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.