Last Tales. Isak Dinesen

his wife happy?”

      “It is always, good Taddeo,” Matteo answered, “difficult for a husband to know whether he is making his wife happy or not. But as to the husband and wife of my tale, the lady, on the twentieth anniversary of their wedding, took her husband’s hand, gazed archly into his eyes and asked him whether he still remembered this first evening of their married life. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘how terrified was I not then for half an hour, how did I not tremble. Why!’ she exclaimed, throwing herself into his arms, ‘if you had not included in your directions that last clause of yours, I should have felt disdained and betrayed! My God, I should have been lost!’”

      The contradance before the two old gentlemen changed into a waltz, and the whole ballroom waved and swayed like a garden under a summer breeze. The seductive Viennese tune then again died away.

      “I should like to tell you,” Taddeo said, “another tale. It may go to support your grandfather’s theology, or it may not.”

      “A nobleman of an ambitious nature, and with a brilliant career behind him, when he was no longer quite young decided to marry and looked round for a wife. On a visit to the town of Bergamo he made the acquaintance of a family of an ancient, great name but of modest means. There were at the time seven daughters in the tall gloomy palazzo, and at the end of the pretty row an only son, who was still a child. The seven young sisters were fully aware that their individual existence might with reason be disputed or denied, since they had come into the world as failures in the attempt at acquiring an heir to the name, and were—so to say—blanks drawn by their ancient house in its lottery on life and death. But their family arrogance was fierce enough to make them bear their sad lot high-handedly, as a privilege out of reach to the common people.

      “It so happened that the youngest sister, the one whose arrival, he felt, to the poor Prince and Princess would have been the hardest blow of all, caught our nobleman’s eye, so that he returned to the house, and again returned.

      “The girl, who was then but seventeen years old, was far from being the prettiest of the group. But the visitor was a connoisseur of feminine loveliness, and spied in her youthful face and form the promise of coming, unusual beauty. Yet much more than by this, he was attracted by a particular trait in her. He guessed behind her demure and disciplined bearing the fruit of an excellent education, an ambition kindred to his own, but more powerful because less blasé, a longing—and an energy to satisfy the longing—a long way out of the ordinary. It would be, he reflected, a pleasant, an entertaining experience to encourage this youthful ambition, still but faintly conscious of itself, to fledge the cygnet and watch it soaring. At the same time, he thought, a young wife of high birth and brought up in Spartan simplicity, with a nostalgia for glory, would be an asset in his future career. He applied for the girl’s hand, and her father and mother, surprised and delighted at having their daughter make such a splendid match, handed her over to him.

      “Our nobleman had every reason to congratulate himself on his decision. The flight feathers of his young bird grew with surprising quickness; soon in his brilliant circle one would not find a lady of greater beauty and finer grace, of more exquisite and dignified comportment, or of more punctilious tact. She wore the heavy ornaments that he gave her with as much ease as a rosebush its roses, and had he, he thought, been able to set a crown on her head, the world would have felt her to be born with it. And she was still soaring, inspired by, as well as enraptured with, her successes. He himself, within the first two years of their married life, acquired two supreme decorations at his native and at a foreign court.

      “But when he and his wife had been married for three years he observed a change in her. She became pensive, as if stirred by some new mighty emotion, obscure to him. At times she did not hear what he spoke to her. It also seemed to him that she would now prefer to show herself in the world on such occasions where he was not with her, and to excuse herself from others where she would have to appear by his side. ‘I have spoilt her,’ he reflected. ‘Is it indeed possible that, against the very order of things, her ambition and her vanity now make her aspire to outshine her lord, to whom she owes all?’ His feelings were naturally badly hurt at the idea of so much ingratitude, and at last, on an evening when they were alone together, he resolved to take her to account.

      “‘Surely, my dear,’ he said to her, ‘you will realize that I am not going to play the part of that husband in the fairy tale who, owing to his connection with higher powers, raised his wife to the rank of queen and empress, only to hear her, in the end, demanding to have the sun rise at her word. Recall to yourself the place from which I took you, and remember that the response of higher powers to the too indulgent husband forwarding his wife’s claim was this: “return, and find her back in her hovel.” ’

      “His wife for a long time did not answer him; in the end she rose from her chair as if about to leave the room. She was tall and willowy; her ample skirts at each of her movements made a little chirping sound.

      “‘My husband,’ she said in her low, sonorous voice. ‘Surely you will realize that to an ambitious woman it comes hard, in entering a ballroom, to know that she is entering it on the arm of a cuckold.’

      “As, very quietly and without another word, she had gone out of the door, the nobleman sat on, wondering, as till now he had never done, at the complexity of the Universe.”