One evening after tea they were all gathered in the sitting-room. The garden and all outdoor amusements were barred, for the rain was pouring down; but no one seemed to mind. The sense of being shut in gave the room something of the snug comfort of a winter evening, and moreover the rain was a blessing. Everything had been so parched and dry, but now the water streamed down, and when the heavy drops rattled against the frame of the reflector in the window the sound called up vague, fleeting glimpses of luscious green meadows and freshened foliage. Now and then someone would say under his breath: “How it pours!” and glance at the windowpanes with a little gleam of pleasure and a half-conscious luxuriating in fellow-feeling with everything out of doors. Erik had fetched the mandolin he had brought with him from Italy and sang about Napoli and the bright stars. Then a young lady who had been to tea sat down at the piano and accompanied her own rendering of “My little nook among the mountains,” in Swedish, making the ah’s very broad to get the right Swedish effect.
Niels, who was not particularly musical, let himself be soothed into a gentle melancholy and sat lost in his own thoughts, until Fennimore began to sing.
Then he awoke, but not pleasantly.
Her song agitated him uncomfortably. She was no longer the little country girl when she gave herself up to the spell of her own voice. Strange how she let herself be carried away by the tones, how freely and unreservedly she poured herself into them! He felt it almost as something immodest, as though she were singing herself naked before him. There was a burning around his heart; his temples throbbed, and he cast his eyes down. Did none of the others see it? No, they saw nothing. Why, she had flown out of herself, away from Fjordby, from Fjordby poetry and Fjordby sentiments! She was in another and a bolder world, where the passions grew on high mountains and flung their red blossoms to the storm.
Could it be his lack of musical sense that made him read so much meaning into her song? He could hardly persuade himself that it was so, and yet he wished it, for he would much rather have her as she usually appeared. When she sat at her sewing, talking in her quiet, tranquil voice, or looking up with her clear, kind eyes, his whole being was drawn to her with the irresistible strength of a deep, calm longing for home. He wanted to humble himself before her, to bend the knee and call her holy. He always felt a strange yearning to come close to her, not only to her present self, but to her childhood and all the days he had not known her. When they were alone, he would lead her to talk of the past, of her little troubles and mistakes and the vagaries that every childhood is full of. He lived in these memories and clung to them with a restless jealousy and a languishing desire to possess and be one with these pale foreshadowings of a life which was even now glowing in richer, riper colors. And then came this song so strangely powerful! It startled him very much like a wide sweep of horizon suddenly revealed by a turn of the path, reducing the forest dell which had been his home to a mere corner in the landscape, and making its little rippling lines seem insignificant beside the grandeur of the hills and distant moors.—Oh, but the landscape was a fata morgana, and what he thought he heard in her song only a fantasy; for now she spoke just as she always did and was her blessed self again. Moreover, he knew from a thousand little things that she was like still water, without storm or waves, reflecting the starry blue heavens.
It was thus he loved her, and thus he saw her; and when she was with him she gradually formed herself upon his image of her, not with any conscious dissembling, for after all his conception was partly true, and it was only natural—when his every word and look, his every thought and dream, appealed to that side of her nature and did homage to it—that she should assume the guise he almost forced upon her. Besides, how could she bother about giving each and every one a correct impression of herself when all her thoughts centred around the one, Erik, the only one, her chosen lord, whom she loved with a passion that was not of herself and with an idolatrous worship that terrified her. She had imagined love to be a sweet dignity, not this consuming unrest, full of fear and humiliation and doubt. Many a time when the declaration seemed trembling on Erik’s lips, she had felt as if it were her duty to put her hand on his mouth and warn him against speaking, accusing herself and telling him how she had deceived him and how unworthy of his love she was, how earthly and small and impure, so far from noble, so wretchedly low and common and wicked! She felt herself dishonest under his admiring gaze; calculating, when she failed to avoid him; criminal, when she could not bring herself to beg God in her evening prayer that He would turn Erik’s heart from her in
