Part 6

"O, death and fury! it will be but one tissue of reproaches and upbraidings from the Lady Jane. Throw it into the sea!"

"What! wilt thou not read it before?"

"I could scarcely do so _after_. Read it thyself!" replied Bothwell; "for Huntly and I have nothing now in common!"

Each tore open a letter, and began slowly and laboriously to decipher the cramped and contracted hand-writing so common to the sixteenth century. The effect of these communications was very different on the readers. A bright smile spread over the broad visage of the Knight of Ormiston; while a frown, black as a thunder-cloud, gathered on the dark brow of Bothwell.

"Fury!" he exclaimed, crushing up the letter. "God's fury, and his malison to boot! be on this white-livered dog--this foul traitor"----

"Who--who?"

"Frederick"----

"How--the King of Denmark and Norway! These are hard names for his majesty to receive within his own fortress of Bergen. What tidings?"

"He declines all further correspondence with me concerning the Shetland Isles, and threatens, that if by the vigil of Saint Denis--now but three days hence--we are found within the Danish seas, to send me captive to Queen Mary, with a full account of my mock embassy. 'Tis some machination of my foeman, Murray."

"Devil burn him!" said Hob. "Well, is it not better, after all, to be Lord of Bothwell and Hailes, at home in puir auld Scotland, than Prince of Orkney and Lord of Hialtland, branded as a traitor till the very name of Hepburn becomes (like that of Menteath of old) a byword and a scoff in every Scottish mouth--banned alike in the baron's hall and at the peasant's hearth--while thou wouldst writhe hourly to free thy head from under the sure claws of the Danish lion."

"Right, Hob! Throw his letter into the sea, and, if thou art clerk enough, let us hear what our noble friend, the Lord Huntly, sayeth."

Ormiston read as follows:--

"To the Right Honorable my very good Lord and especial friend, James Earl of Bothwell, Lord of Hailes, Liddesdale, and Shetland, High Admiral, Sheriff of Haddington, and Bailie of Lauderdale, _Give this in haste--haste--haste_.

"We write to hasten your return, as the Queen's Majesty hath relaxit your Lordship and the worshipful Laird of Ormiston from the horn, and hath banished the Lords Moray, Morton, and others, your enemies, into England, quhere they are now residing and resett at the frontier town of Berwick, for the slaughter of umquhile David Rizzio, her Grace's Italian secretary. Her Majesty desireth me to recal you to her presence, with solemn assurance that your sentence of forfeiture is reversed, your fiefs and honours restored. My dearest sister, the Lady Jane, and my bedfellow, the Lady Anne, send their devoted love to your Lordship.

"So the blessing of our Lady be with you, and grant you long life and great commoditie!

"Done at our castle of Strathbolgie in the Garioch, on the vigil of St. Cuthbert the Confessor, 1565.

"HUNTLIE."

Ormiston threw up his bonnet, his black eyes flashed and filled with tears, as he exclaimed--

"Now, God's blessing on her Grace! from this hour I am her leal man and true. Now man, Bothwell, I am sick to death of this grim Norwayn castle, and its old ale-drinking, chess-playing, and pudding-pated castellan, who is part woodman, part fisherman--half knight, half bear--and I long to see the yellow corn waving on my ain rigs of Ormiston, with the grey turrets of my auld peel-tower, looking down on bonny Teviotdale. Would I were there now, and three hundred of my tall troopers with lance, and horse, and bonnets of steel, all trotting by my side. Benedicite!"

"Three hundred devils! thy wits have gone woolgathering. I have promised love and troth to Anna; and if I return with her as my bride, Huntly and Aboyne, Black Arthur and Auchindoune, will all come down like roaring lions from the hills of Badenoch and the wilds of Strathbolgie--so that I may as well stay here and face Frederick."

"What! dost thou fear a feud with the gay Gordons?"

"Thou knowest," replied the Earl haughtily, "that I fear nothing, as I shall show thee. I love this girl with my whole heart, Ormiston; yet now, when the first fierce burst of love is past, I see the folly of a man like me being tied like a love-knot to a woman's kirtle."

"Leave her behind thee here."

"I cannot--I cannot! What a moment of imbecility was that, when I betrothed myself to Jane of Huntly!"

"A cursed coil! women on both hands; danger in returning and danger in remaining. Our Lady direct us!"

"Dost think she will interest herself in the affairs of such a couple of rascals as we are?"

"Thou speakest for thyself."

"Nay, I speak for thee in particular."

"Thou gettest angry," said Ormiston; "remember the old saw--'He that is angry is seldom at ease.'"

"Tush! .... True it is," said Bothwell musingly, after a long pause--"I love Anna better than my own life, and, because winning her may cost me some trouble and danger; yet I feel that to wed her is to wreck my ship on a dangerous shore. I am grown indifferent to Lady Jane, because I may have her for the asking--besides, I am sick of dark eyes."

"Especially Parisian!"

The Earl's brow knit, but he continued gently--

"I have promised marriage to both; and to one my plight must be broken. What matters it? 'Tis only to a woman; and did not one whom I loved with all the depth and holiness of a first love, slight that passion as valueless, and laugh me to scorn when she chose another?"

"Remain here, and we shall be sent captives to Scotland, where all the particulars of our pretended embassy to Denmark will be discovered."

"And if I return with this little Norwegian by my side, St Paul! but I must keep my best sword buckled there too."

"Any thing thou likest, but let us leave this desolate land. Let us once more have our feet on Scottish ground, and our hands on our bridles; we shall then make our own terms with Huntly and the Queen. If this dame Anna will go"----

"Go! oh, thou knowest not how the little creature loves me! Ardent and impulsive to excess, she will follow me wherever I list."

"While the fit lasts," rejoined Ormiston drily. "Take her with thee, but leave her with some of thy friends in Orkney till we hear how matters go at Holyrood. There is old Sir Gilbert Balfour of Westeray, will keep her close enough in his strong castle of Noltland, where, when once thou seest the queen again, she may chance to remain for the term of her natural life."

Hob paused, and scratched his rough beard with a knowing expression; for he knew enough of his friend to foresee how matters would be in a month.

"Out upon thee, Hob!" said he; "thou art ever prompting me to some knavery."

"But this letter of Huntly"----

"Thank heaven it came!"

"Thou wert about to throw it into the sea."

"St. Mary! but for its contents we must have sailed on a hopeless quest to France, to Italy, or to heaven knows where; for I am already too well known by evil repute throughout the most of Europe. But away, Ormiston, to the harbour. Seek David Wood, our wight skipper, and that red-breeched knave, Hans Knuber, who assists him. Let them have our _Fleur-de-lys_ ready to sail. I will hie me to Anna, and 'tis not unlikely we may put to sea about dusk."

A smile was exchanged.

"Gramercy!" said the knight, "I hope she will not forget to bring her maid, who views my outward man with a favourable eye, so that we may all sail merrily together. Hey for hame! By cock and pie! I almost fancy myself at my ain tower-yett, with my broad banner displayed, and my stout horsemen behind me. Ho! for one headlong gallop by Ettrickshaws or Teviotside--_Te Deum laudamus_! God's blessing on our own land, that lies beyond sea, for it is like no other!" and whirling his bonnet round his head, more like a great schoolboy than a strong man of six feet eight inches, Ormiston with one bound sprang down the steep steps leading from the terrace to the shore; while the Earl, somewhat slowly and thoughtfully for so ardent a lover, returned to the presence of Anna, who, piqued by his long and unceremonious absence, was pleased to receive him with a pouting lip and a clouded brow, which his caresses soon dispelled.

*CHAPTER X*

*THE HERMIT OF BERGEN.*

When fortune makes the match, she rages, And forsakes the unequal pair; But when love two hearts engages, The kind god is ever there. Regard not, then, high blood nor riches, You that would his blessings have; Let love, untaught, guide all your wishes. Hymen should be Cupid's slave. _Sir Charles Sedley._

The Reformation had been accomplished in Denmark and Norway, during the reign of Frederick I., about thirty years before the period of which we write. It had made great progress among the simple and half barbarian Norse, who, though they had laid the ancient hierarchy in the dust, received nothing equal in exchange; and consequently the codes of religion and morality lay lightly on the necks of the people.

A Catholic church was still permitted at Gluckstadt; the title of bishop, the auricular confessional, the crucifix, and other Romish rites and ceremonies, were still retained, though the government was avowedly and essentially Lutheran. Some persons adhered rigidly to the ancient form of worship, others to the new; but many more took a middle and very convenient course, and for a time believed in--nothing.

It was while matters were in this state, particularly in the province of Aggerhuis--that a half-crazed monk, who had belonged to a suppressed monastery in Fuhnen, and whose brain was said to have been turned by the severities to which he had been subjected, by the ecclesiastical superintendent of the reformed church in that diocese, became an anchorite, and undisputed occupant of a cavern on the fiord, near the castle of Bergen. The fame of his austerity, the severity of his penances, and the circumstance of his having made his dwelling in a cavern which for ages had been the reputed habitation of Zernebok, an evil demon, whose name is familiar to the Norse, had been quite enough to procure him a fame beyond the province of Aggerhuis. By night the fishermen shuddered, crossed themselves, and sedulously avoided the long ray of light that streamed from the mouth of his deep cavern upon the glassy waters of the bay; for, notwithstanding his reputation for sanctity and holiness on the one hand, he was dreaded for possessing various supernatural and unpriestly attributes on the other.

But to return from this digression, which was necessary, as the hermit is about to be introduced with due formality to the reader, we may briefly state that the gay Earl, notwithstanding all his eloquence and powers of persuasion, which were very great, failed to prevail on Anna Rosenkrantz to make an unconditional elopement with him; nor would her pride and self-esteem permit her to trust implicitly to one whom she knew to have earned at Copenhagen the dubious reputation of a finished gallant and accomplished courtier.

Much as she loved him, and--notwithstanding her inconstancy to Konrad, she loved him well--Anna could not so utterly sacrifice the name and honour of her family, or be so oblivious of that delicacy which a Norwegian maiden so seldom forgets; and thus, though Bothwell urged with all the oily eloquence that love, ardour, and gallantry lent him, the danger of that delay which would sacrifice him to Rosenkrantz, who in three days, by the king's mandate, would be compelled to make him a prisoner, Anna only wept, and would not--could not--consent to accompany him, unless--

"Unless we are wedded; is it not so, dearest Anna?" said the handsome noble, as she reclined helplessly and in tears on his bosom, within an alcove of the terrace that overlooked the bay.

Anna made no reply.

"Decide, dearest, decide!" urged the Earl, pointing to his ship that was now gallantly riding in the fiord, with her white canvass half unloosed, and glimmering white in the faint twilight of the northern evening. "Decide! for by the express command of the governor, your uncle, I must be far beyond yon blue horizon ere the sun rises; and then thou wilt see me no more!"

Anna sobbed bitterly, and she thought of the triumph the rejected Konrad might feel and display, if the Earl sailed without her. Proud, and perhaps not a little artful, her heart was torn by love, doubt, and anguish; and her answers were very incoherent.

"Oh! what would my uncle Rosenkrantz say, if"----

"I have bade adieu to Rosenkrantz, and he deems me already on board. Since the arrival of King Frederick's mandate, he has been so full of vapour and dignity, that though I cannot but laugh at it, we can hold no further communication; and if, after my late proposal, which he so scornfully rejected, he knew I was here--and with thee"----

"True, true, we would be separated."

"And for ever! I know your scruples, dearest Anna," said the Earl tenderly; for, moved by her tears, and the utter abandonment in which she reclined on his breast, with her face half hidden by the bright masses of her hair, and by her position permitting soft glimpses of a full and beautiful bosom, he felt that he loved her with his whole heart; and that the troth he had plighted to Lady Gordon, the vengeance of the fierce Highland noble her brother, and the wrath or favour of the Scottish court, were all alike to be committed to oblivion. Love bore all before him victoriously for the time; and Bothwell, ever the creature of impulses, yielded to that of the moment.

"Hear me for the last time," he urged. "The good hermit, of whom I have heard you speak so often, and whose abode is in the cavern among yonder rocks, from which we now see a ray of light that trembles on the water, will unite us, and in my own land will I wed thee again, with such magnificence as becomes a bride of the house of Hailes. Consent, dearest Anna! and one blast on my horn will bring a barge to the beach; refuse, and we must part, Anna, never to meet again."

She could make no reply, but drew closer to her winning lover, and exchanged with him one long and passionate kiss, and Bothwell knew that he had triumphed.

"My beloved Anna!" he murmured, as he raised her in his arms, and felt at the moment that ever to love another than this fair being, who trusted to him so implicitly, would be sacrilege, and an impossibility.

"Christina--call Christina Slingbunder! Oh! I cannot go alone," she sobbed.

Bothwell, aware that there was not a moment to lose, beckoned to the waiting-woman, who had been lingering at the corner of the terrace; and who, without knowing what was to ensue, followed him, while he half led and half bore her mistress down the steep and devious pathway that led to the beach.

Darkness had almost set in; the long Norwegian twilight had given place to starry night, and they were unseen by the Danish sentinels, who lounged dreamily on the summit of the keep, and at the castle gate of Bergen. As he descended, Bothwell drew from his embroidered belt a small but exquisitely carved bugle-horn, accoutred with a silver mouthpiece, on which he blew one short and sharp blast of peculiar cadence, that drew an echo from every rock and indentation of the harbour. Ere the last had died away, the sound of oars was heard, the water was seen to flash in the starlight, and a boat glided into the dark shadow thrown by the castle rocks upon the deep water of the fiord; it jarred against the landing-place, and Christina Slingbunder, who was about to make some violent protestations against proceeding, had the strong arm of Ormiston thrown around her.

"Welcome, Bothwell!" said he; "never heard I sound more joyous than thy bugle; for the last hour our wight skipper hath been swearing like a pagan."

"Wherefore?"

"At thy delay."

"Then the knave most e'en solace himself by swearing on."

"He says, if this breeze continues, we will be past Frederick's-vaern by sunrise."

"All the better, Hob," replied the Earl, as he lifted Anna on board; "but I hope he hath our demi-culverins cast loose, and a few yeomen in their armour, in case of surprisal."

"Right--dost thou not see I am in harness?" said Ormiston, making his steel glove clatter on his corselet; for, save the head, his whole bulky frame was completely armed. The eight seamen who pulled the boat were all clad in pyne doublets, and armed with swords and daggers, and they wore the national head-dress, the broad bonnet of blue worsted, adorned with a silver coronet and horse's head--the Earl's crest.

"Now, my stout varlets," said their lord, "dip, and away!"

"Away for the ship!" added Ormiston.

"Nay, for the hermit's grotto under yonder rocks, where thou seest a light now gleaming on the water. Away, and a golden angel on the best oar!"

Ormiston gave a low whistle, expressive of surprise and pity at the folly of his friend, and endeavoured, by a series of somewhat unceremonious caresses, to console the sobbing and half-frightened Christina, who had begun to weep most obstreperously; but he knew enough of the Earl's temperament to be aware that any remark was now futile; and in reality, as he cared not a rush whether he married the Norwegian or not, he resolved to let matters run their course.

All sat silent, and nothing was heard but the interjections of the waiting-woman, and the suppressed breathing of the stout oarsmen, as the boat strained and creaked when their sinewy efforts shot her out into midstream. Anna reclined against the shoulder of the Earl, with her face hidden in a satin hood, and his mantle of crimson velvet rolled around her.

Now rising in her silvery glory from the sea, the broad round moon, with a splendour impossible to describe, aided the brightness of the northern night. One broad gleam of steady radiance extended up the fiord from the horizon to the shore; and when, like a black speck, the boat shot across it, the breakers of the distant ocean, like wavelets of silver, were seen rising and falling afar off, amid the liquid light.

The summit of the rocks of Bergen, and the square tower that crowned them, were shining snow-white in its splendour, but their base was hidden in more than Cimmerian gloom; for though the bright moonlight tipped the eminences and peaks of the far off mountain, the darkness of midnight rested on the bosom of the still fiords and bays that rolled in shadow a thousand feet below them.

From the murky obscurity of a mass of granite, that overhung the deepest part of the fiord, where the rocks descended like a wall abruptly to their foundations, many fathoms under the surface of the water, a faint and flickering light, that gleamed redly and fitfully, directed the steersman to the uncouth dwelling of this hermit of the sea. A sudden angle of the rocks revealed it, and the oarsmen found themselves close to a low-browed cavern, that receded away into the heart of the granite cliffs that overhung the surf.

A seaman made fast the boat, by looping a rope round a pinnacle of rock near the narrow ledge, where the fishermen of Bergen usually left such alms and offerings as fear or piety impelled them to bestow on the hermit, whom they alike dreaded and respected. On these rocks the sea-dogs basked in summer, and shared the hermit's food in winter, when they crawled through the crevices in the ice, that for six months of the year covered the water of the bay.

The Scottish mariners, who did not altogether like their vicinity to the abode of this mysterious personage, cowered together, conversing in low whispers; and their swarthy visages seemed to vary from brown to crimson, in the red smoky light that gushed at times from the mouth of the rugged cavern, as the ocean wind blew through it. Bothwell, who could not for a moment quit the trembling Anna, requested Hob of Ormiston to acquaint the recluse with the nature of the boon they had come to crave of him.

Participating in the fears of the mariners, Hob evidently did not admire venturing on this mission alone. On one hand, a powerful curiosity prompted him; on the other, a childish superstition, incident to the age, withheld him: but he was a bold fellow, whose scruples of any kind never lasted long, and in a minute he had loosened his long sword in its sheath, looked to the wheel-lock of his dague, and sprung up the rocks. His tall feather was seen to stoop for a moment as he entered the cavern, and made signs of the cross as he advanced; for though the Laird of Ormiston, like most of the lesser barons in Scotland for a generation or two after 1540, professed no particular creed, any ideas he had of religion appertained to the Church of Rome--therefore the aspect of the cavern, as he penetrated, was singularly adapted to make a deep impression on his mind.

A pile of drift-wood blazing in a cleft of the rock, through which its smoke ascended, filled the cavern with warmth; and a red glow, that lit up the rugged surface of its rocky walls and arched roof, displaying the wild lichens that spotted them, and the green tufts of weed that grew in the crannies.

A myriad of metallic particles, green schorl, blue quartz, rock crystal, and basaltic prisms, glittered in the blaze of the hermit's fire. It revealed also the strange and ghastly fissures of the cavern, which had been formed by some vast subterranean throe of nature, that had rent asunder the solid mountains; and, by hurling one gigantic mass of rock against another, formed this deep retreat, into which Hob of Ormiston penetrated with a resolute aspect but a hesitating heart.

The roar of a subterranean cataract, that poured down white and foaming behind one of these ghastly seams, lent additional effect to the aspect of the cavern--at the upper end of which stood an altar of stone, having on it a skull polished like ivory by long use, a rude crucifix, and the words--

Sancte Olaf ora pro nobis,

painted above it on the wall in large and uncouth characters. At the approach of Ormiston, the hermit arose from his lair or bed of dried seaweed, and a more wild and unearthly object had never greeted the eyes of his visitor.

His years might number sixty; he was perfectly bald, and his scalp shone like that of the skull, to which his visage, hollow-eyed and attenuated to the last degree, would have borne no distant resemblance but for the long white beard of thin and silvery hair that flowed to his waist. He was clad in the skin of the sea-dog, and his bare legs and arms were so lean that they resembled the bones of a skeleton, with veins and fibres twisted over them. As the hermit arose, Ormiston paused; and while he gazed with irresolution, the wild man did so with wonder; for the Scottish knight was richly accoutred in a suit of plate armour; his hose were of scarlet cloth twined with gold, and the band of his blue velvet bonnet, like the hilt of his dagger, sparkled with precious stones.

"Heaven save you, father!" said he, uncovering his head, and speaking in that broken Norwegian dialect which he had acquired among the Shetlanders.

"And what, may I ask, hath procured me a visit from a son of vanity and trumpery like thee?" asked the old man of the rock, surveying Ormiston with a glance approaching to disdain.

"An errand of friendship, good father," replied the other, whose uneasiness was in no way soothed when he saw, by the restless and unearthly aspect of the hermit's eyes, that he was evidently insane; "from one who hath a boon to crave of thee."

"Of me--Ha! ha!" laughed the hermit, and the reverberations of his laughter, that echoed a hundredfold through the fissures of the cavern, seemed to the imaginative ear of Ormiston like that of fiends ringing from an abyss, and, signing the cross, he involuntarily drew back. The wild hermit seemed to enjoy his terror, and laughed louder still.