He was silent.
She said nothing either, but lay very still with a melancholy smile on her lips, pale as a flower.
Then she half rose and stretched out her hand to Niels. “Will you be my friend?” she asked.
“I am your friend, Fennimore,” and he took her hand.
“Will you, Niels?”
“Always,” he replied, lifting the hand to his lips reverently.
When he rose, it seemed to Fennimore that he held himself more erect than she had ever seen him before.
A little later Trine came in to announce her return, and then there was tea, and at last the rowing back through the dreary rain.
Toward morning Erik came home, and when Fennimore saw him by the cold, truthful light of dawn, preparing to go to bed, heavy and unsteady with drink, his eyes glazed from gambling and his face dirty-pale after the sleepless night, then all the fair words Niels had spoken seemed to her quite visionary. The bright promises she had made to her own heart fainted and paled before the oncoming day—vapory dreams and fumes of fancy: a fairy flock of lies!
What was the use of struggling with this weight dragging them both down? It was futile to lighten it by lies; their life would never have its old buoyancy. The frost had been there, and the wealth of vines and creepers and clustering roses and blossoms fairer than roses that had entwined them had shed every tiny leaf, lost every blossom, and nothing remained but the tough, naked withes binding them together in an unbreakable tether. What did it avail that she roused the feelings of former days to an artificial life by the warmth of memories, that she put her idol up on its pedestal again, that she called back the light of admiration to her eyes, the words of adoration to her lips, and the flush of happiness to her cheeks! What did it all avail, when he would not take upon himself to be the priest of the idol and so help her to a pious fraud? He! He did not even remember her love. Not one of her words echoed in his ears, not one of all their days was hidden in his soul.
No, dead and cold was the ardent love of their hearts. The fragrance, the glamor, and the tremulous tones—all had been wafted away. There they sat, from force of habit, he with his arm around her waist, she with her head resting on his shoulder, drearily sunk in silence, forgetting each other; she, to remember the glorious hero he had never been; he, to transform her in his dreams to the ideal which he now always saw shining in the sky high above her head. Such was their life together, and the days came and went without bringing any change, and day after day they gazed out over the desert of their lives, and told themselves that it was a desert, that there were no flowers nor any hope of flowers or springs or green palms.
As the autumn advanced, Erik’s drinking-bouts became more frequent. What was the use, he said to Niels, of sitting at home waiting for ideas that never came, until his thoughts turned to stone in his head? Moreover, he did not get much comfort from Niels’s society; he needed people with some grit in them, people of lusty flesh and blood, not a whim-wham of delicate nerves. Niels and Fennimore were therefore left much alone, for Niels came over to Marianelund every day.
The covenant of friendship they had made and the talk they had had on that Sunday afternoon put them at their ease with each other, and, lonely as they both were, they drew closer together in a warm and tender friendship, which soon gained a strong hold over both. It absorbed them so that their thoughts, whether they were together or apart, always turned to this bond, as birds building the same nest look on everything they gather or pass by with the one pleasant goal of making the nest snug and comfortable for each other and themselves.
If Niels came while Erik was away, they nearly always, even on rainy and stormy days, took long walks in the woods behind the garden. They had fallen in love with that forest, and grew fonder of it as they watched the summer life die out. There were a thousand things to see. First, how the leaves turned yellow and red and brown, then how they fell off, whirling on a windy day in yellow swarms, or softly rustling in still air, single leaf after leaf, down against the stiff boughs and between the pliant brown twigs. And when the leaves fell from trees and bushes, the hidden secrets of summer were revealed in nest upon nest. What treasures on the ground and on the branches, dainty seeds and bright-colored berries, brown nuts, shining acorns and exquisite acorn cups, tassels of coral on the barberry, polished black
