They scoured the forest from end to end, eager to find all its treasures and marvels. They had divided it between them as children do; the part on one side of the road was Fennimore’s property, and that on the other side was Niels’s, and they would compare their realms and quarrel about which was the more glorious. Everything there had names—clefts and hillocks, paths and stiles, ditches and pools; and when they found a particularly magnificent tree, they gave that too a name. In this way they took complete possession and created a little world of their own which no one else knew and no one else was at home in, and yet they had no secret which all the world might not have heard.
As yet they had not.
But love was in their hearts, and was not there, as the crystals are present in a saturated solution, and yet are not present, not until a splinter or the merest particle of the right matter is thrown into the solution, releasing the slumbering atoms as if by magic, and they rush to meet one another, joining and riveting themselves together according to unsearchable laws, and in the same instant there is crystal—crystal.
So it was a trifle that made them feel they loved.
There is nothing to tell. It was a day like all other days, when they were alone together in the sitting-room, as they had been a hundred times before; their conversation was about things of no moment, and that which happened was outwardly as common and as everyday-like as possible. It was nothing except that Niels stood looking out of the window, and Fennimore came over to him and looked out too. That was all, but it was enough, for in a flash like lightning, the past and present and future were transformed for Niels Lyhne by the consciousness that he loved the woman standing by his side, not as anything bright and sweet and happy and beautiful that would lift him to ecstasy or rapture—such was not the nature of his love—but he loved her as something he could no more do without than the breath of life itself, and he reached out, as a drowning man clutches, and pressed her hand to his heart.
She understood him. With almost a scream, in a voice full of terror and agony, she cried out to him an answer and a confession: “Oh, yes, Niels!” and snatched away her hand in the same instant. A moment she stood, pale and shrinking, then sank down with one knee in an upholstered chair, hiding her face against the harsh velvet of the back, and sobbed aloud.
Niels stood a few seconds as though blinded, groping around among the bulb-glasses for support. It was only for a very few seconds; then he stepped over to the chair where she was lying, and bent over without touching her, resting one hand on the back of the chair.
“Don’t be so unhappy, Fennimore! Look up and let us talk about it. Will you, or will you not? Don’t be afraid! Let us bear it together, my own love! Come, try if you can’t!”
She raised her head slightly and looked up at him. “Oh, God, what shall we do! Isn’t it terrible, Niels! Why should such a thing happen to me? And how lovely it all could have been—so happy!” and she sobbed again.
“Should I not have spoken?” he moaned. “Poor Fennimore, would you rather never have known it?”
She raised her head again and caught his hand. “I wish I knew it and were dead. I wish I were in my grave and knew it, that would be good—oh, so peaceful and good!”
“It is bitter for us both, Fennimore, that the first thing our love brings us should be only misery and tears. Don’t you think so?”
“You must not be hard on me, Niels. I can’t help it. You can’t see it as I do—I am the one that should be strong, because I am the one that is bound. I wish I could take my love and force it back into the most secret depth of my soul and lock it in and be deaf to all its wailing and its prayers, and then tell you to go far, far away; but I can’t, I have suffered so much, I can’t suffer that too—I can’t, Niels. I can’t live without you—see, can I? Do you think I can?”
She rose and flung herself on his breast.
“Here I am, and I won’t let you go; I won’t send you away, while I sit here alone in the old darkness. It is like a bottomless pit of loathing and misery. I won’t throw myself into it. I would rather jump into the fjord, Niels. Even if the new life brings other agonies, at least they are new agonies, and haven’t the dull sting of the old, and can’t stab home like the old, which know my heart so cruelly well. Am I talking wildly? Yes, of course I am, but it is so good to talk to you without any reserve and without having to be careful not to say what I have no right to. For
