Elizabeth was more agitated even than usual after a scene of this kind.
When he had struck her son, her indignation had almost mastered her; and
it frightened her now to think how near she had been to an explosion.
This time the so-often-repeated excuses which she had accustomed herself
to make for him would not suggest themselves; and as she lay awake in
the stillness of the night, and looked back through the years that were
gone, it seemed as if she was struggling and labouring on for ever
without any prospect of getting nearer to the goal, and that her
patience was wellnigh exhausted. Had she no claim at all to
consideration? or must she be for ever silent like this, till one of
them should at last be laid in Tromö churchyard?
These thoughts, having been once roused, would not be repressed again.
They held possession of her during the following day too; and she could
settle down to no work of any kind. She dreaded that Salvé might
unexpectedly return, and did not know how she should receive him,--she
no longer felt sure of being able to control herself. Her own house had
all of a sudden become confined and suffocating, as if it were a prison
in which she had sat for years: it seemed as if she could bear this way
of living no longer.
On one of the following days a neighbour came in with a message from her
aunt. She was ill, and wished Elizabeth to come and see her.
Leaving word, accordingly, for Salvé when he returned, where she was
gone, she took Henrik with her, and set out at once for Arendal. It was
almost a relief to think that she would be away this time when he came
home.
That old Mother Kirstine should be laid up, was, in its way, an event in
the place. Having been professed sick-nurse for so many years, she was
connected by ties of grateful recollection with a number of families.
Men who were now fathers themselves remembered well her face bending
over them when as children they had tossed about in measles or fever;
and when any more serious illness now occurred in any of their
households, she appeared upon the scene as a matter of course without
waiting to be sent for. And it was a comfort in itself to see that
strong, self-possessed old woman, with her quiet experienced tact and
untiring faculty of keeping awake, moving about the sick-bed, and giving
her directions with a confidence that brooked no contradiction. Her
position, in fact, was such, that when a new doctor arrived he soon
perceived that the first thing he had to do, if he was to have any
reputation in the town, would be to win the confidence of old Mother
Kirstine.
Young Fru Beck, amongst others, had constantly sent to inquire after
her; and when she heard that Elizabeth was there, she could not resist
the opportunity of going to see her.
It was one evening before dinner--Mother Kirstine had fallen into a
quiet sleep, and Elizabeth was sitting by her bedside, when she saw Fru
Beck pass the window. Elizabeth knew she would come in, and sat with
beating heart waiting for her knock at the door.
Fru Beck must have stood a long while in the porch, for some minutes
passed before the latch was stirred. Elizabeth went softly out and
opened the door.
They stood face to face. Elizabeth's eyes were full of tears, but Fru
Beck's feelings were not at that moment so easily expressed. She
silently pressed Elizabeth's hand, and her manner, and the expression of
her pale face, showed that she was not the less moved of the two at
their meeting again.
Elizabeth showed her into Mother Kirstine's comfortable little kitchen,
where a saucepan of broth for her sick aunt was simmering over the fire.
She invited her visitor to take a seat. It was so quiet that they could
hear the watch ticking in the next room where her aunt was sleeping.
Neither spoke for a moment or two. Then Fru Beck asked in a low voice--
"How is your aunt, Elizabeth?"
It was a natural question to ask under the circumstances, but it was
felt by both to be only a preliminary breaking of the ice; she had,
besides, sent a messenger that morning already to make inquiries.
"Thank you, Fru Beck, she is improving," Elizabeth replied. "She is
asleep now, and that will do her good."
"It is a long time since we saw each other--nearly eighteen years," said
Fru Beck, and her eyes dwelt upon Elizabeth as if to find what traces
time had left upon her. "But you have kept strong, I see--stronger than
I have."
"It was that morning I left for Holland," said Elizabeth, seeming to
recall it with a certain pleasure.
"I have often thought of that time," whispered Fru Beck, more to herself
almost than to the person she was talking to. Her lip trembled slightly,
and Elizabeth read an expression of mute sorrow in her face. She was on
the point of telling Elizabeth that she knew the reason of her going;
but after debating for a moment within herself whether she should or
not, finally let it pass.
"Ah! if we could only see into the future, Elizabeth!" she exclaimed
with a sigh, and looked sadly at her, as if she thought she had given
expression to a feeling that must be common to them both.
"It is better as it is, Fru Beck. Many things happen in life that would
not be so easy to bear if we were cast down beforehand."
"Yes; but one could guard one's self," whispered Fru Beck, with a
certain bitterness and hardness in her voice.
Elizabeth made no reply, and there was a pause, which seemed to Fru Beck
to have broken the thread of the conversation. She deliberated how she
should take it up again so as to get at what she wanted to say, and
taking Elizabeth's hand with sudden warmth, she said--
"If there is anything your aunt wants, you know, I hope, that she has
only to send to me." She would rather have made Elizabeth herself the
object of her interest instead of her aunt, but felt that there was much
in the relations in which they had stood to one another to make that
impossible; but her meaning was just as clear.
"And for yourself, Elizabeth?" she went on, looking searchingly into her
eyes, with an expression of deep sympathy. "All is not right with you: I
am afraid your marriage has not been a happy one."
These last words brought a sudden flush into Elizabeth's face, and she
involuntarily withdrew her hand.
She looked at Fru Beck with an expression of wounded pride, as if it was
a subject she declined to discuss.
"That is not the case, Fru Beck," she replied. "I am"--she was going to
say "happily," but preferred to say--"not unhappily married." She felt
that that sounded rather weak, and added--
"I have never loved, never wished for, any one but him who is now my
husband."
"I am overjoyed to hear it, Elizabeth, for I had heard otherwise," said
Fru Beck, with some embarrassment--and there was another pause. She felt
from Elizabeth's manner and bearing that she had wounded her
self-esteem; and this last unlucky speech, she was afraid, had made
matters worse.
There was a movement in the adjoining room, and Elizabeth was glad of an
occasion to break the rather painful silence, and went in to her aunt
for a moment.
Fru Beck looked after her with a rather surprised, but an unsatisfied,
expression; she must have been mistaken: but still, happy in her home
Elizabeth could scarcely be. And yet, she thought bitterly, what a gulf
there was between them! She, at all events, loved her husband.
When Elizabeth returned, Fru Beck, with the idea of effacing the
impression she had already produced, and to satisfy, at the same time,
her own longing to open her heart to somebody, said--
"You must not be offended at what I said, Elizabeth. I thought that
others might have sorrow too."
"We all have our burden, and often it is very hard to bear," rejoined
Elizabeth. She understood very well what Fru Beck's words had meant, and
looked at her compassionately; but she avoided answering directly to
what she thought had been blurted out unintentionally, and said--
"You have a son. That should be a great happiness, Fru Beck, and much to
live for."
"To live for!" she exclaimed--"to live for! I will confide to you
something that no one but you now knows. I am dying--dying every day. No
one knows as well as I do myself how much is left of me. It is little,
and it will soon be less." She spoke in a cold, pale kind of ecstasy.
"You are the only creature I have told this to--the only one on this
earth I really care about; hear it and forget it. And now, adieu," she
said; "if we ever meet again in this world, don't let the subject be
mentioned between us." She felt blindly for the door, and opened it.
"Every cross comes from above, and the worst of all sins is to despair,"
said Elizabeth, with an attempt at consolation; she said what most
readily occurred to her at the moment.
Fru Beck turned at the door, and looked back at her with a white, calm,
joyless face.
"Elizabeth," she said, "I found this in one of my husband's drawers. I
tell it you, that you may not think that that has been in any way the
cause of my spoilt life."
She took from her pocket a scrap of paper, yellow with age, and handed
it to her. The door closed behind her then, and she was gone.
Elizabeth sat still for a long while in sad distress, thinking of her.
Now she understood why Fru Beck was so pale. She had not a wrinkle in
her face--it looked so noble; but oh how cold, how pinched it had
become! Poor, poor woman! her burden was indeed a heavy one. It would
have been difficult to recognise Marie Forstberg again in her.
"That, then, it is to have married unhappily," she said to herself. She
seemed to have gazed into some terrible abyss.
Her friend's sorrows continued to occupy her thoughts as she sat by her
aunt's bedside; and when at last her feelings of compassion had calmed
down, another point in their conversation that had been hitherto thrown
into the background came into increasing prominence. It lay in the words
that had so suddenly and grievously wounded her.
"So, that is what the world says of us," she thought: "that our marriage
has been unhappy."
She had time and solitude enough, while tending her patient and sitting
up with her, to ponder the matter; and as she thought over her married
life, and contemplated unflinchingly the constant, weary, fruitless
struggle in which it had passed, and in which she had not advanced one
single step, but rather had been going always, always back, more and
more, she asked herself, could she say that there was happiness in a
life like that? And was Salvé himself happy? She saw him before her as
he was in his early youth, and as he was now--gloomy, savage, and
suspicious in his home; she thought how she welcomed him always with
disguised dread instead of with a wife's joy, how they had last parted,
and what feelings she had since entertained; and she dwelt long and
bitterly upon the contrast. To think that it should have come to this
between them! She began with dread to reflect, "Perhaps this is what
they mean by an unhappy marriage." It had never occurred to her before
that such a thing could be said of her--of her, who had married the man
whom of all others in the whole world she wished to marry.
She sat on far into the night with her hands folded on her knee, and
gazing straight before her, the night-light from the glass behind the
bed throwing its faint light over the room. Fru Beck's words, as she
stood there so pale, and told her of her unhappiness, recurred to her
again and again, more distinctly, it seemed, each time. "I am dying
every day. I know best myself how much is left of me. It is very little,
and will soon be less."
It seemed then all in a moment to flash upon her--
"That is just how Salvé and I are living. We are wasting away--we are
dying every day beside each other. That is what people do who are
unhappily married."
She sat for a long while, with her head bent forward, sorrowfully
engrossed with this thought. In all the self-sacrifice she had
practised, because she thought he could not bear to hear the truth, she
saw now nothing but one long corroding lie. It was owing to the want of
confidence in each other, of mutual candour--to their both having
shunned the truth, the only sure ground of happiness, that their life
together had been thus spoilt. She threw back her head with a look of
wild energy in her face, and never had she looked more handsome than
now, as she exclaimed decisively--
"But there shall be an end of this! Salvé and I shall no longer make a
desert of each other's life!" and she rose from her chair in great
agitation.
"What are you saying, Elizabeth?" asked her aunt, whom she had
unconsciously awakened.
"Nothing, dear aunt," she answered, and bent over the invalid with a cup
of broth, which she had been keeping warm over the night-light.
"You look so--so happy, Elizabeth."
"It is because you have slept so well, aunt; and if you drink this you
will go to sleep again."
There was a quiet smile on her lips now, and her whole bearing was
changed. The burden of years was taken off her heart. At last the
chilling, heavy, bewildering fog which had enclosed her whole life,
making every footstep, every thought, every joy uncertain, had lifted,
and she could clearly see her way.