"By St. Christopher the giant, thou art mad!" said Ormiston, with a gravity that shewed the assertion had sobered him; "be wary, be prudent. Should the Lord Huntly"——
"My malediction on Huntly! He shall never see my face again; so it matters not. He may bestow his pale sister, the Lady Jane, on some ruffling minion of the bastard Moray, the crafty Morton, the craftier Maitland, or of the thundering Knox, who now have all the sway in that court, where the outlawed Bothwell shall never more be seen." And with one hand twisting his mustaches, and the other playing with the pommel of his dagger, the Earl strode away, and left his friend and vassal to his own confused reflections.
Bothwell, who had ever been the creature of impulse, without delay sought old Sir Erick of Welsöö, whom he found seated in a nook of the ramparts, basking in the long lingering sunshine, and sheltered from the evening wind by the angle of the turret. His long sword rested against one arm of his chair, a pewter mug of dricka was placed on the other, and before him stood Sueno, cap in hand, receiving certain orders with all due reverence.
"What the devil is this Van Dribbel tells me?" he was saying as Bothwell approached. "All the beer soured by the thunder-storm! I marvel that it hath not soured my temper too, for there never was a man so crossed, I tell thee, Sueno. It was my wish that Konrad should have undertaken the capture of this necromancer, and seen him hanged in one of his own devilish cords; and now Konrad is nowhere to be found. How dares he leave the precincts of Bergen without my permission?"
"His Danish archers have searched every where," said Sueno, "even to the base of the Silverbergen, sounding their horns through the forest, along the shores of the fiord, and the margin of the bay; and I would venture my better hand to a boar's claw, that the Captain Konrad is not within the province of Aggerhuis."
"Sayest thou so!" exclaimed the Knight Rosenkrantz, who, between the attention required by his offices of castellan and governor,—the machinations of a water-sprite who dwelt in the harbour of Bergen, where he daily wrought all manner of evil to the fishermen,—Nippen, who made himself so busy in the affairs of all honest people on the land,—the gnomes of the Silverbergen, who stole his poultry,—and the cantrips of a certain mischievous demon inhabiting the adjacent wood, and had thrice turned three fair flocks of Sir Erick's sheep into field mice, in which shape he had seen them vanishing into mole-tracks in the turf, where a moment before they had been browsing,—the old governor, we say, who, with all these things to divert his attention, never found time hang heavy on his hands, made a gesture of anger and impatience, and he swore a Norse oath, which the Magister Absalom Beyer has written so hurriedly that our powers of translation fail us; but he added—
"My mind misgiveth me that something is wrong. Away, Sueno, take a band of archers, and once more beat the woods with shout and bugle, and if Konrad appears not by sunrise to-morrow, by the holy Hansdag I will—not know what to think."
The threat evaporated; for honest Rosenkrantz loved the youth as if he had been his own son.
Though Bothwell had a grace, effrontery, or assurance (which you will) that usually carried him well through almost every thing he undertook, and which won every one to his purpose, he could not have chosen a more unfortunate crisis for the startling proposal, which he made with admirable deliberation and nonchalance to the portly Rosenkrantz; who no sooner heard the conclusion, than he said with a hauteur, to which Bothwell, at all times proud and fiery, was totally unaccustomed, and which he did not think this plain unvarnished Nordlander could assume—
"Excuse me, I pray thee, my Lord Earl of Bothwell. Though I venerate your rank and mission, as ambassador from the Queen of the Scots (here the Earl's cheek glowed crimson), I cannot give my niece to you, even were I willing to bestow her. She is the first and only love of my young friend, Konrad of Saltzberg, as gallant a heart as Norway owns; he to whose daring you and your friends owed preservation on the night of the storm. From childhood they have known and loved each other, yea, since they were no higher than that," holding his hand about six inches from the ground; "growing up, as it were, like two little birds in the same nest, twining into each other like two tendrils from the same tree; and a foul stain it would be on me to part them now, even though King Frederick came in person to sue for the hand of Anna."