Transcriber’s Note:

This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical effects.
Italics are delimited with the ‘_’ character as _italic_. In the printed
original, emphasis is indicated by gesperrt (spaced) text, but is here
also delimited as the italic.

Footnotes have been collected at the end of each section or act in which
they are referenced.

Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please
see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding
the handling of any other textual issues encountered during its
preparation.

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
     HENRIK IBSEN

                                VOLUME I

                          LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT

                          THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG

                             LOVE'S COMEDY

                         THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
                              HENRIK IBSEN

           _Copyright Edition.       Complete in 11 Volumes._
                      _Crown 8vo, price 4s. each._

                    =ENTIRELY REVISED AND EDITED BY=
                            =WILLIAM ARCHER=

         Vol. I.      Lady Inger, The Feast at Solhoug, Love’s
                        Comedy

         Vol. II.     The Vikings, The Pretenders

         Vol. III.    Brand

         Vol. IV.     Peer Gynt

         Vol. V.      Emperor and Galilean (2 parts)

         Vol. VI.     The League of Youth, Pillars of Society

         Vol. VII.    A Doll’s House, Ghosts

         Vol. VIII.   An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck

         Vol. IX.     Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea

         Vol. X.      Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder

         Vol. XI.     Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, When
                        We Dead Awaken

                       LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
                        21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.

                         THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
                              HENRIK IBSEN

                           COPYRIGHT EDITION

                                VOLUME I

                          LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT

                          THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG

                             LOVE'S COMEDY

                         WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY

                             WILLIAM ARCHER

                                  AND

                      C. H. HERFORD, LITT.D., M.A.

[Illustration: title page]

                                 LONDON
                           WILLIAM HEINEMANN
                                  1910

                  _First printed (Collected Edition)_ 1908
                          _Second Impression_ 1910

                  _Copyright_ 1908 _by William Heinemann_

                                CONTENTS

                                                              PAGE

     GENERAL PREFACE                                           vii

     INTRODUCTION TO “LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT”                   xvii

     INTRODUCTION TO “THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG”                 xxxiii

     INTRODUCTION TO “LOVE’S COMEDY”                        xxxvii

     “LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT”                                      1
                    _Translated by_ CHARLES ARCHER

     “THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG”                                    181
                              _Translated by_
                        WILLIAM ARCHER and MARY MORISON

     “LOVE’S COMEDY”                                           285
                       _Translated by_ C. H. HERFORD

                            GENERAL PREFACE

    The eleven volumes of this edition contain all, save one, of the
    dramas which Henrik Ibsen himself admitted to the canon of his
    works. The one exception is his earliest, and very immature,
    tragedy, _Catilina_, first published in 1850, and republished in
    1875. This play is interesting in the light reflected from the
    poet’s later achievements, but has little or no inherent value. A
    great part of its interest lies in the very crudities of its style,
    which it would be a thankless task to reproduce in translation.
    Moreover, the poet impaired even its biographical value by largely
    rewriting it before its republication. He did not make it, or
    attempt to make it, a better play, but he in some measure corrected
    its juvenility of expression. Which version, then, should a
    translator choose? To go back to the original would seem a
    deliberate disregard of the poet’s wishes; while, on the other hand,
    the retouched version is clearly of far inferior interest. It seemed
    advisable, therefore, to leave the play alone, so far as this
    edition was concerned. Still more clearly did it appear unnecessary
    to include _The Warrior’s Barrow_ and _Olaf Liliekrans_, two early
    plays which were never admitted to any edition prepared by the poet
    himself. They were included in a Supplementary Volume of the
    Norwegian collected edition, issued in 1902, when Ibsen’s life-work
    was over. They have even less intrinsic value than _Catilina_, and
    ought certainly to be kept apart from the works by which he desired
    to be remembered. A fourth youthful production, _St. John’s Night_,
    remains to this day in manuscript. Not even German piety has dragged
    it to light.

    With two exceptions, the plays appear in their chronological order.
    The exceptions are _Love’s Comedy_, which ought by rights to come
    between _The Vikings_ and _The Pretenders_, and _Emperor and
    Galilean_, which ought to follow _The League of Youth_ instead of
    preceding it. The reasons of convenience which prompted these
    departures from the exact order are pretty obvious. It seemed highly
    desirable to bring the two Saga Plays, if I may so call them, into
    one volume; while as for _Emperor and Galilean_, it could not have
    been placed between _The League of Youth_ and _Pillars of Society_
    save by separating its two parts, and assigning _Caesar’s Apostasy_
    to Volume V., _The Emperor Julian_ to Volume VI.

    For the translations of all the plays in this edition, except
    _Love’s Comedy_ and _Brand_, I am ultimately responsible, in the
    sense that I have exercised an unrestricted right of revision. This
    means, of course, that, in plays originally translated by others,
    the merits of the English version belong for the most part to the
    original translator, while the faults may have been introduced, and
    must have been sanctioned, by me. The revision, whether fortunate or
    otherwise, has in all cases been very thorough.

    In their unrevised form, these translations have met with a good
    deal of praise and with some blame. I trust that the revision has
    rendered them more praiseworthy, but I can scarcely hope that it has
    met all the objections of those critics who have found them
    blameworthy. For, in some cases at any rate these objections
    proceeded from theories of the translator’s function widely
    divergent from my own—theories of which nothing, probably, could
    disabuse the critic’s mind, save a little experience of the
    difficulties of translating (as distinct from adapting) dramatic
    prose. Ibsen is at once extremely easy and extremely difficult to
    translate. It is extremely easy, in his prose plays, to realise his
    meaning; it is often extremely difficult to convey it in natural,
    colloquial, and yet not too colloquial, English. He is especially
    fond of laying barbed-wire entanglements for the translator’s feet,
    in the shape of recurrent phrases for which it is absolutely
    impossible to find an equivalent that will fit in all the different
    contexts. But this is only one of many classes of obstacles which
    encountered us on almost every page. I think, indeed, that my
    collaborators and I may take it as no small compliment that some of
    our critics have apparently not realised the difficulties of our
    task, or divined the laborious hours which have often gone to the
    turning of a single phrase. And, in not a few cases, the
    difficulties have proved sheer impossibilities. I will cite only one
    instance. Writing of _The Master Builder_, a very competent, and
    indeed generous, critic finds in it “a curious example of perhaps
    inevitable inadequacy.... ‘Duty! Duty! Duty!’ Hilda once exclaims in
    a scornful outburst. ‘What a short, sharp, stinging word!’ The
    epithets do not seem specially apt. But in the original she cries
    out ‘Pligt! Pligt! Pligt!’ and the very word stings and snaps.” I
    submit that in this criticism there is one superfluous word—to wit,
    the “perhaps” which qualifies “inevitable.” For the term used by
    Hilda, and for the idea in her mind, there is only one possible
    English equivalent: “Duty.” The actress can speak it so as more or
    less to justify Hilda’s feeling towards it; and, for the rest, the
    audience must “piece out our imperfections with their thoughts” and
    assume that the Norwegian word has rather more of a sting in its
    sound. It might be possible, no doubt, to adapt Hilda’s phrase to
    the English word, and say, “It sounds like the swish of a whip
    lash,” or something to that effect. But this is a sort of freedom
    which, rightly or wrongly, I hold inadmissible. Once grant the right
    of adaptation, even in small particulars, and it would be impossible
    to say where it should stop. The versions here presented (of the
    prose plays, at any rate) are translations, not paraphrases. If we
    have ever dropped into paraphrase, it is a dereliction of principle;
    and I do not remember an instance. For stage purposes, no doubt, a
    little paring of rough edges is here and there allowable; but even
    that, I think, should seldom go beyond the omission of lines which
    manifestly lose their force in translation, or are incomprehensible
    without a footnote.

    In the Introductions to previous editions I have always confined
    myself to the statement of biographical and historic facts, holding
    criticism no part of my business. Now that Henrik Ibsen has passed
    away, and his works have taken a practically uncontested place in
    world-literature, this reticence seemed no longer imposed upon me. I
    have consequently made a few critical remarks on each play, chiefly
    directed towards tracing the course of the poet’s technical
    development. Nevertheless, the Introductions are still mainly
    biographical, and full advantage has been taken of the stores of new
    information contained in Ibsen’s Letters, and in the books and
    articles about him that have appeared since his death. I have
    prefixed to _Lady Inger of Östråt_ a sketch of the poet’s life down
    to the date of that play; so that the Introductions, read in
    sequence, will be found to form a pretty full record of a career
    which, save for frequent changes of domicile, and the issuing of
    play after play, was singularly uneventful.

    The Introductions to _Loves Comedy_ and _Brand_, as well as the
    translations, are entirely the work of Professor Herford.

    A point of typography perhaps deserves remark. The Norwegian (and
    German) method of indicating emphasis by spacing the letters of a
    word, _thus_, has been adopted in this edition. It is preferable for
    various reasons to the use of italics. In dramatic work, for one
    thing, emphases have sometimes to be indicated so frequently that
    the peppering of the page with italics would produce a very ugly
    effect. But a more important point is this: the italic fount
    suggests a stronger emphasis than the author, as a rule, intends.
    The spacing of a word, especially if it be short, will often escape
    the eye which does not look very closely; and this is as it should
    be. Spacing, as Ibsen employs it, does not generally indicate any
    obtrusive stress, but is merely a guide to the reader in case a
    doubt should arise in his mind as to which of two words is intended
    to be the more emphatic. When such a doubt occurs, the reader, by
    looking closely at the text, will often find in the spacing an
    indication which may at first have escaped him. In almost all cases,
    a spaced word in the translation represents a spaced word in the
    original. I have very seldom used spacing to indicate an emphasis
    peculiar to the English phraseology. The system was first introduced
    in 1897, in the translation of _John Gabriel Borkman_. It has no
    longer even the disadvantage of unfamiliarity, since it has been
    adopted by Mr. Bernard Shaw in his printed plays, and, I believe, by
    other dramatists.

    Just thirty years have passed since I first put pen to paper in a
    translation of Ibsen. In October 1877, _Pillars of Society_ reached
    me hot from the press; and, having devoured it, I dashed off a
    translation of it in less than a week. It has since cost me five or
    six times as much work in revision as it originally did in
    translation. The manuscript was punctually returned to me by more
    than one publisher; and something like ten years elapsed before it
    slowly dawned on me that the translating and editing of Ibsen’s
    works was to be one of the chief labours, as it has certainly been
    one of the greatest privileges, of my life. Since 1887 or
    thereabouts, not many months have passed in which a considerable
    portion of my time has not been devoted to acting, in one form or
    another, as intermediary between Ibsen and the English-speaking
    public. The larger part of the work, in actual bulk, I have myself
    done; but I have had invaluable aid from many quarters, and not
    merely from those fellow workers who are named in the following
    pages as the original translators of certain of the plays. These
    “helpers and servers,” as Solness would say, are too many to be
    individually mentioned; but to all of them, and chiefly to one who
    has devoted to the service of Ibsen a good deal of the hard-won
    leisure of Indian official life, I hereby convey my heartfelt
    thanks.

    The task is now ended. Though it has involved not a little sheer
    drudgery, it has, on the whole, been of absorbing interest. And I
    should have been ungrateful indeed had I shrunk from drudgery in the
    cause of an author who had meant so much to me. I have experienced
    no other literary emotion at all comparable to the eagerness with
    which, ever since 1877, I awaited each new play of Ibsen’s, or the
    excitement with which I tore off the wrapper of the postal packets
    in which the little paper-covered books arrived from Copenhagen.
    People who are old enough to remember the appearance of the monthly
    parts of _David Copperfield_ or _Pendennis_ may have some inkling of
    my sensations; but they were all the intenser as they recurred at
    intervals, not of one month, but of two years. And it was not Ibsen
    the man of ideas or doctrines that meant so much to me; it was Ibsen
    the pure poet, the creator of men and women, the searcher of hearts,
    the weaver of strange webs of destiny. I can only trust that, by
    diligence in seeking for the best interpretation of his thoughts, I
    have paid some part of my debt to that great spirit, and to the
    glorious country that gave him birth.

                                                     WILLIAM ARCHER.

                          LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT

                              INTRODUCTION

    Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, at the little seaport
    of Skien, situated at the head of a long fiord on the south coast of
    Norway. His great-great-grandfather was a Dane who settled in Bergen
    about 1720. His great-grandmother, Wenche Dischington, was the
    daughter of a Scotchman, who had settled and become naturalised in
    Norway; and Ibsen himself was inclined to ascribe some of his
    characteristics to the Scottish strain in his blood. Both his
    grandmother (Plesner by name) and his mother, Maria Cornelia
    Altenburg, were of German descent. It has been said that there was
    not a drop of Norwegian blood in Ibsen’s composition; but it is
    doubtful whether this statement can be substantiated. Most of his
    male ancestors were sailors; but his father, Knud Ibsen, was a
    merchant. When Henrik (his first child) was born, he seems to have
    been prosperous, and to have led a very social and perhaps rather
    extravagant life. But when the poet was eight years old financial
    disaster overtook the family, and they had to withdraw to a
    comparatively small farmhouse on the outskirts of the little town,
    where they lived in poverty and retirement.

    As a boy, Ibsen appears to have been lacking in animal spirits and
    the ordinary childish taste for games. Our chief glimpses of his
    home life are due to his sister Hedvig, the only one of his family
    with whom, in after years, he maintained any intercourse, and whose
    name he gave to one of his most beautiful creations.[1] She relates
    that the only out-door amusement he cared for was “building”—in what
    material does not appear. Among indoor diversions, that to which he
    was most addicted was conjuring, a younger brother serving as his
    confederate. We also hear of his cutting out fantastically-dressed
    figures in pasteboard, attaching them to wooden blocks, and ranging
    them in groups or tableaux. He may be said, in short, to have had a
    toy theatre without the stage. In all these amusements it is
    possible, with a little goodwill, to divine the coming dramatist—the
    constructive faculty, the taste for technical legerdemain (which
    made him in his youth so apt a disciple of Scribe), and the
    fundamental passion for manipulating fictitious characters. The
    education he received was of the most ordinary, but included a
    little Latin. The subjects which chiefly interested him were history
    and religion. He showed no special literary proclivities, though a
    dream which he narrated in a school composition so impressed his
    master that he accused him (much to the boy’s indignation) of having
    copied it out of some book.

    His chief taste was for drawing, and he was anxious to become an
    artist; but his father could not afford to pay for his training.[2]
    At the age of fifteen, therefore, he had to set about earning his
    living, and was apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad, a town on
    the south-west coast of Norway, between Arendal and Christianssand.
    He was here in even narrower social surroundings than at Skien. His
    birthplace numbered some 3000 inhabitants, Grimstad about 800. That
    he was contented with his lot cannot be supposed; and the short,
    dark, taciturn youth seems to have made an unsympathetic and rather
    uncanny impression upon the burghers of the little township. His
    popularity was not heightened by a talent which he presently
    developed for drawing caricatures and writing personal lampoons. He
    found, however, two admiring friends in Christopher Lorentz Due, a
    custom-house clerk, and a law student named Olë Schulerud.

    The first political event which aroused his interest and stirred him
    to literary expression was the French Revolution of 1848. He himself
    writes:[3] “The times were much disturbed. The February revolution,
    the rising in Hungary and elsewhere, the Slesvig War—all this had a
    strong and ripening effect on my development, immature though it
    remained both then and long afterwards. I wrote clangorous poems of
    encouragement to the Magyars, adjuring them, for the sake of freedom
    and humanity, not to falter in their righteous war against ‘the
    tyrants’; and I composed a long series of sonnets to King Oscar,
    mainly, so far as I remember, urging him to set aside all petty
    considerations, and march without delay, at the head of his army, to
    the assistance of our Danish brothers on the Slesvig frontier.”
    These effusions remained in manuscript, and have, for the most part,
    perished. About the same time he was reading for his matriculation
    examination at Christiania University, where he proposed to study
    medicine; and it happened that the Latin books prescribed were
    Sallust’s _Catiline_ and Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations. “I devoured
    these documents,” says Ibsen, “and a few months later my drama
    [_Catilina_] was finished.” His friend Schulerud took it to
    Christiania, to offer it to the theatre and to the publishers. By
    both it was declined. Schulerud, however, had it printed at his own
    expense; and soon after its appearance, in the early spring of 1850,
    Ibsen himself came to Christiania.[4]

    For the most part written in blank verse, _Catilina_ towards the
    close breaks into rhyming trochaic lines of thirteen and fifteen
    syllables. It is an extremely youthful production, very interesting
    from the biographical point of view, but of small substantive merit.
    What is chiefly notable in it, perhaps, is the fact that it already
    shows Ibsen occupied with the theme which was to run through so many
    of his works—the contrast between two types of womanhood, one strong
    and resolute, even to criminality, the other comparatively weak,
    clinging, and “feminine” in the conventional sense of the word.

    In Christiania Ibsen shared Schulerud’s lodgings, and his poverty.
    There is a significant sentence in his preface to the re-written
    _Catilina_, in which he tells how the bulk of the first edition was
    sold as waste paper, and adds: “In the days immediately following we
    lacked none of the first necessities of life.” He went to a
    “student-factory,” or, as we should say, a “crammer’s,” managed by
    one Heltberg; and there he fell in with several of the leading
    spirits of his generation—notably with Björnson, A. O. Vinje, and
    Jonas Lie. In the early summer of 1850 he wrote a one-act play,
    _Kiæmpehöien_ (_The Warrior’s Barrow_), entirely in the sentimental
    and somewhat verbose manner of the Danish poet Oehlenschläger. It
    was accepted by the Christiania Theatre, and performed three times,
    but cannot have put much money in the poet’s purse. With Paul
    Botten-Hansen and A. O. Vinje he co-operated in the production of a
    weekly satirical paper, at first entitled _Manden_ (_The Man_), but
    afterwards _Andhrimner_, after the cook of the gods in Valhalla. To
    this journal, which lasted only from January to September 1851, he
    contributed, among other things, a satirical “music-tragedy,”
    entitled _Norma, or a Politician’s Love_. As the circulation of the
    paper is said to have been something under a hundred, it cannot have
    paid its contributors very lavishly. About this time, too, he
    narrowly escaped arrest on account of some political agitation, in
    which, however, he had not been very deeply concerned.

    Meanwhile a movement had been going forward in the capital of
    Western Norway, Bergen, which was to have a determining influence on
    Ibsen’s destinies.

    Up to 1850 there had been practically no Norwegian drama. The two
    great poets of the first half of the century, Wergeland and
    Welhaven, had nothing dramatic in their composition, though
    Wergeland more than once essayed the dramatic form. Danish actors
    and Danish plays held entire possession of the Christiania Theatre;
    and, though amateur performances were not uncommon in provincial
    towns, it was generally held that the Norwegians, as a nation, were
    devoid of all talent for acting. The very sound of Norwegian (as
    distinct from Danish) was held by Norwegians themselves to be
    ridiculous on the stage. Fortunately Olë Bull, the great violinist,
    was not of that opinion. With the insight of genius, he saw that the
    time had come for the development of a national drama; he set forth
    this view in a masterly argument addressed to the Storthing; and he
    gave practical effect to it by establishing, at his own risk, a
    Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. How rightly he had judged the situation
    may be estimated from the fact that among the raw lads who first
    presented themselves for employment was Johannes Brun, afterwards
    one of the greatest of comedians; while the first “theatre-poet”
    engaged by the management was none other than Henrik Ibsen.

    The theatre was opened on January 2, 1850; Ibsen entered upon his
    duties (at a salary of less than £70 a year) in November 1851.[5]

    Incredibly, pathetically small, according to our ideas, were the
    material resources of Bull’s gallant enterprise. The town of Bergen
    numbered only 25,000 inhabitants. Performances were given only
    twice, or, at the outside, three times, a week; and the highest
    price of admission was two shillings. What can have been attempted
    in the way of scenery and costumes it is hard to imagine. Of a
    three-act play, produced in 1852, we read that “the mounting, which
    cost £22 10s., left nothing to be desired.”

    Ibsen’s connection with the Bergen Theatre lasted from November 6,
    1851, until the summer of 1857—that is to say, from his
    twenty-fourth to his thirtieth year. He was engaged in the first
    instance “to assist the theatre as dramatic author,” but in the
    following year he received from the management a “travelling
    stipend” of £45 to enable him to study the art of theatrical
    production in Denmark and Germany, with the stipulation that, on his
    return, he should undertake the duties of “scene instructor”—that is
    to say, stage-manager or producer. In this function he seems to have
    been—as, indeed, he always was—extremely conscientious. A book
    exists in the Bergen Public Library containing (it is said) careful
    designs by him for every scene in the plays he produced, and full
    notes as to entrances, exits, groupings, costumes, accessories, &c.
    But he was not an animating or inspiring producer. He had none of
    the histrionic vividness of his successor in the post, Björnstjerne
    Björnson, who, like all great producers, could not only tell the
    actors what to do, but show them how to do it. Perhaps it was a
    sense of his lack of impulse that induced the management to give him
    a colleague, one Herman Låding, with whom his relations were none of
    the happiest. Ibsen is even said, on one occasion, to have
    challenged Låding to a duel.

    One of the duties of the “theatre-poet” was to have a new play ready
    for each recurrence of the “Foundation Day” of the theatre, January
    2. On that date, in 1853, Ibsen produced a romantic comedy, _St.
    John’s Night_. This is the only one of his plays that has never been
    printed. From the accounts of those who have seen the manuscript, it
    would appear to be a strange jumble of fantastic fairy-lore with
    modern comedy or melodrama. Perhaps it is not quite fanciful to
    regard it as a sort of half-way house between _A Midsummer Night’s
    Dream_ and _Peer Gynt_. In one of its scenes there appears to be an
    unmistakable foreshadowing of the episode in the Troll-King’s palace
    (_Peer Gynt_, Act II., Sc. 6). The play had no success, and was
    performed only twice. For the next Foundation Day, January 2, 1854,
    Ibsen prepared a revised version of _The Warrior’s Barrow_, already
    produced in Christiania. A year later, January 2, 1855, _Lady Inger
    of Östråt_ was produced—a work still immature, indeed, but giving,
    for the first time, no uncertain promise of the master dramatist to
    come.

    In an autobiographical letter to the Danish critic Peter Hansen,
    written from Dresden in 1870, Ibsen says: “_Lady Inger of Östråt_ is
    the result of a love-affair—hastily entered into and violently
    broken off—to which several of my minor poems may also be
    attributed, such as _Wild-flowers and Pot-plants_, _A Bird-Song_,
    &c.” The heroine of this love-affair can now be identified as a lady
    named Henrikke Holst, who seems to have preserved through a long
    life the fresh, bright spirit, the overflowing joyousness, which
    attracted Ibsen when she was only in her seventeenth year. Their
    relation was of the most innocent. It went no further than a few
    surreptitious rambles in the romantic surroundings of Bergen,
    usually with a somewhat older girl to play propriety, and with a bag
    of sugar-plums to fill up pauses in the conversation. The “violent”
    ending seems to have come when the young lady’s father discovered
    the secret of these excursions, and doubtless placed her under more
    careful control. What there was in this episode to suggest, or in
    any way influence, _Lady Inger_, I cannot understand. Nevertheless
    the identification seems quite certain. The affair had a charming
    little sequel. During the days of their love’s young dream, Ibsen
    treated the “wild-flower” with a sort of shy and distant chivalry at
    which the wood-gods must have smiled. He avoided even touching her
    hand, and always addressed her by the “De” (you) of formal
    politeness. But when they met again after many years, he a famous
    poet and she a middle-aged matron, he instinctively adopted the “Du”
    (thou) of affectionate intimacy, and she responded in kind. He asked
    her whether she had recognised herself in any of his works, and she
    replied: “I really don’t know, unless it be in the parson’s wife in
    _Love’s Comedy_, with her eight children and her perpetual
    knitting.” “Ibsen protested,” says Herr Paulsen, in whose _Samliv
    med Ibsen_ a full account of the episode may be read. It is
    interesting to note that the lady did not recognise herself in Eline
    Gyldenlöve, any more than we can.

    It must have been less than a year after the production of _Lady
    Inger_ that Ibsen made the acquaintance of the lady who was to be
    his wife. Susanna Dåe Thoresen was a daughter (by his second
    marriage) of Provost[6] Thoresen, of Bergen, whose third wife,
    Magdalene Krag, afterwards became an authoress of some celebrity. It
    is recorded that Ibsen’s first visit to the Thoresen household took
    place on January 7, 1856,[7] and that on that occasion, speaking to
    Susanna Thoresen, he was suddenly moved to say to her: “You are now
    Elina, but in time you will become Lady Inger.” Twenty years later,
    at Christmas 1876, he gave his wife a copy of the German translation
    of _Lady Inger_, with the following inscription on the fly-leaf:

                “This book is by right indefeasible thine,
                Who in spirit art born of the Östråt line.”

    In _Lady Inger_ Ibsen has chosen a theme from the very darkest hour
    of Norwegian history. King Sverre’s democratic monarchy, dating from
    the beginning of the thirteenth century, had paralysed the old
    Norwegian nobility. One by one the great families died out, their
    possessions being concentrated in the hands of the few survivors,
    who regarded their wealth as a privilege unhampered by obligations.
    At the beginning of the sixteenth century, then, patriotism and
    public spirit were almost dead among the nobles, while the monarchy,
    before which the old aristocracy had fallen, was itself dead, or
    rather merged (since 1380) in the Crown of Denmark. The peasantry,
    too, had long ago lost all effective voice in political affairs; so
    that Norway lay prone and inert at the mercy of her Danish rulers.
    It is at the moment of deepest national degradation that Ibsen has
    placed his tragedy; and the degradation was, in fact, even deeper
    than he represents it, for the longings for freedom, the stirrings
    of revolt, which form the motive-power of the action, are invented,
    or at any rate idealised, by the poet. Fru Inger Ottisdatter
    Gyldenlöve was, in fact, the greatest personage of her day in
    Norway. She was the best-born, the wealthiest, and probably the
    ablest woman in the land. At the time when Ibsen wrote, little more
    than this seems to have been known of her; so that in making her the
    victim of a struggle between patriotic duty and maternal love, he
    was perhaps poetising in the absence of positive evidence, rather
    than in opposition to it. Subsequent research, unfortunately, has
    shown that Fru Inger was but little troubled with patriotic
    aspirations. She was a hard and grasping woman, ambitious of social
    power and predominance, but inaccessible, or nearly so, to national
    feeling. It was from sheer social ambition, and with no qualms of
    patriotic conscience, that she married her daughters to Danish
    noblemen. True, she lent some support to the insurrection of the
    so-called “Dale-junker,” a peasant who gave himself out as the heir
    of Sten Sture, a former regent of Sweden; but there is not a tittle
    of ground for making this pretender her son. He might, indeed, have
    become her son-in-law, for, speculating on his chances of success,
    she had betrothed one of her daughters to him. Thus the Fru Inger of
    Ibsen’s play is, in her character and circumstances, as much a
    creation of the poet’s as though no historic personage of that name
    had ever existed. Olaf Skaktavl, Nils Lykke, and Eline Gyldenlöve
    are also historic names; but with them, too, Ibsen has dealt with
    the utmost freedom. The real Nils Lykke was married in 1528 to the
    real Eline Gyldenlöve. She died four years later, leaving him two
    children; and thereupon he would fain have married her sister Lucia.
    Such a union, however, was regarded as incestuous, and the lovers
    failed in their effort to obtain a special dispensation. Lucia then
    became her brother-in-law’s mistress, and bore him a son. But the
    ecclesiastical law was in those days not to be trifled with; Nils
    Lykke was thrown into prison for his crime, condemned, and killed in
    his dungeon, in the year of grace 1535. Thus there was a tragedy
    ready-made in Ibsen’s material, though it was not the tragedy he
    chose to write.

    The Bergen public did not greatly take to _Lady Inger_, and it was
    performed, in its novelty, only twice. Nor is the reason far to
    seek. The extreme complexity of the intrigue, and the lack of clear
    guidance through its mazes, probably left the Bergen audiences no
    less puzzled than the London audiences who saw the play at the Scala
    Theatre in 1906.[8] It is a play which can be appreciated only by
    spectators who know it beforehand. Such audiences it has often found
    in Norway, where it was revived at the Christiania Theatre in 1875;
    but in Denmark and Germany, though it has been produced several
    times, it has never been very successful. We need go no further than
    the end of the first act to understand the reason. On an audience
    which knows nothing of the play, the sudden appearance of a
    “Stranger,” to whose identity it has not the slightest clue, can
    produce no effect save one of bewilderment. To rely on such an
    incident for what was evidently intended to be a thrilling
    “curtain,” was to betray extreme inexperience; and this single trait
    is typical of much in the play. Nevertheless _Lady Inger_ marks a
    decisive advance in Ibsen’s development. It marks, one may say, the
    birth of his power of invention. He did not as yet know how to
    restrain or clarify his invention, and he made clumsy use of the
    stock devices of a bad school. But he had once for all entered upon
    that course of technical training which it took him five-and-twenty
    years to complete. He was learning much that he was afterwards to
    unlearn; but had he not undergone this apprenticeship, he would
    never have been the master he ultimately became.

    When Ibsen entered upon his duties at the Bergen Theatre, the
    influence of Eugène Scribe and his imitators was at its very height.
    Of the 145 plays produced during his tenure of office, more than
    half (seventy-five) were French, twenty-one being by Scribe himself,
    and at least half the remainder by adepts of his school, Bayard,
    Dumanoir, Mélesville, &c. It is to this school that Ibsen, in _Lady
    Inger_, proclaims his adherence; and he did not finally shake off
    its influence until he wrote the Third Act of _A Doll’s House_ in
    1879. Although the romantic environment of the play, and the tragic
    intensity of the leading character, tend to disguise the
    relationship, there can be no doubt that _Lady Inger_ is, in
    essence, simply a French drama of intrigue, constructed after the
    method of Scribe, as exemplified in _Adrienne Lecouvreur_, _Les
    Contes de la Reine de Navarre_,[9] and a dozen other French plays,
    with the staging of which the poet was then occupied. It might seem
    that the figure of Elina, brooding over the thought of her dead
    sister, coffined in the vault below the banqueting-hall, belonged
    rather to German romanticism; but there are plenty of traces of
    German romanticism even in the French plays with which the good
    people of Bergen were regaled. For the suggestion of grave-vaults
    and coffined heroines, for example, Ibsen need have gone no further
    than Dumas’s _Catherine Howard_, which he produced in March 1853. I
    do not, however, pretend that his romantic colouring came to him
    from France. It came to him, doubtless, from Germany, by way of
    Denmark. My point is that the conduct of the intrigue in _Lady
    Inger_ shows the most unmistakable marks of his study of the great
    French plot-manipulators. Its dexterity and its artificiality alike
    are neither German nor Danish, but French. Ibsen had learnt the
    great secret of Scribe—the secret of dramatic movement. The play is
    full of those ingenious complications, mistakes of identity, and
    rapid turns of fortune by which Scribe enchained the interest of his
    audiences. Its central theme—a mother plunging into intrigue and
    crime for the advancement of her son, only to find that her son
    himself has been her victim—is as old as Greek tragedy. The
    secondary story, too—that of Elina’s wild infatuation for the
    betrayer and practically the murderer of her sister—could probably
    be paralleled in the ballad literature of Scotland, Germany, or
    Denmark, and might, indeed, have been told, in verse or prose, by
    Sir Walter Scott. But these very un-Parisian elements are handled in
    a fundamentally Parisian fashion, and Ibsen is clearly fascinated,
    for the time, by the ideal of what was afterwards to be known as the
    “well-made play.” The fact that the result is in reality an ill-made
    play in no way invalidates this theory. It is perhaps the final
    condemnation of the well-made play that in nine cases out of ten—and
    even in the hands of far more experienced playwrights than the young
    Bergen “theatre-poet”—it is apt to prove ill-made after all.

    Far be it from me, however, to speak in pure disparagement of _Lady
    Inger_. With all its defects, it seems to me manifestly the work of
    a great poet—the only one of Ibsen’s plays prior to _The Vikings at
    Helgeland_ of which this can be said. It may be that early
    impressions mislead me; but I still cannot help seeing in Lady Inger
    a figure of truly tragic grandeur; in Nils Lykke one of the few
    really seductive seducers in literature; and in many passages of the
    dialogue, the touch of a master hand.

                                                               W. A.

-----

Footnote 1:

      See Introduction to _The Wild Duck_, p. xxiii.

Footnote 2:

      He continued to dabble in painting until he was thirty, or
      thereabouts.

Footnote 3:

      Preface to the second edition of _Catilina_, 1875.

Footnote 4:

      This is his own statement of the order of events. According to
      Halvdan Koht (_Samlede Værker_, vol. x. p. i) he arrived in
      Christiania in March 1850, and _Catilina_ did not appear until
      April.

Footnote 5:

      The history of Ibsen’s connection with the Bergen Theatre is
      written at some length in an article by me, entitled “Ibsen’s
      Apprenticeship,” published in the _Fortnightly Review_ for January
      1904. From that article I quote freely in the following pages.

Footnote 6:

      Provost (“Provst”) is an ecclesiastical title, roughly equivalent
      to Dean.

Footnote 7:

      See article by Dr. Julius Elias in _Die neue Rundschau_, December
      1906, p. 1463. Dr. Brahm, in the same magazine (p. 1414), writes
      as though this were Ibsen’s first meeting with his wife; and a
      note by Halvdan Koht, in the Norwegian edition of Ibsen’s Letters,
      seems to bear out this view. But it would appear that what Fru
      Ibsen told Dr. Elias was that on the date mentioned Ibsen for “the
      first time visited at her father’s house.” The terms of the
      anecdote almost compel us to assume that he had previously met her
      elsewhere. It seems almost inconceivable that Ibsen, of all
      people, should have made such a speech to a lady on their very
      first meeting.

Footnote 8:

      Stage Society performances, January 28 and 29, 1906. Lady Inger
      was played by Miss Edyth Olive, Elina by Miss Alice Crawford, Nils
      Lykke by Mr. Henry Ainley, Olaf Skaktavl by Mr. Alfred Brydone,
      and Nils Stenssön by Mr. Harcourt Williams.

Footnote 9:

      These two plays were produced, respectively, in March and October
      1854, at the very time when Ibsen must have been planning and
      composing _Lady Inger_.

-----

                          THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG

                              INTRODUCTION

    Exactly a year after the production of _Lady Inger of Östråt_—that
    is to say on the “Foundation Day” of the Bergen Theatre, January 2,
    1856—_The Feast at Solhoug_ was produced. The poet himself has
    written its history in full in the Preface to the second edition
    (see p. 183). The only comment that need be made upon his rejoinder
    to his critics has been made, with perfect fairness as it seems to
    me, by George Brandes in the following passage:[10] “No one who is
    unacquainted with the Scandinavian languages can fully understand
    the charm that the style and melody of the old ballads exercise upon
    the Scandinavian mind. The beautiful ballads and songs of _Des
    Knaben Wunderhorn_ have perhaps had a similar power over German
    minds; but, as far as I am aware, no German poet has ever succeeded
    in inventing a metre suitable for dramatic purposes, which yet
    retained the mediæval ballad’s sonorous swing and rich aroma. The
    explanation of the powerful impression produced in its day by Henrik
    Hertz’s _Svend Dyring’s House_ is to be found in the fact that in
    it, for the first time, the problem was solved of how to fashion a
    metre akin to that of the heroic ballads, a metre possessing as
    great mobility as the verse of the _Niebelungenlied_, along with a
    dramatic value not inferior to that of the iambic pentameter. Henrik
    Ibsen, it is true, has justly pointed out that, as regards the
    mutual relations of the principal characters, _Svend Dyring’s House_
    owes more to Kleist’s _Käthchen von Heilbronn_ than _The Feast at
    Solhoug_ owes to _Svend Dyring’s House_. But the fact remains that
    the versified parts of the dialogue of both _The Feast at Solhoug_
    and _Olaf Liliekrans_ are written in that imitation of the tone and
    style of the heroic ballad, of which Hertz was the happily-inspired
    originator. There seems to me to be no depreciation whatever of
    Ibsen in the assertion of Hertz’s right to rank as his model. Even
    the greatest must have learnt from some one.”

    The question is, to put it in a nutshell: Supposing Hertz had never
    adapted the ballad measures to dramatic purposes, would Ibsen have
    written _The Feast at Solhoug_, at any rate in its present form? I
    think we must answer: Almost certainly, no.

    But while the influence of Danish lyrical romanticism is apparent in
    the style of the play, the structure, as it seems to me, shows no
    less clearly that influence of the French plot-manipulators which we
    found so unmistakably at work in _Lady Inger_. Despite its lyrical
    dialogue, _The Feast at Solhoug_ has that crispness of dramatic
    action which marks the French plays of the period. It may indeed be
    called Scribe’s _Bataille de Dames_ writ tragic. Here, as in the
    _Bataille de Dames_ (one of the earliest plays produced under
    Ibsen’s supervision), we have the rivalry of an older and a younger
    woman for the love of a man who is proscribed on an unjust
    accusation, and pursued by the emissaries of the royal power. One
    might even, though this would be forcing the point, find an analogy
    in the fact that the elder woman (in both plays a strong and
    determined character) has in Scribe’s comedy a cowardly suitor,
    while in Ibsen’s tragedy, or melodrama, she has a cowardly husband.
    In every other respect the plays are as dissimilar as possible; yet
    it seems to me far from unlikely that an unconscious reminiscence of
    the _Bataille de Dames_ may have contributed to the shaping of _The
    Feast at Solhoug_ in Ibsen’s mind. But more significant than any
    resemblance of theme is the similarity of Ibsen’s whole method to
    that of the French school—the way, for instance, in which
    misunderstandings are kept up through a careful avoidance of the use
    of proper names, and the way in which a cup of poison, prepared for
    one person, comes into the hands of another person, is, as a matter
    of fact, drunk by no one, but occasions the acutest agony to the
    would-be poisoner. All this ingenious dovetailing of incidents and
    working-up of misunderstandings, Ibsen unquestionably learned from
    the French. The French language, indeed, is the only one which has a
    word—_quiproquo_—to indicate the class of misunderstanding which,
    from _Lady Inger_ down to _The League of Youth_, Ibsen employed
    without scruple.

    Ibsen’s first visit to the home of his future wife took place five
    days after the production of _The Feast at Solhoug_. It seems
    doubtful whether this was actually his first meeting with her;[11]
    but at any rate we can scarcely suppose that he knew her during the
    previous summer, when he was writing his play. It is a curious
    coincidence, then, that he should have found in Susanna Thoresen and
    her sister Marie very much the same contrast of characters which had
    occupied him in his first dramatic effort, _Catilina_, and which had
    formed the main subject of the play he had just produced. It is less
    wonderful that the same contrast should so often recur in his later
    works, even down to _John Gabriel Borkman_. Ibsen was greatly
    attached to his gentle and retiring sister-in-law, who died
    unmarried in 1874.

    _The Feast at Solhoug_ has been translated by Miss Morison and
    myself, only because no one else could be found to undertake the
    task. We have done our best; but neither of us lays claim to any
    great metrical skill, and the light movement of Ibsen’s verse is
    often, if not always, rendered in a sadly halting fashion. It is,
    however, impossible to exaggerate the irregularity of the verse in
    the original, or its defiance of strict metrical law. The normal
    line is one of four accents; but when this is said, it is almost
    impossible to arrive at any further generalisation. There is a
    certain lilting melody in many passages, and the whole play has not
    unfairly been said to possess the charm of a northern summer night,
    in which the glimmer of twilight gives place only to the gleam of
    morning. But in the main (though much better than its successor,
    _Olaf Liliekrans_) it is the weakest thing that Ibsen admitted into
    the canon of his works. He wrote of it in 1870 as “a study which I
    now disown”; and had he continued in that frame of mind, the world
    would scarcely have quarrelled with his judgment. At worst, then, my
    collaborator and I cannot be accused of marring a masterpiece; but
    for which assurance we should probably have shrunk from the attempt.

                                                               W. A.

-----

Footnote 10:

      _Ibsen and Björnson._ London, Heinemann, 1899, p. 88.

Footnote 11:

      See note, p. xxv.

-----

                             LOVE'S COMEDY

                              INTRODUCTION

    _Kærlighedens Komedie_ was published at Christiania in 1862. The
    polite world—so far as such a thing existed at that time in the
    Northern capital—received it with an outburst of indignation not now
    entirely easy to understand. It has indeed faults enough. The
    character-drawing is often crude, the action, though full of
    effective by-play, extremely slight, and the sensational climax has
    little relation to human nature as exhibited in Norway, or out of
    it, at that or any other time. But the sting lay in the unflattering
    veracity of the piece as a whole; in the merciless portrayal of the
    trivialities of persons, or classes, high in their own esteem; in
    the unexampled effrontery of bringing a clergyman upon the stage.
    All these have long since passed in Scandinavia, into the category
    of the things which people take with their Ibsen as a matter of
    course, and the play is welcomed with delight by every Scandinavian
    audience. But in 1862 the matter was serious, and Ibsen meant it to
    be so.

    For they were years of ferment—those six or seven which intervened
    between his return to Christiania from Bergen in 1857, and his
    departure for Italy in 1864. As director of the newly founded
    “Norwegian Theatre,” Ibsen was a prominent member of the little knot
    of brilliant young writers who led the nationalist revolt against
    Danish literary tradition, then still dominant in well-to-do, and
    especially in official, Christiania. Well-to-do and official
    Christiania met the revolt with contempt. Under such conditions, the
    specific literary battle of the Norwegian with the Dane easily
    developed into the eternal warfare of youthful idealism with
    “respectability” and convention. Ibsen had already started work upon
    the greatest of his Norse Histories—_The Pretenders_. But history
    was for him little more than material for the illustration of modern
    problems; and he turned with zest from the task of breathing his own
    spirit into the stubborn mould of the thirteenth century, to hold up
    the satiric mirror to the suburban drawing-rooms of Christiania, and
    to the varied phenomena current there,—and in suburban drawing-rooms
    elsewhere,—under the name of Love.

    Yet _Love’s Comedy_ is much more than a satire, and its exuberant
    humour has a bitter core; the laughter that rings through it is the
    harsh, implacable laughter of Carlyle. His criticism of commonplace
    love-making is at first sight harmless and ordinary enough. The
    ceremonial formalities of the continental _Verlobung_, the shrill
    raptures of aunts and cousins over the engaged pair, the satisfied
    smile of enterprising materfamilias as she reckons up the tale of
    daughters or of nieces safely married off under her auspices; or,
    again, the embarrassments incident to a prolonged _Brautstand_
    following a hasty wooing, the deadly effect of familiarity upon a
    shallow affection, and the anxious efforts to save the appearance of
    romance when its zest has departed—all these things had yielded such
    “comedy” as they possess to many others before Ibsen, and an Ibsen
    was not needed to evoke it. But if we ask what, then, is the right
    way from which these “comic” personages in their several fashions
    diverge; what is the condition which will secure courtship from
    ridicule, and marriage from disillusion, Ibsen abruptly parts
    company with all his predecessors. “‘Of course,’ reply the rest in
    chorus, ‘a deep and sincere love’;—‘together,’ add some, 'with
    prudent good sense.'” The prudent good sense Ibsen allows; but he
    couples with it the startling paradox that the first condition of a
    happy marriage is the absence of love, and the first condition of an
    enduring love the absence of marriage.

    The student of the latter-day Ibsen is naturally somewhat taken
    aback to find the grim poet of Doubt, whose task it seems to be to
    apply a corrosive criticism to modern institutions in general and to
    marriage in particular, gravely defending the “marriage of
    convenience.” And his amazement is not diminished by the sense that
    the author of this plea for the loveless marriage, which poets have
    at all times scorned and derided, was himself beyond question a
    poet, ardent, brilliant, and young, and himself, what is more, quite
    recently and beyond question happily, married. The truth is that
    there are two men—in Ibsen an idealist, exalted to the verge of
    sentimentality, and a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, to the
    verge of cynicism. What we call his “social philosophy” is a _modus
    vivendi_ arrived at between them. Both agree in repudiating
    “marriage for love”; but the idealist repudiates it in the name of
    love, the critic in the name of marriage. Love, for the idealist
    Ibsen, is a passion which loses its virtue when it reaches its goal,
    which inspires only while it aspires, and flags bewildered when it
    attains. Marriage, for the critic Ibsen, is an institution beset
    with pitfalls into which those are surest to step who enter in
    blinded with love. In the latter dramas the tragedy of married life
    is commonly generated by other forms of blindness—the childish
    innocence of Nora, the maidenly ignorance of Helena Alving, neither
    of whom married precisely “for love”; here it is blind Love alone
    who, to the jealous eye of the critic, plays the part of the Serpent
    in the Edens of wedded bliss. There is, it is clear, an element of
    unsolved contradiction in Ibsen’s thought;—Love is at once so
    precious and so deadly, a possession so glorious that all other
    things in life are of less worth, and yet capable of producing only
    disastrously illusive effects upon those who have entered into the
    relations to which it prompts. But with Ibsen—and it is a grave
    intellectual defect—there is an absolute antagonism between spirit
    and form. An institution is always, with him, a shackle for the free
    life of souls, not an organ through which they attain expression;
    and since the institution of marriage cannot but be, there remains
    as the only logical solution that which he enjoins—to keep the
    soul’s life out of it. To “those about to marry,” Ibsen therefore
    says in effect, “Be sure you are not in love!” And to those who are
    in love he says, “Part!”

    It is easy to understand the irony with which a man who thought thus
    of love contemplated the business of “love-making,” and the
    ceremonial discipline of Continental courtship. The whole unnumbered
    tribe of wooing and plighted lovers were for him unconscious actors
    in a world-comedy of Love’s contriving—naïve fools of fancy,
    passionately weaving the cords that are to strangle passion. Comedy
    like this cannot be altogether gay; and as each fresh romance decays
    into routine, and each aspiring passion goes out under the spell of
    a vulgar environment, or submits to the bitter salvation of a final
    parting, the ringing laughter grows harsh and hollow, and notes of
    ineffable sadness escape from the poet’s Stoic self-restraint.

    Ibsen had grown up in a school which cultivated the romantic,
    piquant, picturesque in style; which ran riot in wit, in vivacious
    and brilliant imagery, in resonant rhythms and telling double
    rhymes. It must be owned that this was not the happiest school for a
    dramatist, nor can _Love’s Comedy_ be regarded, in the matter of
    style, as other than a risky experiment which nothing but the sheer
    dramatic force of an Ibsen could have carried through. As it is,
    there are palpable fluctuations, discrepancies of manner; the
    realism of treatment often provokes a realism of style out of
    keeping with the lyric afflatus of the verse; and we pass with
    little warning from the barest colloquial prose to strains of
    high-wrought poetic fancy. Nevertheless, the style, with all its
    inequalities, becomes in Ibsen’s hands a singularly plastic medium
    of dramatic expression. The marble is too richly veined for ideal
    sculpture, but it takes the print of life. The wit, exuberant as it
    is, does not coruscate indiscriminately upon all lips; and it has
    many shades and varieties—caustic, ironical, imaginative, playful,
    passionate—which take their temper from the speaker’s mood.

    The present version of the play retains the metres of the original,
    and follows it in general line for line. For a long passage,
    occupying substantially the first twenty pages, the translator is
    indebted to the editor of the present work; and two other
    passages—Falk’s tirades on pp. 58 and 100—result from a fusion of
    versions made independently by us both.

                                                            C. H. H.

                          LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT
                                 (1855)

                               CHARACTERS

    LADY INGER OTTISDAUGHTER RÖMER, _widow of High Steward Nils
    Gyldenlöve._
    ELINA GYLDENLÖVE, _her daughter._
    NILS LYKKE, _Danish knight and councillor._
    OLAF SKAKTAVL, _an outlawed Norwegian noble._
    NILS STENSSON.
    JENS BIELKE, _Swedish commander._
    BIÖRN, _majordomo at Östråt._
    FINN, _a servant._
    EINAR HUK, _bailiff at Östråt._
    _Servants, peasants, and Swedish men-at-arms._

                                -------

    _The action takes place at Östråt Manor, on the Trondhiem Fiord, in
                              the year 1528._

    [PRONUNCIATION OF NAMES.—Östråt = _Östrot_; Elina (Norwegian, Eline)
    = _Eleena_; Stensson = _Staynson_; Biörn = _Byörn_; Jens Bielke =
    _Yens Byelke_; Huk = _Hook_. The _g_'s in “Inger” and in
    “Gyldenlöve” are, of course, hard. The final _e_'s and the _ö_'s
    pronounced much as in German.]

                 LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT | DRAMA IN FIVE ACTS

                               ----------

                               ACT FIRST

        _A room at Östråt. Through an open door in the back, the
            Banquet Hall is seen in faint moonlight, which shines
            fitfully through a deep bow-window in the opposite wall.
            To the right, an entrance-door; further forward, a
            curtained window. On the left, a door leading to the
            inner rooms; further forward a large open fireplace,
            which casts a glow over the room. It is a stormy
            evening._

        BIÖRN _and_ FINN _are sitting by the fireplace. The latter
            is occupied in polishing a helmet. Several pieces of
            armour lie near them, along with a sword and shield._

                                   FINN.

        [_After a pause._] Who was Knut[12] Alfson?

                                   BIÖRN.

        My Lady says he was the last of Norway’s knighthood.

                                   FINN.

        And the Danes killed him at Oslo-fiord?

                                   BIÖRN.

        If you know not that, ask any child of five.

                                   FINN.

        So Knut Alfson was the last of our knighthood? And now he’s
        dead and gone! [_Holds up the helmet._] Well, thou must e’en
        be content to hang scoured and bright in the Banquet Hall;
        for what art thou now but an empty nut-shell? The kernel—the
        worms have eaten that many a winter agone.

        What say you, Biörn—may not one call Norway’s land an empty
        nut-shell, even like the helmet here; bright without,
        worm-eaten within?

                                   BIÖRN.

        Hold your peace, and mind your task!—Is the helmet ready?

                                   FINN.

        It shines like silver in the moonlight.

                                   BIÖRN.

        Then put it by.—See here; scrape the rust off the sword.

                                   FINN.

                        [_Turning the sword over and examining it._]

        Is it worth while?

                                   BIÖRN.

        What mean you?

                                   FINN.

        The edge is gone.

                                   BIÖRN.

        What’s that to you? Give it me.—Here, take the shield.

                                   FINN.

        [_As before._] There is no grip to it!

                                   BIÖRN.

        [_Mutters._] Let me get a grip on _you_——

                                [FINN _hums to himself for a while._

                                   BIÖRN.

        What now?

                                   FINN.

        An empty helmet, a sword with no edge, a shield with no
        grip—so it has all come to that. Who can blame Lady Inger if
        she leaves such weapons to hang scoured and polished on the
        walls, instead of rusting them in Danish blood?

                                   BIÖRN.

        Folly! Is there not peace in the land?

                                   FINN.

        Peace? Ay, when the peasant has shot away his last arrow,
        and the wolf has reft the last lamb from the fold, then is
        there peace between them. But ’tis a strange friendship.
        Well, well; let that pass. ’Tis fitting, as I said, that the
        harness hang bright in the hall; for you know the old saw:
        “Call none a man but the knightly man.” So now that we have
        never a knight in the land, we have never a man; and where
        no man is, there must women order things; therefore——

                                   BIÖRN.

        Therefore—therefore I bid you hold your foul prate!
           [_Rises._

        The evening wears on. Enough; you may hang the helmet and
        armour in the hall again.

                                   FINN.

        [_In a low voice._] Nay, best let it be till to-morrow.

                                   BIÖRN.

        What, do you fear the dark?

                                   FINN.

        Not by day. And if so be I fear it at even, I am not the
        only one. Ah, you may look; I tell you in the housefolk’s
        room there is talk of many things. [_Lower._] They say that,
        night by night, a tall figure, clad in black, walks the
        Banquet Hall.

                                   BIÖRN.

        Old wives’ tales!

                                   FINN.

        Ah, but they all swear ’tis true.

                                   BIÖRN.

        That I well believe.

                                   FINN.

        The strangest of all is that Lady Inger thinks the same——

                                   BIÖRN.

        [_Starting._] Lady Inger? What does she think?

                                   FINN.

        What Lady Inger thinks? I warrant few can tell that. But
        sure it is that she has no rest in her. See you not how day
        by day she grows thinner and paler? [_Looks keenly at him._]
        They say she never sleeps—and that it is because of the
        black figure——

                [_While he is speaking,_ ELINA GYLDENLÖVE _has
                    appeared in the half-open door on the left. She
                    stops and listens, unobserved._

                                   BIÖRN.

        And you believe such follies?

                                   FINN.

        Well, half and half. There be folk, too, that read
        things another way. But that is pure malice, I’ll be
        bound.—Hearken, Biörn—know you the song that is going
        round the country?

                                   BIÖRN.

        A song?

                                   FINN.

        Ay, ’tis on all folks’ lips. ’Tis a shameful scurril thing,
        for sure; yet it goes prettily. Just listen:    [_Sings in a
        low voice._

        Dame Inger sitteth in Östråt fair,
        She wraps her in costly furs—
        She decks her in velvet and ermine and vair,
        Red gold are the beads that she twines in her hair—
        But small peace in that soul of hers.

        Dame Inger hath sold her to Denmark’s lord.
        She bringeth her folk ’neath the stranger’s yoke—
        In guerdon whereof—

          [BIÖRN _enraged, seizes him by the throat._ ELINA
              GYLDENLÖVE _withdraws without having been seen._

                                   BIÖRN.

        I will send you guerdonless to the foul fiend, if you prate
        of Lady Inger but one unseemly word more.

                                   FINN.

        [_Breaking from his grasp._] Why—did _I_ make the song?

                     [_The blast of a horn is heard from the right._

                                   BIÖRN.

        Hark—what is that?

                                   FINN.

        A horn. Then there come guests to-night.

                                   BIÖRN.

        [_At the window._] They are opening the gate. I hear the
        clatter of hoofs in the courtyard. It must be a knight.

                                   FINN.

        A knight? Nay, that can scarce be.

                                   BIÖRN.

        Why not?

                                   FINN.

        Did you not say yourself: the last of our knighthood is dead
        and gone?

                                           [_Goes out to the right._

                                   BIÖRN.

        The accursed knave, with his prying and peering! What avails
        all my striving to hide and hush things? They whisper of her
        even now—; soon all men will be shouting aloud that——

                                   ELINA.

        [_Comes in again through the door on the left; looks round
        her, and says with suppressed emotion:_] Are you alone,
        Biörn?

                                   BIÖRN.

        Is it you, Mistress Elina?

                                   ELINA.

        Come, Biörn, tell me one of your stories; I know you can
        tell others than those that-—-

                                   BIÖRN.

        A story? Now—so late in the evening——?

                                   ELINA.

        If you count from the time when it grew dark at Östråt, then
        ’tis late indeed.

                                   BIÖRN.

        What ails you? Has aught crossed you? You seem so restless.

                                   ELINA.

        May be so.

                                   BIÖRN.

        There is something amiss. I have hardly known you this half
        year past.

                                   ELINA.

        Bethink you: this half year past my dearest sister Lucia has
        been sleeping in the vault below.

                                   BIÖRN.

        That is not all, Mistress Elina—it is not that alone that
        makes you now thoughtful and white and silent, now restless
        and ill at ease, as you are to-night.

                                   ELINA.

        Not that alone, you think? And wherefore not? Was she not
        gentle and pure and fair as a summer night? Biörn,—I tell
        you, Lucia was dear to me as my life. Have you forgotten how
        many a time, when we were children, we sat on your knee in
        the winter evenings? You sang songs to us, and told us
        tales——

                                   BIÖRN.

        Ay, then you were blithe and gay.

                                   ELINA.

        Ah, then, Biörn! Then I lived a glorious life in fable-land,
        and in my own imaginings. Can it be that the sea-strand was
        naked then as now? If it was so, I knew it not. ’Twas there
        I loved to go weaving all my fair romances; my heroes came
        from afar and sailed again across the sea; I lived in their
        midst, and set forth with them when they sailed away.
        [_Sinks on a chair._] Now I feel so faint and weary; I can
        live no longer in my tales. They are only—tales. [_Rising,
        vehemently._] Biörn, know you what has made me sick? A
        truth; a hateful, hateful truth, that gnaws me day and
        night.

                                   BIÖRN.

        What mean you?

                                   ELINA.

        Do you remember how sometimes you would give us good counsel
        and wise saws? Sister Lucia followed them; but I—ah,
        well-a-day!

                                   BIÖRN.

        [_Consoling her._] Well, well—-!

                                   ELINA.

        I know it—I was proud, overweening! In all our games, I
        would still be the Queen, because I was the tallest, the
        fairest, the wisest! I know it!

                                   BIÖRN.

        That is true.

                                   ELINA.

        Once you took me by the hand and looked earnestly at me, and
        said: “Be not proud of your fairness, or your wisdom; but be
        proud as the mountain eagle as often as you think: I am
        Inger Gyldenlöve’s daughter!”

                                   BIÖRN.

        And was it not matter enough for pride?

                                   ELINA.

        You told me so often enough, Biörn! Oh, you told me many a
        tale in those days. [_Presses his hand._] Thanks for them
        all!—Now, tell me one more; it might make me light of heart
        again, as of old.

                                   BIÖRN.

        You are a child no longer.

                                   ELINA.

        Nay, indeed! But let me dream that I am.—Come, tell on!

                [_Throws herself into a chair._ BIÖRN _sits on the
                    edge of the high hearth._

                                   BIÖRN.

        Once upon a time there was a high-born knight——

                                   ELINA.

        [_Who has been listening restlessly in the direction of the
        hall, seizes his arm and breaks out in a vehement whisper._]
        Hush! No need to shout so loud; I can hear well!

                                   BIÖRN.

        [_More softly._] Once upon a time there was a high-born
        knight, of whom there went the strange report——

                [ELINA _half rises, and listens in anxious suspense
                    in the direction of the hall._

                                   BIÖRN.

        Mistress Elina,—what ails you?

                                   ELINA.

        [_Sits down again._] Me? Nothing. Go on.

                                   BIÖRN.

        Well, as I was saying—did this knight but look straight in a
        woman’s eyes, never could she forget it after; her thoughts
        must follow him wherever he went, and she must waste away
        with sorrow.

                                   ELINA.

        I have heard that tale.—Moreover, ’tis no tale you are
        telling, for the knight you speak of is Nils Lykke, who sits
        even now in the Council of Denmark——

                                   BIÖRN.

        May be so.

                                   ELINA.

        Well, let it pass—go on!

                                   BIÖRN.

        Now it happened once on a time——

                                   ELINA.

        [_Rises suddenly._] Hush; be still!

                                   BIÖRN.

        What now? What is the matter?

                                   ELINA.

        [_Listening._] Do you hear?

                                   BIÖRN.

        What?

                                   ELINA.

        It is there! Yes, by the cross of Christ, it _is_ there!

                                   BIÖRN.

                     [_Rises._] _What_ is there? Where?

                                   ELINA.

        She herself—in the hall——

                                   [_Goes hastily towards the hall._

                                   BIÖRN.

        [_Following._] How can you think—? Mistress Elina,—go to
        your chamber!

                                   ELINA.

        Hush; stand still! Do not move; do not let her see you!
        Wait—the moon is coming out. Can you not see the black-robed
        figure——?

                                   BIÖRN.

        By all the saints——!

                                   ELINA.

        Do you see—she turns Knut Alfson’s picture to the wall.
        Ha-ha; be sure it looks her too straight in the eyes!

                                   BIÖRN.

        Mistress Elina, hear me!

                                   ELINA.

        [_Going back towards the fireplace._] Now I know what I
        know!

                                   BIÖRN.

        [_To himself._] Then it is true!

                                   ELINA.

        Who was it, Biörn? Who was it?

                                   BIÖRN.

        You saw as plainly as I.

                                   ELINA.

        Well? Whom did I see?

                                   BIÖRN.

        You saw your mother.

                                   ELINA.

        [_Half to herself._] Night after night I have heard her
        steps in there. I have heard her whispering and moaning like
        a soul in pain. And what says the song—? Ah, now I know! Now
        I know that——

                                   BIÖRN.

        Hush!

                [LADY INGER GYLDENLÖVE _enters rapidly from the
                    hall, without noticing the others; she goes to
                    the window, draws the curtain, and gazes out as
                    if watching for some one on the high road; after
                    a while, she turns and goes slowly back into the
                    hall._

                                   ELINA.

        [_Softly, following her with her eyes._] White, white as the
        dead——!

                [_An uproar of many voices is heard outside the door
                    on the right._

                                   BIÖRN.

        What can this be?

                                   ELINA.

        Go out and see what is amiss.

                [EINAR HUK, _the bailiff, appears in the anteroom,
                    with a crowd of_ RETAINERS _and_ PEASANTS.

                                 EINAR HUK.

        [_In the doorway._] Straight in to her! And be not abashed!

                                   BIÖRN.

        What seek you?

                                 EINAR HUK.

        Lady Inger herself.

                                   BIÖRN.

        Lady Inger? So late?

                                 EINAR HUK.

        Late, but time enough, I wot.

                               THE PEASANTS.

        Yes, yes; she must hear us now!

                [_The whole rabble crowds into the room. At the same
                    moment_ LADY INGER _appears in the doorway of
                    the hall. A sudden silence._

                                LADY INGER.

        What would you with me?

                                 EINAR HUK.

        We sought you, noble lady, to——

                                LADY INGER.

        Well—say on!

                                 EINAR HUK.

        Why, we are not ashamed of our errand. In one word—we come
        to pray you for weapons and leave——

                                LADY INGER.

        Weapons and leave—? And for what?

                                 EINAR HUK.

        There has come a rumour from Sweden that the people of the
        Dales have risen against King Gustav——

                                LADY INGER.

        The people of the Dales?

                                 EINAR HUK.

        Ay, so the tidings run, and they seem sure enough.

                                LADY INGER.

        Well—if it were so—what have you to do with, the Dale-folk’s
        rising?

                               THE PEASANTS.

        We will join them! We will help. We will free ourselves!

                                LADY INGER.

        [_To herself._] Can the time be come?

                                 EINAR HUK.

        From all our borderlands the peasants are pouring across to
        the Dales. Even outlaws that have wandered for years in the
        mountains are venturing down to the homesteads again, and
        drawing men together, and whetting their rusty swords.

                                LADY INGER.

        [_After a pause._] Tell me, men—have you thought well of
        this? Have you counted the cost, if King Gustav’s men should
        win?

                                   BIÖRN.

        [_Softly and imploringly to_ LADY INGER.] Count the cost to
        the Danes if King Gustav’s men should lose.

                                LADY INGER.

                [_Evasively._] That reckoning is not for me

        to make.    [_Turns to the people._

        You know that King Gustav is sure of help from Denmark. King
        Frederick is his friend, and will never leave him in the
        lurch—-—-

                                 EINAR HUK.

        But if the people were now to rise all over Norway’s
        land?—if we all rose as one man, nobles and peasants
        together?—Ay, Lady Inger Gyldenlöve, the time we have waited
        for is surely come. We have but to rise now to drive the
        strangers from the land.

                               THE PEASANTS.

        Ay, out with the Danish sheriffs! Out with the foreign
        masters! Out with the Councillors’ lackeys!

                                LADY INGER.

        [_To herself._] Ah, there is metal in them; and yet, yet——!

                                   BIÖRN.

        [_To himself._] She is of two minds. [_To Elina._] What say
        you now, Mistress Elina—have you not sinned in misjudging
        your mother?

                                   ELINA.

        Biörn—if my eyes have lied to me, I could tear them out of
        my head!

                                 EINAR HUK.

        See you not, my noble lady, King Gustav must be dealt with
        first. Were _his_ power once gone, the Danes cannot long
        hold this land——

                                LADY INGER.

        And then?

                                 EINAR HUK.

        Then we shall be free. We shall have no more foreign
        masters, and can choose ourselves a king, as the Swedes have
        done before us.

                                LADY INGER.

        [_With animation._] A king for ourselves! Are you thinking
        of the Sture[13] stock?

                                 EINAR HUK.

        King Christiern and others after him have swept bare our
        ancient houses. The best of our nobles are outlaws on the
        mountain paths, if so be they still live. Nevertheless, it
        might still be possible to find one or other shoot of the
        old stems——

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Hastily._] Enough, Einar Huk, enough! [_To herself._] Ah,
        my dearest hope!

                           [_Turns to the_ PEASANTS _and_ RETAINERS.

        I have warned you, now, as well as I can. I have told you
        how great is the risk you run. But if you are fixed in your
        purpose, ’twere folly in me to forbid what I have no power
        to prevent.

                                 EINAR HUK.

        Then we have your leave to——?

                                LADY INGER.

        You have your own firm will; take counsel with _that_. If it
        be as you say, that you are daily harassed and oppressed——I
        know but little of these matters. I will not know more! What
        can I, a lonely woman—? Even if you were to plunder the
        Banquet Hall—and there’s many a good weapon on the walls—you
        are the masters at Östråt to-night. You must do as seems
        good to you. Good-night!

                [_Loud cries of joy from the multitude. Candles are
                    lighted; the_ RETAINERS _bring out weapons of
                    different kinds from the hall._

                                   BIÖRN.

        [_Seizes_ LADY INGER’S _hand as she is going._] Thanks, my
        noble and high-souled mistress! I, that have known you from
        childhood up—I have never doubted you.

                                LADY INGER.

        Hush, Biörn—’tis a dangerous game I have ventured this
        night. The others stake only their lives; but I, trust me, a
        thousandfold more!

                                   BIÖRN.

        How mean you? Do you fear for your power and your favour
        with——?

                                LADY INGER.

        My power? O God in Heaven!

                                A RETAINER.

                         [_Comes from the hall with a large sword._]

        See, here’s a real good wolf’s-tooth! With this will I flay
        the blood-suckers’ lackeys!

                                 EINAR HUK.

        [_To another._] What is that you have found?

                               THE RETAINER.

        The breastplate they call Herlof Hyttefad’s.

                                 EINAR HUK.

        ’Tis too good for such as you. Look, here is the shaft of
        Sten Sture’s[14] lance; hang the breastplate upon it, and we
        shall have the noblest standard heart can desire.

                                   FINN.

        [_Comes from the door on the left, with a letter in his
        hand, and goes towards_ LADY INGER.] I have sought you
        through all the house——

                                LADY INGER.

        What would you?

                                   FINN.

        [_Hands her the letter._] A messenger is come from
        Trondhiem[15] with a letter for you.

                                LADY INGER.

        Let me see! [_Opening the letter._] From Trondhiem? What can
        it be? [_Runs through the letter._] O God! From him! and
        here in Norway——

                [_Reads on with strong emotion, while the men go on
                    bringing out arms from the hall._

                                LADY INGER.

        [_To herself._] He is coming here. He is coming here
        to-night!—Ay, then ’tis with our wits we must fight, not
        with the sword.

                                 EINAR HUK.

        Enough, enough, good fellows; we are well armed now. Set we
        forth now on our way!

                                LADY INGER.

        [_With a sudden change of tone._] No man shall leave my
        house to-night!

                                 EINAR HUK.

        But the wind is fair, noble lady; ’twill take us quickly up
        the fiord, and——

                                LADY INGER.

        It shall be as I have said.

                                 EINAR HUK.

        Are we to wait till to-morrow, then?

                                LADY INGER.

        Till to-morrow, and longer still. No armed man shall go
        forth from Östråt yet awhile.

                            [_Signs of displeasure among the crowd._

                           SOME OF THE PEASANTS.

        We will go all the same, Lady Inger!

                              THE CRY SPREADS.

        Ay, ay; we _will_ go!

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Advancing a step towards them._] Who dares to move?

                [_A silence. After a moment’s pause, she adds:_

        I have thought for you. What do you common folk know of the
        country’s needs? How dare you judge of such things? You must
        e’en bear your oppressions and burdens yet awhile. Why
        murmur at that, when you see that we, your leaders, are as
        ill bested as you?——Take all the weapons back to the hall.
        You shall know my further will hereafter. Go!

                [_The_ RETAINERS _take back the arms, and the whole
                    crowd then withdraws by the door on the right._

                                   ELINA.

        [_Softly to_ BIÖRN.] Say you still that I have sinned in
        misjudging—the Lady of Östråt?

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Beckons to_ BIÖRN, _and says_.] Have a guest-chamber
        ready.

                                   BIÖRN.

        It is well, Lady Inger!

                                LADY INGER.

        And let the gate be open to whoever shall knock.

                                   BIÖRN.

        But——?

                                LADY INGER.

        The gate open!

                                   BIÖRN.

        The gate open.    [_Goes out to the right._

                                LADY INGER.

        [_To_ ELINA, _who has already reached the door on the
        left._] Stay here!——Elina—my child—I have something to say
        to you alone.

                                   ELINA.

        I hear you.

                                LADY INGER.

        Elina——you think evil of your mother.

                                   ELINA.

        I think, to my sorrow, what your deeds have forced me to
        think.

                                LADY INGER.

        And you answer as your bitter spirit bids you.

                                   ELINA.

        Who has filled my spirit with bitterness? From my childhood
        I had been wont to look up to you as a great and high-souled
        woman. ’Twas in your likeness that I pictured the women of
        the chronicles and the Book of Heroes. I thought the Lord
        God himself had set his seal on your brow, and marked you
        out as the leader of the helpless and the oppressed. Knights
        and nobles sang your praise in the feast-hall; and even the
        peasants, far and near, called you the country’s pillar and
        its hope. All thought that through you the good times were
        to come again! All thought that through you a new day was to
        dawn over the land! The night is still here; and I scarce
        know if through you I dare look for any morning.

                                LADY INGER.

        ’Tis easy to see whence you have learnt such venomous words.
        You have let yourself give ear to what the thoughtless
        rabble mutters and murmurs about things it can little judge
        of.

                                   ELINA.

        “Truth is in the people’s mouth,” was your word when they
        praised you in speech and song.

                                LADY INGER.

        May be so. But if indeed I chose to sit here idle, though it
        was my part to act—think you not that such a choice were
        burden enough for me, without your adding to its weight?

                                   ELINA.

        The weight I add to your burden crushes me no less than you.
        Lightly and freely I drew the breath of life, so long as I
        had you to believe in. For my pride is my life; and well
        might I have been proud, had you remained what once you
        were.

                                LADY INGER.

        And what proves to you that I have not? Elina—how know you
        so surely that you are not doing your mother wrong?

                                   ELINA.

        [_Vehemently._] Oh, that I were!

                                LADY INGER.

        Peace! You have no right to call your mother to
        account.—With a single word I could——; but ’twould be an ill
        word for you to hear; you must await what time shall bring;
        may be that——

                                   ELINA.

        [_Turns to go._] Sleep well, my mother!

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Hesitates._] Nay—stay with me; I have still somewhat——
        Come nearer;—you must hear me, Elina!

                [_Sits down by the table in front of the window._

                                   ELINA.

        I hear you.

                                LADY INGER.

        For as silent as you are, I know well that you often long to
        be gone from here. Östråt is too lonely and lifeless for
        you.

                                   ELINA.

        Do you wonder at that, my mother?

                                LADY INGER.

        It rests with you whether all this shall henceforth be
        changed.

                                   ELINA.

        How so?

                                LADY INGER.

        Listen.—I look for a guest to-night.

                                   ELINA.

        [_Comes nearer._] A guest?

                                LADY INGER.

        A guest, who must remain a stranger to all. None must know
        whence he comes or whither he goes.

                                   ELINA.

        [_Throws herself, with a cry of joy, at her mother’s feet,
        and seizes her hands._] My mother! My mother! Forgive me, if
        you can, all the wrong I have done you!

                                LADY INGER.

        What do you mean? Elina, I do not understand you.

                                   ELINA.

        Then they were all deceived! You are still true at heart!

                                LADY INGER.

        Rise, rise and tell me——

                                   ELINA.

        Think you I do not know who the stranger is?

                                LADY INGER.

        You know? And yet——?

                                   ELINA.

        Think you the gates of Östråt shut so close, that never a
        whisper of the country’s woe can slip through them? Think
        you I do not know that the heir of many a noble line wanders
        outlawed, without rest or shelter, while Danish masters lord
        it in the home of his fathers?

                                LADY INGER.

        And what then?

                                   ELINA.

        I know well that many a high-born knight is hunted through
        the woods like a hungry wolf. No hearth has he to rest by,
        no bread to eat——

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Coldly._] Enough! Now I understand you.

                                   ELINA.

        [_Continuing._] And that is why the gates of Östråt must
        stand open by night! That is why he must remain a stranger
        to all, this guest of whom none must know whence he comes or
        whither he goes! You are setting at naught the harsh decree
        that forbids you to harbour or succour the outlaw——

                                LADY INGER.

        Enough, I say!

        [_After a short silence, adds with an effort:_ You mistake,
        Elina—’tis no outlaw I look for.

                                   ELINA.

        [_Rises._] Then I have understood you ill indeed.

                                LADY INGER.

        Listen to me, my child; but think as you listen; if indeed
        you can tame that wild spirit of yours.

                                   ELINA.

        I am tame, till you have spoken.

                                LADY INGER.

        Attend, then, to what I have to tell you.—I have sought, so
        far as lay in my power, to keep you in ignorance of all our
        griefs and miseries. What could it avail to fill your young
        heart with wrath and care? ’Tis not women’s weeping and
        wailing that can deliver us; we need the courage and
        strength of men.

                                   ELINA.

        Who has told you that, when courage and strength are needed,
        I shall be found wanting?

                                LADY INGER.

        Hush, child;—I might take you at your word.

                                   ELINA.

        How mean you, my mother?

                                LADY INGER.

        I might call on you for both; I might——; but let me say my
        say out first.

        Know then that the time seems now to be drawing nigh,
        towards which the Danish Council have been working for many
        a year—the time, I mean, for them to strike the last blow at
        our rights and our freedom. Therefore must we now——

                                   ELINA.

        [_Eagerly._] Openly rebel, my mother?

                                LADY INGER.

        No; we must gain breathing-time. The Council is now
        assembled at Copenhagen, considering how best to go to work.
        Most of them hold, ’tis said, that there can be no end to
        dissensions till Norway and Denmark are one; for should we
        still possess our rights as a free land when the time comes
        to choose the next king, ’tis most like that the feud will
        break out openly. Now the Danish councillors would hinder
        this——

                                   ELINA.

        Ay, they would hinder it—! But are we to endure such things?
        Are we to look on quietly while——?

                                LADY INGER.

        No, we will not endure it. But to take up arms—to declare
        open war—what would come of that, so long as we are not
        united? And were we ever less united in this land than we
        are even now?—No, if aught is to be accomplished, it must be
        secretly and in silence. Even as I said, we must have time
        to draw breath. In the South, a good part of the nobles are
        for the Dane; but here in the North they are still in doubt.
        Therefore has King Frederick sent hither one of his most
        trusted councillors, to assure himself with his own eyes how
        we stand affected.

                                   ELINA.

        [_In suspense._] Well—and then——?

                                LADY INGER.

        He is the guest I look for to-night.

                                   ELINA.

        He comes hither? And to-night?

                                LADY INGER.

        A trading ship brought him to Trondhiem yesterday. News has
        just reached me of his approach; he may be here within the
        hour.

                                   ELINA.

        And you do not bethink you, my mother, how ’twill endanger
        your fame thus to receive the Danish envoy? Do not the
        people already look on you with distrustful eyes? How can
        you hope that, when the time comes, they will let you rule
        and guide them, if it be known that——

                                LADY INGER.

        Fear not. All this I have fully weighed; but there is no
        danger. His errand in Norway is a secret; he has come
        unknown to Trondhiem, and unknown shall he be our guest at
        Östråt.

                                   ELINA.

        And the name of this Danish lord——?

                                LADY INGER.

        It sounds well, Elina; Denmark has scarce a nobler name.

                                   ELINA.

        But what then do you purpose? I cannot yet grasp your
        meaning.

                                LADY INGER.

        You will soon understand.—Since we cannot trample on the
        serpent, we must bind it.

                                   ELINA.

        Take heed that it burst not your bonds.

                                LADY INGER.

        It rests with you to tighten them as you will.

                                   ELINA.

        With me?

                                LADY INGER.

        I have long seen that Östråt is as a cage to you. The young
        falcon chafes behind the iron bars.

                                   ELINA.

        My wings are clipped. Even if you set me free—’twould avail
        me little.

                                LADY INGER.

        Your wings are not clipped, save by your own will.

                                   ELINA.

        Will? My will is in your hands. Be what you once were, and I
        too——

                                LADY INGER.

        Enough, enough. Hear me further.—It would scarce break your
        heart to leave Östråt?

                                   ELINA.

        Maybe not, my mother!

                                LADY INGER.

        You told me once, that you lived your happiest life in your
        tales and histories. What if that life were to be yours once
        more?

                                   ELINA.

        What mean you?

                                LADY INGER.

        Elina—if a mighty noble were to come and lead you to his
        castle, where you should find damsels and squires, silken
        robes and lofty halls awaiting you?

                                   ELINA.

        A noble, you say?

                                LADY INGER.

        A noble.

                                   ELINA.

        [_More softly._] And the Danish envoy comes hither to-night?

                                LADY INGER.

        To-night.

                                   ELINA.

        If so be, then I fear to read the meaning of your words.

                                LADY INGER.

        There is naught to fear if you misread them not. It is far
        from my thought to put force upon you. You shall choose for
        yourself in this matter, and follow your own rede.

                                   ELINA.

        [_Comes a step nearer._] Know you the tale of the mother who
        drove across the hills by night, with her little children in
        the sledge? The wolves were on her track; ’twas life or
        death with her;—and one by one she cast out her little ones,
        to win time and save herself.

                                LADY INGER.

        Nursery tales! A mother would tear the heart from her
        breast, before she would cast her child to the wolves!

                                   ELINA.

        Were I not my mother’s daughter, I would say you were right.
        But you are like that mother; one by one have you cast out
        your daughters to the wolves. The eldest went first. Five
        years ago Merete[16] went forth from Östråt; now she dwells
        in Bergen, and is Vinzents Lunge’s[17] wife. But think you
        she is happy as the Danish noble’s lady? Vinzents Lunge is
        mighty, well-nigh as a king; Merete has damsels and squires,
        silken robes and lofty halls; but the day has no sunshine
        for her, and the night no rest; for she has never loved him.
        He came hither and he wooed her, for she was the greatest
        heiress in Norway, and ’twas then needful for him to gain a
        footing in the land. I know it; I know it well! Merete bowed
        to your will; she went with the stranger lord.—But what has
        it cost her? More tears than a mother should wish to answer
        for at the day of reckoning!

                                LADY INGER.

        I know my reckoning, and I fear it not.

                                   ELINA.

        Your reckoning ends not here. Where is Lucia, your second
        child?

                                LADY INGER.

        Ask God, who took her.

                                   ELINA.

        ’Tis you I ask; ’tis you must answer for her young life. She
        was glad as a bird in spring when she sailed from Östråt to
        be Merete’s guest. A year passed, and she stood in this room
        once more; but her cheeks were white, and death had gnawed
        deep into her breast. Ah, I startle you, my mother! You
        thought the ugly secret was buried with her;—but she told me
        all. A courtly knight had won her heart. He would have
        wedded her. You knew that her honour was at stake; yet your
        will never bent—and your child had to die. You see, I know
        all!

                                LADY INGER.

        All? Then she told you his name?

                                   ELINA.

        His name? No; his name she did not tell me. She shrank from
        his name as though it stung her;—she never uttered it.

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Relieved, to herself._] Ah, then you do _not_ know all——

        Elina—’tis true that the whole of this matter was well known
        to me. But there is one thing it seems you have overlooked.
        The lord whom Lucia met in Bergen was a Dane——

                                   ELINA.

        That, too, I know.

                                LADY INGER.

        And his love was a lie. With guile and soft speeches he had
        ensnared her.

                                   ELINA.

        I know it; but nevertheless she loved him; and had you had a
        mother’s heart, your daughter’s honour had been more to you
        than all.

                                LADY INGER.

        Not more than her happiness. Think you that, with Merete’s
        lot before my eyes, I could sacrifice my second child to a
        man that loved her not?

                                   ELINA.

        Cunning words may beguile many, but they beguile not me——

        Think not I know nothing of all that is passing in our land.
        I understand your counsels but too well. I know that in you
        the Danish lords have no true friend. It may be that you
        hate them; but you fear them too. When you gave Merete to
        Vinzents Lunge, the Danes held the mastery on all sides
        throughout our land. Three years later, when you forbade
        Lucia to wed the man to whom, though he had deceived her,
        she had given her life—things were far different then. The
        King’s Danish governors had shamefully misused the common
        people, and you deemed it not wise to link yourself still
        more closely to the foreign tyrants.

        And what have you done to avenge her that was sent so young
        to her grave? You have done nothing. Well then, I will act
        in your stead; I will avenge all the shame they have brought
        upon our people and our house!

                                LADY INGER.

        You? What will you do?

                                   ELINA.

        I will go my way, even as you go yours. What I shall do I
        myself know not; but I feel within me the strength to dare
        all for our righteous cause.

                                LADY INGER.

        Then have you a hard fight before you. I once promised as
        you do now—and my hair has grown grey under the burden of
        that promise.

                                   ELINA.

        Good-night! Your guest will soon be here, and at that
        meeting I should be one too many.

        It may be there is yet time for you——; well, God strengthen
        and guide you on your path! Forget not that the eyes of many
        thousands are fixed on you. Think on Merete, weeping late
        and early over her wasted life. Think on Lucia, sleeping in
        her black coffin.

        And one thing more. Forget not that in the game you play
        this night, your stake is your last child. [_Goes out to the
        left_.

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Looks after her awhile._] My last child? You know not how
        true was that word——But the stake is not my child only. God
        help me, I am playing to-night for the whole of Norway’s
        land.

        Ah—is not that some one riding through the gateway?
        [_Listens at the window._

        No; not yet. Only the wind; it blows cold as the grave——

        Has God a right to do this?—To make me a woman—and then to
        lay on my shoulders a man’s work?

        For I have the welfare of the country in my hands. It is in
        my power to make them rise as one man. They look to _me_ for
        the signal; and if I give it not now—it may never be given.

        To delay? To sacrifice the many for the sake of one?—Were it
        not better if I could——? No, no, no—I _will_ not! I
        _cannot_!

                [_Steals a glance towards the Banquet Hall, but
                    turns away again as if in dread, and whispers:_

        I can see them in there now. Pale spectres—dead
        ancestors—fallen kinsfolk.—Ah, those eyes that pierce me
        from every corner!

                         [_Makes a gesture of repulsion, and cries:_

        Sten Sture! Knut Alfson! Olaf Skaktavl! Back—back!—I
        _cannot_ do this!

                [_A_ STRANGER, _strongly built, and with grizzled
                    hair and beard, has entered from the Banquet
                    Hall. He is dressed in a torn lambskin tunic;
                    his weapons are rusty._

                               THE STRANGER.

        [_Stops in the doorway, and says in a low voice._] Hail to
        you, Inger Gyldenlöve!

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Turns with a scream._] Ah, Christ in heaven save me!

                [_Falls back into a chair. The_ STRANGER _stands
                    gazing at her, motionless, leaning on his
                    sword._

-----

                               ACT SECOND

        _The room at Östråt, as in the first Act._

        LADY INGER GYLDENLÖVE _is seated at the table on the right,
            by the window._ OLAF SKAKTAVL _is standing a little way
            from her. Their faces show that they have been engaged
            in a heated discussion._

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        For the last time, Inger Gyldenlöve—you are not to be moved
        from your purpose?

                                LADY INGER.

        I can do nought else. And my counsel to you is: do as I do.
        If it be Heaven’s will that Norway perish utterly, perish it
        must, for all we may do to save it.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        And think you I can content my heart with that belief? Shall
        I sit and look idly on, now that the hour is come? Do you
        forget the reckoning I have against them? They have robbed
        me of my lands, and parcelled them out among themselves. My
        son, my only child, the last of my race, they have
        slaughtered like a dog. Myself they have outlawed and hunted
        through forest and fell these twenty years.—Once and again
        have folk whispered of my death; but this I believe, that
        they shall not lay me beneath the sod before I have seen my
        vengeance.

                                LADY INGER.

        There is there a long life before you. What have you in mind
        to do?

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        Do? How should I know what I will do? It has never been my
        part to plot and plan. That is where you must help me. You
        have the wit for that. I have but my sword and my two arms.

                                LADY INGER.

        Your sword is rusted, Olaf Skaktavl! All the swords in
        Norway are rusted.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        That is doubtless why some folk fight only with their
        tongues.—Inger Gyldenlöve—great is the change in you. Time
        was when the heart of a man beat in your breast.

                                LADY INGER.

        Put me not in mind of what _was_.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        ’Tis for that very purpose I am here. You _shall_ hear me,
        even if——

                                LADY INGER.

        Be it so then; but be brief; for—I must say it—this is no
        place of safety for you.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        Östråt is no place of safety for an outlaw? That I have long
        known. But you forget that an outlaw is unsafe wheresoever
        he may wander.

                                LADY INGER.

        Speak then; I will not hinder you.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        ’Tis nigh on thirty years now since first I saw you. It was
        at Akershus[18] in the house of Knut Alfson and his wife.
        You were little more than a child then; yet were you bold as
        the soaring falcon, and wild and headstrong too at times.
        Many were the wooers around you. I too held you dear—dear as
        no woman before or since. But you cared for nothing, thought
        of nothing, save your country’s evil case and its great
        need.

                                LADY INGER.

        I counted but fifteen summers then—remember that! And was it
        not as though a frenzy had seized us all in those days?

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        Call it what you will; but one thing I know—even the old and
        sober men among us thought it written in the counsels of the
        Lord on high that you were she who should break our thraldom
        and win us all our rights again. And more: you yourself then
        thought as we did.

                                LADY INGER.

        ’Twas a sinful thought, Olaf Skaktavl. ’Twas my proud heart,
        and not the Lord’s call, that spoke in me.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        You _could_ have been the chosen one had you but willed it.
        You came of the noblest blood in Norway; power and riches
        were soon to be yours; and you had an ear for the cries of
        anguish—then!

        Do you remember that afternoon when Henrik Krummedike and
        the Danish fleet anchored off Akershus? The captains of the
        fleet offered terms of peace, and, trusting to the
        safe-conduct, Knut Alfson rowed on board. Three hours later,
        we bore him through the castle gate——

                                LADY INGER.

        A corpse; a corpse!

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        The best heart in Norway burst, when Krummedike’s hirelings
        struck him down. Methinks I still can see the long
        procession that passed into the banquet-hall, heavily, two
        by two. There he lay on his bier, white as a spring cloud,
        with the axe-cleft in his brow. I may safely say that the
        boldest men in Norway were gathered there that night. Lady
        Margrete stood by her dead husband’s head, and we swore as
        one man to venture lands and life to avenge this last
        misdeed and all that had gone before.—Inger Gyldenlöve,—who
        was it that burst through the circle of men? A maiden—almost
        a child—with fire in her eyes and her voice half choked with
        tears.—What was it she swore? Shall I repeat your words?

                                LADY INGER.

        I swore what the rest of you swore; neither more nor less.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        You remember your oath—and yet you have forgotten it.

                                LADY INGER.

        And how did the others keep their promise? I speak not of
        you, Olaf Skaktavl, but of your friends, all Norway’s
        nobles? Not one of them, in all these years, has had the
        courage to be a man; yet they lay it to my charge that I am
        a woman.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        I know what you would say. Why have they bent to the yoke,
        and not defied the tyrants to the last? ’Tis but too true;
        there is base metal enough in our noble houses nowadays. But
        had they held together—who knows what then might have been?
        And you could have held them together, for before you all
        had bowed.

                                LADY INGER.

        My answer were easy enough, but ’twould scarce content you.
        So let us leave speaking of what cannot be changed. Tell me
        rather what has brought you to Östråt. Do you need harbour?
        Well, I will try to hide you. If you would have aught else,
        speak out; you shall find me ready——

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        For twenty years have I been homeless. In the mountains of
        Jæmteland my hair has grown grey. My dwelling has been with
        wolves and bears.—You see, Lady Inger—_I_ need you not; but
        both nobles and people stand in sore need of you.

                                LADY INGER.

        The old burden.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        Ay, it sounds but ill in your ears, I know; yet hear it you
        must, for all that. In brief, then: I come from Sweden:
        troubles are brewing: the Dales are ready to rise.

                                LADY INGER.

        I know it.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        Peter Kanzler[19] is with us—secretly, you understand.

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Starting._] Peter Kanzler?

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        ’Tis he that has sent me to Östråt.

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Rises._] Peter Kanzler, say you?

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        He himself;—but mayhap you no longer know him?

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Half to herself._] Only too well!—But tell me, I pray
        you,—what message do you bring?

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        When the rumour of the rising reached the border mountains,
        where I then was, I set off at once into Sweden. ’Twas not
        hard to guess that Peter Kanzler had a finger in the game. I
        sought him out and offered to stand by him;—he knew me of
        old, as you know, and knew that he could trust me; so he has
        sent me hither.

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Impatiently._] Yes yes,—he sent you hither to——?

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        [_With secrecy._] Lady Inger—a stranger comes to Östråt
        to-night.

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Surprised._] What? Know you that——?

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        Assuredly I know it. I know all. ’Twas to meet him that
        Peter Kanzler sent me hither.

                                LADY INGER.

        To meet him? Impossible, Olaf Skaktavl,—impossible!

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        ’Tis as I tell you. If he be not already come, he will
        soon——

                                LADY INGER.

        Doubtless, doubtless; but——

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        Then you knew of his coming?

                                LADY INGER.

        Ay, surely. He sent me a message. ’Twas therefore they
        opened to you as soon as you knocked.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        [_Listens._] Hush!—some one is riding along the road. [_Goes
        to the window._] They are opening the gate.

                                LADY INGER.

        [_Looks out._] It is a knight and his attendant. They are
        dismounting in the courtyard.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        ’Tis he then. His name?

                                LADY INGER.

        You know not his name?

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        Peter Kanzler refused to tell it me. He would say no more
        than that I should find him at Östråt the third evening
        after Martinmas——

                                LADY INGER.

        Ay; even to-night.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        He was to bring letters with him; and from them, and from
        you, I was to learn who he is.

                                LADY INGER.

        Then let me lead you to your chamber. You have need of rest
        and refreshment. You shall soon have speech with the
        stranger.

                               OLAF SKAKTAVL.

        Well, be it as you will.

                                         [_Both go out to the left._

                [_After a short pause_, FINN _enters cautiously by
                    the door on the right, looks round the room, and
                    peeps into the Banquet Hall; he then goes back
                    to the door, and makes a sign to some one
                    outside. Immediately after, enter_ COUNCILLOR
                    NILS LYKKE _and the Swedish Commander_, JENS
                    BIELKE.

                                NILS LYKKE.

        [_Softly._] No one?

                                   FINN.

        [_In the same tone._] No one, master!

                                NILS LYKKE.

        And we may depend on you in all things?

                                   FINN.

        The commandant in Trondhiem has ever given me a name for
        trustiness.

                                NILS LYKKE.

        ’Tis well; he has said as much to me. First of all, then—has
        there come any stranger to Östråt to-night, before us?

                                   FINN.

        Ay; a stranger came an hour since.

                                NILS LYKKE.

        [_Softly, to_ JENS BIELKE.] He is here. [_Turns again to_
        FINN.] Would you know him again? Have you seen him?

                                   FINN.

        Nay, none has seen him, that I know, but the gatekeeper. He
        was brought at once to Lady Inger, and she——

                                NILS LYKKE.

        Well? What of her? He is not gone again already?

                                   FINN.

        No; but it seems she holds him hidden in one of her own
        rooms; for——

                                NILS LYKKE.

        It is well.

                                JENS BIELKE.

        [_Whispers._] Then the first thing is to put a guard on the
        gate; so are we sure of him.

                                NILS LYKKE.

        [_With a smile._] H’m! [_To_ FINN.] Tell me—is there any way
        of leaving the castle, save by the gate? Gape not at me so!
        I mean—can one escape from Östråt unseen, though the castle
        gate be barred?

                                   FINN.

        Nay, that I know not. ’Tis true they talk of secret ways in
        the vaults beneath; but no one knows them save Lady
        Inger—and mayhap Mistress Elina.

                                JENS BIELKE.

        The devil!

                                NILS LYKKE.

        It is well. You may go.

                                   FINN.

        Should you need me in aught again, you have but to open the
        second door on the right in the Banquet Hall, and I shall
        presently be at hand.

                                NILS LYKKE.

        Good.

        [_Points to the entrance-door._ FINN _goes out._

                                JENS BIELKE.

        Now, by my soul, dear friend and brother—this campaign is
        like to end but scurvily for both of us.

                                NILS LYKKE.

        [_With a smile._] Oh—not for me, I hope.

                                JENS BIELKE.

        Say you so? First of all, there is little honour to be won
        in hunting an overgrown whelp like this Nils Sture. Are we
        to think him mad or in his sober senses after the pranks he
        has played? First he breeds bad blood among the peasants;
        promises them help and all their hearts can desire;—and
        then, when it comes to the pinch, off he runs to hide behind
        a petticoat!

        Moreover, to say truth, I repent that I followed your
        counsel and went not my own way.

                                NILS LYKKE.

        [_To himself._] Your repentance comes somewhat late, my
        brother!

                                JENS BIELKE.

        For, let me tell you, I have never loved digging at a
        badger’s earth. I looked for quite other sport. Here have I
        ridden all the way from Jæmteland with my horsemen, and have
        got me a warrant from the Trondhiem commandant to search for
        the rebel wheresoever I please. All his tracks point towards
        Östråt——

                                NILS LYKKE.

        He is here! He is here, I tell you!

                                JENS BIELKE.

        Were it not liker, in that case, that we had found the gate
        barred and well guarded? Would that we had; then could I
        have found use for my men-at-arms——

                                NILS LYKKE.

        But instead, the gate is very courteously thrown open to us.
        Mark now—if Inger Gyldenlöve’s fame belie her not, I warrant
        she will not let her guests lack for either meat or drink.

                                JENS BIELKE.

        Ay, to turn us aside from our errand! And what wild whim was
        that of yours to have me leave my horsemen half a league
        from the castle? Had we come in force——

                                NILS LYKKE.

        She had made us none the less welcome for _that_. But mark
        well that then our coming had made a stir. The peasants
        round about had held it for an outrage against Lady Inger;
        she had risen high in their favour once more—and with that,
        look you, we were ill served.

                                JENS BIELKE.

        May be so. But what am I to do now? Count Sture is in
        Östråt, you say. Ay, but how does that profit me? Be sure
        Lady Inger Gyldenlöve has as many hiding-places as the fox,
        and more than one outlet to them. You and I, alone, may go
        snuffing about here as long as we please. I would the devil
        had the whole affair!

                                NILS LYKKE.

        Well, then, my friend—if you like not the turn your errand
        has taken, you have but to leave the field to me.

                                JENS BIELKE.

        To you? What will you do?

                                NILS LYKKE.

        Caution and cunning may in this matter prove of more avail
        than force of arms.—And to say truth, Captain Jens
        Bielke—something of the sort has been in my mind ever since
        we met in Trondhiem yesterday.

                                JENS BIELKE.

        Was that why you persuaded me to leave the men-at-arms?

                                NILS LYKKE.

        Both your purpose at Östråt and mine could best be served
        without them; and so——

                                JENS BIELKE.

        The foul fiend seize you—I had almost said! And me to boot!
        Might I not have known that there is guile in all your
        dealings?

                                NILS LYKKE.

        Be sure I shall need all my guile here, if I am to face my
        foe with even weapons. And let me tell you, ’tis of the
        utmost moment to me that I acquit me of my mission secretly
        and well. You must know that when I set forth I was scarce
        in favour with my lord the King. He held me in suspicion;
        though I dare swear I have served him as well as any man
        could, in more than one ticklish charge.

                                JENS BIELKE.

        That you may safely boast. God and all men know you for the
        craftiest devil in all the three kingdoms.

                                NILS LYKKE.

        I thank you! Though, after all, ’tis not much to say. But
        this present errand I count as indeed a crowning test of my
        powers; for here I have to outwit a woman——

                                JENS BIELKE.

        Ha-ha-ha! In _that_ art you have long since given crowning
        proofs of your skill, dear brother. Think you we in Sweden
        know not the song— Fair maidens a-many they sigh and they
        pine: “Ah God, that Nils Lykke were mine, mine, mine!”

                                NILS LYKKE.

        Alas, ’tis women of twenty and thereabouts that ditty
        speaks of. Lady Inger Gyldenlöve is nigh on fifty, and
        wily to boot beyond all women. ’Twill be no light matter
        to overmatch her. But it _must_ be done—at any cost.
        Should I contrive to win certain advantages over her that
        the King has long desired, I can reckon on the embassy to
        France next spring. You know that I spent three years at
        the University in Paris? My whole soul is set on coming
        thither again, most of all if I can appear in lofty place,
        a king’s ambassador.—Well, then—is it agreed—do you leave
        Lady Inger to me? Remember—when you were last at Court in
        Copenhagen, I made way for you with more than one fair
        lady——

                                JENS BIELKE.

        Nay, truly now—that generosity cost you little; one and all
        of them were at your beck and call. But let that pass; now
        that I have begun amiss in this matter, I had as lief that
        you should take it on your shoulders. Yet _one_ thing you
        must promise—if the young Count Sture be in Östråt, you will
        deliver him into my hands, dead or alive!

                                NILS LYKKE.

        You shall have him all alive. I, at any rate, mean not to
        kill him. But now you must ride back and join your people.
        Keep guard on the road. Should I mark aught that mislikes
        me, you shall know it forthwith.

                                JENS BIELKE.

        Good, good. But how am I to get out——?

                                NILS LYKKE.

        The fellow that brought us in will show the way. But go
        quietly——

                                JENS BIELKE.

        Of course, of course. Well—good fortune to you!

                                NILS LYKKE.

        Fortune has never failed me in a war with women. Haste you
        now!

                               [JENS BIELKE _goes out to the right._

                                NILS LYKKE.

        [_Stands still for a while; then walks about the room,
        looking round him; then he says softly:_] At last, then, I
        am at Östråt—the ancient hall whereof a child, two years
        ago, told me so much.

        Lucia. Ay, two years ago she was still a child. And now—now
        she is dead. [_Hums with a half-smile._] “Blossoms plucked
        are blossoms withered——”

                                           [_Looks round him again._

        Östråt. ’Tis as though I had seen it all before; as though I
        were at home here.—In there is the Banquet Hall. And