At midnight she died.
They were dreary months that followed. Time seemed to swell up into something enormous and hostile; every day was an unending desert of emptiness, every night a hell of memories. The summer was almost over before the rushing, frothing torrent of his grief had hollowed out a riverbed in his soul where it could flow in a turgid, murmuring stream of sadness and longing.
Then it happened one day that he came home from the fields and found his little boy very ill. The child had been ailing for the last few days and had been restless in the night, but no one had believed it to be anything serious; now he lay in his little bed hot and cold with fever and moaning with pain.
The carriage was instantly sent to Varde for a physician, but none of the doctors were at home, and it had to wait for hours. At bedtime it had not yet returned.
Niels sat by the child’s cot. Every half hour or oftener he would send someone out to listen and look for the carriage. A mounted messenger was also despatched to meet it, but he failed to see any carriage and rode all the way to Varde.
This waiting for help that did not come made it all the more agonizing to watch the suffering of the sick child. The malady made rapid progress. Toward eleven the first attack of convulsions set in, and after that they came again and again at shorter and shorter intervals.
A little after one, the mounted messenger returned, saying that the carriage could not be expected for some hours yet, as none of the doctors had been at home when he rode out of town.
Then Niels broke down. He had fought against his despair as long as there was any hope, but now he could fight no more. He went into the dark parlor adjoining the sickroom and stared out through the dusky panes, while his nails dug into the wood of the casement. His eyes seemed to burrow into the darkness for some hope; his brain crouched for a spring up toward a miracle; then suddenly all was still and clear for an instant, and in the clearness he turned away from the window to a table standing there, threw himself over it, and sobbed without tears.
When he came into the sickroom again, the child was in convulsions. He looked at it as if he would stab himself to death with the sight: the tiny hands, clenched and white, with bluish nails, the staring eyes turning in their sockets, the distorted mouth, and the teeth grinding with a sound like iron on stone—it was terrible, and yet that was not the worst. No, but when the convulsions ceased and the body grew soft again, relaxing with the happy relief of lessened pain, then to see the terror that came into the child’s eyes when it felt the first faint approach of the convulsions returning, the growing prayer for help when the pain came nearer and yet nearer—to see this and not be able to help, not with his heart’s blood, not with all he possessed! He lifted his clenched hands threateningly to heaven, he caught up his child in a mad impulse of flight, and then he threw himself down on the floor on his knees, praying to the Lord Who is in heaven, Who keeps the earth in fear through trials and chastisements, Who sends want and sickness, suffering and death, Who demands that every knee shall bend to Him in trembling, from Whom no flight is possible—either at the uttermost ends of the ocean or in the depths of the earth—He, the God Who, if it pleases Him, will tread the one you love best under His foot, torture him back into the dust from which He himself created him.
With such thoughts, Niels Lyhne sent prayers up to the God; he threw himself down in utter abandonment before the heavenly throne, confessing that His was the power and His alone.
Still the child suffered.
Toward morning, when the old family physician drove in through the gate, Niels was alone.
XIV
Autumn had come; there were no flowers any more on the graves up there in the churchyard, and the fallen leaves lay brown and moldering in the wet under the trees of Lønborggård.
Niels Lyhne went about in the empty rooms in bitter despondency. Something had given way in him the night the child died. He had lost faith in himself, lost his belief in the power of human beings to bear the life they had to live. Existence had sprung a leak, and its contents were seeping out through all the cracks without plan or purpose.
It was of no avail that he called the prayer he had prayed a father’s frenzied cry for help for his child, even though he knew none could hear his cry. He had known well what he did even in the depths of his despair. He had been tempted and had fallen; for it was a fall, a betrayal of himself and his ideal. No doubt tradition had been too strong in his blood. Humanity had cried to heaven in its agony for many thousands of years, and he had yielded to an inherited instinct. But he ought to have resisted it, for he knew with the innermost fibres of his brain that gods were dreams, and he knew that when he prayed he was taking refuge in a dream, just as surely as he knew in the old days, when he threw himself into the arms of his fancies, that they were fancies. He had not been able to bear life as it was. He had taken part in the battle for the highest, and in the stress of the fight he had deserted the
