Page:Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1888).djvu/529

 From the two wings of the castle, a staircase leads down to the entrance of a low, vaulted cellar. Here “Long Martha” had been imprisoned, and from thence she was led away to the scaffold. It is said that she took away the lives of five children, that she might devour their hearts, and was under the delusion that if she could obtain two more she would be able to fly and make herself invisible. In this dungeon there was no window, but a narrow loop-hole very near the ceiling admitted the air; no refreshing fragrance from the blooming lime-trees could reach that dwelling, where all was dark and mouldy. There was only a rough bench to lie upon; but a good conscience is a soft pillow, and therefore Jurgen could sleep well. The thick oaken door was locked and fastened outside by an iron bar, but the goblin Superstition can creep through a key-hole in a baron’s castle, as easily as into a fisherman’s hut; and what should prevent it from creeping in now, where poor Jurgen sat thinking of Martha and her terrible deeds?

Her last thought on the night before her execution was perhaps breathed aloud within these dungeon walls, and all the wickedness which tradition said had been practised within the castle in the olden times, when Sir Schwandwedel dwelt there, came into Jurgen’s mind, and made him shudder for a moment. But a refreshing thought penetrated his heart even here, like a sunbeam; it was the remembrance of the blooming elders and the fragrant lime-trees.

He was not left long in the castle; they carried him off to the town of Ringkjöbing, where he was imprisoned with equal severity. Those times were not like ours. The common people were treated harshly. It was not long after these days when the farmer who owned a small farm, could become a knight; and common servants were often made magistrates, and had it in their power to condemn a poor man, for even a small offence, to lose his property, or to suffer corporal punishment. Judges of this kind were even then to be found; especially in Jutland, so far from the capital and from well-ordered and enlightened rulers.

Jurgen had no cause to hope that his case would be speedly settled. He felt cold and cheerless in his prison. When would this state of things end? It seemed his fate to suffer misfortune and sorrow innocently. He had leisure now to reflect on the different positions allotted to man on earth, and to wonder at his own. And yet he felt sure all would be made clear in the next life, in the existence that awaits us after death. His faith had been strengthened in the fisherman’s hut; a faith which had never brightened his father’s mind amidst the wealth of sunny Spain, had been learnt by him in poverty, and was now a light of comfort in the hour of sorrow and distress, a sign of that mercy of God which never fails.

The storms of the spring equinox began to blow, and in the lull of the wind, the rolling and moaning of the North Sea could be heard for miles inland, like the rushing of a thousand wagons over undermined hollow ground. Jurgen, in his prison, heard these sounds, and they were a relief to him. No melody could have touched his heart as did these sounds from the sea; the rolling boundless ocean, on which a man can be borne before the wind through the world, carrying with him his home wherever he