"Farewell to your grace!" replied the Earl, as he kissed her hand with tenderness. "Adieu, Mary! thou who hast been the light, the hope, the pole-star of my life, and whom, more than that life, I have held dear. A long good-night to thee, and all the visions my ambition so vainly pictured, and so ruthlessly attempted to grasp. I go; but, while life remains, I will bear in sad remembrance thy goodness, thy beauty, and thy wrongs. I go—to exile and despair!"
And turning his horse's head, attended only by Ormiston and Bolton, he galloped down the hill to his castle of Dunbar, never once daring to look back towards that fair being whom a reverse of fortune had delivered to his enemies; and, save a message she sent to Denmark on her escape from Lochleven, never once from that hour did the name of Bothwell sully the lips of Mary. In one week from that day he was a pirate among the Isles of Orkney, while Mary was a captive in the hands of the confederates, and led through the streets of her own capital, where—
"Around her numberless the rabble flow'd,
Shouldering each other, crowding for view,
Gaping and gazing, taunting and reviling;
Some pitying; but those, alas! how few.
The most, such iron hearts we are, and such
The base barbarity of human kind,
With insolence and loud reproach pursued her,
Hooting and railing, and with villanous hands
Gathering the filth from out the common ways
To hurl it on her head."
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE WHIRLPOOL.
On Norway's shore the widowit dame
May wash the rocks with tears;
May long, long look o'er the shipless seas
Before her mate appears.
Tossed by adverse winds in the German sea, the labouring crayer of Hans Knuber, after several weeks (during which he became more and more convinced that Nippen, the spirit of evil, and the demons of the waves and wind, were in league against him), made a haven in the bleak isles of Shetland, where they found those uddallers, who inhabited the rude round towers and strong houses on the bluffs and promontories that overhung the ocean, all on the alert; for tidings were abroad that the great Earl of Bothwell, now a fugitive and a wanderer upon the face of the deep, in the madness and impotence of his wrath against his enemies, was spreading devastation and dismay among the northern isles.
After suffering a severe repulse at the Orcadian capital from the cannon of his old ally, Sir Gilbert Balfour of Noltland, he poured his fury upon the stray vessels he met in firth and bay, giving the poor hamlets of these half-desolate coasts to the flames, storming the fortlets of their lords, and, like a wild vikingr of old, spreading terror wherever his banner was unfurled.
Hans Knuber trembled again for his cargo of malt and beer when he heard of these terrible doings, and without other delay than that caused by procuring fresh water from a certain gifted well among those dreary hills that overlooked the sound of Balta, he bore away for the Skager Rack; but, notwithstanding every exertion of seamanship, whistling most perseveringly for fair winds, and sprinkling salt on the sea to lay the foul, the middle of June arrived before he prepared to enter the fiord of Christiana, and ere Konrad saw the shore of his native province rising from the dark blue water, and hailed those peaks, known as the hills of Paradise, that encircle the sea, arise before him with all their echoing woods and snow-white cataracts.
But there even, in their native seas, the fame and terror of the outlawed Earl had gone before them; and many a dismasted and many a shattered hull, with bloodstained decks and broken hatches, rolling on the Skager Back or stranded on the rocks of the fiord, attested the recklessness of that desperate noble and his followers, who were now at war with all mankind.