Hjerrild rose. “Goodbye, Lyhne,” he said. “After all, it is a noble death to die for our poor country.”
“Yes,” said Niels, “and yet this is not the way we dreamed of doing our part that time long, long ago.”
Hjerrild left him. When he came into his own room, he stood a long while by the window looking up at the stars.
“If I were God,” he said under his breath, and in his thoughts he continued, “I would much rather save the man who was not converted at the last moment.”
The pain in Niels’s wound grew more and more intense; it tore and clutched at his breast, it persisted without mercy. What a relief it would have been if he had had a god to whom he could have moaned and prayed!
Toward morning he grew delirious, the inflammation was progressing rapidly.
So it went on for two more days and two more nights.
The last time Hjerrild saw Niels Lyhne he was babbling of his armor and of how he must die standing.
And at last he died the death—the difficult death.
Endnotes
-
Letters of J. P. Jacobsen. Published with a preface by Edvard Brandes. ↩
Colophon
Niels Lyhne
was published in 1880 by
J. P. Jacobsen.
It was translated from Danish in 1919 by
Hanna Astrup Larsen.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Claus Maack Andersen,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2017 by
Paul Marshall and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
The Danish author J. P. Jacobsen,
a painting completed in 1879 by
Ernst Josephson.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
February 5, 2023, 5:54 a.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/j-p-jacobsen/niels-lyhne/hanna-astrup-larsen.
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