Everybody was sorry for the poor idiot Jörgen.
It was he who, before he saw the light of day, was destined to a career of earthly prosperity, of wealth and happiness, so great that it was "frightful pride, overweening arrogance," to wish for, or to believe in, a future life! All the high powers of his soul were wasted. Nothing but hardships, sufferings, and disappointments had been dealt out to him. A valuable bulb he was, torn up from his rich native soil, and cast upon distant sands to rot and perish. Was that being, made in the image of God, worth nothing more? Was he but the sport of accidents or of chance? No! The God of infinite love would give him a portion in another life for what he had suffered and been deprived of here.
"The Lord is good to all: and His tender mercies are over all His works."
These consolatory words, from one of the Psalms of David, were repeated in devout faith by the pious old wife of the trader Brönne; and her heartfelt prayer was, that our Lord would soon release the poor benighted being, and receive him into God's gift of grace—everlasting life.
In the churchyard, where the sand had drifted into piles against the walls, was Clara buried. It appeared as if Jörgen had never thought about her grave; it did not enter into the narrow circle of his ideas, which now only dwelt among wrecks of the past. Every Sunday he accompanied the family to church, and he generally sat quiet with a totally vacant look; but one day, while a psalm was being sung, he breathed a sigh, his eyes lightened up, he turned them towards the altar—towards that spot where, more than a year before, he had knelt, with his dead friend at his side. He uttered her name, became as white as a sheet, and tears rolled down his cheeks.
He was helped out of church, and then he said that he felt quite well, and did not think anything had been the matter with him; the short flash of memory had already faded away from him—the much-tried, the sorely-smitten of God. Yet that God, our Creator, is all wisdom and all love, who can doubt? Our hearts and our reason acknowledge it, and the Bible proclaims it. "His tender mercies are over all His works."
In Spain, where, amidst laurels and orange trees, the Moorish golden cupolas glitter in the warm air, where songs and castanets are heard, sat, in a splendid mansion, a childless old man. Children were passing through the streets in a procession, with lights and waving banners. How much of his enormous wealth would he not have given to possess one child—to have had spared to him his daughter and her little one, who perhaps never beheld the light of day in this world. If so, how would it behold the light of eternity—of paradise? "Poor, poor child!"
Yes; poor child—nothing but a child—and yet in his thirtieth year! for to such an age had Jörgen attained there in Gammel-Skagen.
The sand-drifts had found their way even over the graves in the churchyard, and up to the very walls of the church itself; yet here, amidst those who had gone before them—amidst relatives and friends—the dead were still buried. The good old Brönne and his wife reposed there, near their daughter, under the white sand.