"He hated Darnley," says Robertson; "and was no less hated by him. In order to be revenged, he entered into a sudden friendship with Bothwell, his ancient and mortal enemy. He encouraged him to crime, by giving him hopes of marrying the queen. All this was done with a design to throw upon the queen herself the imputation of being accessory to the murder (of Darnley), and under that pretext to destroy Bothwell next—to depose and imprison her, and to retain the sceptre which he had wrested out of her hands."
The "godly" Earl saw all this in the distance; and the mistaken Bothwell, whose daring hopes and unruly ambition he fostered and cajoled, now sought his society as sedulously as before he had shunned it. He had long been rid of Anna, who had been conveyed to her native Norway, in charge of Christian Alborg, in the Biornen; and as for his Countess, who resided in her father's solitary castle of Strathbolgie, among the woods and wilds of the Garioch, he never bestowed a thought on her. While her own brother, borne away by the tide of politics, and infected by the spirit of ambition and intrigue that pervaded all, had resolved to sacrifice even her to the giant projects formed by Bothwell and the nobles of his faction.
Mary had resided alternately in Holyrood, and at her summer castle of Craigmillar; but since the scene by the garden-dial, had never again given the Earl an opportunity of addressing her alone; and, even in the presence of her courtiers, she curbed her natural vivacity and gaiety of manner, and addressed him with marked reserve.
In the old tower of Holyrood, enclosed by strong grilles and vigilant archers of the guard, Konrad passed three months in hopeless and tedious monotony—hopeless, because he knew not what might be his fate; and tedious, because unmarked by any change, save the day-dawn and the sunset, the morning visit of the archer who brought his breakfast, and the nightly one of the warder, who secured all gates and doors when St. Giles' bell struck ten.
So passed the time.
Winter came, and the bleak summit of the Calton was covered with snow; the trees around the palace, and the old orchards that crowned the Abbeyhill, were leafless and bare; and drearily looked the chapel-royal and ancient cloisters, with snow mantling their carved battlements and time-worn knosps and pinnacles.
Then the poor prisoner sighed for his native hills, and night, after night his dreams brought them before him in all their wild sublimity and picturesque desolation. Again he was among them in all the happiness of boyhood, with Anna by his side, as she had beea in the days when first he learned to love her—when they had sought the wild daisy and the mountain bee by the green base of the lofty Dovrefeldt, whose summit was glistening with impending glaciers, and crowned by eternal snows; whose old primeval forests were the abode of the bear and eagle, and its unfathomed caverns, of Druid ghosts, of demon dwarfs, and one-eyed gnomes; whose sides were terrible with chasms split by the hammer of Thor, and overshadowed by the petrified giants whom, in the days of other years, his breath had turned into stone. In his dreams, too, he heard the dash of the free and boundless ocean that rolled on his native shore; and he saw the vast Moskenstrom, that dark and fearful abyss, around which for ever boil the eternal waves; in whose deep whirl the largest wrecks are sucked like reeds down—down—to be carried through the bowels of the inner earth, and vomited on the desolate shores of the Bothnian Gulf; and from these stirring dreams of his distant home, and the love and freedom of his boyhood, poor Konrad awoke, in agony to find himself a captive and a slave, a prisoner without a crime; in a foreign land, unpitied and uncared for, and without, a hope of reprieve, save death. Often he exclaimed aloud, as he clasped his lettered hands; for loneliness had taught him to commune with himself—
"How many a giant project have I formed in secresy and solitude, when inspired alike by the ardour of youth and love, and here they end! Oh, Anna! dearly hath thy perfidy cost the heart that loved thee well."
He was often visited by Hepburn of Bolton, who, by Bothwell's directions, had him under his immediate guardianship; and, being a blunt and soldierly young man, whose heart had been as yet unseared by jealousy or disappointment, and then felt happy in the ideal love of his Mariette, to console the prisoner, brought now and then a staup of Rochelle under his mantle; and was wont to converse with him so winningly and frankly, that he learned the particulars of his story, and the errand which made him seek the Scottish shore.
"St. Bothan! but thou art a rare fellow, Master Konrad," said Bolton. "Loving this damsel, and yet labouring to restore her to the arms of a rival. Rare platonism—by the mass!"