Marie Grubbe by Jens Peter Jacobsen (parable of the sower read online txt) 📕

CHAPTER XVI

After she came back to Tjele, Mistress Marie Grubbe remained in her

father’s household until sixteen hundred and seventy-nine, when she

was wedded to Palle Dyre, counsellor of justice to his Majesty 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 intimacy or affection to give warmth, no

homelike comfort to throw a ray of light. Endless brawling about

nothing, noisy hectoring for the slightest neglect, peevish

fault-finding, and coarse jibes 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 parsimony; 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 hubbub and bustle all

around her and sink into waking dreams of beauty, changing as clouds,

teeming 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 bursting buds had been

lulled to sleep in the fullness of spring at the very moment when they

quickened on the branches of the moss green trees. She came up to the

palace. From the thorny vines of the rose bushes, a flood of green

billowed noiselessly down over walls and roofs, and the flowers fell

like silent froth, sometimes in masses of bloom, sometimes flecking

the green like pale pink foam. From the mouth of the marble lion a

fountain jet shot up like a tree of crystal with boughs of cobweb, and

shining horses mirrored breathless mouths and closed eyes in the

dormant waters of the porphyry basin while the page rubbed his eyes in

sleep.

 

She feasted her eyes on the tranquil beauty of the old garden where

fallen petals lay like a rose-flushed snowdrift high against walls and

doors, hiding the marble steps. Oh, to rest! To let the days glide

over her in blissful peace hour after hour and to feel all memories,

longings, and dreams flowing away out of her mind in softly lapping

waves—that was the most beautiful of all the dreams she knew.

 

This was true at first, but her imagination tired of flying

unceasingly toward the same goal like an imprisoned bee buzzing

against the windowpane, and all other faculties of her soul wearied

too. As a fair and noble edifice in the hands of barbarians is laid

waste and spoiled, the bold spires made into squat cupolas, the

delicate, lace-like ornaments broken bit by bit, and the wealth of

pictures hidden under layer upon layer of deadening whitewash, so was

Marie Grubbe laid waste and spoiled in those sixteen years.

 

Erik Grubbe, her father, was old and decrepit, and age seemed to

intensify all his worst traits just as it sharpened his features and

made them more repulsive. He was grouchy and perverse, childishly

obstinate, quick to anger, extremely suspicious, sly, dishonest, and

stingy. In his later days he always had the name of God on his lips,

especially when the harvest was poor or the cattle were sick, and he

would address the Lord with a host of cringing, fawning names of his

own invention. It was impossible that Marie should either love or

respect him, and besides she had a particular grudge against him

because he had persuaded her to marry Palle Dyre by dint of promises

that were never fulfilled and by threats of disinheriting her, turning

her out of Tjele, and withdrawing all support from her. In fact her

chief motive for the change had been her hope of making herself

independent of the paternal authority, though this hope was

frustrated, for Palle Dyre and Erik Grubbe had agreed to work the

farms of Tjele and Norbaek—which latter was given Marie as a dower on

certain conditions—together, and as Tjele was the larger of the two

and Erik Grubbe no longer had the strength to look after it, Marie and

her husband spent more time under her father’s roof than under their

own.

 

Palle Dyre was the son of Colonel Clavs Dyre of Sandvig and Krogsdal,

later of Vinge, and his wife Edele Pallesdaughter Rodtsteen. He was a

thickset, shortnecked little man, brisk in all his motions and with a

rather forceful face, which, however, was somewhat marred by a

hemorrhage in the lungs that had affected his right cheek.

 

Marie despised him. He was as stingy and greedy as Erik Grubbe

himself. Yet he was really a man of some ability, sensible, energetic,

and courageous, but he simply lacked any sense of honor whatever. He

would cheat and lie whenever he had a chance and was never in the

least abashed when found out. He would allow himself to be abused like

a dog and never answer back if silence could bring him a penny’s

profit. Whenever a relative or friend commissioned him to buy or sell

anything or entrusted any other business to him, he would turn the

matter to his own advantage without the slightest scruple. Though his

marriage had been in the main a bargain, he was not without a