"Oh, Sir Erick--Sir Erick--what think you? last night Konrad of Saltzburg shot this cock in the Wood Demon's oak!"
"Now, heaven forefend!" exclaimed the Castellan, sinking back in grief and alarm. "Then, Sueno, thou needst search no more. God save thee, poor Konrad!"
"How--how, wherefore?" asked Bothwell; "what has happened?"
"We shall never behold him more. He hath assuredly been spirited away," replied Rosenkrantz in great tribulation; for in the existence of all those elementary beings incident to Norse superstition, he believed devoutly as in the gospel; "he hath been spirited away, and enclosed Heaven alone knoweth where--perhaps in a rock or tree close beside us here--perhaps in an iceberg at the pole"----
"Amen!" thought Bothwell, who would have laughed had he dared; "I would that the Captain of Bergen were keeping him company!"
"O Sueno! thou rememberest how it fared with thy brother Rolf, when he stole acorns from that very tree?"
"Yes--yes--as he crossed the Fiord in the moonlight, a great hand arose from the water, and drew down his boat to the bottom--and so he perished. Poor Rolf!"
"And with the father of Hans Knuber, who left his axe resting against it one evening, in the summer of 1540?"
"An invisible hand hurled it after him, and broke both his legs."
"And Gustaf Slingbunder, who pursued a fox into its branches, was bewitched by the demon in such wise, that he ran in a circle round the tree for six days and nights, till his bones dropped asunder."
Erick Rosenkrantz and Sueno continued to gaze at each other in great consternation, while Bothwell looked at them alternately with astonishment, till the blast of a horn at the gate arrested their attention, and a Danish archer approached, to inform his excellency the Governor of Aggerhuis, that a royal messenger from Copenhagen required an audience.
"So this unmannerly boor hath rejected my suit!" muttered the haughty Earl, as he turned away; "mine--by St. Paul! I can scarcely believe my senses. If my _roué_ friends d'Elboeuff or Coldinghame heard of it, they would cast a die to decide which was the greater fool--Bothwell or Rosenkrantz. Rejected! Be it so; but to have this damsel on my own terms shall now be my future care."