to anguish and despair, there
where her glad eyes had beamed upon the lights and the crowd of the
feast. Despair had come long since and slowly and she had closed her
eyes to it and denied it. It had grown and come nearer to her and she
had run away from it, as though she were running for her life. Now it
was there and reached from earth to heaven, in her, around her, far and
wide. And, if the bells could not conquer it, then she must die.”

Cordt spoke so softly that Finn could hardly catch his words.

“Then the bell up there ceased. Soon after, the day dawned and the
sun shone on her white, moist cheeks. She was still now and silent,
but her thoughts were the same. When things began to stir around us,
in the town and at the hotel, she went out, I did not know where,
but I daresay she was at the chapel. Towards evening, she returned
and, at midnight, we sat on the verandah again and listened to the
church-bell.... A week passed thus. I often feared for her reason. She
always talked of the same thing and it was almost worse when she was
silent. I sent old Hans home with you and, the next day, we left. But
it was long before we reached home. She wanted to travel by the same
road which we had taken on the journey out. She said she wanted to pray
in every church which she had passed on her hunt for happiness through
the world.”

Finn half raised himself in his chair:

“And did you?” he asked.

“I did as she wished. It became a pilgrimage to every region where life
lies nakedest in its pleasure. Restlessly we travelled from place to
place. She omitted none, afraid lest there should remain a single sin
which she had not prayed away, a single memory which the bells had not
rung into the grave.”

“And then did you come home?”

Cordt looked at his son as if he had forgotten that he was in the room.
He suddenly awoke to the consciousness of what lay between those days
and these; and his face became so gloomy and his eyes so serious that
Finn was frightened.

“Then we came home. And then....”

He rose quickly and stood with his arms crossed on his breast and
looked at Finn:

“Then we came home. And the years passed and Fru Adelheid recovered her
peace of mind. She found herself again and became the same as in the
old days. Her thoughts waver restlessly, her desires yearn insatiably.
Her carriage now rattles through the streets as before ... only it
stops at the church instead of the theatre.”

Finn wanted to speak, but could not, because Cordt stood in front of
him and looked at him fixedly and nodded to him, once, as if to say
that he knew what it was and that it was no use.

“She goes to Heaven’s table,” said Cordt, “and Heaven comes to her
parties.”

Finn sank back in his chair.

He was surprised and ashamed that he was not grieved with his father
for saying that, nor with his mother, if it were true. He knew that he
ought to rouse himself to protest or sympathy, but could not, because
he understood it all so well.

But Cordt crossed the room with a firm stride:

“Heaven is not what Fru Adelheid thinks, nor where she seeks it,”
he said. “Perhaps you will not understand me until you have lived
longer in the world; but look here, Finn ... what I have seen of God
in my life I have seen most in those who denied Him. In their sense of
responsibility, in their humanity ... in their pride I have seen God’s
splendor. The others, those who confess His name and fill His house ...
they masked Him from me so closely, when they ought to glorify Him,
made Him so small, when they praised His might....”

He talked about this for a time. Finn sat dumb and helpless in his
chair and wished his father would cease. He felt like one who has
inadvertently witnessed something he ought not to see, or like one who
is receiving a confidence under a false pretence.

And deep down within him lay a little ironical astonishment at the fire
and authority with which his father was talking.

But, at that moment, Cordt sat down in front of him with both his hands
in his own and sad and gentle eyes and words as soft and humble as
though he were a sinner begging for peace:

“I don’t know, Finn. I cannot really tell you anything about it. I can
never talk with you about these things. A father is a poor creature,
Finn, and I am a poor father. I cannot tell you that the forest is
green and that the birds sing and that there is nothing behind the blue
sky. I dare not, Finn. I do not think I have the right to. I cannot go
to church with you, either ... nor even be glad when you go with your
mother.”

He pressed Finn’s hands nervously. They lay dead in his and Finn did
not know what to do with his eyes.

“But I must talk to you a little ... just this once ... to-day, when
I have confessed to you and made up your parents’ accounts. If you
will try to understand me ... and to forgive me ... to forgive us,
because we are not so rich as our child could expect ... since we
have a child.... You love the bells, Finn. When they ring, you fall
a-dreaming; they ring you far away from where you are. You were like
that ever since you were a little boy. And I can well understand it.
I love them, too. I am glad because they are there. But ... Finn ...
Finn, there are so many bells in the world besides those which summon
us to church. Every man has his own, which are his and his only ...
which he alone can hear, which call no one but him. There are men,
opulent, charming men, for whom the bells ring wherever they set foot.
They lead more powerful lives than we and prouder lives. They suffer
us ... those of us who love them. But there is not in the world a man
so small but that the bells call him. One has them in his work, Finn.
And one in his child ... and one in his love. For one they hang in a
neat little room where his mother lives and where he can only come for
an hour, perhaps ... on a Sunday.... It is not the same for the one as
for the other, Finn, but the bells are there always. They call their
man back when he has strayed from the way he should go, or, if that is
too late, they ring for his remorse. They ring to the banquet and they
ring their music when he is tired and sad.... But the church-bells ...
they ring for the man whose ears life has deafened ... and life makes
such a terrible noise. They ring on Sundays to remind us of that which
we have forgotten throughout the week.... And it is well that they are
there.... But ... Finn ... it is so tragic when the church-bells drive
and tumble people together who once had each his own sacred church.
It is just as when a home breaks up and the old find a refuge in the
workhouse. The sun shines through the windows and it is warm indoors
and there are flowers in the casement. But there was once something
that was better.... For your mother and me, Finn ... for us the bells
used to ring in the old room.”

He was silent and no longer looked at Finn. And Finn was at ease again
and at last found words for what he had long wanted to say:

“May I use the old room, father? May I set it up again ... all as it
was ... and live there with my books?...”

Cordt released his son’s hands and his face wore a look that made Finn
regret his request. They both rose to their feet. And, at that moment,
Cordt’s face lit up with a smile:

“That you may,” he said. “You dear child, who never asked for anything.
Let this, then, be my present to you to-day.”

       *       *       *       *       *

This happened on the day when Cordt’s son completed his twenty-first
year.




CHAPTER XIII


Finn stood in the old room with the yellow document in his hand:

  “God brought me thus far, that I was able to erect this fair house,
  which shall stand till distant times, a witness to my might and that
  of my race. Here shall be upright living and generous dealing; the
  house shall be faithfully guarded from father to son; good men and
  women shall sit in the hall and dance to the sound of flutes and
  violins.

  “I have placed this room in the most secret part of the house and no
  one knows of it but the architect who built it and my oldest servant.
  But I have sealed the architect’s tongue with a solemn oath and a
  heavy fee; and my servant is true to me.

  “I have decorated the room with gilt and figured leather hangings and
  costly carpets from the East. I have had two great armchairs made in
  Milan, whose woodwork is carved into birds and animals which grin
  strangely in the dark, but cease to do so when the lights are lit.

  “Then I gave my servant a key of the room and told him to care for
  it faithfully. Every evening, when it grows dusk, he is to light the
  candles on the mantelpiece; and he is to do this even if he know that
  his master is travelling in distant lands. Every morning, he is to
  adjust the room with his own hands. None but himself is ever to cross
  the threshold.

  “For this room shall be for me and my wife and for none other in the
  world. Therefore I placed it in the most secluded part of the house,
  far from the counting-house, where we work, from the passages, along
  which our servants go, and from the drawing-room, where we receive our
  guests, ay, even from our marriage-bed, where she sleeps by my side.

  “It shall be the temple of our marriage, hallowed by our love, which
  is greater than anything that we know. Here we will pray to Him Who
  gave us to each other. Here we will talk gladly and earnestly, every
  evening when our hearts impel us to. And, when we come to die, our son
  shall bring his wife here and they shall do as we did.

  “This evening, which is the first in my new house, I brought my wife
  in here and told her my wish. She listened to my words in love and
  gladness and I have written down in this document how it all happened
  and we have set our names to it in witness for those who come after
  us.”

Finn read their names and the names of those who had taken possession
of the room after the builder and his wife. Last of all stood Cordt’s
name and Fru Adelheid’s, which were struck out again.

Then he put the document back in its place and locked it up and looked
round the room.

The old room stood again as it used to stand, built high over the
square, long and deep and silent, like a spot where there is no life.

The balcony was white with snow and the sparrows hopped in the snow.
Inside, behind the colored panes, stood many red flowers and longed for
the sun. The dust had been removed from the figured-leather hangings,
which shone with a new brightness. The oriental carpet spread over the
floor like a lord returning from exile and once more taking possession
of his estates.

And all the old glories had found their places again and stood as
lawfully and restfully as though it had never been otherwise. The
spinet was there and the jar with the man writhing through thorns and
the celestial globe whose stars shone and ran: all the furniture which
the room’s different owners had set there in the course of time, each
after his own taste and heart.

Before the fireplace stood the two great, strange armchairs.

Finn felt as if he were in a cathedral where every flag was a tombstone
over a famous man. His senses drank the odor of the bygone times, his
fancy peopled the room with the men and women who had sat there and
exchanged strong and gentle words, while the house lay sleeping around
them.

With it all, he became lost in thought of those who had sat there last
and after whom no others were to come, those two who had given him the
life which he knew not what to do with.

He saw them before him in the love and struggle of their youth. He
heard their voices in the room, he saw Fru Adelheid’s red mouth and
Cordt’s steady eyes. He saw Cordt bring his wife into the room, which
was the soul of the house and its tradition and its secret chamber, and
show her the strange things which his ancestors had put there.

He saw him on the day when he stood alone by the fireplace ... in the
empty room ... and struck out his own name and Fru Adelheid’s from the
document and went away and left the door open behind him....

He saw all this as it had happened. But they were not his father and
mother. They were two attractive people of whom he had read in a book
and grown fond, as a man loves art, palely and with no self-seeking in
his desire.

Finn drew one of the big chairs over to the window and sat down and
sat there for long.

He was sitting there when Fru Adelheid came.

She stood in the doorway, in her white gown, with her white hair, and
nodded to him. Then she turned her face round to the room and looked at
it.

And then that happened which was only the shadow of a dream that
vanished then and there: everything came to life in the room.

The spinet sang, the queer faces on the old chairs raised themselves
on their long necks; there was a whispering and a muttering in every
corner....

Fru Adelheid shrank back against the door. She did not see Finn, did
not remember that he was there.

But Finn saw her.

He rose from his chair and his eyes beamed:

“You light up the room, mother,” he said, “and the room lights up you.”

He took her hand and kissed it and, with her hand in his, Fru Adelheid
went through the old room, which had been too narrow for her youthful
desires.

The fairy-tale was over and the dread. But the glow still lay over her
figure and made her look wonderfully pretty. Her cheeks were as pink
as a girl’s; her step was light, her eyes moist and shy. She laughed
softly and gladly, while she looked at the old things and talked about
them and touched them.

She told the story of the woman who used to sing when she was sad and
who had brought the old spinet there; and her hands shook as she struck
a chord and the slender, beautiful notes sounded through the room. Of
the spinning-wheel, which had whirred merrily every evening for many a
good year and which stood as it was, with thread upon the spindle. Of
the celestial globe, which had been the toy of the man whose intellect
was obscured. Of the doll with the vacant face, which stood there in
memory of the lady who dreaded the deep silence of the room and never
entered it but once; but her son, who loved her, had hidden the doll
in the curtain. Of Fru Lykke, whose portrait had hung where the light
stain was, but hung there no longer, because her marriage had been
dissolved.

Of the jar with the man writhing through thorns, which she herself had
brought as her gift, she said nothing. She passed her hand over its
bright surface and was silent.

Finn’s eyes clung to her.

Never had he seen his beautiful mother so beautiful. He did not know
that look, or that smile on her mouth, or that clear ring in her voice.

At times, he added something to what she was telling and spoke with
such profound intelligence that she was quite surprised and frightened.
Now he guessed her words before she uttered them. Then he knew
something which she had never suspected.

Secretly, her fear increased as to what Cordt could have told him.

But Finn was lost in his delight.

And, fascinated by her beauty and the strange things he had seen and
heard and the deep silence of the room, he forgot that the seal of the
old room was broken and wished to play the game as vividly as possible.

He drew the second of the two big chairs across to the window and made
her sit down and sat himself beside her:

“Now you are not my mother,” he said. “You are my young bride. I have
brought you into the sanctuary to-day and now I will initiate you into
the mysteries.”

Fru Adelheid turned very pale and Finn took her hand penitently:

“Have I hurt you, mother?”

She shook her head and forced herself to smile.

Then he walked into the room again and rejoiced at all this and talked
about it. But she remained sitting with knitted brow.

She was heavy at heart, because it seemed to her, all at once, that
she was not his mother, as they sat talking here in the secret chamber
of the house. The old days came in their great might; and their strong
memories and impressive words drowned the bells which had rung her into
another world.

It was the echo here, in the old room, of Cordt’s words and of his
love ... of the strong faith and great happiness of the race which
had sprouted in the good mould of tradition and produced flower after
flower in the times that passed.

Fru Adelheid thought--for a moment--that it would have been well had
things happened as Cordt wished.

But, at the same instant, she was seized by a thought that suddenly
made her rebellious and young, as when she was here last, many years
ago.

She thrust her chair back hard and looked with sparkling eyes round the
room where everything and every memory was hostile to her.

She looked at Finn, who was standing by the celestial globe and trying
to set it going, but could not, because the spring was rusty and
refused to work.

She wondered, when the time came for Finn to take a wife ... would he
try to revive the tradition and bring her here and sit down with her in
the old chairs?

Then Finn’s son and his son after him would read her name, which was
written on the yellow document and struck out again. She would be like
one of those who were branded in that family.... Legends would grow
about her love of going out and her hunt after happiness which did not
exist....

“Come and help me, mother,” said Finn.

She went over and pressed hard on the spring and the clockwork hummed.

“See how you let loose the magic,” he said.

He went on talking, delighted with the stars, which lit up and ran.

“Sit down here by me, Finn.”

She waited till he came and a little longer, as though she could not
find the words she wanted, and did not look at him while she spoke:

“Finn” she said and put her hand on his shoulder and drew it away
again immediately. “Finn ... once ... ever so many years ago, I was
alone, one evening, in the old room. I had often been here before,
you know ... with father. And I was under the power of the old room
and never happy. I was young, Finn, and it went so terribly hard with
my longing and my gladness. I could not understand that and could not
mitigate it or get over it. For father belonged to the room and it
was his and all the queer things in it and they were all against me.
Every time I came to the door, my heart stopped beating.... And once
I was inside ... it was ... it was as if my own words were taken from
my tongue and others put in their place for me to speak ... beautiful
words and good words, Finn, but not mine. But then, when I took courage
and said what I wanted to say, it sounded as if I was defying the old
room and father and God himself. And then....”

Fru Adelheid felt that she was on the point of betraying something
great and fine that had been laid in her hands. She looked round as if
she were afraid that there was some one in the room or that the room
itself would rise up against her in its venerable might.

But there was no one and it was silent.

Then she turned her face to Finn and looked at him and said, gaily:

“But that evening, Finn, I broke the spell of the old room. I tore the
veil from the Holy of Holies and saw that there was nothing behind it.
For the first time, I breathed freely in my own home.”

Fru Adelheid did not tell how, at the same moment, she had been
overcome by terror and fled from the room. But she did not gain what
she thought by her lie. For Finn looked at her sorrowfully and said:

“How could you do that, mother? How could you find it in your heart?”

“Are you also under the spell?” she asked.

There was in her tone a scorn which was stronger than she intended and
which frightened herself. But Finn simply paid no attention to it:

“The old room no longer exists,” he said. “It is nothing more than an
image, a monument ... my fancy, which father humored me in.”

She turned her face away and listened.

“But had I lived in the days of the old room,” he said, “then it would
certainly have captured me and held me captive.”

“Yes ... you have been talking to father,” she said, softly.

“Yes.”

Then he lay down before her, with his cheek on her hand, as he so often
did:

“Yes,” he repeated. “And ... mother ... I love you. You are so pretty.
But we will not talk about the old room ... ever. For I think it is
the most wonderful ... and the most beautiful and the strongest thing
I know of.... But it hurts me that I am not wholly your son ... or
father’s either, that I might devote myself to one of you in sharing
your strongest feelings. And I cannot talk to father about it ...
neither can we two, can we?”

Fru Adelheid did not answer him, but stroked his hair with her hand.
Neither of them spoke and it was quite silent in the room.

In the silence she became herself again. The many moulded years came to
their own again and the bells rang monotonously and ever more strongly
from out of the noise of the world, which had drowned them.

She marvelled at the excitement into which the old room had thrown
her. Quenched was the love which had made her its mistress and quenched
the red desire which made it too narrow. She thought of Cordt, who
had fought, she considered, for what was not worth fighting for.
Sorrowfully she looked at her tall, silent boy, whose weary thoughts
kept pace so well with her own.

She crossed her hands in her lap and the light faded in her eyes. The
glow of the old room withdrew from her face, her words became restful
as her thoughts.

Finn looked at her, but did not see this. For him, too, the fairy-tale
was over. He was sitting in his chair again with bent head and his
hands open on his knees.

And, without their doing anything or thinking of it, they came in their
usual way to talk together. It was not any interchange of thoughts and
still less a contest of opinions. They said nearly the same thing and,
wherever the thoughts of the one roamed, he found the other’s. Often
their words were solemn, but never powerful. Often the one was silent
and agreed with the other. Many times they sat long without saying
anything and thought they had told each other everything.

“Look,” said Finn, pointing out of the window. “How hideous!”

A hearse came trotting across the square.

He moved in his chair and said:

“A hearse should always drive at a foot’s pace, solemnly and
ceremoniously ... always ... as though they were only driving the
horses to water. And soldiers should always hold themselves stiff and
starched, keeping step and time, even when they are taking their shoes
to the cobbler’s. Then it would all be easier.”

He was silent for a while. Then he slowly turned his face to her:

“I was talking about it to father the other day,” he said. “I happened
to say something of the kind.”

She looked at him in surprise.

“I don’t know how it came about. But he laughed and said I ought to
write an article about it or form a society for preserving the correct
pace of hearses.”

Fru Adelheid smiled and laid her hands in her lap and looked at them.

“Then he suddenly became serious and came up to me and laid his hands
on my shoulders: ‘Hearses ought to drive fast,’ he said, ‘gallop ...
at a rousing pace. Away with the dead, Finn! Let life grow green and
blossom!’”

“Father is so masterful,” said Fru Adelheid.

Finn nodded.

Then they began to talk about Cordt. They often did so. And they were
always eager to find good words to praise him in. But under the words
there lay the consciousness, like a secret understanding between them,
that he was made of a coarser clay than they.

They never said this; but they felt a sort of patronizing pity for him,
such as one feels for a person who runs and runs, when it is good to
sit still.

But, when they talked together, Fru Adelheid knew that deep in Finn’s
soul there lay a secret yearning towards just that masterful side in
his father which frightened him.

It was so weak, only a pale reflection of her own young love, a distant
echo of the voice which had stated Cordt’s case in her own heart when
he was fighting to win her.

But it was enough to hurt her. She thought she only had her son for a
time. She traced a certain disdain in the intimacy to which he admitted
her. She thought there was something in him which was greater than
what he gave her and which was Cordt’s or would become so.

And she realized that the fight for Finn would become harder than that
which broke the seal on the door of the old room.

Finn was absorbed in what had filled his mind, the whole day, with
light and color. He was thinking now of his mother’s visit to the room
on the evening when she had broken the spell:

“I simply cannot understand how you could have the heart,” he said.

She knew at once what he meant, but said nothing.

“There ought to be some law, like that in the fairy-story, where he
who lifted the veil had to die,” he said. “And there ought to be
veils upon veils ... veils upon veils.... Can you bear to look at the
sun, mother? Women ought to go in a veil and never ... never raise it,
except when the occasion was so great that everything grew great....
And one ought not to see the people who play....”

Fru Adelheid half raised herself in her chair.

She wanted to tell him that, on that evening, she was punished for her
presumption with the greatest terror which she had ever experienced in
her life. But she could not. Then she said, quite quietly and with her
eyes looking out over the square:

“And suppose there were some one who could not ... suppose the veil
stifled one....”

Finn looked out into space like her:

“Veils upon veils.... Veils over the dead,” he said.

Fru Adelheid sighed and said nothing.

“Then one could live,” said Finn.




CHAPTER XIV


From that day onward, Finn only left the old room when obliged.

The spring had opened the fountain before the house and he was happy
at its rippling, which never began and never stopped. The red flowers
were put out on the balcony: when the wind blew, their petals fluttered
right over into the basin of the fountain and rocked upon the water. He
followed their dance through the air and wondered if they would reach
their goal.

His best time was in the evening, when the square shone with a thousand
lights.

He loved the dying day.

He knew every light that went out, every sound as it stopped. And he
liked the sound best when it stopped and the light when it went out.
He thought that the people who moved down below, disguised in the
darkness, were of another kind or better than those whom the sun shone
upon. He had no more to do with them than with the others; but he liked
them better.

Then, when night came and the rippling of the fountain sang louder and
louder through the silence and cries sounded from down below, no one
knowing what they were, and solitary steps were heard, that approached
and retreated again, then he lit the candles on the mantelpiece and sat
down in one of the old chairs, there where the owners of the house and
their wives had sat when the house slept and they had something to say
to each other.

He looked round the room, where the things sang in every dark corner,
and simply could not conceive that he had not known the old room
before.

He was more at home here than anywhere else: here, where he was outside
the world, which worried him, because it demanded that of him which he
had not; here, where every spot and every object told how all had been
said and done and accomplished in the old days, so that he had nothing
else to do but listen wonderingly and rejoice at its marvellous beauty.

Then he fell a-dreaming and remained sitting till the lights went out.

“He does not sleep enough,” said Fru Adelheid, anxiously.

Cordt crossed the floor with the same thought in his mind. Then he
stopped where she was sitting and looked at her:

“I wonder, is he ever awake, Adelheid?” he said.

By day, Finn generally sat at the window and stared out, idly and
silently, with his hands open on his knees.

Often, when Cordt was crossing the square, he thought that he could
see Finn’s old face behind the window-panes. He would stop and nod and
beckon to him.

But Finn never saw him. For he saw nothing positively.

And Cordt went on ... in and out ... constantly longing to see the
strong air of the old room color his son’s cheeks and rouse his will
... constantly trusting that, sooner or later, this would happen.

He never went up there since the day when he and his old servant had
arranged the room as it used to be.

And Finn was glad of this. He was so afraid lest that should happen
that a long time passed before he could suppress his terror when he
heard any one coming. And, even when he had recovered his composure,
he knew that it would happen sooner or later and that the day of its
happening would be a gloomy one.

For he well understood the eternal loving question in Cordt’s eyes
and it hurt him and frightened him. He dreaded the craving in his
affection, which was greater than a father’s. It was like that of a
sovereign for the heir who is to occupy the throne after him.

And Finn could not take the reins of empire in his slack hands or
bear the pressure of the crown upon his head, which ached at the mere
thought of it.

But Fru Adelheid often came; and they two were comfortable up there, in
the old room.

She came with no craving; and, if she was doubtful and restless, as she
often was since Finn had moved up into the old room, then she would be
quite silent when the door closed behind her.

Silent like Finn ... and like the big chairs and the jar with the man
writhing through thorns ... silent like the spinning-wheel, which had
whirred merrily every evening for many a good year and stood as it was
with thread upon its spindle.

He looked at her and smiled and nodded when she spoke. He himself
talked ... for long at a time and then stopped, without its making any
difference, and listened to the rippling of the fountain and the voices
in the old room, which always talked to him and plainest when Fru
Adelheid was with him.

He told her that, when she came, the room was no longer his own.

For then he felt like a stranger, a man of another period, who should
suddenly find himself in an old ruined castle, full of marvellous
dangers and adventures, and stand face to face with the last of those
who had lived the castle’s rich, wonderful life.

Once he spoke her name aloud just as she was entering at the door. It
was dark in the room and his voice and figure were so like Cordt’s that
she grew pale and frightened. But he did not see this and she forced a
laugh and soon forgot it.

And, gradually, the wonderful solemnity of the old room retreated into
the background, when they were both there, for they spent more and more
of their time there and at last simply did not think they were together
except there. But Finn was always able to summon it up when he wished.

They used to read together.

And that happened in this way, that one of them found a book, a
treasure of silence and singing, which was the only sort that they
felt equal to, and read it and gave it to the other, who then read it
while they were together.

They found most of the books in foreign languages and it seemed as if
there were no end of them. Also, the fact that the language was foreign
made the book dearer to them, because it carried them farther afield.

When they had read one of these books, they lived in it for a time ...
not in its action, among its characters, for there was no action and no
characters, but in its music. They tuned their thoughts and words in
its key.

Then they felt as if they had passed through some experience or as if
they were travelling.

“The artist lives,” said Finn. “He makes the sky blue and grey for
himself ... for himself and for us all. He wipes everything out with
his hand and builds it up again ... greater, ever greater. He is the
master. He is God.”

One day, he asked Fru Adelheid to sing.

She had not sung for many years, except in church, and was surprised at
his request:

“I have given up singing, Finn.”

He lay down before her and looked up smiling into her face:

“I can remember so well when you used to sing,” he said. “You often
sang to me when I was a boy. But one occasion ... one occasion I
remember in particular. There were many visitors and I, of course, had
long been in bed, but I was not asleep. For old Marie had promised to
take me down to the dining-room when the people had got up from dinner
and you were to sing. She told me that, when there was company and all
the candles were lighted and you were prettiest and brightest, then you
sang a thousand times more beautifully than usual.”

She took her eyes from his face and laid her head back in her chair.

“I kept awake till she came and it lasted long. But then I heard you
and also saw you for a moment through the door.”

“And was it so nice?”

“I don’t remember,” he said. “But I remember the many faces.... I
should know them again if I saw them now, I think. And best of all I
remember father’s.”

Fru Adelheid rose:

“What shall I sing?” she asked.

He laughed with content, went to the spinet and opened it. Then he took
up one of the pieces of music:

“Look what I have found,” he said. “This was sung by the one who
put the spinet here. Look, here is her name: she herself wrote both
the words and the music.... See how pale the writing is ... and how
distinct.”

Fru Adelheid stood with the old, yellow sheet in her hand. She hummed
the tune and struck the keys.

Then she sat down to the spinet and sang:

  Day is passing, dearest maiden:
  Ere thou knowest, comes the night;
  Warning winds, with fragrance laden,
  Bring cool air and colder light.
  We must part: time hastens so!
  Day is passing, dew is falling.
  Hark! Thy mother’s voice is calling:
  Dearest maiden, I must go.

  Part we must, dear maid, in sorrow!
  Day is surely doomed to die.
  Ah, but we shall find to-morrow
  Countless joys we let go by,
  Countless words we uttered not,
  Hours we robbed of wasted chances,
  Eyes we balked of mutual glances,
  Countless kisses we forgot.

  Happy smiles will haunt thee dreaming
  On a couch of virgin white;
  In my brain thy picture gleaming,
  I shall hasten through the night.
  Let the crimson sun depart!
  Brighter sunshine in thy face is,
  Sunshine of remembered places,
  Love’s own sunshine in thy heart.

She remained sitting a while with the old music-sheet in her hand. Then
Finn said:

“She used to sing that. Do you know if she was happy, mother?”

“She was often sad,” said Fru Adelheid. “And, when she was sad, she
sang.”

She put down the sheet and took up the first music-book that came to
hand, but threw it aside, as though it had burnt her fingers.

It was the Lenore songs, which she had sung to Cordt.

She rose and went back to her place beside Finn. Then she sprang up
and stood with her arms crossed on her breast and sat down again and
stared with great eyes through the window:

“Finn ... if I sang it to you ... would you recognize the ... the song
you heard when Marie carried you down...?”

He woke from his dream and looked at her in surprise:

“The song ... no ... I should not. Why, do you remember it?”

“No,” said Fru Adelheid.

They long sat silent. Twilight fell and it grew dark in the room.

“Mother,” said Finn, “what are women like?”

She turned her face slowly towards him. He did not look at her. His
eyes were far away and she realized that he had forgotten his question
or did not know that he had put it.




CHAPTER XV


Fru Adelheid stood in her wraps at the window and looked out. The
horses were stamping in the porch below; the footman stood by the
carriage-door and waited.

They were going to the station to fetch Finn.

He had been abroad the whole summer.

This was the first time he had been away alone and he had not enjoyed
himself abroad. From Florence, Spain and Paris he had written to ask if
he might not come home. But Cordt was resolved that he should remain
abroad for the time agreed upon.

He wrote oftenest to Fru Adelheid ... and stupidly and awkwardly,
because he knew that his father would read the letters. Cordt noticed
this, but said nothing. He hurried through the letters as though he
were looking for something positive and put them down with a face as
though he had not found it.

He always gave Fru Adelheid the letters he received, although she never
asked for them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fru Adelheid looked impatiently at her watch. She sat down, closed her
eyes and pressed her forehead against the pane.

She thought how empty the house had been during the summer.

Cordt had not said a word about the old room, but, from the day when
Finn had moved up there, things had altered between him and her.
Something had happened ... something indefinite and nameless, but none
the less fateful on that account.

And, while Finn was abroad, this had grown between them ... without
their doing anything to further or prevent it. Neither of them thought
about it. Both led their own lives and drifted farther apart in their
yearning for their quiet child. The day was long for them, their rooms
were cold.

But inside her was a growing anxiety for Cordt, who became ever more
silent and wore such a melancholy look in his eyes.

A door opened and she sprang up:

“We shall be late, Cordt.”

“Not at all,” he said, calmly. “You ordered the carriage too early.”

“Let us go, Cordt. We may just as well wait there as here.”

Cordt sat down with his hat on his knee and looked at her. She stood
with bent head and buttoned her gloves.

“Sit down for a moment,” he said and pushed a chair towards her.

“Do you want to talk to me?”

“Sit down, Adelheid,” he said, impatiently. “Sit down for a moment.”

Fru Adelheid leant against the chair and remained standing.

“It is long since we talked together, Adelheid ... many, many years. Do
you know that?”

She shrugged her shoulders:

“Very likely,” she said and made her voice as firm as she could. “We
have peace now, you see.”

Cordt nodded. He drummed with his fingers on his hat and looked out of
the window:

“Yes ... yes, no doubt. We are old, Adelheid. As old as can be.”

“Is that what you wanted to say to me?”

“I am afraid for Finn,” said Cordt. “He will come home as pale as when
he went away, a poor dreamer by the grace of God. To-morrow, he will be
sitting up there and staring out at the life he dare not live.”

“Yes ... why should he be up in the old room?”

“It was he who asked me,” said Cordt, calmly. “I could not deny him his
inheritance. He has the right to know the ground he sprang from.”

“And what then? Do you think you can bring the dead days to life again?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think that. I don’t want that.”

He was silent for a little. She did not take her eyes from his face.
Then he said:

“Finn can build himself a new house, if he likes. Or he can refurnish
his ancestral halls. And put in plate-glass windows and wide staircases
and anything that suits him and his period. But he must know and be
thankful that the walls are strong and the towers tall.”

Fru Adelheid pushed back the chair she was leaning against:

“There does not appear to be room for a mother in your arrangement,”
she said.

Her voice trembled, her eyes were large and angry. But Cordt rose and
looked as calm as before:

“You went out of it, Adelheid. You did not wish to be there.”

She made no reply. She understood that he did not mean to consult her,
to ask her for her help ... did not even want it.

“Adelheid ... now that Finn is coming....”

“Yes?...”

“I am afraid for him, Adelheid. And I would ask you to be on your guard
and do him no harm. I believe that sometimes you smother his poor,
dejected spirit. The peace which you have gained may be good in itself
and good for you ... but he is young, you must remember. He is only at
the start of life, he has no need for peace and resignation. What is a
boon to you is death to him, perhaps....”

She took a step forward and raised her face close up to his:

“Now it has come to this, Cordt, that you think I am your enemy for
Finn’s sake.”

“You may become so,” he said.

“You will drive me to it, Cordt.”

He took her hand and held it tight when she tried to draw it away:

“No,” he said. “No, Adelheid. I only want to warn you.”




CHAPTER XVI


The balcony-door was standing open, because they had forgotten to close
it. But the weather was mild and there was hardly any wind. Now and
again, a yellow leaf fell somewhere or other from the baluster. It
began to grow dusk.

Fru Adelheid sat with her head in her hands and stared out before her.

Cordt’s words kept ringing in her ears. She did not think either that
Finn was as he used to be. He was restless, could not sit still, talked
more than usual:

“Wherever I went, I found the fountain outside,” he said. “It followed
me throughout my journey. There was not a rushing noise so strong
but the fountain sounded through it nor a night so still but it came
rippling and sang me home again to the old room.... I wonder, did one
of the owners of this house set it up?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes,” said Finn. “That must be it. I am sure of it. Perhaps it was the
one who built the house. You see, it forms part and parcel of the old
room ... it sums it all up. If there was nothing else but the fountain,
it would all be here just the same. I must ask father.”

She shivered with cold and Finn shut the door:

“We are chilly people,” he said. “Both of us. We are not like father.
He laughed at me yesterday when I came down to his room to say
good-morning and wanted to shut the window. ‘Don’t, Finn,’ he said.
‘The autumn air is bracing and healthy, it makes one young again ...
sit in the draught and don’t be afraid, old man that you are!’”

“Yes, father is strong.”

Finn looked at her stealthily.

He had soon understood that his parents had drifted apart while he was
abroad; and he suffered in consequence. He was as kind and affectionate
to his mother as ever; but his thoughts were always harking back to
Cordt, whatever they might be talking of:

“Father is so sad,” he said.

“I haven’t noticed it.”

She colored after saying this. But Finn was not looking at her,
scarcely heard her reply:

“It was strange, mother ... out there, on my journey, ever so many
times I had a feeling that I came upon father. Wherever I went, I would
suddenly hear his voice ... then he would be close to me, I walked with
him, regulated my step by his and talked to him.”

He laid his head back in his chair and closed his eyes:

“Often it was as if he had been where I came and prepared everything
for me, so that I saw him in every corner. Sometimes I felt that I must
put off my departure until he came.”

“And did he come?”

“Always. Wasn’t that strange?”

“Yes.”

Fru Adelheid thought the sound of his voice was different from
ordinary. He did not look at her, as he was used to do ... his thoughts
were not with her.

“Where were you and father to-day?” she asked.

“We went out into the woods ... a long way out. Father was silent, but
not so bored as at home. It was so lovely out there ... and so strange.
One could hardly see a thing ... for the leaves falling.”

“Yes,” said Fru Adelheid.

Then she bent over him to look into his face, which had grown thinner
and paler during the time that he was away:

“Finn,” she said, “was I not with you ... out there ... when you were
travelling?”

Finn smiled and nodded his head:

“You came in your letters,” he said. “That father never did. But you
were mostly here at home, where I was longing to be.”

She thought it was strange that he did not take her hand when he said
that.

And, suddenly, she became conscious that she was sitting in terror lest
he should slip away from her.

What had she to hold him with, if anything seized him that was stronger
than their quiet life in these hours ... what had she, if he went...?

It seemed to her as though Cordt stood in the room and beckoned him
out into the yellow woods, where the air was so bracing and good. And
Finn leapt up with a joyful cry ... they went away ... and never looked
back....

She felt that Cordt was stronger than she and hated him for it. She
sought for a weapon to defend herself. She wished that Finn, who loved
her, would lie down before her, as he so often used to do, with his
cheek against her hand. And she knew that he was not thinking of it.

She felt so wretched and so lonely that she grew frightened and called
upon her old longing for the red happiness ... if only it would come
and take her, so that she might have something to set against him who
had everything....

“Sing to me, mother,” said Finn.

“Yes,” she said.

She crossed the room with a stronger step than usual. Her cheek was red
and her eyes glowed. She took hold of the instrument with firm hands
when she opened it. Finn noticed this and looked at her in surprise;
but it was not light enough for him to make out her face.

  Lovs’t thou the peasant in his cosy cottage-nook?
  Thou shalt share bed and board with him, eating and sleeping;
  Thou shalt tranquilly brew and merrily cook;
  Dusty wheel, rusty needle thy care shall not brook;
  Thou shalt bless sun and rain in God’s keeping.
    But she that loves none shall go weeping!

  Lovs’t thou the poet with harp all of gold?
  Thou shalt list to his song o’er the loud strings sweeping;
  Thou shalt meet him, where flowrets peep from the wold;
  By thy smiles shall his going and coming be told,
  His mind in thy joyfulness steeping.
    But she that loves none shall go weeping!

  Lovs’t thou the lordling, who hunts in the grove?
  Thou shalt sue to thy mother and fly from her keeping;
  Thou shalt give him thy lips and give him thy love;
  Thou shalt take, as he flings horse or hound from above,
  Blows, fame and food flung to thee creeping.
    But she that loves none shall go weeping!

Fru Adelheid remained sitting with bowed head.

The song had broken her pride. She trembled over all her body and great
tears fell upon her hands. She had conjured up spirits which she could
not lay; she felt more powerless and small than she had ever felt
before.

She began to think of Finn and looked round in alarm. But he could not
see her and she wept silently. She laid her forehead against the spinet
... then her hand fell upon the keyboard and she started and rose from
her seat.

“That was a strange song,” said Finn.

It was so still in the room that she could not bear it.

“I have not sung it for many years,” she said. “In the old days, I used
to sing it often.”

“What was father like when you met him?” asked Finn.

She stood with her back to him and turned the pages of the music with
trembling hands.

“Was he as handsome as now?”

“Yes ... no.... I don’t know if he was handsome.”

Finn listened.

“He was ... he was charming.”

“That he was ... that he was,” he said and clapped his hands like a
child who is delighted with a story. “And then he was so masterful ...
was he not?... So that one was bound to follow him?”

“Yes,” said Fru Adelheid.

“Father was a king,” said Finn.

Her heart throbbed, she listened with all her senses. She felt that
Finn was somewhere close to her and accomplishing something that would
destroy her. And she could not turn round, could not go to him and beg
him to desist.

“I could wish I had a brother,” said Finn.

“Do you feel lonely?”

“No ... no, it is not that. But then he should have the kingdom.”




CHAPTER XVII


At that time, Finn made a friend whom he had not chosen or wanted for
himself, but whom Cordt gave him in his anxiety, because he thought he
could never get any one better.

His name was Hans and they had known each other since they were
children. He was a year older than Finn, not quite so tall, but more
powerfully developed, with bright hair and eyes and disposition.

His father was a little man who sat among the people in the
counting-house, where his father had sat before him. He and his little
wife had no luck in life save their son. But at times they trembled for
his future, because his ideas were so pronounced and took so wide a
range.

For, even as he was taller than his father, so he would not be content
with his measure in anything.

Above all, he did not want to sit in the office, but to go out in the
world, big as it was. And, from the time when he was a little boy, he
believed that it was bigger than they told him.

Now that he had grown up and become conscious of his need and his
powers and could not get anywhere, he went fearlessly to the master of
the house and told him how the matter stood.

Cordt liked him and wanted to keep him for his house, but soon saw that
he had nothing that could tempt him. He asked him what he would like to
be; and it appeared that Hans wanted to be an engineer.

Cordt looked at him and thought that his glance could blast rocks.

Then he promised his assistance and remained sitting in deep thought,
while Hans went down the stairs singing.

Time passed. He advanced along his road and both he and the others
could see that he was fully keeping pace with his dreams. Cordt did not
lose sight of him and was pleased when he called. But Fru Adelheid did
not like him, because he talked so loud and had such a heavy tread.

One evening, Cordt stood in Hans’ room and talked to him as he had
never talked to any one:

“I am your father’s employer,” he said, “and my father was your
grandfather’s. My son will never be yours. For you mean to make your
own way and be your own master. You would have done that even if no
one had lent you a helping hand. That is true. But then you would have
become bitter, perhaps, and distrustful and narrow-minded in the use of
your strength. From this I delivered you. To-day, I come to ask for a
return.”

Hans had taken the hand which he put out to him and stood ill at ease,
without understanding. And Cordt sat down wearily and sat long without
speaking further.

At last, he woke from his thoughts and looked at the young man, who
could not interpret his glance, but was moved by it:

“I do not wish that you were my son,” he said. “I have a son and he is
a good lad and I love him. He has not your strength of character, but
then he does not need it. His path was smoothed and shaded from the day
when he was born and grew up. But he can give you many things which you
have not.”

He listened to his own words, to the way in which they kept on shaping
themselves into an apology for Finn, a prayer for forbearance towards
him. He suffered at this; and Hans, who saw his distress, felt, without
understanding, that something important and tragic was taking place in
this great house, where he and his had earned their living.

“Will you try if you can be his friend?”

Hans was quite willing.

Cordt looked at him and gauged his strength. He looked round in the
little low-ceilinged room which contained nothing but what served Hans
in his work. He looked out of the window, where the roofs intersected
one another, dirty and grey against the sky: smoke rose from hundreds
of chimneys, the noise of the courtyard and the street filled the room,
the window was broken and pasted up with paper.

Then he again turned his eyes to the man who sat amidst these mean
surroundings and grew up strong. And Cordt knew that he was not
standing here as his benefactor and his father’s employer, who was
opening his rich house to him. He stood here as one who could beg and
nothing more.

“You know you used to play together as children,” he said.

And, when he had said that, he was overcome with emotion, because he
remembered that Finn had never played. Hans thought the same thing, but
could not find the words that should be spoken on this occasion and the
silence became heavy and painful to both of them.

To say something at all costs, Hans asked if Finn was ill.

Then Cordt understood that Hans must long since have pronounced his
judgment on the pale, silent heir of the house and that the judgment
could not be good.

He rose, tired of seeking for guarded phrases. He laid his hands on
Hans’ shoulders and looked at him in such a way that Hans never forgot
it:

“Do you be David,” he said. “Come to us with your harp. And come of
your own accord and come when we send for you.”




CHAPTER XVIII


The first thing was that Finn had his former room arranged so that he
and Hans could be there when Hans came to see him.

There was nothing said about it. For it was taken as a matter of course
that no stranger should set foot in the old room. But Cordt at once
thought that his hope in Hans was shattered.

Sometimes Finn was glad when Hans was there.

They could never talk together.

Hans’ thoughts were constantly at work on plans and difficulties, the
least of which seemed quite unsurmountable to Finn, and he had not the
remotest idea as to what passed in his friend’s brain. He talked to
all men alike and his words were all questions or answers or opinions.

So it was Hans who spoke and, wholly taken up with himself as he was,
he seldom noticed that Finn fell a-dreaming.

When Finn could get him to set to work on some calculation or other, he
himself sat delighted and watched Hans while he struggled with figures
and drawings.

He was amused at Hans’ wrinkled forehead, his eager, impatient
movements. And he waited expectantly, like one sitting on a
race-ground, or wherever else men are engaged in contest, for the shout
with which the engineer would fling aside the pencil when the problem
was solved.

Then Finn’s face beamed with delight. He was as pleased as if it had
been himself that had gained the triumph and he had no notion what sort
of triumph it was or what it was worth.

But sometimes, and more and more frequently, Hans was too active, too
restless for him.

There were days on which Finn hid when his friend called. Often, Hans’
mere presence in the room occasioned him real bodily pain. He could
feel half unconscious under his powerful glance, his voice, which was
so loud and jolly, his words, which all meant something.

Then he sat tortured and wretched, because it was not possible for him
to ask the other to go. And it was only seldom that Hans perceived
this. When it did happen, there was no end to his awkward distress; and
then Finn was not content before he had succeeded in persuading him
that he was quite wrong.

Then Finn submitted, in the same way in which a hopeless invalid
submits to a new cure which prepares new sufferings for him and in
which he does not himself believe. And, while he suffered, he thought
incessantly of his father, who suffered more than he did and whom he
could not help.

His best time was when they were out together.

They drove and rode; and then they were never agreed, for Finn wanted
to ride slowly and drive fast and Hans wanted just the opposite. They
were always eager to accommodate themselves to each other, but this
came to pass only when it was Finn’s wish that prevailed.

Finn did not like going out. But, once he had started, he was glad; and
then he always wanted to have Hans with him. He was shy in a crowd and
his friend’s presence reassured him.

They generally walked in the streets, for Finn felt cold if he went
outside the town. Then he took Hans’ arm and kept step with him and was
proud of him. He liked to hear his strong voice through the noise of
the street, his quick step, the tap of his stick on the pavement.

Then Finn would sometimes begin to talk.

Mostly of his travels. And he could speak of these almost as he thought
and as he spoke to his mother. It was as though the life and the noise
that half drowned his words made him feel freer and safer.

And, although Hans cared but little for what Finn had seen and talked
about, still there was a color and a gleam about his words that
captivated him.

But, when it happened that the noise in the street was suddenly
stilled, then Finn was silent and frightened. And, if, for a moment,
they were separated in the crowd and Hans failed to catch a sentence
and asked him to repeat it, or seized upon some phrase and asked for a
further explanation and confirmation, then Finn was forthwith tired
and his mood changed.

He often stopped when a piece of street-life caught his attention. He
pointed it out to his friend and made it the subject of his talk. Then
Hans would underline his words with some racy observation or other,
which amused Finn, but afterwards annoyed him, because it spoilt the
picture for him.

They never talked about women.

Finn was silent, because his thoughts were vague and modest. And Hans’
experiences were not of such a nature that he cared to talk about them.
Then, also, they both had an instinctive feeling that they had less in
common on this subject than on any other and that they did not wish
ever to cross each other’s path.

On one occasion only was Finn his friend’s guest in his home.

It was a regular feast in the little rooms, high up under the roof, and
Finn was glad to be there.

He looked in delight at the two little old people who stood and sat
with folded hands and little bows and nods and did not know how to show
their respect and gratitude to the young master of the house. They took
it for granted, as a settled thing, that Finn must be vexed because
Hans had broken with tradition and gone his own way and they made
endless covert excuses for it.

And through the excuses rang their pride in the strong son whom they
handled as cautiously as though he would fall to pieces if they took
firm hold of him ... their joyous dread of the greatness that awaited
him.

Finn understood them and was touched by them. He sang his friend’s
praises and prophesied a preposterous success for him and was happy to
read the gladness in the little parents’ eyes.

And, while he was deep in conversation with them and amused at Hans,
who was utterly confused that his friend should see the adoration of
which he was the object, the picture of his own parents suddenly rose
before his thoughts like great black silhouettes against the light
background.

He stopped talking and then they all became silent and it was not
pleasant in the room.

Afterwards, he stood with Hans and looked through the open window.

His eyes roamed over the hundreds of roofs. The sun shone on the slates
and the red tiles and lit up the telephone-wires. Little garret-windows
stuck out on every side ... with chintz curtains, with wall-flowers and
geraniums and pelargoniums and yellow birds in white cages.

In one place there hung an elegantly-painted wooden box with ferns,
which were quite brown, but stood proud and stiff, and a little
fir-tree in the middle. In another, the curtain fluttered right out
into the air and waved and flapped like a flag. Here, two sparrows
hopped about in the gutter ... there, a caged bird was singing, shrilly
and sweetly.

“How charming this is!” he said.

Hans did not exactly think so.

But, at that moment, Finn set eyes on a window a little to one side and
so near that he felt as if he could reach across to it.

The window was open. There were flowers in it and there was a bird
which hopped from perch to perch in its cage, silently and unceasingly.
Behind the flowers sat a young girl sewing. He could see the back of
her and a bit of her chin and hear the stitching of the sewing-machine:

“Look,” he said, in an undertone.

Hans came up and at once looked away again:

“That’s Marie,” he said. “She’s a seamstress.”

There was nothing wrong either in the words or in the tone in which
they were uttered. But he said it so loud and so carelessly that it
hurt Finn. The girl opposite looked up and smiled.

Then something like a cloud passed over the whole picture, with the
flowers and the bird and the sunny roofs. Finn sighed and came away
from the window.

And, when they sat together at supper and had finished eating, suddenly
there fell upon him an insuppressible melancholy.

He looked from one to the other and read in their faces that they were
subduing their gladness on his account. He imagined what it was like
when the three were alone, busy and cheerful in their work and in
their faith in one another.

And behind their kind words and smiles he felt the pity for their quiet
guest. But he thought of this only as pity for Cordt and of himself as
one who suffered blame.

Then he hurriedly took his leave.




CHAPTER XIX


Hans and Finn were driving in the woods, when a little stray dog ran
under the wheel and was badly hurt.

They both jumped out of the carriage. Hans knelt on the ground and took
the gasping dog in his arms:

“Give me your pocket-handkerchief,” he said.

Not receiving it at once, he looked up, impatiently.

Finn did not stir.

He stood leaning over the dog and looking into its glazed eyes with
a great, deep, strange glance. He was not thinking whether it was
an animal or a human being, whether it could be saved or whether he
himself could do anything....

“Finn!”

He did not stir. He was staring into the great face of death. The door
of the dark house was flung open and he stared and stared into the
darkness. His soul was filled with a devout awe. He felt nothing, saw
nothing, but life expiring before his eyes.

Hans looked at him speechlessly, terrified at the expression in his
face, which he did not know how to interpret, and grew more and more
agitated.

“Give me your pocket-handkerchief, Finn.”

Finn started. He looked up and handed him the handkerchief:

“I didn’t think of it,” he said.

Hans did not reply. In a little while, the dog was dead and he flung it
in among the trees in such a way that Finn could have struck him.

They got into the carriage and drove on in silence. Finn thought
of nothing but what he had seen and did not suspect his friend’s
agitation. Then, suddenly, he told the coachman to pull up:

“You mustn’t mind, Hans,” he said. “I am going to get out.... I can go
home by myself.... I want to be alone for a little.”

Hans jumped out of the carriage and walked away without saying
good-bye. Finn took no notice. He let the coachman shut the door,
shrank into a corner and drove home.

Fru Adelheid came to him in the old room and could not make him speak
of what lay on his mind. She smiled to him and took his hand and sang
for him.

But Finn sat silent and absent.

       *       *       *       *       *

Some time after, the friends were walking, one evening, through the
streets and along the canal, where the boats lay in a row and, on the
other side, an old castle stood, with broken windows and charming green
roofs.

“Let us sit here for a bit,” said Finn.

They sat on the quay. The water flowed black and angry beneath them.
The boats rocked and bumped and swayed. Hans drummed with his cane
against the embankment-wall:

“Is it like this in Venice?” he asked.

“No,” said Finn. “It’s finer there. Because one’s strange to it.”

Hans laughed gaily and Finn said nothing more and looked down into the
water.

Then they suddenly heard a shout.

They both sprang up and ran and, when they had come some distance, they
saw a child on the point of drowning:

“Here, Finn ... help me....”

Hans scrambled down into one of the boats and was fumbling with the
oars. But Finn ran on and jumped into the water, where the child was,
without a moment’s reflection.

He could not swim and Hans had first to save him. Then, with the
greatest difficulty, he rescued the child. They went home to Cordt’s
house and, when the first fright was over and it became clear that Finn
had suffered no harm, they all sat in the living-room and talked about
it.

Fru Adelheid held Finn’s hand between her own and patted it and pressed
it. Cordt walked up and down in great emotion.

“How could you take it into your head?” said Hans. “You know you can’t
swim.”

“I never gave it a thought,” said Finn, quietly.

Cordt stopped in front of his son and nodded to him. Fru Adelheid
kissed him on the forehead and her eyes beamed.

Hans looked at them, crimson with anger.

He thought of how Finn might have been drowned, or the child, or both
of them. Then he remembered the scene in the woods, with the dying dog.
He could not understand these people’s train of thought and he despised
it. He looked at none of them and, with an effort, forced his voice to
be calm, as he said:

“One has no right to behave like that. It is stupid.”

“Yes,” said Finn.

But Cordt put his hand on the engineer’s shoulder and looked at him in
such a way that Hans suddenly remembered his own little faint-hearted
father:

“Yes,” said Cordt, “it is stupid that Finn shouldn’t know how to swim.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Then it was decided that Cordt’s son should learn to swim.




CHAPTER XX


Fru Adelheid sat, book in hand, without reading.

It was late. Finn had been with her and had said good-night and Cordt
was not at home. It was silent in the house and silent outside.

She had a feeling as though she were alone in the world.

Fru Adelheid was not happy.

The peace which the good grey years had brought had departed from the
house. She could not see her way anywhere: not with Finn, not when she
was alone, least of all when Cordt was in the room.

She did not feel safe even at church. It would happen to her that she
left church heavier in mind than when she entered. It also happened
that she simply dared not go in, but turned back, when the organ pealed
to her in the porch.

She sat and stared, with her white hands folded in her lap. She wanted
to try if she could think the thing out to the end. But she had tried
before, with ever-decreasing success.

First, there was the going back to the old room.

This was the beginning and she could not but think that it was the
whole matter, for, in truth, she had never got over it. She could not
defend herself against the memories that came crowding one upon the
other. Her blood grew hot, her eyes moist, without her knowing why.

She suffered from a constant terror which she could neither explain
nor shake off. Now it was Finn, whose pale face frightened her. Now
it was Cordt, who was silent and ever more silent and brooded over his
thoughts.

Then she was overcome as by a despairing remorse and she could not see
how she had offended. Then she went in a secret dread of revenge and
she knew of no one who meant her any harm.

There were days on which every step she took gave a dull and
threatening echo of the old days. She felt as though she were living
in a house whose walls were full of secret recesses with old documents
which would upset everything that existed, if they came to light
... she felt as though she were walking over mysterious vaults that
concealed the traces of mysterious crimes.

Wearily, Fru Adelheid leant her head upon her hand and let her hand
fall again. She half rose in her chair and hid her face in the roses
that stood on the table before her. She took up the book and put it
down at once.

Then Cordt came.

He nodded to her, went to the farther side of the room and sat down
with a book.

She looked at him timidly. She heard him turn the pages and wondered
what book it was. She asked him. He answered, without looking up, and
the silence increased twofold.

Fru Adelheid sighed and rose to go to bed:

“Good-night, Cordt.”

He closed the book and tossed it on the table. She stopped and looked
at him. Then he asked:

“Has Hans been here to-day?”

She sat down in her chair again. He had got up and was pacing the room.
She waited and listened to his footsteps.

Then she could bear it no longer:

“Cordt!”

He stopped and looked at her.

“Cordt ... Finn will die, if Hans is always with him.”

“Yes,” he said, softly and sorrowfully. “Finn will die and you will die
and I shall die. But Hans will live.”

“What are you trying to do with him, Cordt?”

“Have you forgotten what I want?”

He looked at her and his eyes hurt her.

“I wonder if your wish is also mine, Cordt,” she asked.

“No.”

He said that calmly, without anger, but also without hesitation.

Then she leapt up:

“Your wish was never mine ... never! You have been able to persuade me
and frighten me and force me.... I never meant it, Cordt, never ...
even when I agreed.”

“Let the dead days be, Adelheid.”

“And now ... Cordt.... Now I am farther away from you ... now you
understand me less than ever ... there is something in me now that is a
thousand times stronger than what parted us then.”

Cordt looked at her with a tempest in his strong eyes:

“So there is in me, Adelheid.”

He stood before her, drawn up to his full height. She thought he seemed
taller than usual and his face looked strangely young.

“There is Finn,” he said.

Fru Adelheid sat in her chair, because she could not stand.

“You speak as if he were your son and not mine,” she said.

She did not take her eyes from his face. She could not get rid of the
thought that he looked so young. His hair had not a sign of grey, his
walk was easy and erect as in the old days, his eyes glowed with the
same strength and the same confidence.

She bent forward and stared and sought. Surely she must be able to find
the wounds which sorrow had given him, the marks which age had brought.

Cordt did not look at her. He stood with his hands folded about his
neck and with strangely distant eyes:

“You have said it, Adelheid ... it is as you say ... there is something
now that is a thousand times greater than what parted us then. We
mortals always think, when misfortunes come, that no more will come now
... that it must be over now. And so there is no difference between
the child with its lost doll and the man with his dead love ... none
except time, which comes and goes, comes and goes, puts out a light and
kindles a pyre and puts out the pyre also.”

He dropped his arms and stood silent for a while:

“Adelheid....”

He said no more. He looked round the room and at her, as though he were
waking from his thoughts. Then he went to the window and looked across
the square, where the lights were being put out.

Fru Adelheid stared with great fixed eyes at where he stood.

She had not seen him during many years ... where had she been all those
years ... what had she been doing?

Then she had seen him again, distantly and dimly at first, like the
memory of a fight, a pain, on the day when she stood once more in the
old room. He had come closer ... the time he warned her about Finn.
And, little by little, he had approached her through Finn ... through
his fears and his love, through his every word, constantly closer and
more effectively.

She clutched the arms of the chair so firmly that her knuckles turned
white.

Now it had come ... now the doors of the mysterious cellars grated on
their rusty hinges and the crime stood revealed ... now the secret
recesses in the walls were opened and the old documents bore witness to
the right....

Now there was no longer anything between her and him and there was
nothing outside him and her. He stood beside her ... she could reach
him with her hands. She had no son and no God. His words swept over her
like a storm, his eyes were bent upon her....

She wanted to get up and run away, but could not. A sort of dizziness
came over her and the ground retreated under her feet.

There were voices which told her that it was surely a very old and
forgotten story ... a legend preserved in the archives of the house for
the entertainment and instruction of future times, which would possibly
judge differently from the one who had set the legend down.

There were others, mocking and exultant voices, which whispered to her
that it was all imagination and nothing else ... that Finn belonged to
her and not to him, that all his confidence and all his strength would
break like glass against that pale, quiet boy, who loved his mother.

There were hymns and psalms and organ-pealing and impressive words
about sin and forgiveness and Christ’s heavenly glory. The cool air of
the church-vault passed over her burning forehead ... all the bells
rang, as though for a soul in need.

She heard it all and it vanished like a sound in the air.

And all the voices were merged before her confused thoughts.

It turned into an evening in the old days ... an evening of lights and
gayety. She saw the people of that time ... she heard her own voice....

Then, suddenly, it was quenched in the great silence of the old room.

The candles were burning on the mantelpiece.... She sat and stared into
the red hearth. Now Cordt spoke ... Cordt in the old days:

“I will stake life and happiness to win you. I will talk to you and
importune you and conquer you. I will take you in my arms and close my
door to you and run after you and forgive you. And, if I do not win
you, I shall cast you off.”

She sprang up and clasped her head in her two hands:

“Cordt ... Cordt....”

He turned round and looked into her white face.

She raised her face to him and sought and stared after her portrait in
his eyes ... only a thought from the old days ... a memory....

It was not there. For him there was nothing in the world except that
which was his happiness and his fear and his struggle ... now as in the
old days....

And it was no longer she.

“Adelheid ... are you ill?”

“No ... no....”

She laughed aloud. Cordt took her hands and led her to a chair. She let
him do as he would and continued to look up in his face.

Then she suddenly thrust him from her.

She smiled and shook her head at her folly. She rose and walked round
the room. She said she was quite well, told him to go away ... just to
go away.

And Cordt went.

She stared at the door, which closed after him, as though she had seen
him for the last time. Then she turned round and looked into a mirror
which showed her whole figure.

Slowly she walked up to the mirror, sat down before it, with her head
in her hands, and stared into her own face.

The clock struck one and two from the church-steeples and she did not
hear. Then some one shouted down in the square. She rose, took a candle
and left the room.

She went through the long passages and up the stairs, softly and
carefully, as if she were a thief. She listened at Cordt’s door and at
Finn’s. Then she stood outside the old room. She listened ... there was
no sound. She opened the door ajar and saw that it was dark.

She went in quickly and walked straight up to the secret recess in the
wall. She opened it and took the yellow document in her trembling hands.

Then she stared at Cordt’s name and her own, which were written down
last and struck out again.




CHAPTER XXI


Finn stood at the window in Cordt’s room, with his head leaning against
the frame, and looked down into the yard, where the porter’s children
were playing.

He had come, as usual, to say good-morning and Cordt had told him to
wait while he finished a letter. The letter had been sealed for some
time, but Finn had not noticed it. He was watching the game down below
and bending forward to see better.

Then the children were called in. He laid his head against the
window-frame again and looked up at the grey sky. He thought of Hans,
who had left for Paris that morning and was to remain abroad for two
years.

Cordt sat silent. From where he was, he could see Finn’s profile: the
forehead, which was so white, the eyelids, which lifted themselves so
heavily, the mouth, which was so tired and so weak.

“Finn!”

Finn started and turned round.

“Did you see Hans off?”

“Yes.”

Finn sat down by the window where he stood, with bent head and his
hands upon his knees. He wound the cord of the blind round his fingers
and unwound it again.

“I wonder if you will miss Hans?”

“Oh ... yes.”

“I shall,” said Cordt. “Hans represents the new order at its finest
... the hero in modern poetry ... the engineer, you know, whom they can
never put on the stage without making him insipid ... because he never
acts a part. He is strong and has the courage to employ his powers. To
us he often seems lacking in refinement and he finds it difficult to
grant us our due. He has no ancestors ... he is the ancestor ... he
founds a dynasty.”

“Yes,” said Finn.

They sat silent for a while.

There was no doubt in Cordt. He knew what he wanted and wanted it. He
did not seek for kind words, but strong words. Finn knew this too. He
sat like a culprit awaiting sentence and was thankful for every minute
that passed.

Then they looked up into each other’s eyes.

They measured each other’s strength. And Finn was strong in his
hopelessness, even as Cordt was strong in the hope which he could not
let go, because he had nothing else to fall back upon.

“Do you know that you are a born artist, Finn?”

Finn smiled sadly and shook his head.

“You are,” said Cordt. “There is no doubt about it. When you were
travelling abroad ... there was simply nothing in your letters but
delight at the pictures you saw. Your journey was one long progress
through a royal gallery. At sea, in the street, on the mountains ...
everywhere you caught life and hung it on your wall and sat down to
look at it.”

“Did I?”

“Had you not been born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you would
have been lost beyond redeeming. You would have become a painter ... no
... an author.”

“Would that be so bad?”

“What use is literature to us modern people?” said Cordt. “Where does
it lead us? How does it form our lives? If the old poets had lived
nowadays, they would certainly have been merchants, or electricians,
or arctic navigators.... Just look round you, Finn ... the books we
read, the pictures we look at, the plays they perform: isn’t it all
like an orchestra that plays for an hour while people walk about the
grounds? Tired people, who like to hear a bit of music before they go
to bed. The band plays its tune and gets its pay and its applause and
we are interested in seeing that the performance is well and properly
given.... But ... the _poet_, Finn.... A solitary horn sounds over the
hills. We drop the plough and listen and look up, because the notes
seem to us so rare and so powerful and we have never heard them before
and know them so well. Then our eyes glisten. And the sorrow that bent
our back and the gladness that held us erect and the hope we had ...
all of that suddenly acquires color and light. And we go whither the
horn calls us ... over the hills ... to new green fields where it is
better living.”

“Father....”

Finn raised his head, but then could not find the phrase for what he
wanted to say.

“Don’t you think that the poet must be a _man_ ... a man like the
others, with courage in his breast and a sword at his thigh? Then he
goes forth and sings them to battle and wedding, to dance and death. He
is a part of the business, foremost in the crowd.”

“The poets also sat in the ladies’ chambers and sang,” said Finn.

Cordt nodded:

“They did that _also_,” he said. “But the poets we now have do nothing
else. There will always be fiddlers as long as there are idle women
and women with two husbands and wars and kings. As long as the stars
wander so far through the sky and the children cannot catch the bird
that flies in the bush.... But never mind that, Finn. Never mind that.
Just look at those who sit in the orchestra to-day.... Would you sit
among them? They are sick people singing about their sickness. One is
sick with love and one with lewdness and one with drink. One chants
his faith on vellum, another sells his doubts in sixpenny editions.
The feeble will of the one quavers in silly verses ... the other
intoxicates his pale fancy with blood and horrors drawn from the olden
times. Do you think that a free man would of his own accord select his
place among those artists?”

Finn looked up with his quiet eyes:

“Who is a free man, father?... Are you?”

Cordt put his hands on Finn’s shoulders and bent over him and looked at
him:

“You are, Finn.... You are a free man ... if you wish to be.”

“Father....”

Finn put out his hands like a child asking for something. But Cordt
looked at him inexorably. And so strong and radiant was his glance,
that Finn tried to escape it, but could not; tried to speak, but was
silent.

Then Cordt walked across the room, up and down, with great, calm
strides, and spoke and was silent and never for a moment released his
son from his stern grasp.

His words seized Finn and lifted him up where things were great and
beautiful and bitterly cold, he thought; then let him fall again, till
he relapsed into his own dark corner; and seized him anew and carried
him aloft.

But, when Cordt ceased, it was to Finn as though he heard a flourish of
trumpets from the clouds proclaiming that other words were now coming,
greater still and austerer, more loving, ever heavier to bear.

“You are right, Finn.... I am not a free man, I never was. I am bound
up in the tradition that built my house and bore my race and, when I
could not support the tradition, things broke for me. But that did not
make me free.... Those were heavy days, Finn. I could not understand
it, you see, and I fought to the end. I was young and strong and I was
in love. You are fond of the old room ... you can hear the legends
up there singing their powerful, melancholy song.... Remember, Finn,
I am one of those on whom the legend is laid. I have lived in the
secrecy of the old room.... I have stood, in my calm, proud right ...
up there, where the room stood, unseen by any one except the master
of the house and his wife ... always remote and locked and hidden
in its time-honored might ... always open to him who owned it.... I
left it like a beaten man. But I could not retire into a corner and
mourn, for I had you, Finn. You were only a little child then, so I
could not know how your paths would go. I knew only one thing, that
you would never sit with your wife up there, where people became
so small when they sat down in the big chairs and where it was so
pleasant and so safe. I was the last. With me, the tradition of the
old room was finished.... Then I had to try if I could find my way in
the world which I did not understand. I had to go through all that
which I disliked so desperately and which had killed my happiness. For
myself, I had nothing to gain: I was a bound man and a wounded. But
I had you, Finn.... And I had to know if they were building properly
and honestly somewhere behind all the dancing and flirting and singing
which I saw before my eyes. Or if it was no different from what my
eyes saw and if I should not be doing best to carry my child out into
the mountains and let the wild beasts tear it to pieces.... I was
alone in this. Your mother went to live in an old house beside the old
house where her happiness could not grow. There she found peace. But
I needed no refuge. Where I was, I was at home: I only wanted to see
the place where you and your children should flourish.... I did not
spare myself, Finn. I sought honestly, south and north, east and west.
I took their books ... the light ones burst like soap-bubbles in my
hands and the powerful ones my thoughts had to struggle to understand.
Not one of their green visions but has been with me in my room, not
one of their bright swords but has flashed before my eyes.... I did
not allow myself to be blinded by my own bitterness, or tricked by
catch-words, or frightened by abuse. I went on as long as I could see
the way ... and longer, Finn. I peered out into the farthest, where
those who thought as I did saw nothing but horror and insanity.... And
Finn ... I don’t know.... Perhaps it was your mother’s God that helped
me ... perhaps it was my ancestor, who himself had sailed into harbor
and raised our house on new ground for many a good, long day. Perhaps
it was your little hand, which lay so trustingly in mine, when you
used to come to me in those anxious, lonely days and say good-morning
and good-night.... I don’t know. I daresay it was my love for you
that lifted me above myself. I climbed as high up the mountains as a
mortal can climb. It all lay under my feet like a cloud ... longing and
happiness and daily bread and daily trouble. I could not see the valley
in which my house was built. But out of the cloud, over the mountain, I
saw the road where we hustle and strive, generation after generation,
ever forward towards the goal which we cannot see, but which is there,
because the road is there.... And I saw land ... the promised land of
you and your children ... from the mountain where I stood. A land I did
not know ... a land strange to my eyes ... people with other habits
and other beliefs, with a different form of love and a different code
of honor.... I saw it through the storm that flung the door of the old
room wide open.... That was a strange time, Finn ... the strongest in
my life and the happiest.”

Cordt stood at the window with his arms crossed over his chest. He
looked at his son and smiled sadly. Finn sat still, with his head
thrown back in his chair and his eyes closed.

“Then I equipped you for the journey, Finn.... I did not show you this
way or that, for I was a bound man and could not go with you. I gave
you books and masters, who opened all the gates of the world to you. I
let you look into the mist where you wanted to ride. I feared nothing,
because I wanted nothing for myself and because I had seen through the
mist.... You grew up and I saw that you grew good and clever. Then I
sat down and waited and longed for the day when I should wave to you
from the balcony of my old house, when you marched forth to conquer
your new land.... I was right to wait for the day.... Ah.... I have
seen them, the poor devils, hungry and wounded, rush blindfold towards
the new, which they did not know, because it could not possibly be
worse than the old. I have heard them call for new laws because they
had violated the old ... they were driven from their huts and sat on
the deck of the emigrant-ship with their bundle and their uncertain
hope for a better fate in the new world.... But you.... You had done no
wrong and had nothing to revenge. Free as a king’s son, you rode over
the bridge with your retinue and rode through the world and planted
your banner wherever you chose to dwell. Born of your mother’s longing
for excitement ... in your father’s house, whose walls are as thick
as the walls of a castle ... with the strong air of the old room in
your lungs and without its yoke upon your neck ... a rich and spotless
nobleman, taking his place of his own free will in the ranks of the
revolution.”

He was silent. His steps sounded heavily through the stillness:

“Are you with me, Finn?”

“Yes, father.”

“Come.”

Finn rose. Cordt put his arm over his shoulder and they paced the room
together.

“I had so many dreams, Finn. And I gained such confidence, because my
own happiness was shattered and I had you. I had become an old man, but
my mind was not blunted. I had suffered shipwreck, but I was not afraid
of the sea. I believed in life ... in God, if you like.”

They did not walk well together and Cordt removed his arm. Finn sat
down in his chair again and listened. Cordt went on walking:

“Then came the days which you know ... the days of the present.... You
grew up into the quiet man you are. Your eyes looked heavily upon life,
you shrank back timidly when you saw that there was fire and smoke on
earth.... You kept your scutcheon untarnished, but that is easily done,
when one doesn’t fight. You were never in places where one does not
wish to be seen ... that is true. But you never went outside your door,
Finn ... never. There was no fire in your blood, no desire in your
thoughts. You were tired, Finn ... merely tired.... I grew frightened
for you.... As the years passed, you had become more to me than a son.
You were not only flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone ... you were
a link in the human chain that goes on through the ages, ever onward.
Your hand was in mine, but your life was more precious than mine. For
you had to carry a greater burden and to carry it into new ways....
Remember, Finn, I had been on the mountain and seen through the mist.
It was more than the question of an inheritance, more than family pride
and family loyalty. You and I were allied in a great cause. And I sat
with the map before me and followed the course of the battle ... like
an old soldier, who can no longer sally forth himself, but who has
his son and his colors and his emperor under fire.... Remember how I
had arrived at where I was. Remember what I had lost, what I had let
go, how completely I had sacrificed myself for you. I had you, Finn
... had I anything else?... When I, then, became frightened for you,
I plunged into my wonderful treasure and endowed you lavishly. I told
you the legend of the old house and thought it would call you to arms,
like the blast of the bugle over the camp. I revealed your father’s
and your mother’s fate to you, that you might see how people fight
for happiness. I sent you out into the world, where life is bigger
and stronger than at home, so that life might make you into a man....
But never ... never did I put any constraint upon you. Never did I
usurp the place of Providence.... And you turned over the pages of the
picture-book and came home paler than before and wearier. The old room
was merely a charming poem to you, that sang you into deeper dreams.
Up there ... where the strong men of our race met their wives, when
the sun went down upon the business of the day, and talked gladly and
earnestly when their hearts impelled them to ... there you sit, alone,
all day long, with your slack hands.”

Then he laid his hands firmly on Finn’s shoulders. And Finn looked up
with moist eyes and quivering mouth.

“To-day, Finn, I have given you your inheritance. From to-day, I look
upon you as of age. You were such that one could not use coercion with
you ... and, in fact, there was none that wanted to use it. Nor could
one be angry with you ... you were the same ... it was the same ...
always. To-day, that is past. Go out and buy yourself a house and take
a wife and have children by her. And remember that, if there were some
in the family that fell, there was none that flinched.”

“Father.... I understand you ... but I cannot do what you want.”

Cordt took a step back and tossed his thick hair from his forehead:

“You pale people _understand_ everything, because no faith blinds your
eyes: you are so kind and clever, you think. You judge leniently, you
do not judge at all, you know that the truth is nowhere and everywhere.
You justify every silly thought you have entertained ... you sit for
all time and contemplate your navel ... and then you let the murderer
go and the thief escape. God help you poor wretches! The stupidest, the
most ignorant dervish is cleverer and kinder than you!”

Finn wanted to say something, but Cordt made a preventive gesture with
his hand:

“A man _must_ not understand everything. He must choose and judge and
reject. If he doesn’t do that, there is no happiness in the world and
no loyalty and no peace. And, if he cannot hate, he cannot love either.”

He went to the window and looked out. And, as he stood there, Finn came
up to him and seized his hand and looked at him pleadingly:

“I can’t do what you want,” he said.

But Cordt withdrew his hand and moved away from him:

“You have no right to say that to me, Finn. I won’t listen to it. For
what I want is only that you should live. Take the inheritance which I
have given you and use it as you can. One day, you shall be called upon
to answer for your son, as I to-day for you.”

Finn smiled sadly:

“I shall never have a son,” he said, softly.

Cordt did not hear what he said. He was struggling with a memory
... passed his hand over his face and stared before him. He saw Fru
Adelheid ... that evening in the old room, when she had said what Finn
was saying now ... the same hopeless, impotent words: “I cannot do what
you want.”

He sat down and fell back in his chair.

All the despair of the old days came over him like a tremendous
weariness. He was struggling against what was stronger than himself. He
had nothing to set against that eternal, hopeless, “I cannot do what
you want.”

Then he sprang up and stood in front of Finn with blazing eyes:

“If it’s your mother who paralyzes your will, then fly from her, hate
her, thrust her from you....”

“Father ... father....”

“Hate her, I say. She was smitten with the pestilence from her youth.
She understood everything ... like you. To her nothing was small or
great, nothing near or far. Her will was gone, like yours. She knew
where the glory lay, if she could reach it, but she could not. She
hearkened to the times and the times made her their own. She was always
sick ... sick unto death.”

He crossed the room and said nothing more.

They were both of them very pale and both longed to be alone. They had
nothing more to say to each other.

And Finn was not angry on his mother’s account. He thought only of the
one thing, that he could not do what Cordt wanted and could not appease
his sorrow ... could not even tell him that he loved him. And then he
longed to sit still ... in the old room ... with his mother, who was
so pretty and whom he had never offended:

“Are you angry with me, father?”

Cordt looked at him long and intently. Then he said:

“Yes.”

But, when Finn was gone, he sat with his face buried in his hands and
wept.




CHAPTER XXII


Cordt entered, dressed to go out, and hurriedly crossed the room.

Fru Adelheid sat writing. She looked up, as he came in, and went on
writing.

“Where is Finn?”

“Upstairs, I suppose ... in his room,” she answered, without looking at
him.

He stood at the window for a moment. Then he flung himself into a chair
and got up again and stood by the table at which she was sitting:

“Have you been with him to-day?”

“No.”

She closed her blotting-book and turned her chair so that her face was
in shadow. Then she said:

“Finn is too much alone.”

“Yes.”

He nodded and said yes again; then stood with his head bowed deep in
thought.

“It is so quiet here,” said Fru Adelheid. “You are not happy and Finn
notices it. And Hans is away....”

“Yes ... yes....”

She crossed her arms over her breast and sat silent and looked at the
tip of her foot.

“Adelheid....”

Cordt drew himself erect:

“We will fill the house with gayety,” he said. “We will go and pay
visits to-morrow morning ... you and Finn and I ... to old friends and
new. We will have young and cheerful people here and pretty women and
clever men ... lights and music.”

She looked up at him. He smiled and put his hand on her shoulder.

“Yes,” she said.

Cordt talked about it a little and then went out hurriedly.

Fru Adelheid remained sitting long. The room grew dark. The lamps
before the gateway were lit and their flickering gleams danced on the
ceiling. The fire in the hearth smouldered under the ashes. Where she
sat, no light fell; her white dress shone faintly through the gloom.

She thought of Cordt’s smile ... he had said that to her much as though
he were asking one of the people in the office to take pains in a
difficult matter.

She thought of Finn, who looked at her with such strange eyes, as
though the relations between him and his mother had changed and he
could not understand it.

She thought of herself. She felt like a tree in autumn, when the leaves
fall ... a tree that had always thought itself green and beautiful
until now, when it saw its glory flutter before the wind.

And, day after day and every hour of the day, she rebuilt it all as it
might have been.

She built up the temple of the old room again and locked the door with
seven seals. She put time back and sat with her little boy in her lap
and resented old Marie’s undressing him and singing him to sleep. She
put time forward and celebrated the day when Finn should lead his wife
into the secret chamber of the house and tell her all about it, in all
its beauty and solemnity, and write his name and hers on the yellow
document.

Fru Adelheid smiled sadly.

She thought she was like the man who had put the celestial globe up
there in the old room ... the man whose intellect was obscured and who
sat and played with the stars until he died.

But her thoughts always went the same way, while the darkness fell ever
closer about Cordt’s house.

She wondered, would it be any use now, if the house were filled with
lights and gayety? Or would the darkness lurk in every gloomy corner
and spring forth when the feast was over and for ever hide the three
who moved about the house, each his own way, anxiously and alone?

She did not know. But she always thought of it. And there was nothing
tempestuous in her hope and in her fear and in her regret.

Fru Adelheid was calm now, always.




CHAPTER XXIII


Then the stately house on the square was lit up with gayety.

The horses trampled in the gateway and the servants ran up and down
the carpeted stairs. The great drawing-rooms streamed with lights and
flowers and music and the floor was filled with dancers.

It was a wealth and splendor even greater than in the old days, for now
the master of the house was a more lavish host than he had ever been
before. He could never have things fine enough, luxurious enough. He
saw to everything, was everywhere and moved among his guests so that
they could see that he delighted in them.

The entertainments at Cordt’s house became legendary. And all that were
rich and beautiful and noble and intelligent came when he invited them
and came gratefully and were glad to stay.

The men gathered close about the lady of the house, who was charming in
her white gown, with her white hair.

Those who had paid her their homage in the old days raised their grey
heads when she passed them and followed her tall figure with a gleam
of their youthful fire in their eyes. And those who were now young
wondered when they heard the old ones tell that she was once a thousand
times prettier.

Or not prettier, perhaps. But such that every man on whom her eyes fell
was, from that moment, hers and that every glance she vouchsafed was
remembered for all time.

Now she was more remote in her smiles. Her glance was deeper, but
it was as though it did not see. Her red mouth no longer promised
happiness as it used to. Any one would think it a happiness to win her.
But no one would believe it possible.

And, while they saw her thus in the light of their youth, they wondered
what could have happened in the years that had passed and why the house
had so long been closed and why it had now so suddenly opened its doors
wide to the world which holds revel daily.

But their thoughts never grew to the shadow of a slander.

They asked her to sing. And, as she sat at the piano and looked through
the room with her great, strange eyes, the old friends of the house
remembered the glowing songs of her youth, which had set their blood
aflame as she exulted and wept in them with desire and love.

But now, when she sang, the young ones listened, enraptured with her
voice, which was so bright and so clear and so wonderfully still:

  The wildest water on earth to-day
    (God grant me His grace consoling!)
  Flows deep and dreary through gorges grey,
  But whither and whence they alone can say
    Who first set its wild waves rolling.

  For no ship ever its tideway knew,
    Its marge bore never a blossom.
  And never a bird from the beaches flew,
  And never a mirrored star it drew
    From Heav’n to its own black bosom.

  It wells from eyes that are glazed with pain
    (God shield me in all disaster!)
  When a man has rent like a rag in twain
  His own life’s bliss, by his own hand slain,
    Being never his fortune’s master.

There was a brief silence when she ceased. Then they crowded round her
in admiration and with endless requests for more.

Fru Adelheid rose. She talked and smiled and thanked them. But her
glance wandered far beyond all these people, who meant nothing to her,
to Cordt, who stood at the far end of the room and was talking to some
one and did not see her and had not heard her.

But Finn had heard her. And Finn had seen her great, humble, plaintive
look.

He did not take his eyes off her and strange thoughts hurried through
his head. He now understood what had happened in this house. He knew
why Fru Adelheid had come to him so seldom, lately, in the old room.
Why she had sat so silent, steeped in distant thoughts ... why her
glance had been so uncertain and so timid, her words so wavering, her
hand so slack in his.

And he felt that the last bond was broken that bound him to mankind.

He had lost his mother, now that he was pushing hardest towards her.
When she came to him now, it was Cordt she looked for. Were he to go to
her now and lie down before her with his cheek on her hand, as he had
so often done, she would lift him up and bid him go out into the world
and live.

He had a feeling as though he had been betrayed, but, at the same time,
he wept with her in his heart. He looked at his father and thought
how much more of a man he was than she suspected in her poor, tardy
repentance. He looked at his mother and felt a curious loving contempt
for her ... such as men feel for a woman who comes to them and begs for
something a thousand times less important than what she once possessed
and despised.

Then he had to go into the crowd of people, who offered him their
smiles and asked for his.

And so strong was the feeling of loneliness in him that he mingled
readily with the guests of the house and was more cheerful than usual
and more talkative.

He was as pleased to move about these bright rooms as elsewhere,
because he was no longer at home anywhere. He might just as well
exchange a few words with these smartly-dressed ladies and gentlemen,
since he had to talk and since he could no longer tell any one what was
passing within him and since no one could tell him what he wanted to
hear.

The women crowded round him as the men did round Fru Adelheid. They
wound a circle of white arms and bright eyes round the young heir of
the house, who was so pale and so handsome and such that women longed
for that which he did not show. They met him with charming, flattering
words and smiled upon him and he did not hear the words and broke
through the circle without a trouble and without a sigh.

The men offered him their friendship and he shook their hands and
talked to them and went away and forgot their faces. Cordt found him
in every corner, where he had hidden for a moment without intending
to or thinking about it, and carried him smilingly and teasingly and
jestingly into the throng. And he smiled to his father and went with
him and remained always alone.

He saw himself and only himself. He seized upon every thought that
arose in him and discussed it as if it had been thought by another. He
contemplated every mood that welled up in his soul as if he had read it
in a book.

He climbed high up the peaks upon which men cannot live ... the peaks
whence they topple down one day or where they perish in the bright
frost. For there is no sound up there and no air, no day and no paths.
Only light and always light.

But, when it happened that Cordt’s glance fell upon him, without his
knowing it, the loneliness was suddenly extinguished in his soul.

Then he knew who he was and where he was and the pain of life gnawed
into his soul. For he constantly read the eternal, hopeless, fond
question in his father’s eyes. He realized what he had forgotten, that
the house was making holiday for his sake and his sake alone. Every
strain that sounded, every rose that blushed, every pretty woman who
moved across the floor: they were all his father’s servants, who came
to him with message after message that life’s banquet was served if he
would but take his seat at the board and drain its golden cup.

Then he thought sadly of his tranquil, beautiful mother, who had gone
from him, out into life, which did not touch him. How good it would
have been if they could sit together now and talk and be silent, while
the fountain rippled in the square and the queer things in the old room
whispered their strange and mighty legend!

It would have been good for him. And good for her, he thought. And best
of all, perhaps, for Cordt, who did not see her.

His thoughts gathered in love for Cordt, who was struggling to the
death in his hopeless fight. He felt as though his father were a hero
in the wars and wished that he were his meanest page to buckle on his
armor for him and bathe his wounds and sit beside him with his lute,
when he would sleep.

But the rout ran its course and it was late before the gate closed
behind the last carriage.

It fell heavily and harshly as though it were striking angrily at
the guests’ heels. It grated its hinges long and shook its bolts as
though it thought of never opening again, but of shutting out the
world for ever from that old house, in which no light could drive away
the increasing gloom, no joyous trumpets drown the hoarse voices that
threatened in the corners.

Then they sat together for a while longer, they three who dwelt in the
house, and talked with empty words and empty eyes.

Fru Adelheid it was who first ceased, because her thoughts were the
strongest. And Finn it was who said the most ... as though to expiate
the fault that oppressed him.

But it was Cordt who was bitterest in his care, while indifferent words
passed between those who stood as close together as it was possible
for mortals to stand and who feared the silence and who had nothing
more to say to each other.

Then Cordt said good-night and Finn. But Fru Adelheid told the servants
to leave her for a little and the candles burnt where the rout had been.

Restlessly she wandered about the room and again thought of the days
that were gone and could never return. And she readily surrendered
herself to her fancies, for there was in her now but one hope and one
faith and one repentance.

She fancied that one of the long evenings was over in which gay
acquaintances filled her rich house and Cordt and she exchanged glances
which only they understood.

She had been to the nursery and leant over her little boy, who was
sleeping with red cheeks. Now she would take the reddest flower there
was and then go up the secret stair ... up to where the old room
stood, in its wonderful glory.

There he sat and waited for her.

She saw him as she entered ... he raised his face to her and nodded and
then lapsed again into his heavy thoughts. And she stood silent at the
window, where the red flowers blushed before her feet and the square
lay below her in the darkness of the night and the fountain sang its
refrain, which never begins and never stops.

Then she rose and crossed the room. She heard his voice when he talked
to her, as he so often talked ... ever the same judgment upon the dance
that passed over the world, the same mighty song in praise of great
marriage, the same passionate, loving prayer that she would only see it
while there was yet time and let those dance who had nothing better to
do and take the proud place which he offered her by his side ... in
the old chair, in which people became so small and so strong, because
they sat with their feet on an altar that was raised in faith and built
up of faith and fenced in with faith throughout the changing times.

Then, when he had said that and sat by the chimney, where the fire
glowed and the candles shed their rays sparingly in the corners of the
old room ... she would stand for a little at the window, while all was
silent in the room, and look at him, who was the man in her life and
had never ceased to be so. And then she would go up to him ... slowly
and quietly, because she honored the ground she trod on ... kneel down
where he sat and raise to him the eyes whose beauty he had loved, whose
glance he had sought in such great hope and such great fear.

Then she would tell him exactly how it was ... how strong it was and
how silent:

“Cordt ... you strong, you irresistible man ... I love you as you would
be loved. I thank you, because you talked to me and never grew weary.
Because you always besought me. Because you waited for me and trusted
that the day would come when the silence of the old room should turn to
gladsome song in my soul and all the other sounds in the world like a
distant buzz in the woods. Now I am here ... Cordt ... you strong, you
irresistible man. Now I am yours, as I was before, and I am yours in
the old room. There is nothing threatening or gloomy now in the strange
things up here from the vanished days. I can sing to the old spinet
so that no strings snap and no memories are mortally startled, for I
sing only of you and of my boy and of my happiness. I can cherish the
thread upon great-grandmother’s spinning-wheel because I have woven
the cloth of happiness in my own room. I can lovingly hide the wax
doll in the folds of the curtain, because I have lived to see the day
when I went gladly and readily to the secret chamber of the house and
sat there long and was contented.... But the jar with the naked man
writhing through thorns: I set that up here when I was not yet what
I am. It shall stand here in memory of the evil time that pulled at
Fru Adelheid’s soul and lured her desires with sounds from the square
outside.... And our little boy, who sleeps with red cheeks, shall grow
to man’s estate and come up here one day, when you and I are dead, and
sit with his wife in the chairs in which we sat. Then he shall know
that his mother was tempted, it is true, but not destroyed.”

Fru Adelheid sat in her corner and dreamt in the silent, empty rooms.

Her white gown spread over the floor about her feet. Her eyes shone.

       *       *       *       *       *

But high up, on the balcony of the old room, stood Finn and stared into
the night that stretched round about him like a waveless sea.

It was silent. He did not think, did not dream. His soul mingled with
the darkness, which was not evil and not good ... only silent.

He was like a dead man who had been put on guard on the brink of the
tower and who still stood there, staring with glazed eyes. The fountain
rippled ... it was as though the water rose over the edge of the basin
and would rise and rise until it reached the dead man up there and
washed him away.

Then a man came across the square.

He walked and sang, until he set eyes upon the man who stood up there,
high and dark and motionless. Then he stopped and looked at him and
shouted something.

And the man on the balcony answered with a shout. And the man below was
seized with fear and ran away and vanished in the darkness.




CHAPTER XXIV


Cordt looked into the room where Fru Adelheid sat:

“Where is Finn?”

“I think he’s in the old room.”

Cordt closed the door and walked quickly down the passage. She was
sitting by the window and saw him in the square below, where he stood
and looked up at the house. Then he walked away, in such a manner that
she could see that he had no object for his walk.

The servant came and lit the candles. Fru Adelheid sat down by the
fireplace with her hands in her lap and listened for a sound in the
quiet house.

Soon after, Cordt came home.

She heard his voice in the passage. Then he went into his own room
... now he was outside again. She understood that he was on his way to
Finn; but the next moment he came in to where she was sitting and sat
down at a distance from her:

“Have you been up to him to-day, Adelheid?”

“No.”

Cordt moved restlessly in his chair, rose to go and sat down again. Fru
Adelheid struggled with herself not to go over to him and take his hand
and talk to him. Then he said:

“He has been so odd, lately. Brighter than usual, but more absent,
nevertheless. He is not shamming, but still he is not himself.”

Cordt went on talking about it, without looking at her and not so much
in order to tell it to her as because he could not keep silent. She saw
this exactly and turned away her face and cried quietly. Then he asked:

“Haven’t you noticed it?”

“I think he is much as usual.”

Cordt rose and crossed the room. He stood for a time by the chimney,
where she sat, and stared into the fire. She looked up at him with
bright, moist eyes. Then he went over and sat where he had been sitting
before and it was silent in the room.

“I wonder, oughtn’t you to go up to him, Adelheid?”

He could not hear her reply and looked across at her. She had stood up
and was coming towards him. He saw that she was very pale and that she
was crying, but did not think about it and forgot it again at once.

Then she sat by him ... so close that her white gown lay over his feet.
She crossed her hands in her lap and parted them again and did not
look at him while she spoke:

“Cordt....” she said.

And, when she had said that, she began to tremble and pressed her hands
together.

“Yes?”

“_You_ ought to go up to him, Cordt.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he bent closer to her and lowered his
voice, as though there were some one in the room who could hear what he
was saying and must not:

“I dare not. I have frightened him. He starts when he sees me ... he
stands outside my door and collects his courage when he comes to me to
say good-morning. I will go quite away from him for a little while ...
go for a journey, I think, until he becomes more tranquil.”

She looked at him and pictured him roaming round the world so that
Finn might recover his tranquillity. She saw him strolling in distant
towns, where life flowed on around him, alone, knowing no peace, ever
thinking of his son ... longing for the day when he could come home,
dreading how he would find him then.

Fru Adelheid slipped from her chair and lay on the floor before him,
with her cheek against his hand and her eyes streaming with tears.

Cordt did not see. He stared into the room across her head, with the
strained, racked look which he now always wore when he was alone:

“He does not like our parties, Adelheid,” he said, meditatively. “We
only did him harm.”

“Yes.”

“But, if you would go up to him, Adelheid ... very quietly ... and sit
with him a little, so that he could not give way to his thoughts. Or
help him, so that his thoughts could find utterance. You two always got
on well together, you know, and he was glad to see you whenever you
came.”

“He is no longer glad to see me, Cordt.”

He looked at her in surprise and encountered her moist glance.

“If I went up now, Cordt ... I could not sit with Finn as I used to.
For I am no longer the same.”

“Ah, well!” was all he said.

He spoke calmly and indifferently, as though he had had no particular
faith in his remedy and must look round for something else.

“Cordt!...”

It was a scream.

He started. And, as if he had now first seen that she was kneeling
before him, he pushed back his chair and rose to his feet.

He crossed the room and then came back and stood and looked at her with
a sense of dislike that increased every minute. She crept to the chair
from which he had risen and laid her head on it. She closed her eyes
before his glance and wept silently and without stopping.

“_You...?_” he said slowly.

She received the blow which the word gave her without breathing a
sound. Once she opened her eyes and immediately closed them again. Pale
and still she lay before his feet.

Then his eyes blazed with anger and scorn:

“What a number of years have passed since we two first met, Fru
Adelheid ... what a number of miserable years!”

“Yes,” she said and raised her head for a moment and laid it on the
chair again.

“You went away ... in search of your red happiness. You were not
content with your husband, whom you loved and who loved you ... you
must have all men on their knees before your beauty ... you must needs
see the desire in their eyes and their unchaste hands cramped because
they dared not lay them upon Cordt’s wife.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Well, did you find the lover who bound your will to his foot? And did
he spurn you when he had seen to the depths of your charming eyes? Or
did you leave him of your own accord ... and go farther out into the
world ... in search of that which was greater still and redder?”

“I had no lover,” she said, in a low voice.

He tossed back the hair from his forehead and clenched his fists:

“No,” he said. “You did not. That is your disgrace and your judgment.”

“Cordt ... Cordt ... suppose I had had....”

“Yes ... if you had had a lover and were here to-day, then I should
take your hand and lead you to our son and say to him, ‘Here is your
mother, who has been unhappy. She loved your father and her love died
when the man came who was more to her than he. She has not known a
really happy day in all these years, because her fate was too strong
for her. Now she has come to ask for your affection and needs it.’”

He crossed the room and then came and stood by her again:

“Get up, Adelheid.”

She rose from the floor and sat down in her chair again, with her white
hands crossed in her lap, silently and quietly. He looked at her and it
was as though her humble obedience added to his anger:

“Where did you go on the day when you broke the bonds of your marriage,
because the air in the old room was too pure for you and too strong?
Where have you been since?”

“I went to God.”

Cordt laughed:

“Show me your God.”

He bent over and looked her in the face:

“I don’t believe in your God,” he said.

She did not take her eyes from his and stretched out her trembling
hands to him and her red mouth quivered with weeping:

“Then I don’t believe in Him either, Cordt.”

He turned away from her. Quietly she bowed her head, her tears fell
upon her hands, she listened and moaned under the blows which she had
received and longed for more.

But Cordt sat at the window and looked out where the rain came pouring
down and the flame of the lamps flickered in the wind. His anger was
over. He could not remember what they had been talking of. His thoughts
were where they always were and all the rest was nothing.

Then he suddenly stood by her again and struck his hand on his temples
and looked at her with fear in his eyes:

“Adelheid ... do you think Finn won’t come to us at all to-night?”

She understood that it was too late ... irremediably, hopelessly too
late. She would never be able to tell him what was burning in her soul.
He would never know that she did not come, because she was weary and
because she was afraid, but that she had honestly wiped out the bad
years of her life and stood again as he would have had her the time ...
the time he wanted to have her thus.

“He will come and say good-night,” she said calmly.

Fru Adelheid raised her folded hands to her mouth.

Things could not remain thus for ever. But she could wait. She could go
barefoot over the stones, if only once she reached a place in his house
where she could stay. There must be a road somewhere that led to him.

       *       *       *       *       *

And the evening sped on.

She sat beside him again and held his hand in hers, happy that he
allowed her to keep it. She wanted to push his hair off his forehead,
where the wrinkles lay so sharply marked, but did not. She wanted to
put her hands on his tired eyes, but dared not.

They talked of Finn and she talked softly and soothingly to him as to
a child, happy to be going the way he wanted. She found such gentle
words and such impressive ones ... she found her smile again and looked
at him and met his smile, which came stealing to his face like a
sun-gleam and vanished again at once.

He heard but little of what she said. But the sound of her voice did
him good. He heard it and the rain, which beat against the panes, and
it grew warm and peaceful around him.

His fears, which had aroused and spied and driven his every thought and
turned and weighed his every doubt, slumbered in this quiet hour. He
sat there like an old man who has suffered so much that his faculties
have been blunted to pain and who takes his solace as it comes and is
thankful.

He looked at her as he used to look at his mother when he was young and
unhappy. He thought of her as of a young girl who knew the old man so
little and owed him nothing, but went to his chair and laid her roses
in his hand, so that things might be a little pleasanter for him.

And once he moved uneasily in his chair and looked at her quite
differently and said:

“Adelheid ... why have I no child but him?”

He said that very quietly and, a little after, he said it again. He
said it to himself and not to her. She saw this and wept, because she
knew he did not perceive it.

       *       *       *       *       *

And the evening sped on.

They sat quietly and she was silent and talked again of their son up
there in the old room. Then she said:

“Cordt, let us go up to him!”

“Both of us?”

She listened anxiously whether he would say any more ... whether he
would reflect who she was and thrust her from him in anger, as he had
done before.

But he sat silent and looked at the red glow in the fireplace.

Then she rose and put out her hands to him:

“Come ... Cordt ... let us go. We will sit with him a little and talk
to him, quietly and cheerfully, till the shadows disappear. Then we
will come down here again and they will return, when he is alone. But
we will go up every day and fight with them for him and win him.”

He rose heavily and took her hand.

Fru Adelheid led him through the room like a child. They went through
the long passage and up the secret stairs.... She was always a little
in front of him. Her eyes shone with happiness. The bells rang out in
her soul and she held Cordt’s hand so fast as though she would never
let it go.

They came to the door of the old room and knocked and listened. She
looked at him and bent over his hand and kissed it with streaming tears.

Then she opened the door briskly and went in with head uplifted and
drew him after her.

Over by the window sat Cordt’s son, in one of the big chairs. He had
shot himself.


THE END.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.







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