AFTER she came back to Tjele, Mistress Marie Grubbe remained in her father’s household until sixteen hundred and seventy-nine, when she was wedded² to Palle Dyre, counsellor of justice to his Majesty³ the King, and with him she lived in a marriage that offered no shadow of an event until sixteen hundred and eighty-nine. This period of her life lasted from the time she was thirty till she was forty-six—full sixteen years.

Full sixteen years of petty worries, commonplace duties, and dull monotony, with no sense of intimacy⁴ or affection to give warmth, no homelike comfort to throw a ray of light. Endless brawling⁵ about nothing, noisy hectoring for the slightest neglect, peevish⁶ fault-finding, and coarse jibes⁷ were all that met her ears. Every sunlit day of life was coined into dollars and shillings and pennies; every sigh uttered was a sigh for loss; every wish, a wish for gain; every hope, a hope of more. All around her was shabby parsimony⁸; in every nook and corner, busyness that chased away all pleasure; from every hour stared the wakeful eye of greed. Such was the existence Marie Grubbe led.

In the early days, she would sometimes forget the hubbub⁹ and bustle¹⁰ all around her and sink into waking dreams of beauty, changing as clouds, teeming¹² as light. There was one that came oftener than others. It was a dream of a sleeping castle hidden behind roses. Oh, the quiet garden of that castle, with stillness in the air and in the leaves, with silence brooding over all like a night without darkness! There the odors slept in the flower-cups and the dewdrops on the bending blades of grass. There the violet drowsed with mouth half open under the curling leaves of the fern, while a thousand - 207 - bursting buds had been

分享到：