“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.