The deep, dark consciousness of desolation that had been settling over him, might have become in time a more subdued and morbid feeling of regret; but now this sudden meeting brought back all his first hopes and emotions to their starting-place, and renewed in poignancy all the agony of that hour, in which he learned that he had lost her for ever.
CHAPTER XIII.
NOLTLAND.
The nicht followis, and every weary wicht
Throwout the Erde has caucht anone richt,
The sound pesund slepe them liket beat
Woddis and rayeand sels war at rest.
And the Sterne, thair myd coursis rollis doun,
All the fieldis still othir, but noyis or soun.
The Æneid of Douglas, 1518.
The long twilight of the northern eve had passed away, and the darkness of an October night had closed over Westeray.
Tall and grim and dark, save where lit by an occasional ray from a window, the Keep of Noltland towered in massive outline above the rocky isle.
This magnificent castle was built by Thomas de Tulloch, bishop and governor of Orkney under Erick king of Denmark, about 1422. It was surrounded by massive walls and outworks; the sides of the great keep were perforated by a series of loopholes for quarrelles or cannon, rising tier above tier like the gun-ports of a line-of-battle ship. Many parts of this vast baronial hold are richly decorated by the skill and fancy of the architect, whom tradition avers to have found his grave within its walls, and a large stone, shaped like a coffin, is still pointed out at the foot of the great staircase, as covering the place of his last repose.
The stately hall of the Bishop's castle glowed cheerfully in the blaze of the fire that crackled in the arched fireplace, where a pile of driftwood blazed, the fragments of old wrecks that, could they have spoken, might have told many a tale of suffering and of war, with logs of resinous pine brought from Norway, or washed on the beach from the savage and then unknown coasts of the Labrador.
From the roof hung a large brazen chandelier, in which the flames of twelve tall candles were streaming in the currents of air that swept through the vast apartment. The floor was paved with stone, which, though originally of red rock like the walls, was carefully whitened and sanded. The great oak girnels and cabinets, the tables and chairs, were all of the fashion of James III.; and behind them, on rusty tenterhooks, hung long pieces of rude and carpet-like tapestry, representing, in dark and gigantic figures, the voyage of Æneas, and other passages from Virgil. As the wind moved the arras, the great mishapen figure of the pious Trojan, his long-haired Creusa and chubby Ascanius, seemed at times as if starting into life. At the lower end of the hall, and almost lost in the shadow of its vast vacuity, were several retainers of Westeray, clad in their mail shirts and brown kilts, lolling on hard wooden settles, conversing in guttural whispers, or sleeping under the side tables rolled up in their plaids, looking like bundles of tartan with a mop stick through them—the latter being represented by their shock heads of hair.
A trivet table, marked with a diagram for playing the old chivalric game of Troy, was placed near the fire, and thereon lay cards and dice, and a tall pewter tankard of malmsey wine, from which the silver-mounted horns were incessantly replenished by Bothwell, Ormiston, and the Knight of Noltland, who, with their doublets unbuttoned and their gorgets and swordbelts flung aside were lounging by the ruddy fire and conversing with animation, but marked by a gravity rather unusual for the two first-named personages.