Part 12

"Then here, thou little miser, are ten golden unicorns," said the Countess, taking her purse from her girdle; but the pert boy drew back, saying--

"How, Lady Bothwell! wouldst thou think to bribe the son of a French knight like the spawn of a rascally clown? If I am paid for keeping a secret, St Mary! 'twill be with no other coin than Cupid's."

The Countess reddened; but finding it necessary to humour the lad, who had her so completely in his power,--

"Thou forward imp!" she replied; "one may easily discern thy court education. I will give thee one kiss now, and another after I have seen this stranger. But see to it, sirrah, that thou art secret and sincere, or the kiss may be more fatal than that of Judas."

"Sweet lady!" replied the saucy boy, blushing with pleasure as the lip of the beautiful Countess touched his blooming cheek, "at the risk of my life will I serve thee; and in the hour I fail, may Heaven fail me!"

He sprang away, and, coiling himself up in his mantle, watched near the door of the Earl's chamber till he was summoned to lead forth the unwelcome visiter.

"Boy," said Konrad, "I will give thee a silver crown, if thou wilt lead to the first and nearest bridge that crosses yonder river."

"Fair sir, follow me!" said the page; and, cap in hand, by a narrow spiral stair, which ascended to the second story of the Valence tower, he led Konrad straight to the bower of the countess.

"Where art thou leading me, boy?" asked Konrad suspiciously; while keeping one hand on his dagger, and the other on the page's mantle, as they stumbled up the dark stair, through the slits of which the night wind blew on their faces, and they heard the endless rush of the adjacent Clyde.

"I lead thee where silence is best, else thou mayest come down with the aid of other legs than thine own."

"How, varlet! what jade trick is this?" exclaimed the young man with surprise, on being suddenly ushered into a magnificent little boudoir, where he found himself in presence of a lady.

"'Tis the Countess of Bothwell," whispered French Paris, "who would learn from thee"----

"What thou art not to hear," interrupted the Countess; "so, begone! and if thou wouldst keep that head on thy shoulders, retire behind the arras, and muffle it well in thy mantle."

French Paris immediately retired; and Konrad, whose anxiety for the safety of Anna (when he remembered the half-dying state in which he left her,) amounted now to agony, stood silent and confused, gazing with irresolution on the Countess. He bowed with the deepest respect; for her beauty and dignity, notwithstanding her diminutive stature, were very striking.

The position she occupied, and the splendour by which she was surrounded, contrasted forcibly, in his mind, with the forlorn condition of Anna Rosenkrantz, stretched on the couch of leaves among the ruins like a homeless outcast; and he felt, he scarcely knew why, a sentiment of hostility struggling with pity for the Countess.

Her large and oriental-like eyes dilated as she asked--

"Art thou the man whom my husband saved from the river?"

"I am, lady; but, had he known me, I had been left to perish amid its waters."

"Thou art quite a youth, and a handsome one, too--a Frenchman, I think?"

"Nay, noble lady, I am of old Norway in the distant north; but a good Catholic, as I see thou art by thy crucifix."

"Our religion is a bond of friendship in these dangerous days of obdurate heresy," said the Countess, whose eyes lighted up; "but wherefore sayest thou my lord would rather thou hadst perished, though he risked his life to save thee?"

"Because," replied the other with a lowering brow, "I am the bearer of a secret that if, unfolded to thee, would make the Lord Bothwell slay me, even if I stood with the grace-cup on his own hearthstone."

"And what is this secret?" she asked with a hauteur that was assumed to hide her trembling curiosity.

"Excuse my revealing it, lady, and let me begone, I pray you, for an agony of anxiety oppresses me. One day, perhaps, you may--you must know all!"

"Now--tell me now, I implore thee? Behold this ring; it contains four diamonds, each worth I know not how many angels"--

"I am a gentleman, and a captain of arblastiers under Frederick of Denmark, and to me your bribe is proffered in vain. I repeat, madam, that I must decline to reveal the secret."

"This is alike insolent and cruel!" said the Countess, raising her voice, while her dark eyes flashed, and her little hands were clenched. "Tell me this instant all thou knowest, or I will summon those who will make thee. I have a proud lord, and a jealous. Beware! Think what he may do if thou art found in my chamber at this hour. Now, the secret--the secret! Man, thy life is in my hands!" She seized a silver whistle that lay on the table--hand-bells were not then in use--and there was something so malevolent in the threat, and so serpent-like in the expression of her wild dark eyes, that Konrad was both startled and provoked. "The secret"----

"Is--That _thou art not_ Countess of Bothwell!" he replied, with quiet scorn.

"What hast thou dared to say?" she asked, in a breathless voice, and grew paler than marble.

"That thy husband is a villain, lady--a villain who hath deceived thee cruelly! He has another Countess, who shall one day claim him, and compel him to acknowledge her as such before the assembled peers of Scotland; for she is of noble birth in her own country, and the warlike King Frederick will not permit the honour of her house to be trifled with."

"Man, thou hast lied--oh, say thou hast lied! Oh, say that thou art mistaken!" said the Countess, in a low and broken voice, as she sank upon a settle with a ghastliness of face, which the darkness of her eyes and hair increased.

"I am not mistaken, lady. I swear to thee by every saint who is blessed in heaven, and by their shrines that are revered on earth, that I am _not_! He is solemnly espoused to Anna"----

"_Anna!_ 'tis the name he has muttered thrice in his sleep."

"Anna Rosenkrantz, a lady of Norway, who at this hour wears on her marriage finger the emerald ring which the hermit of Bergen blessed, and with which she was solemnly espoused."

"Sayest thou an emerald ring?" demanded the Countess, a sudden light flashing in her eyes, while her lips became more white and parched.

"Yea, lady, wherein the traitor had inscribed a legend, purporting that 'the gift and the giver were hers for ever.'"

The Countess uttered a wild cry, and threw her clasped hands above her head.

"Holy Mother look upon me, that my senses may be preserved! That ring was mine--my betrothal gift to him. He said 'twas lost during his exile; and with that gift (which my good and pious kinsman, the Bishop of Dunblane, blessed on our plighting day) he hath espoused another! But I will be avenged! and by the soul of my murdered father, who with his sword in his hand and the cross on his brow, fell on the field of Corrichie, I will raise through all Strathbolgie and Aboyne a cry for vengeance, that Scotland will long remember!"

"Against whom, lady?" asked Konrad, who had now a dash of the cynic in his manner. "The man thou lovest?"

But there was no reply. Exhausted by the fury of that tempest of passion, which convulsed a frame at all times too excitable and nervous, the Countess had become insensible; and then Konrad, full of the tenderest concern, was approaching, when French Paris, who had been listening intently to the whole interview, and now began to tremble for his own bones, raised the arras, and, plucking him by the sword, said--

"If thou valuest thy life, follow me and begone! Her cries have reached the hall, and already I hear the voice of the Earl."

They rushed down the secret stair to the postern, the arras barely closing over Konrad at one end of the bower chamber, when the astonished Earl raised it at the other.

*CHAPTER XXI.*

*DISAPPOINTMENT.*

Once more the gate behind me falls; Once more before my face I see the moulder'd abbey walls That stand within the chase. _Tennyson._

Konrad stood on Bothwell bank, the wooded declivity that sloped abruptly to the margin of the Clyde, in whose deep bosom the stars were now reflected; for all traces of the storm had died away, and the wet foliage of the woodlands was rustling in the soft west wind that blew from the darkened hills of Lanark.

High and sombre in its feudal strength and architectural pride, towered up the keep of Bothwell, and its grass-tufted barbican wall. Lights flashed through the casements of turret and corridor, and loud voices were heard calling clamorously in the echoing court.

"There lies thy path," said the page, pointing towards the river; "traverse its banks for about a mile till thou reachest the bridge of Bothwell. The hamlet of the same name is near it, and there thou canst pass the night."

"Is there no place nearer? consider again, good lad," said Konrad, thinking more for Anna than himself, as he slipped the promised crown into the page's hand.

"The warder of the bridge resides in a house above the archway, which is closed after nightfall. He keeps an hostelry which affordeth good up-putting both for men and horses; but mark me, fair sir! seek neither hamlet nor hostel to-night, for we know not what evil may come of thy plaguy interview with the countess. Keep in the woods, and lie _en perdu_ till daybreak, and then God speed thee!"

The postern closed, and Konrad stood alone.

A vague sense of danger impelled him to hurry from the vicinity of the castle; but he was less actuated by that motive than by his anxiety to rejoin Anna, from whom he had now been two hours absent, without procuring the succour she required so much.

He found the passage of the river open, for the warder had partaken somewhat freely of the potations of a traveller who had tarried there about curfew-time, and consequently he had forgotten to secure the barrier-gate that closed the roadway after dark, and which none could pass without paying toll, or drinking a can of ale at his hostel. Konrad passed on; and just as day was brightening in purple and orange on the distant hills, he began to ascend the eminence which was crowned by the ruined priory of the Augustines of Blantyre.

As day broke on the green woods of Bothwell, and the magnificent river, a hundred yards in breadth, that flowed in blue and silver light between them, no other silvan scene could surpass that landscape in beauty and romance. Contrasting strongly with the bright green of the summer forest, which was seen at intervals between the ivied buttresses and shattered windows of the gothic priory, rose Bothwell's broad round towers and ponderous ramparts, shining almost blood-red in the rising sun, being all built of ruddy-coloured stone. White and silvery, from the margin of the deep and crystal river, the morning mist curled up through the heavy foliage in a thousand fantastic shapes, and melted away in the thin air of the blue and balmy sky.

Hurrying among the grass-grown masses of the broken tombs and fallen walls, Konrad entered the vault where he had left Anna, and a pang shot through his bosom on beholding her lying at full length, still and motionless, on her bed of leaves. Her face seemed pale as death when viewed by the dim light that struggled through the arched chamber, from a little pointed window in the massive wall.

"If she should be dead!" he thought, as he stooped tenderly over her. "Ah! Heaven be thanked, she only sleeps!"

The contour and pallor of her beautiful fece, then attenuated by mental suffering and bodily fatigue, seemed almost sublime in the placidity of its aspect. Tears were oozing heavily from her long lashes, and her respirations were short and quick as her lover bent over her, and, taking one of her passive hands in his, pressed it gently to his lips.

Anna awoke, and started on beholding Konrad, whose attire had been changed; for the pages of the Earl had given him a sombre suit of black sarcenet in lieu of his wet garments.

"Konrad," she said faintly, "thou hast tarried long."

"Not one moment longer than I could avoid, dearest Anna! Thou canst not guess where I have been, and whom I have seen."

"Thou hast seen _him_," she replied, with a radiant face; "whom else couldst thou see that I care for?"

"I _have_ seen him, lady," said Konrad, over whose countenance there fell a deeper shade of melancholy. "I have seen him, and stood with him face to face in his own castle hall."

"Oh!" exclaimed Anna; and, half-clinging to Konrad's neck, she turned upon him a face and eyes that were radiant with eagerness and joy; "and what said he? what message sent he to me--to his well-loved Anna? why came he not himself?"

"Thou hast forgotten, Anna"----

"Ah! my God! yes--the story. He is still faithful to me--say that he is, dear Konrad!"

"Six months ago, with all formality and magnificence, he was married to another, and thou art no more remembered than the last year's snow."

"This must--must be some dreadful dream or fantasy!" said Anna, pressing her hands upon her temples.

"I have seen his bride."

"Is she beautiful?"

"Yes, singularly beautiful, and gentle, and winning."

"Hah!" muttered Anna sharply through the teeth, which were set like a vice.

Her face was pale and colourless. An expression of jealous bitterness, of anger, and reproach, were on her forehead, and sparkling in her eyes, which were almost white with an aspect of passion, such as Konrad had never before witnessed in her usually calm features; and, taking her hands in his, he said tenderly--

"Be composed, dearest Anna! for I never will forsake thee while hie remains; and even were I to die, my spirit, I am assured, will hover near thee still."

"_Thou!_" said she bitterly, as she snatched away her hands; "what art thou to me?"

The young man trembled, for at these cruel words a heavy palsy seemed to fall upon his heart.

"And where is his castle, Konrad?" she demanded abruptly.

"Behold!" he replied; and, drawing back a mass of the pendant ivy and wild-roses that overhung the entrance of the vault, he displayed the beautiful valley or dell, through which the noble Clyde, so broad, blue, and crystalline, was winding between its banks of lofty wood, and overlooked by the dark facade of Bothwell's princely stronghold.

Full on the long line of its crenelated rampart, on the strong round towers that the patriot Wallace, and "proud Pembroke's haughty Earl," had built, on its shining casements and lofty keep, overtopping the summer foliage and the morning mist, shone the warm splendour of the early sun. Anna gave one fixed and fierce glance at the edifice, and then arose with tottering steps, and wildness in her air and eyes.

"Whither wouldst thou, Anna?" said Konrad imploringly, retaining her hand.

"I am going to him"----

"To Bothwell?"

"I will--I shall see him once again, though only to expire at his feet. One interview may"----

"Dear Anna," said Konrad, who never for an instant, under all her petulance and neglect, altered his gentle and loverlike tone; "thou forgettest that he is wedded to another--a great lady of the land--and that thou art now but as a weed, a bramble in his path, to be crushed or thrown aside."

"Go to! Konrad--'tis but jealousy that makes thee speak thus."

"Thou wrongest me, Lady Anna; 'tis long since jealousy died within me. Oh! _that_ was an agony that could not last with life. Tarry but one hour, I implore--thou art so faint, Anna"----

"Dare you detain me, sir?"

"Go, then; and Bothwell's boorish warders and flippant pages will drive thee like some poor wanton from his gates; and think then--when with insult and opprobrium they are closed upon thee--what thy father, the brave old knight of Aggerhuis, who died with one hand on his sword and the other on the standard of the Lubeckers, would have felt, could he have thought that such an hour was reserved for the only daughter of that wife he loved so dearly."

"True--true!" replied Anna, giving way to a passionate burst of tears; for the mention of her parents subdued her. "O Mary! blessed mother of compassion, intercede for me! Inspire me with resignation and strength to endure my fate. Ah, pardon me, kind and good Konrad! for my heart is so torn by love and shame and indignation, that at times I know not what I say. From what I was in Frederick's court, to become what I am--a poor outcast on a foreign shore--an object of scorn to the proud, and pity to the good! Oh, how frightful! Be still kind to me, Konrad--and end my misery by putting thy poniard into the heart that so cruelly deceived thee."

Konrad was deeply moved by this passionate burst of grief; he leaned against a fragment of the ruin, and covered his face with his hands.

"Anna!" said he, after a pause; "bethink thee that Scotland hath a queen whose goodness of heart and gentleness of spirit are revered in every land save her own?"

"True! and at her feet will I pour forth my sorrow and my tears together. As a woman she will sympathize with me, and lend a kind ear to the story of my wrongs, Thou wilt go with me, Konrad?"

He kissed her hand again, and led her to the arch of the vault, and then they paused--for at that moment the blast of a bugle, clear and ringing, ascended from the bosky dell below the ruined Priory. Then the flash of steel was seen among the foliage, and a band of between forty and fifty men-at-arms on horseback, three abreast, having two swallow-tailed pennons displayed, and with their steel caps and tall uplifted lances glittering in the morning sun, swept at full gallop round the steep knoll on which the castle stood.

For a few minutes the reflection of their passing files was seen to glitter in the mirror-like bosom of the river, as horse and rider, spear and pennon, vanished among the apple bowers and birchen glades that clothed the braes of Bothwell.

Konrad felt instinctively that they were in pursuit of him; and, with a sadness and anxiety caused only by the reflection that, if he were slain, Anna would be friendless and desolate, he led her slowly from the ruins, and, hand in hand, the forlorn pair traversed the thickets of old and gnarled oak surrounding Blantyre Priory, and reached the rough and dusty highway which was to lead them--but how they knew not--to the court and palace of the Queen of Scotland.

*CHAPTER XXII.*

*THE COUNTESS JANE.*

What was once a source of pleasure, Now becomes the cause of pain; Day no more displays its treasure, Endless night o'erspreads the plain: The powers of nature and of art Cease to charm the wounded heart. _Sonnet by Queen Mary._

The Earl of Bothwell was more astonished than alarmed on finding his Countess insensible; but hastening forward with proper solicitude, he raised her from the ground, and the moment he did so she partially recovered.

Her deep dark eyes gave him one full, bright, sickening glance of sorrow and reproach, then she closed them again, and her head drooped over his shoulder.

Again she recovered suddenly, and, trembling in every limb, withdrew from the Earl's encircling arm, and cold, passionless, and rigid in feature as a statue, gazed steadily upon him for a moment, and, removing her wedding ring from the marriage finger, laid it on a little marble table that stood near her.

"Now, my Lord," said she, in a voice that struggled to be firm, "now, I have done with thee. Give this ring to _her_ who now wears my betrothal gift, and may she be happier than I have been! Oh! Bothwell, Bothwell! if ever"----

"Woman, art thou mad?" exclaimed the astonished noble, growing pale with surprise and increasing anger.

The Countess laughed bitterly.

"Mad!" she repeated, and pressed her little hands upon her throbbing temples. A strange light blazed in her dark eyes, that were liquid and swimming, though not one of the hot salt tears that trembled in them rolled over her pallid cheek. "Yes--I am mad! ha, ha!"

A shudder crept over Bothwell on hearing that ghastly laugh, and he said--

"Take up thy ring, Jane, for thy manner makes me tremble."

"Hah! doth it so? Oh, Bothwell! did I not love thee almost to adoration, I should spit upon thee! Thy ring--oh! never more shall ring of thine disgrace the hand of Lord Huntly's daughter. Where is the ring that I gave thee in exchange for _this_ on the day of our betrothal, when together we knelt before the Bishop of Dunblane, and the old man blessed us both? Oh, false and faithless! dishonourable and base!"----

"Speak louder, lady!" said the Earl, whose brow darkened with suppressed passion,--"speak louder, I pray thee! Let every groom and gossiping page hear how Bothwell and his Countess can bandy hard words in their quarrels, like two tavern brawlers. What a plague have I to do with thy quips and quirks?--thy freaks and wild fancies? Thou hast found thy tongue, (a wanion upon it!) pray, endeavour to recover thy temper also. Lady--by St. Paul thy best wits have gone woolgathering!"

"Oh! why didst thou wed me, Bothwell?" she exclaimed, in a passionate burst of grief, as she threw herself upon a cushioned settle, and covered her face with her hands. The Earl was touched; he approached, and bent over her.

"Jane, Jane!" he began, in a faltering voice.

"Why didst thou take me from hearts that loved me so well?"

Scorn curled the Earl's lip at this question, for he thought it referred regretfully to Lord Sutherland, who, in her girlish days, had been an assiduous admirer of the Countess. He replied coldly--

"I doubt not there are still hearts who love thee in Strathbolgie--and _Strathnaver_, too."

"Begone!" she exclaimed, in a voice that thrilled through him; for her terrible malady was then fast stealing upon her senses and energies. "Begone to thine Anna, and leave Jane of Gordon to die! Away--begone!--dost thou hear?" And, in the childish bitterness of her passion, she spat upon him.

The Earl withdrew a pace or two; rage crimsoned his features, and he rolled his eyes about for some object to vent his fury upon.

"Oh! why didst thou teach me to love thee?" continued the Countess in her piercing voice. "What led thee to woo and to wed me?"

"_Fatality!_" replied the Earl, with a cold and haughty smile. "Fatality! O woman! knowest thou not that every action of my life has been impelled by an overruling principle, which I could neither see, nor avert, nor avoid? and I know not on what other shoals and rocks of danger and intrigue, this current of my inevitable fete may hurry me. But I feel within me a solemn presentiment that this right hand shall yet do deeds at which the boldest hearts--and my own, too--shall be startled and dismayed."

"Away from me further; for now I see thou art tainted with the cursed heresies of Calvin. Fatality! This is not the Catholic doctrine thy pious mother, Agnes of Sinclair, instilled into thy mind. Now I no longer need to marvel at thy duplicity. Thou who art false to thy God, may well be false to me; or art thou growing mad, too? Away to Anna, and leave me!"

"Anna?"

"Yes, Anna--'tis the name thou hast often muttered in thy sleep, when, with a heart full of love, I lay waking and watching by thy side, and these evil dreams were my meed. Hence to thy Norwegian!"

"By St. Paul! this fellow, Konrad, hath been with thee! Ah, villain and traitor! beware how thou comest again within the reach of Bothwell's dagger. Ho, Hob of Ormiston!--John of Bolton!--Calder!--Paris!--ho there! What a blockhead, what a jack-a-lent I have been!"

The page appeared, and too frightened to remember his fee now, trembled in every limb at the domestic storm he had been partly the means of raising.

"Has any one had access to the Countess?" asked the Earl, with a terrible frown.

"None--none, my lord, that I know aught of."