"I could not slay him!" thought the young man, generously, as other emotions rose within him; "no, not even if he smote me with his clenched hand. She seems to love him so much, that his death would be alike a source of misery to her and deep remorse to me. Dear Anna! thy happiness will still be as much my aim as if I had wedded thee; but I pray God thou mayest not be deceived, and endure—what I am now enduring!"
These generous thoughts soothed not his agony; and bitter was the sense of loneliness, of misery, and desolation, that closed over his heart in unison with the shadows of evening that were then setting over the wide landscape below.
"And she coldly saw me weep!" he exclaimed.
He felt that he must leave Bergen and the presence of Anna—but for whence? Whether for the desolate settlements of the half-barbarian Lapps, or the wars of the Lubeckers and Holsteiners, he could not decide. His love of the chase inclined him to the first; his weariness of life, to the last.
Such were his thoughts; but at two-and-twenty one seldom tires of existence, whatever its disappointments and bitterness may have been.
The sun had set on the distant sea, and the long line of saffron light it shed across the dark blue water died away; the gloomy shadows of the rocks and keep of Bergen faded from the bosom of the harbour, and red lights began to twinkle one by one, in the little windows of the wooden fisher-huts, that nestled on the shelving rocks far down below, among a wilderness of nets, and boats, and anchors.
From the terrace of the castle, miles beyond miles of rocky mountains were seen stretching afar off in blue perspective towards the surf-beaten Isles of Lofoden; and, tipped by the last red light of the sun that had set, their splintered and rifted peaks shot up in fantastic cones from those endless forests, so deep, and dark, and solemn—so voiceless, and so still. Konrad's melancholy meditations were uninterrupted by a sound; no living thing seemed near, save a red-eyed hawk that sat on a fragment of rock.
He could hear his own heart beating.
Though his mind was a prey to bitterness the most intense, he watched the sunset, and the changing features of the landscape, with all the attention that trifles often receive, even in moments of the deepest anguish.
Gradually the shadows crept upward from the low places to the mountain tops. Each long promontory that jutted into the far perspective of the narrow fiord, was a steep mountain that towered from its glassy bosom in waveworn precipices; between these lay the smaller inlets, long and narrow valleys full of deep and dark blue water, that reflected the solemn pines by day, and the diamond stars by night. Some were dark and sunless, but others glittered still in purple, gold, and green, where the eider-duck floated in the last light of the west; and all was still as death along the margin of that beautiful bay, save the roar of a distant cataract, where a river poured over the chasmed rock, and sought the ocean in a column of foam.