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.