Chapter VI: Pirro. Never!

_Angelo._ What! I believe you would try to play the virtuous man.
Wretch! If you utter a single word--

_Pirro._ But, Angelo, I beseech you, for the love of God--

_Angelo._ Do not meddle with what you cannot prevent.

_Pirro._ Ah! When the Devil holds one by a single hair, as well
yield him the entire head. Unhappy that I am!

EMILIA GALOTTI.

An hour after the young traveller with the black plume left the Spladgest, night fell, and the crowd dispersed. Oglypiglap closed the outer door of the funereal structure, while his master, Spiagudry, gave the bodies deposited within a final sprinkling. Then both withdrew to their scantily furnished abode, and while Oglypiglap slept upon his wretched pallet, like one of the corpses intrusted to his care, the venerable Spiagudry, seated at a stone table covered with old books, dried plants, and fleshless bones, was buried in grave studies which, although really very harmless, had done no little to give him a reputation among the people, for sorcery and witchcraft,--the disagreeable consequence of science at this period.

He had been absorbed in his meditations for some hours, and, ready at last to exchange his books for his bed, he paused at this mournful passage from Thormodr Torfesen: “When a man lights his lamp, death is beside him ere it be extinguished.”

“With the learned doctor’s leave,” he muttered, “he shall not be beside me to-night.”

And he took up his lamp to blow it out.

“Spiagudry!” cried a voice from the room where the corpses lay.

The old man shook from head to foot. Not that he believed, as another might have done in his place, that the gloomy guests of the Spladgest had risen in revolt against their master. He was enough of a scholar to be proof against such imaginary terrors; and his alarm was genuine, because he knew the voice which called him only too well.

“Spiagudry!” angrily repeated the voice, “must I come and pull off your ears before I can make you hear me?”

“Saint Hospitius have mercy, not on my soul, but on my body!” said the terrified old man; and with a step both hastened and delayed by fear, he moved towards the second side door, which he opened. Our readers have not forgotten that this door led into the mortuary.

His lamp lit up a strange and hideous scene,--on the one hand, the thin, tall, stooping figure of Spiagudry; on the other, a short, stout man, dressed from head to foot in the skins of wild beasts, still stained with dried blood, standing at the feet of Gill Stadt’s corpse, which, with the dead bodies of the young girl and the captain, occupied the background. These three mute witnesses, buried in shadow, were the only ones who could behold, without flying in horror, the two living beings who now entered into conversation.

The features of the little man, thrown into vivid relief by the light, were singularly wild and fierce. His beard was red and bushy, and his forehead, hidden under an elkskin cap, seemed bristling with hair of the same color; his mouth was large, his lips thick, his teeth white, sharp, and far apart, his nose hooked like an eagle’s beak; and his grayish-blue eyes, which were extremely quick, flashed a side glance at Spiagudry, in which the ferocity of a tiger was only tempered by the malice of a monkey. This singular character was armed with a broadsword, an unsheathed dagger, and a stone axe, upon whose long handle he leaned; his hands were covered with thick gloves made of a blue fox-skin.

“That old ghost keeps me waiting a long time,” said he, as if talking to himself; and he uttered a sound like the roar of a wild beast.

Spiagudry would certainly have turned pale with fright, had he been capable of turning paler than he was.

“Do you know,” continued the little man, addressing him directly, “that I come from Urchtal Sands? Do you

Photo-Etching.--From drawing by François Flameng.]

want to change your straw bed for one of these beds of stone, that you keep me waiting thus?”

Spiagudry trembled more than ever; the two solitary teeth left to him chattered in his head.

“Excuse me, master,” said he, bending his long back to a level with the little man; “I was asleep.”

“Do you want me to make you acquainted with a far sounder sleep than that?”

Spiagudry’s face assumed an expression of terror, the only thing which could be more comic than his expression of mirth.

“Well! what is it?” continued the little man. “What ails you? Is my presence disagreeable to you?”

“Oh, my lord and master!” replied the old keeper, “there can surely be no greater happiness for me than to see your Excellence.”

And the effort which he made to twist his frightened face into a smile would have unbent the brow of any but the dead.

“Tailless old fox, my Excellence commands you to hand over the clothes of Gill Stadt.”

As he uttered this name, the little man’s fierce, mocking features grew dark and sad.

“Oh, master, pardon me, but I no longer have them!” said Spiagudry. “Your Grace knows that we are obliged to turn over the property of all workers in the mine to the Crown, the king inheriting by right of their being his wards.”

The little man turned to the corpse, folded his arms, and said in a hollow voice: “He is right. These miserable miners are like the eider duck;[5] their nests are made for them, but their down is plucked from them.”

Then raising the corpse in his arms and hugging it to his heart, he began to utter wild yells of love and grief, like the howls of a bear caressing her young. With these inarticulate sounds were blended, at intervals, a few words in a strange lingo, which Spiagudry did not understand.

He let the corpse drop back upon the stone, and turned towards the guardian.

“Do you know, accursed sorcerer, the name of the ill-fated soldier who was so unlucky as to be preferred by that girl to Gill?”

And he kicked the cold remains of Guth Stersen.

Spiagudry shook his head.

“Well! by the axe of Ingulf, the first of my race, I will exterminate every wearer of that uniform!” and he pointed to the officer’s dress. “He on whom I must be avenged will surely be of the number. I will burn down the entire forest to consume the poisonous shrub that it contains. I swore it on the day that Gill died, and I have already given him a companion that will delight his corpse. Oh, Gill! so there you lie, lifeless and powerless,--you who outswam the seal, outran the deer; you who outwrestled the bear in the mountains of Kiölen. There you lie motionless,--you who traversed the province of Throndhjem, from the Orkel to the Lake of Miösen, in a single day; you who climbed the peaks of the Dovrefjeld as the squirrel climbs the oak. There you lie mute and dumb, Gill,--you who on the stormy summits of Kongsberg sang louder than the thunder’s roar. Oh, Gill! so it is in vain that for your sake I filled up the Färöe mines; in vain for your sake I burned the Throndhjem cathedral. All my labor is in vain, and I shall never see the race of the children of Iceland, the descendants of Ingulf the Destroyer, perpetuated in you; you will never inherit my stone axe; but you leave me the legacy of your skull, from which I may henceforth drink sea-water and the blood of men.”

With these words he seized the corpse by the head, exclaiming: “Help me, Spiagudry!” And pulling off his gloves, he displayed his broad hands, armed with long, hard, crooked nails, like the claws of a wild beast.

Spiagudry, seeing him about to hew off the corpse’s head with his sword, cried out with unconcealed horror, “Good heavens! master! A dead man!”

“Well,” calmly responded the little man, “would you rather have me sharpen my blade upon a living one?”

“Oh, let me entreat your Grace--How can your Excellency commit such profanation? Your Worship--Sir, your Serenity would not--”

“Are you done? Do I require all these titles, living skeleton, to believe in your deep respect for my sabre?”

“By Saint Waldemar! By Saint Usuph! In the name of Saint Hospitius, spare the dead!”

“Help me, and do not talk of saints to the devil!”

“My lord,” continued the suppliant Spiagudry, “by your illustrious ancestor, Saint Ingulf--”

“Ingulf the Destroyer was an outlaw like myself.”

“In the name of Heaven,” said the old man, falling on his knees, “whose anger I would spare you!”

Impatience overcame the little man. His dull gray eyes flashed like a couple of live coals.

“Help me!” he repeated, flourishing his sword.

These words were uttered in the voice which might beseem a lion, could he speak. The keeper, shuddering and half dead with fright, sat down upon the black stone slab, and held Gill’s cold, damp head in his hands, while the little man, by means of sword and dagger, removed the crown with rare skill.

When his task was done, he gazed at the bloody skull for some time, muttering strange words; then he handed it over to Spiagudry, to be cleaned and prepared, saying with a sort of howl,--

“And I, when I die, shall not have the comfort of thinking that an heir to the soul of Ingulf will drink sea-water and the blood of men from out my skull.”

After a mournful pause, he added,--

“The hurricane is followed by a hurricane, each avalanche brings down another avalanche, but I shall be the last of my race. Why did not Gill hate every human face even as I do? What demon foe to the demon of Ingulf urged him into those fatal mines in search of a handful of gold?”

Spiagudry, who now returned with Gill’s skull, interrupted him: “Your Excellency is right; even gold, as Snorri Sturleson says, may often be bought at too high a price.”

“You remind me,” said the little man, “of a commission I have for you; here is an iron casket which I found upon yonder officer, all of whose property, as you see, did not fall into your possession; it is so firmly fastened, that it must contain gold,--the only thing precious in the eyes of men. You will give it to widow Stadt, in Thoctree village, to pay her for her son.”

He drew a small iron box from his reindeer-skin knapsack. Spiagudry received it with a low bow.

“Obey my orders faithfully,” said the little man, with a piercing glance; “remember that nothing can prevent two demons from meeting; I think you are even more of a coward than a miser, and you will answer to me for that box.”

“Oh, master, with my soul!”

“Not at all. With your flesh and bones.”

At this moment the outer door of the Spladgest echoed with a loud knock. The little man was amazed; Spiagudry tottered, and shaded his lamp with his hand.

“Who is there?” growled the little man. “And you, old villain, how you will shake when you hear the last trump sound, if you shiver so now!”

A second and louder knock was heard.

“It is some dead man in haste to enter,” said the little man.

“No, master,” muttered Spiagudry, “no corpses are brought here after midnight.”

“Living or dead, he drives me hence. You, Spiagudry, be faithful and be dumb. I swear to you, by the spirit of Ingulf and the skull of Gill, that you shall see the dead bodies of the entire regiment of Munkholm pass through your hostelry in review.”

And the little man, binding Gill’s skull to his belt, and drawing on his gloves, hurried, with the nimbleness of a goat, and by the help of Spiagudry’s shoulders, through the opening in the roof, where he vanished.

A third knock shook the whole Spladgest, and a voice outside commanded him to open in the name of the king and viceroy. Then the keeper, moved alike by two different terrors,--one of which might be called the terror of memory, and the other of hope,--hurried toward the low door, and opened it.