The Restored Domkirke.
Eight hundred years the old Dom of Ribe had borne its testimony, when its crumbling walls gave warning that nothing that is of earth is imperishable, and now, after many years of labor, it stood restored. It was to its birthday we had come home. Morning, noon, and evening our steps turned toward it; and when at night the old town had settled down to its fireside chat, and only the organist was musing over the old hymns in his loft, my feet found the familiar paths. They needed no guide here, even where the shadows lay deepest. There was the pillar with the mark of the great flood that two hundred years ago[21] at the Christmastide made ten thousand homes desolate upon the Danish coast. Though the Dom stands upon the highest spot in town, anciently called the mountain because it was at least ten feet above the level of the river, the water rose man-high within it. We boys used to measure up against the mark, and wonder if we would ever grow to be so tall. There was the oaken door with great bronze rings worn thin and light that bore their own testimony to those days and their ways. The powerful bishops who built the Dom and gave it renown were fighting men. It was the custom of their day. The one who laid its foundation fell in battle before the walls were fairly above ground. But at home they wore the mitre, and knew how to make even the King hold his hand at the door of the sanctuary. To all men it was that literally; hence the worn rings. How many appealing hands had grasped them with despairing grip, no one may ever tell; but this much is certain, that the appeal was not in vain. The iron hand was over the town gate, indeed, symbol of the rigor of human justice that demanded an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but at the church door a mightier was raised to stay it, at least until the case had been heard by the tribunal that claimed power to loose and to bind in the world to come as in the one that is.
The Cat-head Door.
The Cat-head Door, as we called it, because of the lions’ heads wrought upon it, long since ceased to play other part than to frighten us children. It was nearest the altar, and, with that curious incongruity that in the popular superstition assigned to Satan an abode in the church when it was forsaken at night, we boys had been told how we could bring him out by walking thrice around the building and calling each time through the key-hole of that door, “Come out!” The third time he would appear. I do not think any of us believed it; but many a dark night—it was only at such times that speech was to be had with his Satanic Majesty—I have made one of a party to test the power of the spell. We made the circuit of the Domkirke bravely enough twice, albeit we lagged a little on the second lap; but invariably when we approached the Cat-head Door on the third, a wild panic would seize us, and we ran as if the devil were after us in very truth.
Silly? Of course it was. But in Ribe it was bred in the bone. Barely within the door that held us in such terror, haven of refuge though it had once been, was the accursed candlestick, with its blasphemous ban upon whoever should presume to move what some purse-proud burgher had hung there to celebrate his own littleness, persuading himself and his time, perhaps, that it was also to the glory of God. In such fashion had he succeeded that stories of how disaster had befallen when impious hands were stretched forth to touch it were whispered yet in my school days. The sexton had fallen from the ladder, the architect had died suddenly, etc. Silly, certainly. But with every spade-thrust in the earth disclosing forgotten cemeteries, buried cloister walls, and secret burrows; with the watchmen at night droning forth their chants of five hundred years ago in the dark shadows of the Domkirke; with the deep voice of its bell counting the hours, the bell that hung in the great tower when men went to war clad in iron—and little else they did in that country in those days; with the very street names proclaiming the past on every hand: Black Friar Street, Gray Friar Street, Priest Street, Bishop Street, Monk Street, Cloister Street, Castle Street, Grave Street—mere names now, it is true, but eloquent of things long dead—why, the wonder was, not that we were still so little, but rather that we had grown so big in our world ghosts.
The Old Cloister-church.
To one they had put up a marble tablet since I was a boy. There it was, set in the wall of the old house:
Here lived the tailor Laurids Splid, whose poor wife, Maren, on November the 9th, 1641, was burned for witchcraft on the gallows hill.