Night drew on; the bleating of the home-driven kids, the flap of the owlet's wing, and faint howl of a wandering wolf, broke the stillness of the balmy northern eve; while the wiry foliage of the vast pine-forests, that flourished almost to the castle gates, vibrated in the rising wind, and seemed to fill the dewy air with the hum of a thousand fairy harps.
Konrad, who, with his face buried in his hands, had long reclined against the rampart of the terrace, was startled to find close beside him a tall dark man, whose proportions, when looming in the twilight, seemed almost herculean, intently examining the great wood-cock, in the bosom of which a cross-bow bolt was firmly barbed.
Filled with that inborn superstition which is still common to all Scandinavia, his first thought was of the terrible Wood Demon, in whose venerated oak he had so heedlessly and daringly shot the bird. Animated by terror, such as he had never known before, a prickly sensation spread over his whole frame, and even Anna was partially forgotten in the sudden horror that thrilled through him, as, with an invocation to God, he sprang upon the battlement of the terrace.
The dark stranger uttered a shout, and sprang forward. Konrad's terror was completed.
He toppled over, made one palsied and fruitless effort to clutch the grass that grew in the clefts of the ancient wall, and failing, launched out into the air; down, down, he went, disappearing headlong into that dark abyss, at the bottom of which rolled the ocean.
"Cock and pie!" muttered Black Hob, with astonishment; (for it was no other than he,) as he peered over the rampart, "was it a madman or a bogle that vanished over the wall like the blink of a sunbeam?"
He stretched over, cast down one hasty glance, and instinctively drew back; for far down at the base of the beetling crags, he saw the ocean boiling, white and frothy, through the obscurity below.
A wild and unearthly cry ascended to his ear.
"By the blessed mass, a water-kelpie!" muttered Ormiston, as he hurried away in great disorder.
Konrad escaped a death on the rocks, but, falling into the ocean, arose to the surface at some distance from the shore. Breathless and faint by his descent from such a height, he could scarcely (though an excellent swimmer) make one stroke to save his life. A strong current running seaward round the promontory, drove a piece of drift-wood—a pine log—past him. He clutched it with all the despair of the drowning, and, twining himself among its branches, was thus swiftly, by the currents of the fiord, borne out into the wide waste of the Skager Rack.