Page:Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1888).djvu/535

 to be merely the sport of chance? No! the all-loving Creator would repay him in the life to come, for what he had suffered and lost in this. “The Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works,” says the psalmist; and these words of David were repeated in patience and hope by the old, pious wife of the merchant; and the prayer of her heart was that Jurgen might soon be summoned to enter into eternal life.

In the churchyard, where the walls are surrounded with sand, Clara lay buried. Jurgen appeared to have no idea of this; it did not enter his mind, which could only retain fragments of the past. Every Sunday he went to church with the old people, and sat silent, gazing on vacancy. One day, while the psalms were being sung, he uttered a deep sigh, and a light came into his eyes, as he fixed them upon the place at the altar where he had often knelt during a year with his friend who was dead. He uttered her name, and then became pale as death, while the tears rolled down his cheeks. They led him out of the church; he told the bystanders he was quite well, and had never been ill. He who had been so heavily afflicted—the waif cast forth upon the world—remembered nothing of his sufferings. “The Lord our Maker is wise, and full of loving-kindness; who can doubt it?”

In Spain, where the warm breezes blow over the Moorish cupola, and among the orange and myrtle groves, where the song and the castanets are ever heard, where children march in procession through the streets with flags and lighted tapers, in a luxurious house sat the rich merchant, a childless old man. How much of his wealth would he not have given to be able once more to press his daughter to his heart, or her child, which had perhaps never seen the light of life. “Poor child!” Yes, poor child; a child still, yet more than thirty years of age, for Jurgen had reached that age while living in Skjagen.

Drifting sands had covered the graves in the churchyard, quite up to the walls of the church; but the dead must be buried among the relations and the loved ones who had gone before them. Merchant Bronne and his wife were laid with their children in one of these graves beneath the white sand. It was spring time, the season of storms, The sand from the hills near Hunsby was whirled up in clouds; the sea ran high, and flocks of birds flew about in the storm, or ran shrieking across the sand-dunes. Shipwreck followed shipwreck, on the reefs of Skjagenzwieg.

One evening Jurgen sat alone in his room; suddenly his mind seemed to become clearer, and a feeling of unrest came upon him, such as had often driven him forth, in his younger days, to wander on the heath and among the sand-dunes. “Home, home!” he exclaimed. No one heard him. He went out of the house, and turned his steps towards the dunes. Sand and stones blew in his face, and were whirled about. He continued his way on towards the church. The sand lay high round the walls, half covering the windows, but the heap had been shovelled away from before the door, and there was a clear and free pathway to enter, so Jurgen went into the church.

The storm continued to howl over the town of Skjagen; there had not