But he thought of Anna only with anger, for no human heart could ever contain two loves. Jane Gordon he remembered with feelings of compunction, when he mused on her unrepining gentleness and devoted love; but he thought most of Mary, and, forgetting that he was himself a captive, laid many a wild and futile scheme to free and to avenge her.
He could not flee from his own thoughts. They would come again and again, weighing like an incubus upon his mind, alike in the bright sunshine of noon and the solemn silence of night; amid the heedless revelry of the Norwegian officers he longed for solitude, and in solitude the stings of conscience drove him back to revelry and wine; and thus the deep and morbid horror that hour by hour, and day by day, had every where pursued him, settled down like a cloud of darkness on his soul.
Long since satiated with pleasure, sick of ambition, and wearied of the world, he now found how deep were the stings of unavailing regret.
The day, we have said, went down, and night spread her spangled mantle on the darkened water and the moonlit sea.
Brightly in its calm beauty the evening star arose from the dark-heaving line of the northern ocean, and Bothwell thought of the time when he had last watched that orb expanding on the night, as it rose above the ruined spire of St. Mary-in-the-Field.
At that moment, a cry—that seemed to be wafted over the surface of the water—made his ears and heart tingle, as it passed away on the skirt of the hollow wind.
Bothwell grew ghastly pale, he covered his ears with his hands, and rushed away to his cabin in despair.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE VAIN RESOLUTION.
She told me all,
And as she spoke her eyes led captive mine—
Her voice was low, and thrill'd me to the bone;
She ceased and all was silence, whilst I sat
Like one who, long entranced by melody,
Feels still the music in the soul
Though sound has died away.
Sir C. Lindesay's Alfred.