Chapter 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.