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Lovisa stared at her in impatient derision. Thelma was too surprised to answer immediately, and Sigurd took it upon himself to furnish what he considered a crushing reply. "Odin's mark!" he said, patting the scar with much elation. "No wonder you are afraid of it! Everybody knows it birds, flowers, trees, and stars! Even you you are afraid!"
"You cannot call me murderess again!" "Coward and fool!" shrieked Lovisa. "Was it your intent that the child should live? Were you not glad to think it dead? And cannot I spread the story of your infamy through all the villages where you are known? Is not the wretched boy himself a living witness of the attempt you made to kill him? Does not that scar speak against you?
They preach and pray and shriek and groan in their huts; some swear that they have the spirit of prophecy, others that they are possessed of devils, others imagine witchcraft, like Lovisa and altogether there is such a howling on the name of Christ, that I am glad to be out of it, for 'tis a sight to awaken the laughter and contempt of a pagan such as I am!"
"Let her speak!" "Strike, Olaf Gueldmar!" said Lovisa, in a deep voice, harsh, but all untremulous "Strike, pagan, with whom the law of blood is supreme strike to the very center of my heart I do not fear you! I killed her, I say and therein I, the servant of the Lord, was justified!
Gueldmar leaned from his motionless sledge and listened in awe it was the same sound he had before heard as he stood by Lovisa Elsland's death-bed and was in truth nothing but a strong current of wind blowing through the arched and honeycombed rocks by the sea, towards the higher land, creating the same effect as though one should breathe forcibly through a pipe-like instrument of dried and hollow reeds, and being rendered more resonant by the intense cold, it bore a striking similarity to the full blast of a war-trumpet.
Ulrika glared at her vengefully, then drew herself up with an air of defiance. "I care nothing for your taunts, Lovisa Elsland!" she said. "You can do me no harm! All is over between us! I will help in no mischief against the Gueldmars. Whatever their faults, they saved my child!" "Is that so great a blessing?" asked Lovisa ironically. "It makes your threats useless," answered Ulrika.
Lovisa raised herself with a sharp cry, and wrung her hands together "Ten years ten years!" she moaned. "I thought her dead and she lived on, beloved and loving all the while. Oh God, God, why hast thou made a mockery of Thy servant!" She rocked herself to and fro then looked up with an evil smile. "Nay, but she suffered! That was best. It is worse to suffer than to die. Thank God, she suffered!"
"It matters not!" and Lovisa regarded him with a strange and awful smile. "I have had my revenge!" She stopped abruptly, then went on "'Twas a fair bride you chose, Olaf Gueldmar child of an alien from these shores, Thelma, with the treacherous laughter and light of the South in her eyes and smile!
The people are tired of you tired of bad harvests, ill-luck, sickness, and continued poverty. You are the cause of all our miseries, and we have resolved you shall not stay among us. Go quickly, take the blight and pestilence of your presence elsewhere! Go! or if you will not " "We shall burn, burn, burn, and utterly destroy!" interrupted Lovisa, with a sort of eldritch shriek.
Out of the deep obscurity, like some gaunt spectre rising from the tomb, started a face, wrinkled, cadaverous, and distorted by suffering, a face in which the fierce, fevered eyes glittered with a strange and dreadful brilliancy the face of Lovisa Elsland, stern, forbidding, and already dark with the shadows of approaching death.
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