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Updated: May 21, 2025
"What then?" asked he, meeting her troubled look with a strong, cheerful glance. "Then the world is less beautiful than I thought it; the sun is less bright, and I am no more pleasing to myself." Tears began to flow down her noble cheeks; but Balder's eyes grew brighter, seeing which, Gnulemah was encouraged to continue.
Nevertheless, so subtle is the boundary between love human and divine, Gnulemah in these first passionate moments may easily have deemed the one no less sublime than the other. But there was no danger of Balder's falling into such an error. The distinction was clear to him.
The tears came to his eyes, hearing her speak out her loving soul so simply. He had travelled through the world, while she had lived her life between a wall and a precipice. But not the noisy, gaudy, gloomy crust which is fresh to-day, and to-morrow hardens, and the next day crumbles, is the world; but the fire-globe within: and Gnulemah was nearer that fire than Balder.
Meanwhile her last objection remained unanswered, and Balder, distrustful of his capacity, was inspired to seek inspiration from her he would instruct. "Tell me how you love me, Gnulemah," said he. She roused herself, and bending her face to his, breathlessly kissed his lips. Then she drooped her warm cheek on his shoulder, and whispered the rest:
Gnulemah had more than once striven to check it, but in vain. When he had come to an end, and stood tense and quivering as a bowstring whose arrow has just flown, these words reached him: "Hiero is not dead; he is there behind the trees." Stiffly he turned and stared bewildered. Landscape, sky, Gnulemah, swam before his eyes in fragments, like images in troubled water.
Balder Helwyse, dumfounded before the revelation of the clock, might have stared himself into imbecility, had not he heard his name spoken in sweet human music, and, turning, beheld Gnulemah peeping through the doorway down the hall. There was no great distance between them, yet she seemed immeasurable spaces away.
That sublime office whose reversion he had boldly courted, in the possession shrivelled his soul to nothing and left him dead. It was not easy to be God, even over one human being! But Gnulemah, in her mighty earnestness, knelt nearer, so that the edge of Balder's sunlight smote the golden ornaments that clung round her outstretched arms.
"I am Balder Helwyse, the son of Thor," continued the other, speaking with incisive deliberation, better to touch the stunned man's apprehension, "I once had a twin sister. You believe that Gnulemah is she." The priest's features were getting a bewildered, plaintive expression.
Is it blind chance or lifeless expediency that moulds the curves of woman's bosom, builds up man's forehead like a citadel, and sets his head on his shoulders? Is beauty beautiful, or are we cozened by congenial ugliness? But Balder's philosophic scepticism should never have braved a test like Gnulemah!
Either he was beginning to comprehend the purport of Balder's words, or else the sternness of the latter's tone and glance agitated him. Bader concentrated all his force into the utterance of the final sentences, vowing to himself that his fallen enemy should understand! Did he think of Gnulemah then? or of Salome partly for whose; sake, he feigned, he had assumed the scourge?
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