Part 13

"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.

The sunlight died away--the gloaming came, and the walls of the old abbey, within whose aisles the dead of ages lay, looked dark and dreary; the silence of his prison increased, and a deep reverie--a stupefaction--fell upon the mind of Bolton.

A hand that touched his shoulder lightly aroused him; he looked up, and saw--could it be possible?

Mariette!

"Oh no! it is a spectre!" he muttered, and covered his face with his hands! Again he ventured to look up, and the same figure met his eye--the same face was gazing sadly upon him. The features--for he summoned courage to regard them fixedly--were indeed those of the Mariette Hubert he had loved so well; but the bloom of their beauty had fled; her dark French eyes had lost their lustre and vivacity; her cheeks their roses, and her lips their smiles.

Her countenance was full of grief, and expressed the most imploring pity. Hepburn gazed steadily upon her; and though for a moment he deemed her a supernatural vision, he felt no fear. Suddenly he sprang to her side, and threw an arm around her form--her passive but round and palpable form--exclaiming as he did so,--

"Mariette--my own Mariette, is it thou? By what miracle did the mercy of God enable thee to escape me? Speak--speak--convince me that it is thee, and to-morrow I will die happy; for I will be guiltless of thy death, Mariette--thine--thine! Oh, that moment of crime, of vengeance, of madness--how dear it has cost me! Speak to me, adorable Mariette--thou livest?"

"I do, dearest Bolton, by the mercy of Heaven."

"True, true!" he gasped; "for thy lover had none." He groaned aloud, and regarded her with eyes full of grief, astonishment, and passion.

"I found myself, when day was breaking, lying near the ruins of the king's house. I had been insensible I know not how long, and was covered with bruises, and almost dying; for" (she shuddered, and added with a sad but tender smile) "thou, dear heart! in the blindness of thy fury, did so nearly destroy me"----

"Oh, now! when standing upon the verge of my grave, Mariette, remind me not of that moment of dread and despair. Thou wert found"----

"By an aged man, in other days a prebend of St. Giles, Father Tarbet, who conveyed me to a cottage near the ruined convent of Placentia, where an old woman, that in a better time had been a sister of St. Katherine, dwelt; and to her care he bequeathed me. A raging fever preyed upon me long; but, by the goodness of Heaven, and the tenderness of the poor old recluse, I recovered; and, disguised in this long cloak, by presenting to the javellour of Holyrood a forged order purporting to be from the Regent Moray, have gained admittance to thy cell, and am come to save thee, John of Bolton, and to take thy place till to-morrow--to be freed as a woman, or to die in thy name as fate may direct."

Hepburn wept with rapture to find that he had not destroyed her in that fit of insanity which jealousy and passion had brought upon him; hot and salt were the tears that fell upon her hands, as he kissed them again and again.

"The darkness increases apace," said Mariette; "take thou this mantle and broad hat, lower thy stature, stoop if thou canst, pass forth, and may God attend thee! Leave me in thy place--they cannot have the heart to destroy me, a poor French girl; and yet," she added, in an under tone, "what matters it now?"

"Destroy thee? thou the sister of French Paris--of that Nicholas Hubert, who this day died amid the yells of the infuriated thousands who crowded the Lawnmarket like a living sea!"

"True, true, I am his sister!" said Mariette, wringing her hands; "God sain and assoilzie thee, my dear, dear brother; but in this, my disguise of page, I have another chance of escaping, for Charles la Fram, Duval, and Dionese la Brone, who, thou mayest remember, were in thy band of archers, and now serve as arquebusiers in the guards of the Regent Moray, are at this moment sentinels in the Abbey Close, and by their connivance, for the love of old France, I am sure--oh! quite sure--of escaping in safety. Be persuaded, dearest monsieur, I am as certain of freedom as thou art of a terrible death."

"And by the ignominious rope--the badge of shame--amid a gazing and reviling multitude. John Hepburn, of the house of Bolton--the last of a line whose pennons waved at Halidon--to die thus! God of mercy! any risk were better than the agony of such an end."

"Away, then, and long ere the sun rises we shall both be free."

"At this hour, then, to-morrow eve, thou wilt meet me, Mariette."

"Meet thee--meet thee!--where?"

"At the Rood Chapel, by the loan side that leads to Leith."

"Ah, monsieur! 'tis a wild and solitary place."

"But a safe one. Thou knowest it then--near the Gallowlee. I have much--oh, very much--to say to thee, and many a question to ask. Promise thou wilt come, Mariette, for the sake of that dear love thou didst once bear me!"

"Once," she repeated mournfully; "well, be it so. I promise--at this hour, then; but away while all around us is so quiet and still--take this pass, and leave me to my own ingenuity for the rest."

Bolton wrapped himself in the mantle, and drew the broad Spanish hat over his face.

"Ah, _mon Dieu_! La Fram and Duval will never be deceived!" said Mariette, with anguish, as she surveyed his towering figure.

"Trust to me and the gloom of this autumnal night. To-morrow, then--at the Rood Chapel--remember!" said Hepburn, taking her hands in his, and pausing irresolutely, until impelled by that old regard which, when once kindled in the human heart, can never wholly die, he drew her towards him, and kissed her; but with more calm tenderness, and with less of passion, than ever he had done in other days.

"Go, go!" said Mariette, in a choking voice, "I deserve not this honour from thee. Guilty have I been, and false; but St. Mary be my witness that I speak the truth--I was besieged, betrayed, and dazzled by the artful king; the rest was fear, despair, and frenzy all!"

She pressed her hands upon her bosom, as if it was about to burst.

"I can conceive all that _now_, Mariette," replied Hepburn, in the same broken voice, while he pressed her to his heart; "from my soul I forgive thee, as thou hast done me, the greater, the more awful ill, I meditated against thee."

They separated; but he had lingered so long, and time had fled so fast, that midnight tolled from the spire of the old abbey church before he had shown the pass bearing the forged signature of _James, Regent_, to the drowsy javellour, or gateward, avoided the sentinels at the outer porch, and issued into the palace gardens, from which, by scaling a wall, he easily made his way to the bare and desolate Calton.

At the east end of the hill there then lay many deep pits, overgrown with whin and bushes; deep, dangerous, and half-filled with water, the haunt of the hare and fuimart. These were known as the Quarry Holes, and were often the scene of a ducking for sorcery, and legal drowning for various crimes; and to these he fled for shelter and concealment; for though hundreds would gladly have afforded him both on his own barony of Bolton, which was only eighteen miles distant, and had been gifted to the (as yet unsuspected) secretary Maitland--there was not a man in Edinburgh but would instantly have surrendered him into the hands of the civil authorities--and to that punishment awarded him as Bothwell's abettor in the death of the Lord Darnley.

There, overcome by long deprivation of sleep, and the bitterness of his thoughts for many a weary night and day, a deep slumber fell upon him, and the noonday sun of the morrow had soared into the wide blue vault of heaven, ere he awoke to consciousness and a remembrance of where he was--the fate from which he had escaped--the existence and the last devotion of Mariette.

Her existence! While lying in that desolate spot, he knew not what had been acted in the city that lay below the brow of the hill where he lurked in security.

In the grey twilight of that autumnal morning, which a dense and murky mist from the German sea rendered yet more gloomy, the prisoner in the tower of Holyrood had been led forth by the half-intoxicated doomster to die; and passing in her male disguise for Hepburn of Bolton, the repentant Mariette--as an atonement for the falsehood she had practised towards him--a faithlessness that had hurried him into crimes against his country, and plans of vengeance on his king--died on the scaffold, where her brother had perished but the day before--died with the secret of her sex on her lips--and died happy, that in doing so she might, by allaying all suspicion and pursuit, enable her lover to escape.

Young Hepburn knew not of this; but anxiously watched the passing day, and longed for evening, when he was to meet her at the Rood Chapel, a lonely little oratory situated on the open muirland midway between the Calton Hill and St. Anthony's Porte, the southern gate of Leith.

He heard the hum of Edinburgh ascending the hill-side, and the notes of its clocks on the passing wind as they struck the slow-seceding hours. The blue sky was above, and the dark-green whins were nodding from the rocks around him; at times, a red fox put forth its sharp nose and glancing eyes from its secret hole, or a fuimart, with its long body and bushy tail, shot past like an evil spirit; but nothing else disturbed the solitude of the place where he lay. Slowly the weary day rolled on, and he hailed with joy the last red rays of the sun, as they stole up the steep rocks of Salisbury, lingered for a moment on Arthur's rifted cone, and then died away.

The twilight soon came on; the young man crept from his hiding-place, and with an anxious heart descended the northern side of the hill, towards the place of meeting. The last flush of the set sun was lingering still behind the darkening Ochils; and amidst the smoke of busy Leith, the old spire of St. Mary, and St. Anthony's shattered tower, were still visible, but a favourable gloom and obscurity were veiling every thing; and Bolton hurried with a beating heart to the old oratory, burning to give Mariette the warm embrace, her devotion to him in his worst extremity so well deserved.

There was no one there.

Dismantled of its ornaments and statues, its font and altar, its door and windows, by reformers and thieves, the old chapel of the Holy Rood was desolate and empty. The stone arches still sustained the groined roof; but the velvet moss and the tufted grass grew in the joints of the masonry, and clung to the carved crockets and grotesque corbels.

Long he waited, and anxiously he watched the loan, that, from the chasm below the Calton's western brow, led to Leith; but no one approached--not a footstep or a sound met his ear--but the wind, as it swept over the Gallowlee, whistling drearily in the open tracery of the chapel windows, and waving the tufts of grass and wallflower that grew in its mouldering niches.

Hour succeeded hour.

Midnight came, and an agony entered his soul, for he then feared, he knew not what--he dared not to think of it, but began hastily to traverse the rough horse-way that led to the city.

Near the chapel there stood a clump of ancient sycamores, and among them were two from which the branches had been lopped, and across the tops of these divested trunks, a beam was extended to serve for the gibbet, which obtained for the place the name it bears even unto this day--the Gallowlee--and thereon were usually exposed in chains the bodies of those who had been executed--a barbarous practice, which was common in England until a comparatively recent period.

A crowd of horrible thoughts filled the mind of Bolton; but, above all, two were most palpable before him--the image of Mariette as she had been when he loved her of old, and the gibbet.

He drew near it fearfully.

Behind this ill-omened spot, the landscape to the eastward was level, extending to the seashore; here and there low clumps of coppice and the rocks of Restalrig broke its horizontal outline. The sky was all of a cloudless white tint; there were no stars, there was no moon; but against that cold pale background, the trees and the beam of the gallows stood forth in strong relief and black outline.

On the right towered up the rocky Calton, a dark and undistinguishable mass.

A number of full-fed gleds and monstrous ravens, who built their nests in the sycamores, were perched on the beam of the gallows, where they clapped their dusky wings, and cawed and screamed as the disturber of their feast approached.

Two skeletons were swinging there in the night wind; and the remains of two other beings, evidently fresh from the hands of the doomster, swung beside them. One was headless and handless; but, by its bulk and vast conformation, Hepburn knew the body to be that of Black Hob of Ormiston.

The other, which was of much shorter stature and slighter make, hung by the neck vibrating in the passing wind, which swayed it round and waved its long dark hair.

Fearfully, tremblingly, and scarcely daring to breathe, Hepburn of Bolton drew near it.

One glance sufficed him, and he rushed from the spot to return no more.

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*CHAPTER XXIV.*

*MALMO.*

Yes! there are sighs for the bursting heart, And tears for the sleepless eye; But tears and sighs and sympathy, Are luxuries unknown to _me_. The wretch immured in the dungeon-keep May snatch an hour's repose; And dream of home and the light of heaven Ere he wake to misery's throes; If _Hope_ with her radiant light be there-- I mate with the swarthy fiend Despair! _Vedder._

Here, for a page or so, we resume the MSS. of the reverend and worthy Magister Absalom Beyer.

About this period, his diary, journal, or history (which you will), for it partakes of them all, suddenly breaks off, and there are left but a few fragments, referring to a later period.

One records the baptism of the sixth son of Anna and Konrad, whom King Frederick, for his valour in capturing a Lubeck frigate that ravaged the shores of Bergen, had created Count of Saltzberg, Lord of Welsoeoe, and governor of Bergenhuis; and the garrulous Magister records that this baptismal ceremony, at which he officiated, and which was celebrated with great splendour, was the seventh anniversary of that joyous day on which he had blessed the nuptial ring of Anna and Konrad in the old cathedral of the bishopric of Bergen; and he further records the quantity of ale, wine, and dricka imbibed on the occasion, and the loads of venison, bread, and bergenvisch, eaten by the tenantry at the baptism of young Hans (for so baby the sixth was named); and how he screamed and kicked when the holy water fell on him, till he nearly sprang from his carved cradle, which was hollowed like a boat in the Norse fashion, lined with moss and velvet, and was borne by Christina Slingebunder, who had found her way from Westeray back to Bergen.

He also mentions that Konrad had grown somewhat florid, and rather more round in form, than when he had placed the ring on Anna's hand before that magnificent altar; and that she too, though retaining her youthful bloom, had (alas, for romance!) lost much of her slender and graceful aspect, and looked quite like the mother of the five chubby little ones, each of whom clung to her skirts with one hand, while the other was occupied with a great piece of the spiced christening cake, on which they were regaling with a satisfaction, equalled only by that of the Danish soldier, who, having again found the can and the cake offered on this occasion to Nippen, had appropriated them both to himself.

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