Part 11

“Oh, do not speak with such assurance, my son! Do not tempt the Lord! No man can know what passes in the mind of another, and you cannot tell what the viceroy’s son may decide to do. Perhaps, alas! he will never condescend to admit a humble chaplain to his presence. Farewell, my son; may your journey be blessed, and may you sometimes remember the poor priest and pray for his unhappy prisoners.”

XV.

Welcome, Hugo; tell me, did you ever see so terrible a storm!--MATURIN: _Bertram_.

In a room communicating with the apartments of the Governor of Throndhjem, three of his Excellency’s secretaries sat at a table loaded with parchments, papers, inkstands, and seals, a fourth chair, left vacant, showing that one of the scribes was late. They had been silently writing and thinking for some time, when one of them exclaimed: “Did you know, Wapherney, that the poor librarian, Foxtipp, is to be dismissed by the bishop, owing to the letter which you wrote recommending Dr. Anglyvius’s petition to his favorable notice?”

“What nonsense are you talking, Richard?” hastily inquired the secretary to whom Richard had not spoken. “Wapherney could not have written in favor of Anglyvius, for the fellow’s petition disgusted the general when I read it to him.”

“So you told me,” answered Wapherney; “but I found the word _tribuatur_[10] written on the petition in his Excellency’s own hand.”

“Indeed!” exclaimed the other.

“Yes, my dear fellow; and several other of his Excellency’s decisions of which you told me, were also altered in marginal notes. For instance, on the petition of the miners, the general wrote, _negetur_.”

“What! I can’t understand that; the general dreaded the turbulent spirit of those miners.”

“Perhaps he wanted to frighten them into submission by his severity. What makes me think so is that Chaplain Munder’s request for the pardon of twelve condemned prisoners is also refused.”

The secretary whom Wapherney addressed, rose abruptly, saying, “Oh, come now, I can’t believe that; the governor is too kind, and expressed too much compassion for those prisoners to--”

“Very well, Arthur,” answered Wapherney; “read it for yourself.”

Arthur took the petition and saw the fatal words.

“Really,” said he, “I can scarcely credit my own eyes. I must present this to the governor again. What day did his Excellency mark these papers?”

“I believe it was some three days ago,” replied Wapherney.

“That was,” said Richard in a low voice, “the morning before Baron Ordener’s brief appearance and mysteriously sudden disappearance.”

“Stay!” quickly exclaimed Wapherney, before Arthur had time to answer; “if here is not another _tribuatur_ on Benignus Spiagudry’s ridiculous petition!”

Richard burst out laughing.

“Didn’t that old keeper of corpses disappear in a strange way, too?”

“Yes,” replied Arthur; “a body was found in his charnel-house so mutilated that the officers of the law are in pursuit of him on a charge of sacrilege. But a little Lapp, who acted as his servant, and who was left alone at the Spladgest, thinks, as do most people, that the Devil carried him off for a sorcerer.”

“Here,” said Wapherney, laughing, “is a fellow who leaves a good reputation behind him!”

He had hardly had his laugh out when the fourth secretary came in.

“Upon my honor, Gustavus, you are very late this morning. Did you happen to get married yesterday?”

“Oh, no!” answered Wapherney; “he only took the longest way round, so that he might pass under the fair Rosalie’s windows in his new cloak.”

“Wapherney,” said the new-comer, “I only wish that you were right. But the cause of my delay is not half so agreeable; and I doubt if my new cloak produced the slightest effect upon the persons whom I visited.”

“Where have you been, then?” asked Arthur.

“To the Spladgest.”

“Heaven is my witness,” cried Wapherney, dropping his pen, “that we were just now speaking of that place! But though it may be talked of to pass away the time, I cannot conceive how anybody can enter it.”

“And still less,” said Richard, “how anybody can linger there. But what did you see, my dear Gustavus?”

“Yes,” said Gustavus, “you are curious to hear about it, if not to see it; and it would serve you right if I refused to describe those horrors which you would shudder to behold.”

The three secretaries crowded about Gustavus, who waited to be urged, although his desire to tell what he had seen was secretly no less lively than their curiosity to hear.

“Well, Wapherney, you can repeat my story to your little sister, who is so fond of frightful tales. I was pushed into the Spladgest by the crowd which thronged about it. The bodies of three soldiers and two bowmen from the Munkholm regiment had just been brought in, having been found yesterday some four miles away, in the ravine at the foot of Cascadthymore cliff. Some of the spectators declared that the poor fellows were the very ones sent out three days ago in the direction of Skongen to catch the runaway keeper of the Spladgest. If this be true, it is impossible to imagine how so many well-armed men could be murdered. The mutilation of the bodies seems to prove that they were flung from the top of the rocks. It made my hair stand on end to look at them.”

“What, Gustavus! did you see them?” eagerly inquired Wapherney.

“They are still before my eyes.”

“And has any one an idea as to the authors of the crime?”

“Some think that it may have been a band of miners, and assert that they heard the sound of the horn with which the soldiers call to one another, only yesterday among the mountains.”

“Really!” said Arthur.

“Yes; but an old peasant demolished this supposition by remarking that there were neither mines nor miners in the neighborhood of Cascadthymore.”

“Then who could it have been?”

“No one knows. If the bodies were not intact, it might be supposed the work of wild beasts, for their limbs are covered with long, deep scratches. The same is the case with the corpse of a white-bearded old man brought into the Spladgest day before yesterday, after that fearful storm which prevented you, my dear Leander Wapherney, from visiting your Hero across the fjord, on the Larsynn shore.”

“All right, Gustavus,” said Wapherney, laughing. “But who was this old man?”

“From his height, his long white beard, and a rosary still clasped tightly in his hands, although he had been stripped of everything else, he was recognized as a hermit of the neighborhood; I believe they called him the Monk of Lynrass. It is evident that this poor man was murdered also; but for what purpose? People are not slaughtered now for their religious opinions, and the old hermit possessed nothing in the world but his serge gown and the good-will of all who knew him.”

“And you say,” observed Richard, “that his body was mangled, like those of the soldiers, as if by the claws of some savage animal?”

“Yes, my dear boy; and a fisherman declares that he noticed the same marks upon the body of an officer found murdered a few days since upon Urchtal Sands.”

“That is strange,” said Arthur.

“It is frightful,” said Richard.

“Come,” said Wapherney, “silence, and to work, for I think the general will be here soon. My dear Gustavus, I am curious to see those corpses. If you like, we will stop a moment at the Spladgest when we leave here this evening.”

XVI.

She with young unwakened senses, Within her cabin on the Alpine field Her simple homely life commences, Her little world therein concealed. And I, God’s hate flung o’er me, Had not enough, to thrust The stubborn rocks before me And strike them into dust! She and her peace I yet must undermine: Thou, Hell, hast claimed this sacrifice as thine! GOETHE: _Faust, Bayard Taylor’s Translation_.

In 1675, twenty-four years previous to the date of this story, sooth to say, the whole village of Thoctree rejoiced and made merry over the marriage of sweet Lucy Pelryhn and that tall, handsome, upright youth, Carroll Stadt. They had long been lovers, and every one felt a warm interest in the happy pair upon the day which was to change so many restless hopes and eager longings into assured and quiet bliss. Born in the same village, reared in the same fields, Carroll had often in their childhood slept in Lucy’s lap when tired of play; Lucy had often, as a young girl, leaned on Carroll’s arm as she returned from work. Lucy was the loveliest and most modest maiden in the land; Carroll the bravest and noblest lad in the village. They loved each other, and they could no more remember the day when their love began than they could recall the day when they were born.

But their marriage did not come, like their love, easily and as a matter of course. There were domestic interests to be consulted,--family feuds, relations, obstacles. They were parted for a whole year; and Carroll suffered sadly far from Lucy, and Lucy wept bitter tears far from Carroll, before the dawn of that happy day which united them, thereafter never to suffer or to weep apart.

It was by saving her from great danger that Carroll finally won his Lucy. He heard cries from the woods one day; they were uttered by his Lucy, surprised by a brigand dreaded by all the mountain folk, and on the point of carrying her off to his den. Carroll boldly attacked this monster in human shape, who gave vent to strange growls like those of a wild beast. Yes, he attacked the wretch, whom none before had ventured to resist. Love lent him a lion’s strength. He rescued his beloved Lucy, restored her to her father, and her father gave her to her deliverer.

Now, the whole village made merry upon the day which united these two lovers. Lucy alone seemed depressed; and yet never had she gazed more tenderly at her dear Carroll. But her gaze was as sad as it was loving, and amid the universal rejoicing this was a subject for surprise. Every moment, as her husband’s happiness seemed to increase, her eyes expressed more and more love and despair.

“Oh, my Lucy,” said Carroll, when the sacred rites were over, “the coming of that robber, a curse to the entire country, was the greatest blessing for me!”

She shook her head, and made no answer.

Night came; they were left alone in their new abode, and the sports and dancing on the village green went on more merrily than before, to celebrate the happiness of the bridal pair.

Next morning Carroll Stadt had vanished. A few words in his handwriting were brought to Lucy’s father by a hunter from the mountains of Kiölen, who met him before daylight wandering along the shore of the fjord.

Old Will Pelryhn showed the paper to his pastor and the mayor, and nothing was left of last night’s festival but Lucy’s gloom and dull despair.

This mysterious catastrophe dismayed the entire village, and vain efforts were made to explain it. Prayers for Carroll’s soul were said in the same church where but a few days before he himself sang hymns of thanksgiving for his happiness.

No one knew what kept Widow Stadt alive. At the end of nine months of solitary grief she brought into the world a son, and on the same day the village of Golyn was destroyed by the fall of the hanging cliff above it.

The birth of this son did not dissipate his mother’s deep depression. Gill Stadt showed no signs of resemblance to Carroll. His fierce, angry infancy seemed to prophecy a still more ferocious manhood. Sometimes a little wild man--whom those mountaineers who saw him from a distance asserted to be the famous Hans of Iceland--entered the lonely hut of Carroll’s widow, and the passers-by would then hear a woman’s shrieks and what seemed the roar of a tiger. The man would carry off young Gill, and months would elapse; then he would restore him to his mother, more sombre and more terrible than before.

Widow Stadt felt a mixture of horror and affection for the child. Sometimes she would clasp him in her maternal arms, as the only tie which still bound her to earth; again she would repulse him with terror, calling upon Carroll, her dear Carroll. No one in the world knew what agitated her soul.

Gill reached his twenty-third year; he saw Guth Stersen, and loved her madly.

Guth Stersen was rich, and he was poor; therefore he set off for Roeraas and turned miner, in order to make money. His mother never heard from him again.

One night she sat at the wheel, by which she earned her daily bread; the lamp burned low as she worked and waited in her cabin, beneath those walls which had grown old like herself, in solitude and grief, the silent witnesses of her mysterious wedding-night. She thought anxiously of her son, whose presence, ardently desired as it was, would recall much sorrow, perhaps bring more in its train. The poor mother loved her son, ungrateful as he was. And how could she help loving him, she had suffered so much for him?

She rose and took from an antique wardrobe a crucifix thickly coated with dust. For an instant she looked at it imploringly; then suddenly casting it from her in horror, she cried: “I pray! How can I pray? Your prayers can only be addressed to hell, poor woman! You belong to hell, and to hell alone.”

She had relapsed into her mournful revery, when there was a knock at the door.

This was a rare event with Widow Stadt. For many long years, in consequence of the strange incidents connected with her history, the whole village of Thoctree believed that she had dealings with evil spirits; no one therefore ever ventured near her hut,--strange superstitions of that age and ignorant region! She owed to her misfortunes the same reputation for witchcraft that the keeper of the Spladgest owed to his learning.

“What if it were my son, if it were Gill!” she exclaimed; and she rushed to the door.

Alas! it was not her son. It was a little monk clad in serge, his cowl covering all of his face but a black beard.

“Holy man,” said the widow, “what would you have? You do not know the house to which you come.”

“Yes, truly!” replied the hermit in a hoarse and all too familiar voice.

And tearing off his gloves, his black beard, and his cowl, he revealed a fierce countenance, a red beard, and a pair of hands armed with tremendous claws.

“Oh!” cried the widow, burying her head in her hands.

“Well,” said the little man, “have you not in four-and-twenty years grown used to seeing the husband upon whom you must gaze through all eternity?”

“Through all eternity!” she repeated in a terrified whisper.

“Hark ye, Lucy Pelryhn, I bring you news of your son.”

“My son! Where is he? Why does he not come?”

“He cannot.”

“But you have news of him. I thank you. Alas! and can you bring me pleasure?”

“They are pleasant tidings indeed that I bring you,” said the man in hollow tones; “for you are a weak woman, and I wonder that you could bring forth such a son. Rejoice and be glad. You feared that your son would follow in my footsteps; fear no longer.”

“What!” cried the enraptured mother, “has my son, my beloved Gill, changed?”

The hermit watched her raptures with an ominous sneer.

“Oh, greatly changed!” said he.

“And why did he not fly to my arms? Where did you see him? What was he doing?”

“He was asleep.”

In the excess of her joy, the widow did not notice the little man’s ominous look, nor his horrible and scoffing manner.

“Why did you not wake him? Why did not you say to him, ‘Gill, come to your mother?’”

“His sleep was too sound.”

“Oh, when will he come? Tell me, I implore, if I shall see him soon.”

The mock monk drew from beneath his gown a sort of cup of singular shape.

“There, widow,” said he, “drink to your son’s speedy return!”

The widow uttered a shriek of horror. It was a human skull. She waved it away in terror, and could not utter a word.

“No, no!” abruptly exclaimed the man, in an awful voice, “do not turn away your eyes, woman; look. You asked to see your son. Look, I say! for this is all that is left of him.”

And by the red light of the lamp, he offered the dry and fleshless skull of her son to the mother’s pale lips.

Too many waves of misfortune had passed over her soul for one misery the more to crush her. She gazed at the cruel monk with a fixed and meaningless stare.

“Dead!” she whispered; “dead! Then let me die.”

“Die, if you choose! But remember, Lucy Pelryhn, Thoctree woods; remember the day when the demon, taking possession of your body, gave your soul to hell! I am that demon, Lucy, and you are my wife forever! Now, die if you will.”

It is the belief in those superstitious regions that infernal spirits sometimes appear among men to lead lives of crime and calamity. In common with other noted criminals, Hans of Iceland enjoyed this fearful renown. It was also believed that a woman, who by seduction or by violence, became the prey of one of these monsters in human form, by that misfortune was doomed to be his companion in hell.

The events of which the hermit reminded the widow seemed to revive in her these thoughts.

“Alas!” she sobbed, “then I cannot escape from this wretched existence! And what have I done? for you know, my beloved Carroll, I am innocent. A young girl’s arm is without strength to resist the arm of a demon.”

She rambled on; her eyes were wild with delirium, and her incoherent words seemed born of the convulsive quiver of her lips.

“Yes, Carroll, since that day, though polluted, I am innocent; and the demon asks me if I remember that horrible day! Carroll, I never deceived you; you came too late. I was his before I was yours, alas! Alas! and I must be forever punished. No, I can never rejoin you,--you for whom I weep. What would it avail me to die? I should follow this monster into a world as fearful as himself,--the world of the damned! And what have I done? Must my misfortunes in this life become my crimes in the next?”

The little monk bent a look of triumph and command upon her face.

“Ah!” she suddenly exclaimed, turning toward him; “ah, tell me, is not this some fearful dream induced by your presence? For you know but too well, alas! that since the day of my ruin, every night that I am visited by your fatal spirit is marked by foul apparitions, awful dreams, and frightful visions.”

“Woman, woman, cease your raving; it is as true that you are wide awake as it is true that Gill is dead.”

The memory of her past misfortunes had, as it were, blotted out all thought of her fresh grief; these words revived it.

“Oh, my son! my son!” she moaned; and the tones of her voice would have moved any but the wicked being who heard it. “No, he will return; he is not dead; I cannot believe that he is dead.”

“Well, go ask him of Roeraas rocks, which crushed out his life; of Throndhjem Fjord, which swallowed up his body.”

The widow fell upon her knees, crying convulsively, “God! great God!”

“Be silent, servant of hell!”

The wretched woman was silent. He added: “Do not doubt your son’s death; he was punished for the sins of his father. He let his granite heart melt in the sunlight of a woman’s eyes. I possessed you, but I never loved you. Your Carroll’s misfortune was also his. My son and yours was deceived by his betrothed, by her for whom he died.”

“Died!” she repeated, “died! Then it is really true? Oh, Gill, you were born of my misery; you were conceived in terror and born in sorrow; your lips lacerated my breast; as a child, you never returned my caresses or embraces; you always shunned and repulsed your mother, your lonely and forsaken mother! You never tried to make me forget my past distress, save by causing me fresh injury. You deserted me for the demon author of your existence and of my widowhood. Never, in long years, Gill, never did you procure me one thrill of pleasure; and yet to-day your death, my son, seems to me the most insupportable of all my afflictions. Your memory to-day seems to me to be twined with comfort and rapture. Alas! alas!”

She could not go on; she covered her head with her coarse black woollen veil, and sobbed bitterly.

“Weak woman!” muttered the hermit; then he continued in a firm voice: “Control your grief; I laugh at mine. Listen, Lucy Pelryhn. While you still weep for your son, I have already begun to avenge him. It was for a soldier in the Munkholm regiment that his sweetheart betrayed him. The whole regiment shall perish by my hands. Look, Lucy Pelryhn!”

He had rolled up the sleeves of his gown, and showed the widow his misshapen arms stained with blood.

“Yes,” he said with a fierce roar, “Gill’s spirit shall delight to haunt Urchtal Sands and Cascadthymore ravine. Come, woman, do you not see this blood? Be comforted!”

Then all at once, as if struck by a sudden thought, he interrupted himself: “Widow, did you not receive an iron casket from me? What! I sent you gold and I bring you blood, and you still weep. Are you not human?”

The widow, absorbed in her despair, was silent.

“What!” said he, with a fierce laugh, “motionless and mute. You are no woman, then, Lucy Pelryhn!” and he shook her by the arm to rouse her. “Did not a messenger bring you an iron casket?”

The widow, lending him a brief attention, shook her head, and relapsed into her gloomy revery.

“Ah, the wretch!” cried the little man, “the miserable traitor! Spiagudry, that gold shall cost you dear!”

And stripping off his gown, he rushed from the hut with the growl of a hyena that scents a corpse.

XVII.

My lord, I braid my hair; I braid it with salt tears because you leave me alone, and because you go hence into the hills.--_The Count’s Lady_ (_Old Romance_).

Ethel, meantime, had already reckoned four long and weary days since she was left to wander alone in the dark garden of Schleswig tower; alone in the oratory, the witness of so many tears, the confidant of so many longings; alone in the long gallery, where once upon a time she had failed to hear the midnight bell. Her aged father sometimes accompanied her, but she was none the less alone, for the true companion of her life was absent.

Unfortunate young girl! What had that pure young soul done that it should be thus early given over to so much sorrow? Taken from the world, from honors, riches, youthful delights, and from the triumphs of beauty, she was still in the cradle when she was already in a prison cell; a captive with her captive father, she had grown up watching his decay; and to complete her misery, that she might not be ignorant of any form of bondage, love had sought her out in prison.

Even then, could she but have kept her Ordener at her side, would liberty have tempted her? Would she ever have known that a world existed from which she was cut off? Moreover, would not her world, her heaven, have been with her in that narrow keep, within those gloomy towers bristling with soldiers, toward which the passer-by would still have cast a pitying glance?

But, alas! for the second time her Ordener was absent; and instead of spending all too brief but ever recurring hours with him in holy caresses and chaste embraces, she passed days and nights in bewailing his absence, and praying that he might be shielded from danger. For a maiden has only her prayers and her tears.

Sometimes she longed for the wings of the free swallow which came to her to be fed through her prison bars. Sometimes her thought escaped upon the cloud which a swift breeze drove northward through the sky; then suddenly she would turn away her head and cover her eyes, as if she dreaded to see a gigantic brigand appear and begin the unequal contest upon one of the distant mountains whose blue peaks hung on the horizon like a stationary cloud.