Page:Fairy tales and stories (Andersen, Tegner).djvu/426

 394 before had she danced so charmingly. Her tender feet felt as if they were being pierced by sharp knives, but she did not feel this; her heart suffered from a far more terrible pain. She knew it was the last evening she should see him for whom she had left her relations and her home, for whom she had given up her beautiful voice, and had daily suffered infinite agonies, of which he had no idea. It was the last night she would breathe the same air as he, and see the deep sea and the starlit sky. An eternal night without thoughts and dreams awaited her, who had no soul, who could never gain one. On board the ship the rejoicings and the merriment went on until far beyond midnight. She laughed and danced while the thoughts of death were uppermost in her mind. The prince kissed his lovely bride, and she played with his black locks, and arm in arm they went to rest in the magnificent tent.

Everything then became quiet on the ship, only the steersman was standing at the helm, and the little mermaid laid her white arms on the gunwale and gazed toward the east for the first blush of the morning. The first ray of the sun, she knew, would be her death. Then she saw her sisters rising from the sea. They were as pale as she, and their long, beautiful hair no longer waved in the wind. It had been cut off.

"We have given it to the witch, that she might help you, that you may not die this night. She has given us a knife; here it is. See how sharp it is! Before the sun rises you must plunge it into the prince's heart, and when his warm blood touches your feet they will grow together to a fish's tail, and you will become a mermaid again, and can go down with us into the sea and live your three hundred years before you become the dead salt froth on the sea. Make haste! He or you must die before the sun rises. Our old grandmother is mourning so much for you that her white hair has fallen off, just as ours fell under the scissors of the witch. Kill the prince and come back with us. Make haste! Do you see the red streak on the sky? In a few minutes the sun will rise, and then you must die." And the sisters gave a strange, deep sigh and vanished in the waves.

The little mermaid drew back the purple curtain of the tent, and saw the beautiful bride asleep with her head resting on the prince's breast. She bent down, kissed him on his beautiful forehead, and looked at the sky, where the gleam of the morning was growing brighter and brighter. She glanced at the sharp knife, and again fixed her eyes on the prince, who just then whispered the name of his bride in his dreams. He thought only of her. The knife trembled in the hand of the little mermaid—then she suddenly flung it far away into the waves, which gleamed red where it fell. The bubbles that rose to the surface looked like drops of blood. Once more she looked with dimmed eyes at the prince, and then threw herself from the ship into the sea. She felt her body dissolving itself into foam.

The sun now rose above the horizon, its rays falling so mild and warm on the deadly cold sea foam that the little mermaid did not feel the pangs