There lay, partially imbedded in the sand-bank, the wreck of a ship; the sea rolled over it, but the white figure-head was supported by an anchor, the sharp iron of which stuck up almost to the surface of the water. It was against this that Jörgen had struck himself when the current had driven him forward with sudden force. Stunned and fainting, he sank with his burden, but the succeeding wave threw him and the young girl up again.
The fishermen had now reached them, and they were taken into the boat. Blood was streaming over Jörgen's face; he looked as if he were dead, but he still held the girl in so tight a grasp that it was with the utmost difficulty she could be wrenched from his encircling arm. As pale as death, and quite insensible, she lay at full length at the bottom of the boat, which steered towards Skagen.
All possible means were tried to restore Clara to animation, but in vain the poor young woman was dead. Long had Jörgen been buffeting the waves with a corpse exerting his utmost strength and straining every nerve for a dead body.
Jörgen still breathed; he was carried to the nearest house on the inner side of the sand-hills. A sort of army surgeon who happened to be at the place, who also acted in the capacities of smith and huckster, attended him until the next day, when a physician from Hjörring, who had been sent for, arrived.
The patient was severely wounded in the head, and suffering from a brain fever. For a time he uttered fearful shrieks, but on the third day he sank into a state of drowsiness, and his life seemed to hang upon a thread: that it might snap, the physician said, was the best that could be wished for Jörgen.
"Let us pray our Lord that he may be taken; he will never more be a rational man."
But he was not taken; the thread of life would not break, though memory was swept away, and all the powers and faculties of his mind were gone. It was a frightful change. A living body was left a body that was to regain health and go about again.
Jörgen remained in the trader Brönne's house.
"He was brought into this lamentable condition by his efforts to save our child," said the old man; "he is now our son."
Jörgen was called "an idiot;" but that was a term not exactly applicable to him. He was like a musical instrument, the strings of which are loose, and can no longer, therefore, be made to sound. Only once, for a few minutes, they seemed to resume their elasticity, and they vibrated again. Old melodies were played, and played in time. Old images seemed to start up before him. They vanished all glimmering of reason vanished, and he sat again staring vacantly around, without thought, without mind. It was to be hoped that he did not suffer anything. His dark eyes had lost their intelligence; they looked only like black glass that could move about.
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."