Page:Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1888).djvu/146

 “Oh, I wish she would!” said the child, who was quite unhappy about it. “I should be so glad. I would give up my doll and all my playthings, if she could only come here again. Poor Ingé! it is so dreadful for her.”

These pitying words penetrated to Ingé’s inmost heart, and seemed to do her good. It was the first time any one had said, “Poor Ingé!” without saying something about her faults. A little innocent child was weeping, and praying for mercy for her. It made her feel quite strange, and she would gladly have wept herself, and it added to her torment to find she could not do so. And while she thus suffered in a place where nothing changed, years passed away on earth, and she heard her name less frequently mentioned, But one day a sigh reached her ear, and the words, “Ingé! Ingé! what a grief thou hast been to me! I said it would be so.” It was the last sigh of her dying mother.

After this, Ingé heard her kind mistress say, “Ah, poor Ingé! shall I ever see thee again? Perhaps I may, for we know not what may happen in the future.” But Ingé knew right well that her mistress would never come to that dreadful place.

Time passed—a long, bitter time—then Ingé heard her name pronounced once more, and saw what seemed two bright stars shining above her. They were two gentle eyes closing on earth. Many years had passed since the little girl had lamented and wept about “poor Ingé.” That child was now an old woman, whom God was taking to Himself. In the last hour of existence the events of a whole life often appear before us; and in this hour the old woman remembered how, when a child, she had shed tears over the story of Ingé, and she prayed for her now. As the eyes of the old woman closed to earth, the eyes of the soul opened upon the hidden things of eternity, and then she, in whose last thoughts Ingé had been so vividly present, saw how deeply the poor girl had sunk. She burst into tears at the sight, and in heaven, as she had done when a little child on earth, she wept and prayed for poor Ingé. Her tears and her prayers echoed through the dark void that surrounded the tormented captive soul, and the unexpected mercy was obtained for it through an angel’s tears. As in thought Ingé seemed to act over again every sin she had committed on earth, she trembled, and tears she had never yet been able to weep rushed to her eyes. It seemed impossible that the gates of mercy could ever be opened to her; but while she acknowledged this in deep penitence, a beam of radiant light shot suddenly into the depths upon her. More powerful than the sunbeam that dissolves the man of snow which the children have raised, more quickly than the snowflake melts and becomes a drop of water on the warm lips of a child, was the stony form of Ingé changed, and as a little bird she soared, with the speed of lightning, upward to the world of mortals. A bird that felt timid and shy to all things around it, that seemed to shrink with shame from meeting any living creature, and hurriedly sought to conceal itself in a dark corner of an old ruined wall; there it sat cowering and unable to utter a sound, for it was voiceless. Yet how quickly the little bird discovered the beauty of everything around it. The sweet, fresh air; the soft radiance of the moon, as its light spread over the earth;