LITMIR.BIZ

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the scent of fresh green woods, the huntsman’s cry and the fiddler’s play and the rustling of stiff, billowy silks. Distant but sunlit, the life of his childhood in the red-roofed Holstein town passed before him. He saw the tall form of his mother, Mistress Margrethe Pappen, a black hymn-book in her white hands. He saw the freckled chamber-maid with her thin ankles and the fencing-master with his pimpled, purplish face and his bow-legs. The park of Gottorp castle passed in review, and the meadows with fresh hay-stacks by the fjord, and there stood the gamekeeper’s clumsy boy Heinrich, who knew how to crow like a cock and was marvellously clever at playing ducks and drakes. Last came the church with its strange twilight, its groaning organ, its mysterious iron-railed chapel, and its emaciated Christ holding a red banner in his hand.

      Again came a blast of the horn from West Gate, and in the same moment the sun broke out, bright and warm, routing all mists and shadowy tones.

      He remembered the chase when he had shot his first deer, and old von Dettmer had made a sign in his forehead with the blood of the animal, while the poor hunters’ boys blew their blaring fanfares. Then there was the nosegay to the castellan’s Malene and the serious interview with his tutor, then his first trip abroad. He remembered his first duel in the fresh, dewy morning, and Annette’s cascades of ringing laughter, and the ball at the Elector’s, and his lonely walk outside of the city gates with head aching, the first time he had been tipsy. The rest was a golden mist, filled with the tinkling of goblets and the scent of wine, and there were Lieschen and Lotte, and Martha’s white neck and Adelaide’s round arms. Finally came the journey to Copenhagen and the gracious reception by his royal father, the bustling futilities of court duties by day and the streams of wine and frenzied kisses at night, broken by the gorgeous revelry of the chase or by nightly trysts and tender whisperings in the shelter of Ibstrup park or the gilded halls of Hilleröd castle.

      Yet clearer than all these he saw the black, burning eyes of Sofie Urne; more insistent than aught else her voice sounded in his spell-bound memory—beautiful and voluptuously soft, its low notes drawing like white arms, or rising like a flitting bird that soars and mocks with wanton trills, while it flees....

      A rustling among the bushes of the rampart below waked him from his dreams.

      “Who goes there!” he cried.

      “None but Daniel, Lord Gyldenlöve, Daniel Knopf,” was the answer, as a little crippled man came out from the bushes, bowing.

      “Ha! Hop-o’-my-Thumb? A thousand plagues, what are you doing here?”

      The man stood looking down at himself sadly.

      “Daniel, Daniel!” said Ulrik Frederik, smiling. “You didn’t come unscathed from the ‘fiery furnace’ last night. The German brewer must have made too hot a fire for you.”

      The cripple began to scramble up the edge of the rampart. Daniel Knopf, because of his stature called Hop-o’-my-Thumb, was a wealthy merchant of some and twenty years, known for his fortune as well as for his sharp tongue and his skill in fencing. He was boon companion with the younger nobility, or at least with a certain group of gallants, le cercle des mourants, consisting chiefly of younger men about the court. Ulrik Frederik was the life and soul of this crowd, which, though convivial rather than intellectual, and notorious rather than beloved, was in fact admired and envied for its very peccadillos.

      Half tutor and half mountebank, Daniel moved among these men. He did not walk beside them on the public streets, or in houses of quality, but in the fencing-school, the wine-cellar, and the tavern he was indispensable. No one else could discourse so scientifically on bowling and dog-training or talk with such unction of feints and parrying. No one knew wine as he did. He had worked out profound theories about dicing and love-making, and could speak learnedly and at length on the folly of crossing the domestic stud with the Salzburger horses. To crown all, he knew anecdotes about everybody, and—most impressive of all to the young men—he had decided opinions about everything.

      Moreover, he was always ready to humor and serve them, never forgot the line that divided him from the nobility, and was decidedly funny when, in a fit of drunken frolic, they would dress him up in some whimsical guise. He let himself be kicked about and bullied without resenting it, and would often good-naturedly throw himself into the breach to stop a conversation that threatened the peace of the company.

      Thus he gained admittance to circles that were to him as the very breath of life. To him, the citizen and cripple, the nobles seemed like demigods. Their cant alone was human speech. Their existence swam in a shimmer of light and a sea of fragrance, while common folk dragged out their lives in drab-colored twilight and stuffy air. He cursed his citizen birth as a far greater calamity than his lameness, and grieved over it, in solitude, with a bitterness and passion that bordered on insanity.

      “How now, Daniel,” said Ulrik Frederik, when the little man reached him. “’Twas surely no light mist that clouded your eyes last night, since you’ve run aground here on the rampart, or was the clary at flood tide, since I find you high and dry like Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat?”

      “Prince of the Canaries, you rave if you suppose I was in your company last night!”

      “A thousand devils, what’s the matter then?” cried Ulrik Frederik impatiently.

      “Lord Gyldenlöve,” said Daniel, looking up at him with tears in his eyes, “I’m an unhappy wretch.”

      “You’re a dog of a huckster! Is it a herring-boat you’re afraid the Swede will catch? Or are you groaning because trade has come to a standstill, or do you think the saffron will lose its strength and the mildew fall on your pepper and paradise grain? You’ve a ha’penny soul! As if good citizens had naught else to think about than their own trumpery going to the devil,—now that we may look for the fall of both King and realm!”

      “Lord Gyldenlöve—”

      “Oh, go to the devil with your whining!”

      “Not so, Lord Gyldenlöve,” said Daniel solemnly, stepping back a pace. “For I don’t fret about the stoppage of trade, nor the loss of money and what money can buy. I care not a doit nor a damn for herring and saffron, but to be turned away by officers and men like one sick with the leprosy or convicted of crime, that’s a sinful wrong against me, Lord Gyldenlöve. That’s why I’ve been lying in the grass all night like a scabby dog that’s been turned out, that’s why I’ve been writhing like a miserable crawling beast and have cried to God in heaven, asking Him why I alone should be utterly cast away, why my arm alone should be too withered and weak to wield a sword, though they’re arming lackeys and ’prentice boys—”

      “But who the shining Satan has turned you away?”

      “Faith, Lord Gyldenlöve, I ran to the ramparts like the others, but when I came to one party they told me they had room for no more, and they were only poor citizens anyway and not fit to be with the gentry and persons of quality. Some parties said they would have no crooked billets, for cripples drew the bullets and brought ill luck, and none would hazard life and limb unduly by having amongst them one whom the Lord had marked. Then I begged Major-General Ahlefeldt that he would order me to a position, but he shook his head and laughed: things hadn’t come to such a pass yet that they had to stuff the ranks with stunted stumps who’d give more trouble than aid.”

      “But why didn’t you go to the officers whom you know?”

      “I did so, Lord Gyldenlöve. I thought at once of the cercle and spoke to one or two of the mourants—King Petticoat and the Gilded Knight.”

      “And did they give you no help?”

      “Ay, Lord Gyldenlöve, they helped me—Lord Gyldenlöve, they helped me, may God find them for it! ‘Daniel,’ they said, ‘Daniel, go home and pick the maggots out of your damson prunes!’ They had believed I had too much tact to come here with my buffoonery. ’Twas all very well if they thought me fit to wear cap and bells at a merry bout, but when they were on duty I was to keep out of their sight. Now, was that well spoken, Lord Gyldenlöve? No, ’twas a sin, a sin!

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