Erik had discovered the villa when he left Fjordby after his engagement. As it contained everything they needed, and as he hoped to go to Italy in a year or two, he had persuaded Consul Claudi to postpone the purchase of household furnishings for a while. They had moved into Marianelund very much as into a hotel, except that they brought a few more trunks than travellers usually carry.
The house fronted the fjord, less than twenty feet from the water, and was rather ordinary in appearance. It had a balcony above, a veranda below, and at the back a young garden with trees no thicker than walking-sticks, but from the garden one could step right into a magnificent bit of beech woods with heathery glades and wide clefts opening between banks of white clay, and that made up for many shortcomings.
This was Fennimore’s new home, and for a while it was as bright as happiness could make it, for they were both young and in love, strong and healthy, and without a care for their means of subsistence, either spiritual or material.
But every palace of joy that rises heavenward has sand mixed in the earth on which it is founded, and the sand will collect and run away, slowly perhaps, imperceptibly perhaps, but it runs and runs, grain by grain. … And love? Even love is not a rock, however much we may wish to believe it.
She loved him with her whole soul, with the hot, tremulous passion born of fear. He was to her much more than a god, much nearer—he was an idol, whom she worshipped without reason and without reserve.
His love was strong as hers, but it lacked the fine, manly tenderness that protects the loved woman against herself and watches over her dignity. Dimly he felt it as a duty, which called him sometimes in a faint, low voice, but he would not hear. She was too alluring in her blind love; her beauty, which had the provocative luxuriance and the humble seductiveness of the female slave, incited him to a passion that knew neither bounds nor mercy.
In the old myth about Amor, is it not told somewhere that he puts his hand over Psyche’s eyes before they fly away, rapturously, into the glowing night?
Poor Fennimore! if she could have been consumed by the fire of her own heart, he who should have guarded her would have fanned the flames; for he was like that drunken monarch who swung the incendiary torch, shouting with joy to see his imperial city burn, intoxicating himself with the sight of the leaping flames, until the ashes made him sober.
Poor Fennimore! She did not know that the hymn of joy can be sung so often that both melody and words are lost, and nothing remains but a twaddle of triviality. She did not know that the intoxication which uplifts today takes its strength from the wings of tomorrow, and when at length sobriety dawned, gray and heavy, she realized tremblingly that they had loved themselves down to a sweet contempt for themselves and each other—a sweet contempt which day by day lessened in sweetness and became, at last, utterly bitter. They turned away from each other as far as they could; he, to dream about his betrayed ideal of lofty coldness and scornful grace; she, to gaze with longing despair at the dim, quiet shores of her girlhood days, now so immeasurably far away. With each day that passed, it seemed harder to bear; shame burned madly in her veins, and a suffocating disgust with herself made everything seem wretched and hopeless. There was a small deserted room containing nothing but the trunks she had brought from home, and there she would often sit, hour after hour, until the sun sank over the world out there and filled the room with reddish light. There she tortured herself with thoughts sharper than thorns and scourged herself with words more stinging than whips, until she was stupefied by misery and tried to deaden her pain by throwing herself down on the floor as something too full of corruption and dregs—a carrion of herself—too foul to be the seat of a soul. Her husband’s mistress! That thought was never out of her mind; with that she threw herself in the dust and trampled on herself; with that she barred every hope of regeneration and turned every happy memory to stone.
Gradually a hard, brutal indifference came over her, and she ceased to despair, as she had long ceased to hope. Her heaven had fallen, but she did not try to raise the vault again in her dreams. The earth was good enough for her, since she was but of earth, earthy. She did not hate Erik, nor did she draw away from him. No, she accepted his kisses; she despised herself too much to repulse them, and besides, was she not his wife—his woman?
For Erik, too, the awakening was bitter, although his man’s prosaic common sense had warned him that some time it must come. When it really came, however, when love no longer gave boot for every bane, and the veil of gleaming gold in which it had descended to earth for him had been wafted away, he felt such a sinking of his spirits and such a sluggishness creeping over all his powers that he was angered and alarmed. Feverishly he turned to his work to assure himself that he had lost nothing else besides happiness, but art did not give him
