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Read books online » Fiction » Marie Grubbe by Jens Peter Jacobsen (black male authors txt) 📖

Book online «Marie Grubbe by Jens Peter Jacobsen (black male authors txt) 📖». Author Jens Peter Jacobsen



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wetting his fingers and wrist and falling in clear drops from his full

white lace ruffles. His cheeks were flushed with wine, his eyes shone,

and he spoke in an unsteady voice.

 

“Beauty! Are you blind, one and all, or have you never even seen the

Lady from Denmark—not so much as seen Mistress Marie! Her hair is

like the sunlight on a field when the grain is ripe. Her eyes are

bluer than a steel blade, and her lips are like the bleeding grape.

She walks like a star in the heavens, and she is straight as a sceptre

and stately as a throne, and all, all charms and beauties of person

are hers like rose upon rose in flowering splendor. But there is that

about her loveliness which makes you feel when you see her as on a

holy morn when they blow the trumpets from the tower of the cathedral.

A stillness comes over you, for she is like the sacred Mother of

Sorrows on the beauteous painting; there is the same noble grief in

her clear eyes and the same hopeless, patient smile around her lips.”

 

He was quite moved. Tears came to his eyes, and he tried to speak but

could not and remained standing, struggling with his voice to utter

the words. A man sitting near him laid a friendly hand on his shoulder

and made him sit down. They drank together goblet after goblet until

all was well. The mirth of the old fellows rose high as before, and

nothing was heard but laughter and song and revelry. Marie Grubbe was

at Nurnberg. After the parting from Sti Hogh she had roamed about

from place to place for almost a year and had finally settled there.

She was very much changed since the night she danced in the ballet at

Frederiksborg park. Not only had she entered upon her thirtieth year,

but the affair with Sti Hogh had made a strangely deep impression upon

her. She had left Ulrik Frederik urged on partly by accidental events

but chiefly because she had kept certain dreams of her early girlhood

of the man a woman should pay homage to, one who should be to her like

a god upon earth from whose hands she could accept, lovingly and

humbly, good and evil according to his pleasure. And now, in a moment

of blindness, she had taken Sti for that god, him who was not even a

man. These were her thoughts. Every weakness and every unmanly doubt

in Sti she felt as a stain upon herself that could never be wiped out.

She loathed herself for that short-lived love and called it base and

shameful names. The lips that had kissed him, would that they might

wither! The eyes that had smiled on him, would that they might be

dimmed! The heart that had loved him, would that it might break! Every

virtue of her soul—she had smirched it by this love; every

feeling—she had desecrated it. She lost all faith in herself, all

confidence in her own worth, and as for the future, it kindled no

beacon of hope.

 

Her life was finished, her course ended. A quiet nook where she could

lay down her head, never to lift it again was the goal of all her

desires.

 

Such was her state of mind when she came to Nurnberg. By chance she

met the golden Remigius, and his fervent though diffident

adoration—the idolatrous worship of fresh youth—his exultant faith

in her and his happiness in this faith—were to her as the cool dew to

a flower that has been trodden under foot. Though it cannot rise

again, neither does it wither; it still spreads delicate, brightly

tinted petals to the sun and is still fair and fragrant in lingering

freshness. So with her. There was balm in seeing herself pure and holy

and unsullied in the thoughts of another person. It well-nigh made her

whole again to know that she could rouse that clear-eyed trust, that

fair hope and noble longing which enriched the soul of him in whom

they awoke. There was comfort and healing in hinting of her sorrows in

shadowy images and veiled words to one who, himself untried by grief,

would enter into her suffering with a serene joy, grateful to share

the trouble he guessed but did not understand and yet sympathized

with. Ay, it was a comfort to pour out her grief where it met

reverence and not pity, where it became a splendid queenly robe around

her shoulders and a tear-sparkling diadem around her brow.

 

Thus Marie little by little grew reconciled to herself, but then it

happened one day, when Remigius was out riding that his horse shied,

threw him from the saddle, and dragged him to death by the stirrups.

 

When the news was brought to Marie, she sank into a dull, heavy,

tearless misery. She would sit for hours staring straight before her

with a weary, empty look, silent as if she had been bereft of the

power of speech and refusing to exert herself in any way. She could

not even bear to be spoken to; if anyone tried it, she would make a

feeble gesture of protest and shake her head as if the sound pained

her.

 

Time passed, and her money dwindled until there was barely enough left

to take them home. Lucie never tired of urging this fact upon her, but

it was long before she could make Marie listen.

 

At last they started. On the way Marie fell ill, and the journey

dragged out much longer than they had expected. Lucie was forced to

sell one rich gown and precious trinket after the other to pay their

way. When they reached Aarhus Marie had hardly anything left but the

clothes she wore. There they parted; Lucie returned to Mistress

Rigitze, and Marie went back to Tjele.

 

This was in the spring of seventy-three.

CHAPTER XVI

After she came back to Tjele, Mistress Marie Grubbe remained in her

father’s household until sixteen hundred and seventy-nine, when she

was wedded to Palle Dyre, counsellor of justice to his Majesty the

King, and with him she lived in a marriage that offered no shadow of

an event until sixteen hundred and eighty-nine. This period of her

life lasted from the time she was thirty till she was forty-six—full

sixteen years.

 

Full sixteen years of petty worries, commonplace duties, and dull

monotony with no sense of intimacy or affection to give warmth, no

homelike comfort to throw a ray of light. Endless brawling about

nothing, noisy hectoring for the slightest neglect, peevish

fault-finding, and coarse jibes were all that met her ears. Every

sunlit day of life was coined into dollars and shillings and pennies;

every sigh uttered was a sigh for loss; every wish a wish for gain;

every hope, a hope of more. All around her was shabby parsimony; in

every nook and corner, busyness that chased away all pleasure; from

every hour stared the wakeful eye of greed. Such was the existence

Marie Grubbe led.

 

In the early days she would sometimes forget the hubbub and bustle all

around her and sink into waking dreams of beauty, changing as clouds,

teeming as light. There was one that came oftener than others. It was a

dream of a sleeping castle hidden behind roses. Oh, the quiet garden

of that castle with stillness in the air and in the leaves, with

silence brooding over all like a night without darkness! There the

odors slept in the flower-cups and the dewdrops on the bending blades

of grass. There the violet drowsed with mouth half open under the

curling leaves of the fern while a thousand bursting buds had been

lulled to sleep in the fullness of spring at the very moment when they

quickened on the branches of the moss green trees. She came up to the

palace. From the thorny vines of the rose bushes, a flood of green

billowed noiselessly down over walls and roofs, and the flowers fell

like silent froth, sometimes in masses of bloom, sometimes flecking

the green like pale pink foam. From the mouth of the marble lion a

fountain jet shot up like a tree of crystal with boughs of cobweb, and

shining horses mirrored breathless mouths and closed eyes in the

dormant waters of the porphyry basin while the page rubbed his eyes in

sleep.

 

She feasted her eyes on the tranquil beauty of the old garden where

fallen petals lay like a rose-flushed snowdrift high against walls and

doors, hiding the marble steps. Oh, to rest! To let the days glide

over her in blissful peace hour after hour and to feel all memories,

longings, and dreams flowing away out of her mind in softly lapping

waves—that was the most beautiful of all the dreams she knew.

 

This was true at first, but her imagination tired of flying

unceasingly toward the same goal like an imprisoned bee buzzing

against the windowpane, and all other faculties of her soul wearied

too. As a fair and noble edifice in the hands of barbarians is laid

waste and spoiled, the bold spires made into squat cupolas, the

delicate, lace-like ornaments broken bit by bit, and the wealth of

pictures hidden under layer upon layer of deadening whitewash, so was

Marie Grubbe laid waste and spoiled in those sixteen years.

 

Erik Grubbe, her father, was old and decrepit, and age seemed to

intensify all his worst traits just as it sharpened his features and

made them more repulsive. He was grouchy and perverse, childishly

obstinate, quick to anger, extremely suspicious, sly, dishonest, and

stingy. In his later days he always had the name of God on his lips,

especially when the harvest was poor or the cattle were sick, and he

would address the Lord with a host of cringing, fawning names of his

own invention. It was impossible that Marie should either love or

respect him, and besides she had a particular grudge against him

because he had persuaded her to marry Palle Dyre by dint of promises

that were never fulfilled and by threats of disinheriting her, turning

her out of Tjele, and withdrawing all support from her. In fact her

chief motive for the change had been her hope of making herself

independent of the paternal authority, though this hope was

frustrated, for Palle Dyre and Erik Grubbe had agreed to work the

farms of Tjele and Norbaek—which latter was given Marie as a dower on

certain conditions—together, and as Tjele was the larger of the two

and Erik Grubbe no longer had the strength to look after it, Marie and

her husband spent more time under her father’s roof than under their

own.

 

Palle Dyre was the son of Colonel Clavs Dyre of Sandvig and Krogsdal,

later of Vinge, and his wife Edele Pallesdaughter Rodtsteen. He was a

thickset, shortnecked little man, brisk in all his motions and with a

rather forceful face, which, however, was somewhat marred by a

hemorrhage in the lungs that had affected his right cheek.

 

Marie despised him. He was as stingy and greedy as Erik Grubbe

himself. Yet he was really a man of some ability, sensible, energetic,

and courageous, but he simply lacked any sense of honor whatever. He

would cheat and lie whenever he had a chance and was never in the

least abashed when found out. He would allow himself to be abused like

a dog and never answer back if silence could bring him a penny’s

profit. Whenever a relative or friend commissioned him to buy or sell

anything or entrusted any other business to him, he would turn the

matter to his own advantage without the slightest scruple. Though his

marriage had been in the main a bargain, he was not without a

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