His conscience and his interest led him to remember, that adherence to those vows so solemnly exchanged with Lady Jane Gordon, was the most honourable and prudent course; but this sudden passion, conceived by him for Anna Rosenkrantz at the Court of Copenhagen, and pursued in that rash and obstinate spirit with which he plunged into every new amour and vagary, soon made him commit to oblivion those vows which one yet fondly and sadly brooded over. A temporary separation, an unexpected meeting, as shown in the beginning of our story, had fully developed his sentiments for Anna, and in this mock marriage brought them to a crisis.
Having been frequently abroad, under every variety of fortune—at one time commanding a French army during a desperate civil war; at another, charged with an important embassy; and often an exile desperate in circumstances—in the wandering life he had led for many a year, his career had been one of such wild adventure and danger, that his code of morality fitted him loosely as his gauntlet; thus, with all the love he bore Anna, though as yet he shrank from wedding her before the altar of that church where he had knelt in childhood, this espousal of her, before a half-witted Norwegian hermit, exactly suited the wildness of his fancy and the romance of his temperament.
His trusty friend and libertine follower, Hob of Ormiston, whose fate and fortune were so completely identified with his own, knew, from old experience, that the flame of his lord had expanded too suddenly to burn long; and as the love fit and the voyage would in all probability end together, he would not have objected to wedding Christina Slingbunder in the same easy and fantastic fashion, although he was already handfasted, as the phrase was, to a lady of gentle blood at home.
Though she saw not the clouds that overhung her future career, Anna was very much dejected, when next morning she lay with her head reclining on the shoulder of that lover to whom she had sacrificed herself, and the love of Konrad; and into whose hands she had committed the honour of her family and her future fate.
Bright rose the sun from the waters of the Skager Rack; the hills of Denmark were on their lee, and those of Norway, with all their pouring waterfalls and echoing woods, were lessening far astern. A gentle breeze was blowing from the westward; and as the heavily-pooped ship careened over, her great white lateen sails bellied before it, and the bright green water flashed from her sharp prows to bubble in snowy showers under the head of the white steed that, with blood-red nostrils and arching neck, reared beneath the gallant bowsprit.
The sailors, with Nicholas Hubert and the Earl's other pages and servants, were grouped in the forecastle and in the deep waist, over which peered the brass arquebuses of the poop. The skipper, Master David Wood of Bonyngtoun, in Angus, with a great gaudy chart (such as was then prepared in the Hanseatic towns for the use of mariners) spread on the capstan, was intently measuring the distance from the Naze of Norway to the Oysterhead of Denmark; from thence to Thorsmynde, and so on.
He was a short, squat man, with a thick scrubby beard and heavy eyebrows; he wore his blue bonnet drawn well over his forehead, to keep the sun from his eyes, and had a gaberdine of blue broadcloth, with immense pockets at the sides, red trunk breeches, which met a pair of black funnel boots about three inches below the knee. He carried a pocket-dial and a long dagger at his girdle.
Hob of Ormiston, minus weapons and armour, without which he was never seen on shore, was yawning with ennui, wishing, as he often said, "sea-voyaging at the devil," and (in absence of Christina, who was very sick a-bed) endeavouring to wile away the time by watching for an occasional shot at the passing birds with his wheel-lock caliver, and whistling the old air then so much in vogue—
"The Frog cam to the Myll doore."
Anna and the Earl were seated under a small tapestry awning, which screened them from the view of the groups in the waist on one hand, and from the watch and timoneer on the other. Her eyes were full of tears.