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
[Illustration: _Hans of Iceland finding the Body of his Son, Gill
Stadt._