king's prisoners, and, though accused of invasion and piracy, no
castellan in Denmark or Norway can hang or quarter you without the
king's express orders."
"Hang!" grumbled Ormiston; "hang thee, thou old sea-horse! Dost forget
thou speakest to James, Duke of Orkney, the mate of Mary of Scotland?"
The family of Rosenkrantz were hereditary governors of Bergen, and
castellans of Bergenhuis, and, as Konrad's ancestors had always followed
their banner in battle, he had ever considered the castle of Bergen his
home; and, with all the feeling of a returned exile, he approached its
massive portal, which was flanked by broad round towers, and overhung by
a strong portcullis of jagged and rusted iron, where the crossbowmen of
his own Danish band were still keeping guard in their scarlet gaberdines
and steel caps.
At the gate they were received by Cornelius Van Dribbel, the great
butler of Bergen, who, in his flutter and pomposity at the unusual
arrival of such a goodly band of prisoners and visitors, never once
recognised the careworn Konrad, who was too spirit-broken to address
him, and, disguised by the altered fashion of his beard and garments,
was borne with the throng towards the great hall, where the superior of
the fortress was to receive them.
There was a flush on Bothwell's brow, a fire in his eye, a scorn on his
lip, and a loftiness in his bearing, that increased as he approached the
presence of this Norwegian dignitary; for, all unused to the humility of
his position, he had resolved to requite pride with pride, scorn with
scorn; and thus, modelling their looks by those of their leader, Hob
Ormiston and Hay of Tallo assumed an air of sullen defiance; but the
young knight of Bolton, who was utterly careless about his ultimate
fate, wore a spirit-broken aspect, more nearly allied to that of Konrad.
"Cornelius Van Dribbel," said Christian Alborg, puffing and blowing, as
he seated himself in a capacious chair on entering the hall, and wiped
his great polished head with a handkerchief. "I thought thou saidst the
castellan was here to receive the king's prisoners?"
"St. Olaus forefend!" replied Van Dribbel; "surely thou knowest that the
knight Rosenkrantz hath lain in his last home at Fredericksborg these
many months."
"Smite thee! yes," growled the seaman; "but I meant the new castellan."
"We have none but such as thou shalt see in time--Ha! lo you, now!" he
added, as the arras concealing the archway, which, at the lower end of
the hall, opened upon a carpeted dais, was withdrawn, and when again it
fell, Anna Rosenkrantz, attended by Christina Slingebunder and another
young maiden, stood before them.
Had a spectre appeared there, Bothwell and Konrad could not have
appeared more disturbed, and Anna was equally so; but the Earl, now less
animated by love, and, as a courtier, being habituated to keep his
emotions under restraint, was the first to recover himself, and a smile
of scornful surprise spread over his face, as he doffed his bonnet and
bowed to the lady of the castle.
Poor Konrad grew pale as death; he became giddy and breathless; and
shrank behind the shadow of a column against which he leaned, for the
atmosphere seemed stifling.
Meanwhile Anna stood upon the dais, between two massive columns of
gothic form, encrusted with old runic stones. She was looking pale, but
beautiful as ever. Her tresses were gathered up in the simple fashion
of the north, and, supported by a silver bodkin, formed a coronet of
plaits, as they were wreathed round her head. Her dress of blue silk
was massive with embroidery and silver fringe, and her stomacher was
studded with jewels, as became the heiress of Welsoeoe and Bergenhuis.
The Earl's first reflection, was his being now a captive, and completely
in the power of an enraged and slighted woman, whom in the zenith of his
power he had treated with cruelty, contumely, and contempt. These
thoughts brought with them no qualm, no pity. He felt only apprehension
for what she might now in turn make him endure; for, when in Italy and
France, he heard many a tale of "woman's vengeance," that now came back
full and vividly on his memory.
"By St. Paul! we find kenned faces wherever we go;" said Ormiston to
Bolton; "this old sea-dog hath brought us to the right haven. We will
have free-house and free-hold here, I doubt not."
"Madam," said the stout captain of the _Biornen_, bowing as low as his
great paunch and long basket-hilted espadone would permit him, "allow me
to introduce to you the terrible pirate who, for the last month, has
been the terror of our Fiords, and the scourge of the Sound, and whom we
find to be no other than the great Earl of Bothwell, with whose
astounding misdeeds all Europe has been ringing."
Anna scarcely heard a word of the captain's address. On first beholding
the Earl, she had trembled violently, and then became pale as death.
Her eyes filled with fire, and she regarded him with a long, fixed, and
serpent-like gaze, that even he had some trouble in meeting.
"Well, madam," said he, with one of his graceful smiles, "when last we
stood together in this hall, we foresaw not the day when we would greet
each other thus."
"The meeting is as unexpected to me as our last may have been to _you_,
my Lord Earl," replied Anna in French, but with admirable hauteur and
firmness. "So, pirate and outlaw, as I now understand thee to be, thou
hast lived to see all thy wild visions and schemes of ambition crumble
and fade away, and now thou art a captive in the power of her thou didst
so deeply wrong, and so cruelly insult."
"True, madam," replied Bothwell, curling his mustache, "and what then?"
"Dost thou not know that thy life and liberty are alike in my power?"
"I am glad of it, being assured that they could not be in safer
keeping."
"Oh, man! cold and heartless as thou art," said Anna, who seemed now to
have forgotten her own infatuated passion for the Earl, "I cannot but
admire this stately calmness under a reverse of fortune so terrible.
Were thy fate fully in mine own hands, I would return thee to the land
from whence thou hast fled, leaving the flames of civil war to rage
behind thee--to the arms of her thou didst love and win, so fatally for
herself--or I would again commit thee to the wide ocean, to follow thy
wayward fate on other shores; for now there can neither be love nor
loyalty, nor falsehood nor truth, between us--but the will of the king
sayeth nay!"
"And what sayeth the will of Frederick?" asked Bothwell, with proud
surprise.
"That thou and thy followers must be separated."
"Hoh, is it so?"
"They, to be sent home to Scotland--thou, to his castle of Kiobenhafen,
in fetters."
"Fetters!" cried the Earl, in a voice of thunder, while his eyes flashed
fire and his hand grasped his sword. "This to Bothwell? Woman! what
hast thou dared to say? Dost thou forget that I am a Scottish duke--the
consort of a queen--the governor of a kingdom?"
"No!" replied Anna bitterly, while her eyes flashed with rage and
jealousy, though every sentiment of love was long since dead; "and
neither have I forgotten that thou art a regicide and a betrayer, who
from this hour shall have meted out to him the stern measures he so
ruthlessly dealt to others. Christian Alborg--this man is the king's
prisoner, whom we have warrants from Peder Oxe, the marshal of Denmark,
to detain. Away with him to the _Biornen_, and ere sunset be thou out
of the Jelta fiord, and under sail for Kiobenhafen! Thou knowest
Frederick, and that he brooks no delay."
And with a glance, where spite and jealousy were mingled with a
sentiment of pity and admiration, Anna withdrew; and, as the arras fell
behind her, a party of red-bearded Danish bowmen, who formed the
garrison at Bergen, crowded round the Earl.
"Ha! ha!" he laughed bitterly through his clenched teeth; "there spoke
thy woman's vengeance, Anna!"
"Lord Earl," said Ormiston gravely, "in the name of the master of
mischief, what prompted thee to beard her thus? Foul fall thee! Why
didst thou not flatter, and cajole, and feign thine old love? To fleech
with the devil, when thou canst not fight him, is ever good policy. An
old love is easily revived: she is only a woman, and would doubtless
have believed thee, for thou hast a tongue that would wile the gleds out
of the sky. Cock and pie! Bothwell, till something better came to
hand, thou mightest have been castellan of Bergen, and I thy lieutenant.
All our fortunes had been made even here, in this land of barkened
bannocks and snowballs."
"To feign thus, would be to commit foul treason against her whom I will
ever remember with loyalty and love, while Heaven, permits me to live.
Here we part at last, stout Hob, perhaps to meet no more. If ever again
thou treadest on Scottish ground, remember that in serving _her_ thou
servest Bothwell. Farewell to thee, Bolton, thou man of gloomy
thoughts; and farewell thou, stout Hay of Tallo; for I fear me much,
that God's vengeance for _that night_ in the Kirk-of-Field is coming
surely and heavily upon us all."
They were rudely separated.
Ormiston, Bolton, and Tallo, raised their bonnets with sadness and
respect as the Earl was led off; for the bonds of old feudality, and
love, and service, which knit their names and fortunes together, had
been strengthened by a certainty that the terrible career on which they
had run, had for ever cut them off and isolated them from the rest of
mankind; and thus a feeling of loneliness and desolation fell upon their
hearts, as their great leader and master-spirit was led away to that
mournful captivity which was to end only in the--grave.
That night a Scottish ship of war, which was commanded by two knights of
distinction, and had been sent by the Earl of Moray in pursuit of
Bothwell, anchored in the Jelta fiord, and to their care were consigned
the shipwrecked followers of the captive noble; and soon after these
knights set sail for Scotland.
But many hours before they had come into Bergen, the _Biornen_ had
vanished from that narrow inlet of the ocean, and was bearing the great
Scottish captive along the shores of western Gothland, and breasting the
frothy waves of the Cattegat.
The sun, as he set in the western ocean, shed a mellow light upon the
wide expanse of shore that stretched upon their lee--on many an
impending cliff, on the dark summits of which waved the old primeval
pines of Scandinavia, and on whose bases the waters of the west were
dashing in foam--on many a wooded wilderness, amid the recesses of which
the wolves were prowling by the Druid stones of Loda, and the
long-forgotten grave of many a gothic chief.
Buried in reverie, with folded arms and saddened eyes, Bothwell watched
the changing features and windings of that foreign shore, with all its
pathless woods, volcanic rocks, and dark blue hills, throwing their
deepening shadows on each other, as the burning sun sank in the distant
sea, and the dusky tints of night shed upon the scenery a gloom in
unison with his own dark thoughts and bitter memories.
Bitter and sad they were truly; but how unavailing!
Now separated from the evil influence of Ormiston and others, he
deplored his wickedness and folly with an intensity that amounted to
agony. Had the universe been his, he would have given it that he might
live the last year of his life over again, with the experience in his
mind of what the guilt, the terrors, the anxieties, and remorse of that
year had been.
With sorrow, with envy, yea, with agony, he looked back to the position
he had held in the estimation of others, and of himself; and felt, in
the bitterness of his soul, that the eminence could never more be
re-won.
Never more, never more! It was a terrible reflection.
He thought, too, of the native land he might never see again; and--
"Of many a tale of love and war
That mingled with the scene;
Of Bothwell's bank that bloom'd so dear,
And Bothwell's bonny Jean."
But he thought of Anna only with anger, for no human heart could ever
contain two loves. Jane Gordon he remembered with feelings of
compunction, when he mused on her unrepining gentleness and devoted
love; but he thought most of Mary, and, forgetting that he was himself a
captive, laid many a wild and futile scheme to free and to avenge her.
He could not flee from his own thoughts. They _would_ come again and
again, weighing like an incubus upon his mind, alike in the bright
sunshine of noon and the solemn silence of night; amid the heedless
revelry of the Norwegian officers he longed for solitude, and in
solitude the stings of conscience drove him back to revelry and wine;
and thus the deep and morbid horror that hour by hour, and day by day,
had every where pursued him, settled down like a cloud of darkness on
his soul.
Long since satiated with pleasure, sick of ambition, and wearied of the
world, he now found how deep were the stings of unavailing regret.
The day, we have said, went down, and night spread her spangled mantle
on the darkened water and the moonlit sea.
Brightly in its calm beauty the evening star arose from the dark-heaving
line of the northern ocean, and Bothwell thought of the time when he had
last watched that orb expanding on the night, as it rose above the
ruined spire of St. Mary-in-the-Field.
At that moment, a cry--that seemed to be wafted over the surface of the
water--made his ears and heart tingle, as it passed away on the skirt of
the hollow wind.
Bothwell grew ghastly pale, he covered his ears with his hands, and
rushed away to his cabin in despair.
*CHAPTER XXII.*
*THE VAIN RESOLUTION.*
She told me all,
And as she spoke her eyes led captive mine--
Her voice was low, and thrill'd me to the bone;
She ceased and all was silence, whilst I sat
Like one who, long entranced by melody,
Feels still the music in the soul
Though sound has died away.
_Sir C. Lindesay's Alfred._
Christian Alborg had departed with his prisoners; and, unnoticed and
uncared for, Konrad stood in the hall, where he had once been so welcome
a guest. A sensation of loneliness and bitterness ran through his mind.
There was the chair of the old knight Rosenkrantz, with his sword and
long leather gloves hung upon it, just as he had last left them; his
walking-cane stood in a corner, and his furred boots were beside it; the
place was identified with his presence--full of his memory; and his
bluff round figure, in his ample red gaberdine and trunk hose, his kind
old face, with its mild blue eyes and fair bushy beard, seemed to flit
between the shadowy columns of the ancient hall.
Konrad had no intention of remaining in a place where all was so changed
to him; but, ere he turned to leave it for ever, he paused a moment
irresolutely. Since last he stood there, all that had passed appeared
like a dream, but a sad and bitter one. His heart melted within him at
the very thought of his own desolation; a shower of tears would have
relieved him, but he had none to shed, for his eyes felt dry and stony.
"Why should I remain here, where not one is left to care for me now?" he
said with a smile, as if in scorn of the weakness that made him linger,
and, turning away, was about to retire, when a sound arrested him; once
more the arras rose and fell, and Anna stood before him. He gazed upon
her without the power of utterance.
She was alone.
With a heightened colour in her cheek, and a charming timidity in her
eye, she approached, and, touching his arm, said--
"Christina told me thou wert here, Konrad; and wouldst thou go without
one greeting--one farewell--to me?"
Her accents sank into his inmost soul; he trembled beneath her touch,
and felt all his resolution melting fast away.
"Unkind Konrad!" said she, with one of her sad but most winning smiles,
"is this the friendship thou didst vow to me at Westeray?"
"I have learned, Anna, that love can never be succeeded by friendship.
It runs to the other extreme--the impulses of the human heart cannot
pause midway."
"Thou hast learned to hate me, then?"
"Heaven forbid!" replied Konrad, clasping his hands; "hate thee, Anna?
oh no!"
His eyes were full of the sweetness and ardour of the days of their
first love, and Anna's filled with tears.
"I have long wished," she faltered, in a low and broken voice, while
seating herself on the bench of one of those deeply-recessed windows
near them--"I have long wished to see thee once more," she repeated,
without raising her timid eyes, "to implore--not thy pardon, dear
Konrad, for that I have no right to expect--but--but that thou wilt not
remember me with bitterness"----
Konrad muttered something--he knew not what.
"I feel, Konrad, that I owe thee much for all I have made thee suffer;
and I have now seen the worth and faith of thy heart when contrasted
with mine own, and I blush for my weakness--my wickedness--my folly.
Thou mayest deem this unwomanly--indelicate; but in love we are equal,
and why may not one make reparation as the other--I as well as thou? I
have lived, I say, to learn the value of the heart that loved me so
well, and which, in a moment of frenzy--infatuation--O, dearest Konrad!
call it what thou wilt--I forsook for another--another who betrayed me
by a semblance of religious rites--oh! spare me the rest!" ....
"Anna," said Konrad, in a choking voice, as he rose to retire--but,
instead, drew nearer to her; "though my eye may be hollow, my cheek
pale, and my heart soured and saddened, its first sentiment for thee
hath never altered. Anna--Anna, God knoweth that it hath not! For all
thou hast made me endure for the past two years--from my heart--from my
soul, I forgive thee, and I pray that thou mayest be happy.
Anna--dearest Anna--I am going far away from the hills and woods of
Bergen, to join the Lubeckers, or perhaps the Knights of Rhodes in their
warfare in the distant East, for I have doomed myself to exile; but I
still regard thee as I did, when we were in yon far isle of Westeray--as
my sister--as my friend. As we first met in this old castle hall, when
thou wert but a guileless girl and I a heedless boy, so shall we now
part. All is forgotten--all is forgiven. And now--farewell; may the
mother of God bless thee!"
He kissed her hand, and his tears fell upon it; he turned to leave the
hall, but a giddiness came over him, and a film overspread his eyes.
He still felt the hand of Anna in his: another moment, and she sank upon
his breast. All her love for him had returned; and all her womanly
delicacy, and overweening pride, had given way before the more tender
and generous impulses this sudden reunion with her early lover had
called up within her.
"Oh, Konrad!" she whispered, while almost suffocated by her tears, "if
my heart, though seared and saddened, is still prized by thee, it is
thine, as in the days of our first love."
And, borne away by his passion, the forgiving Konrad pressed her close
and closer to his breast. "And here," sayeth the Magister Absalom in
his quaint papers, "here endeth the most important Boke in this our
Historie."
*CHAPTER XXIII.*
*RETRIBUTION.*
Vanish'd each pleasure--vanish'd all his woes,
Nor Hope nor Fear disturb his long repose;
He saw the busy world--'twas but to-day!
A keen spectator of life's motley play--
The curtain falls--the scene is o'er.
_Hallor's Eternity._
The summer wore away--and the winter approached.
By order of Frederick II., the conqueror of the Ditmarsians, Bothwell
had been transmitted, heavily ironed--an insult under which his proud
spirit writhed in agony--from the great castle of Kiobenhafen to that of
Malmoe, a strong and gloomy fortress on the Swedish coast, washed by the
waters of the Sound, and overlooking a little town then possessed by the
Danes.
There he was kept, in sure and strict ward, by a knight named Beirn
Gowes, captain of Malmoe and governor of Draxholm, in a vaulted
apartment, with windows grated, and doors sheathed with iron, grooved in
the enormous granite walls, to prevent escape; and there, the long and
weary days, and weeks, and months, rolled on in dull and unchanging
monotony.
Of those stirring events that were acting at home he knew nothing, for
never a voice fell on his ear in that far-northern prison; and thus he
heard not of Mary's escape from the isle of Lochleven--her futile flight
to seek succour of the false Elizabeth, and that she, too, was pining a
captive in the castle of Nottingham. He knew not that all his sounding
titles, and those old heraldic honours which, by their good swords, his
brave forefathers had acquired, and borne on their bucklers through many
a Scottish battle-field, had been gifted away with his lordly castles,
his fertile fiefs, and noble baronies, to the upholders of the new
_regime_--the Lords of the Secret Council. Of the fury of the Douglas
wars--of Moray's death, and Lennox's fall--of Morton's power and pride,
his lust and wrath, under which the capital languished and the country
writhed. Of all these he heard not a word; for he was utterly forgotten
and deserted by all. Even Jane of Huntly, his countess, that gentle
being who had once loved him so well, after their divorce had soon
learned to forget him in the arms of her former lover, the Earl of
Sutherland, and to commit to oblivion that she had once been the happy
bride of the splendid Bothwell.
He knew not, too, of the terrible vengeance that had fallen upon his
numerous adherents,--how their heads were bleaching on the battlements
of Edinburgh--how their castles were ruined, their families forfeited,
their names proscribed; while James, Earl of Morton, the mainspring and
prime mover of all these plots and conspiracies, of which his
(Bothwell's) frantic love and mad ambition had made him the too ready
tool, was flourishing, for a brief term, in unrestricted pride and
plenitude of power, as Regent and Governor of Scotland.
Black Hob of Ormiston, Bolton, Hay of Tallo, with French Paris and
others, who had been transmitted by Anna Rosenkrantz to Scotland, were
solemnly arraigned as traitors and regicides before the supreme legal
tribunal at Edinburgh, and sentenced to be decapitated and quartered.
In that grated chamber of the old tower of Holyrood, in which Konrad had
been confined, young Hepburn of Bolton sat counting the minutes that yet
remained to him between time and eternity.
The hand of retribution had come heavily upon him.
That day he had seen his three companions led forth to die--to be
dismembered as traitors, to have their bowels torn out from their
half-strangled and yet breathing bodies, and their limbs fixed to the
ramparts of the city barriers; and that day, with sorrow and contrition,
he had confessed to the ministers of Moray all his share in Bothwell's
plots and crimes.
As if in mockery of his sad thoughts, bright through the iron grating
streamed the setting sunlight in all the beauty of a warm autumnal eve.
At that sunset he gazed long and fixedly, for it was the last he would
ever behold, and the tears filled his sunken eyes and bedewed his faded
cheek, for more lovely was that evening sun than ever he had seen it,
as, sinking behind the long ridge of the Calton, it cast a farewell
gleam on the old rood spire and abbey towers of Holyrood--on the hills
of emerald green and rocks of grey basalt that overhang them--on the
woods of Restalrig, and the narrow glimpse of the blue and distant ocean
beyond them--and he felt that on all this his eyes were about to be
closed for ever.
For ever I did his mind recoil at this terrible reflection? No; but it
often trembled between the depth of thought and the abyss of despair.
Better it was to die, than to linger out a life, haunted by the burning
recollection of those crimes, upon which the force of circumstances,
rather than any evil propensity of his own, had hurried him.
And Mariette--since the hour when first he knew her love was lost, he
had felt comparatively happy, to what he had been since that terrible
night on which he took such vengeance upon her, and on her kingly lover,
in the house of the Kirk-of-Field--that vengeance for which he was now
to die.
As he mused on all his blighted hopes and blasted prospects--of what he
was and what he might have been--the young man groaned aloud in the
agony of his soul; he wreathed his hands among his heavy dark-brown
hair, and bowed his head upon the hard wooden bench, which served him
alike for bed and table.