Ten years!
And in all that long and weary time he had been a fettered felon within the iron walls of Malmö. Pining hopelessly in a captivity the most crushing to a heart so fierce and proud—to a soul so high-spirited and restless, with one thought ever before him—liberty and home; and though forgotten by Mary, or remembered only with a shudder, his old love for her had never died; and many a futile effort he made, by piteous letters and petitions, to Frederick II. of Demark—petitions so humble, that his once proud nature would have shrunk from their tenor—to interest himself, "pour la deliverance de la Royne sa Princesse Marie."[*]
[*] See Les Affaires de le Cante du Boduel.
But neither her deliverance or his own were ever achieved; for, were such a thing possible, even God seemed to have abandoned them to a fate that was alike inexorable and irresistible.
Year after year wore away, and the seasons succeeded each other in dreary and monotonous succession. This monotony was most intolerable in winter—the long and desolate winter of the north; when the descending avalanche roared between the frozen peaks—when the ice cracked and burst in the narrow fiords, where the seals and walrusses slept in the rays of the moon—and when the northern lights, as they flashed behind the summits of the distant hills, filled the midnight sky with figures that were equally beautiful and terrible.
Ever and anon, in one of those dreary winters, when (as in A.D. 1333) all the harbours of the Sound were sheeted over with ice, and the shallow Baltic was frozen from Lubeck to the castle of Kiobenhafen, Bothwell sighed, as he thought of the great Yule-logs that blazed so merrily in many a Scottish hall, of the nut-brown ale and wine that flowed in many a quaigh and luggie; while the green holly branch and the mistletoe bough hung from the old roof-trees, and the mirth and joy of the season expanded every heart.
Then came the short spring, that lasted but a month, when the snow melted or lingered only on the distant peaks; when the streams burst their frosty barriers, and, with the roar of a thousand waterfalls, poured in silver currents over the rocks of the fiord, where the wild rasp, the dwarf birch, and the barberry, sprouted in the warmth of the coming sun.
And then, in the early mornings and the late nights of that northern region—nights when the sun sets at twelve P.M., he would gaze, dreamily, from his prison window on the waters of the Sound, until, to his fancy, they became like those of the Clyde, that swept round Bothwell bank, amid its dark green woods and sylvan solitude.
The summer passed, and winter would come again to spread snow and desolation over the face of the land; and so the time wore on, until its very monotony turned his impetuous brain, and he became a raving maniac!
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