Outside, beyond the window, the white flowers flushed to pink in the light of the setting sun. Arch upon arch, the blossoming sprays built of their gossamer bloom a rose-castle, a vaulted choir of roses, and through this airy dome the azure sky shone with a softened twilight blue, while golden lights and lights of gold flaming to crimson shot like the rays of a nimbus from every garlanded line of the ethereal temple.
White and still, Edele lay there with the old man’s hand between both of hers. Slowly she breathed out her life, breath by breath; fainter and fainter was the rising of her breast; heavier and heavier fell the eyelids.
“My love to Copenhagen!” was her last low whisper.
But her last message was heard by no one. It did not come from her lips even as a breath—her message to him, the great artist whom she had loved secretly with her whole soul, but to whom she had been nothing, only a name that his ear knew, only one unrecognized figure in the great admiring public.
The light faded into blue dusk, and her hands fell weakly apart. The shadows grew—shadows of night and of death.
The old man bent down over her bed and laid his hands on her pulse, waiting quietly, and when the last throb of life had ebbed away, when the last feeble pulse-beat was stilled, he lifted the pale hand to his lips.
“Little Edele!”
IV
There are those who can take up their grief and bear it, strong natures who feel their own powers through the very heaviness of their burden. Weaker people give themselves up to their sorrow passively, as they would submit to a sickness; and like a sickness their sorrow pervades them, drinks itself into their innermost being and becomes a part of them, is assimilated in them through a slow struggle, and finally loses itself in them, as they return to perfect health.
But there are yet others to whom sorrow is a violence done them, a cruelty which they never learn to accept as a trial or chastisement or as simple fate. It is to them an act of tyranny, an expression of personal hate, and it always leaves a sting in their hearts.
Children do not often grieve in this way, but Niels Lyhne did. For had he not been face to face with God in the fervor of his prayers? Had he not crawled on his knees to the foot of the throne, full of hope, tremulous with fear, and yet firm in his faith in the omnipotence of prayer, with courage to plead until he should be heard? And he had been forced to rise from the dust and go away with his hope put to shame. His faith had not been able to bring the miracle down from heaven, no God had answered his cry, death had marched straight on and seized its prey, as if no sheltering wall of prayers had been lifted toward the sky.
A stillness fell upon him. His faith had flung itself blindly against the gates of heaven, and now it lay on Edele’s grave with broken wings. For he had believed with the crude, implicit fairytale faith that children so often feel. The complex, subtly shaded figure of the Catechism is not the God children believe in; their God is the mighty one in the Old Testament, He who loved Adam and Eve so much, and to whom the whole generation of men, kings, prophets, Pharaohs, are nothing but good and bad children, this tremendous, fatherly God, Who is wrathful with the anger of a giant and bountiful with the generosity of a giant, Who has hardly created life before He lets death loose upon it, Who drowns His earth in the waters from His heaven, who thunders down laws too heavy for the race He made, and who, finally, in the days of the Emperor Augustus, has pity upon men and sends His Son to death in order that the law may be broken while it is fulfilled. This God, Who always answers with a miracle, is the one to whom children speak when they pray. By and by, a day comes when they understand that they have heard His voice for the last time in the earthquake that shook Golgotha and opened the graves, and that now, since the veil of His Holy of Holies has been rent in twain, it is the God Jesus who reigns; and from that day on they pray differently.
But Niels had not yet attained to this. It is true, he had followed Jesus on His earthly pilgrimage with a believing heart, but when he saw Him subjecting Himself to the Father, going about so bereft of power and suffering so humanly, all this had hidden the godhead from him. He had seen in Him only the one Who did the will of the Father, the Son of God, not God Himself: therefore, it was to God the Father he had prayed, and it was God the Father who had failed him in his bitter need. But if God had turned from him, he could turn from God. If God had no ears, he had no lips; if God had no compassion, he had no worship, and he defied and cast God out of his heart.
On the day Edele was buried, he spurned the earth of the grave with his foot, whenever the pastor spoke the name of the Lord, and when he met it afterwards in books or on the lips of people, a rebellious frown would wrinkle his youthful forehead. When he lay down to sleep at night, a sense of forsaken greatness came over him, as he thought that now
