Slowly she opened her eyes and looked at her image in the mirror with a discreet smile as at a fellow conspirator before whom she did not wish to commit herself too fully. Then she went around the room gathering together her gloves, hat, and mantilla.
Her dizziness seemed blown away, leaving only a rather pleasant sense of weakness in her knees. She walked about to feel it better. Secretly, as if by accident, she gave the rocking-chair a confidential little push with her elbow.
She rather liked scenes.
With one look she said farewell to some invisible thing. Then she rolled up the blinds, and it seemed like another room.
Three weeks later Mrs. Boye was married, and Niels Lyhne was quite alone with himself. He could not quite keep up his indignation over the unworthy manner in which she had thrown herself into the arms of that conventional society at which she had so often scoffed. True, it had only opened the door and beckoned, and she had come. But it was hardly for him to throw stones, for had he not himself felt the magnetic attraction of honest bourgeoisie? If it had not been for that last meeting! If that really was what he accused her of, if it had been intended for a madcap farewell to the old life, one last wanton prank before she withdrew behind “the quintessence of propriety”—could it be possible? Such boundless self-scorn, such a cynical mockery of herself and him and all that they had shared of memories and hopes, of enthusiasm and sacred ideals! It made him blush and rage by turns.—But was he fair to her? After all, what had she done but tell him frankly and honestly: Such and such things draw me to the other side and draw me powerfully, but I recognize your right even more fully than you ask, and here I am. If you can take me, I am yours; if not, I go where the power is greatest.—And if it were so, had she not been entirely within her rights? He had not been able to take her. The final decision might depend on such a little thing, on the shadow of a thought, the vibration of a mood.
If he only knew what she must have known for an instant and probably did not know any longer! He hated to believe that of which he could not help accusing her. Not only for her sake, but even more for his own, because it seemed to put a blot on his ’scutcheon, not logically, of course, and yet—
But, whatever the manner of her leaving him, one thing was certain: he was now alone, and though he felt the emptiness at first, he was soon conscious of a sense of relief. So many things were waiting for him. The year at Lønborggård and abroad, though absorbing his thoughts, had been in a sense an involuntary rest, and the very fact that this period had given him a clearer conception of his own powers and limitations spurred him on to use his faculties in undisturbed work. He was not anxious to create yet, but rather to collect; there was such an infinite mass of material he wanted to make his own that he began to think dejectedly of the brief span of mortal life. Though he had never wasted his time, it is not easy to emancipate one’s self from the paternal bookcase, and it seems simplest to seek the goal along the paths where others have attained it, and therefore he had not set out to seek his own Vineland in the wide world of books, but had followed where the fathers led. Loyally he had closed his eyes to much that lured him, in order to see more clearly in the vast night of the Eddas and sagas; and he had been deaf to many voices that called him, in order to listen more closely to the mystic sounds of nature in the folksongs.
But now he understood, at last, that it was not a law of nature to be either Old Norse or Romantic, that it was simpler to express his own doubts than to put them in the mouth of Gorm, Loki-worshipper, that it was more rational to find words for the mystic stirrings of his own being than to call to the cloister walls of the Middle Ages and hear his own voice come back to him as a faint echo.
He had always had an open mind for the new ideas of his time, but he had been occupied in finding how the New had been foreshadowed in the Old, rather than in listening to what the New said clearly and explicitly for itself. In this he was in no wise remarkable; for never yet has any new gospel been preached but the whole world has become busy with the old prophets.
Yet this did not suffice, and Niels threw himself enthusiastically into his new labors. He was seized with that lust of conquest and thirst for the power of knowledge which every worker in the realm of thought, no matter how humble a drudge he may later become, has surely felt once in his life, though for only one brief hour. Which one of us all, whom a kind fate has given the opportunity to care for the development of our own minds, has not gazed rapturously out over the boundless sea of knowledge, and which of us has not gone down to its clear, cool waters and begun, in the lighthearted arrogance of youth, to dip it out in our hollow hand as the child in the legend? Do you remember how the sun could laugh over the fair summer land, yet you saw neither flower nor sky nor rippling brook? The feasts of life swept past and woke not even a dream in your young
