“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.
“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.”