I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall—I will do such things,—
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep;
No, I'll not weep.
King Lear.
Next day Lady Alison was moody, reserved, and sullen; she spoke little, or muttered as she sat in the bay of the hall window whirling her spindle, or secluded herself in her bower-chamber. Maud, the old nurse, who had lost a husband and two brothers in the feud with the Hamiltons, alone shared her angry communings; and even Roger, the bailie, who deemed himself one of the dame's chief counsellors and prime minister, on this day found her morose and unapproachable. Florence dreaded a renewal of the conversation of yesterday; thus, avoiding the presence of his mother, he busied himself among the horses of his retainers, seeing that all were carefully shod and proved to be sound in wind and limb, while an armourer from Edinburgh was at work on the iron trappings of steed and man. The grindstone was whirling in the court-yard; and songs were sung and tales told of the wars of James IV; while blades were burnished and pike-heads pointed and tempered anew: for now, like a thousand other castles in Scotland, the little fortalice of Fawside resounded with the bustle of military preparation.
So passed the noon of day. Florence watched the western verging of the sun as evening drew near, and the rays revolved round the dial. Then his heart beat quicker with anticipated happiness; for the hour of his meeting with Madeline drew nearer and more near. Yet time never seemed to pass so slowly.
As the hours of this long day succeeded each other, Lady Alison strove to smother the angry scorn her son's too peaceful spirit roused within her; but being loath to nurse this growing bitterness against him, she sought him in the garden, which then lay on the sloping bank to the southward of the tower wall.
On the face of a grassy terrace Florence reclined, with his head supported on his elbow, and so lost in thought that he did not hear her approach. In the hollow of his left hand lay the opal ring of Madeline; and it caught the keen eye of Lady Alison as she propped herself on her long cane and stooped over him. Startled by finding his deep and fond reverie so suddenly interrupted, Florence hastily placed the ring on one of his fingers, and resuming his volume of "Gologras and Gawaine," which lay near, arose with a flush of annoyance on his cheek. Rapid though the action, it was not done quickly enough to escape the keen eye of Dame Alison, and her sharp, angry, and anxious glance was at once riveted on the trinket. She saw that it was an opal; and the mysterious and malignant power which that stone was believed to possess and to exert over mortals at once occurred to her, and gave her maternal heart a twinge of alarm.
"Here is some new and fatal mystery!" she muttered; "dool and plague be on the hour I sent my only son to France! What bauble is this, Florence, that finds such favour in your sight?" she asked. And, as he expected the question, he replied calmly,—
"A trinket—only a trinket, mother; few gentlemen about the court are without such."
"My bairn," said she, seating herself by his side on the grassy slope of the terrace, and taking his hand in hers, while a fond smile spread over her face to conceal the anxious and searching glance of her grave grey eyes, "there was a time when a good sheaf of feathered arrows, a gay baldrick with pasements of gold, a crossbow with a stock inlaid with mother-o'-pearl, or a sword with a handsome guard, were toys that pleased you better, but that was before——"
"What, mother?"
"Before ye went to France, and to that devilish place Vendome? Ye have been sairly changed, my bairn, sinsyne, nor like the name ye inherit!"
"Dear mother," said he, kissing her hand with that combination of gallantry and affection which went out with the age of periwigs, "may I hope that I find more favour in your eyes to-day?"
"Favour, my winsome bairn!" she reiterated, while playing with his curly locks and the tassels of his ruff, and smiling fondly in spite of herself.
"Or am I still a lurdane and a maudlin fool?"
The old woman's brow darkened with an expression of care and trouble.
"I never thought ye either, Florence; but why has the just and natural bitterness of your heart for him who slew the nearest and dearest of your kinsmen turned all to peace and sweetness? Was it for this I brought ye hame frae France?—woe worth the day I ever sent thee there! There is magic in it; I tell thee, Florence, 'tis sorcery, and thou art under spell!"
"Perchance I am, mother," said he sadly, but with a fond smile, for he thought of Madeline.
"Perchance ye are?" she reiterated scornfully. "Art puling again like a yammering bairn, instead of acting like a bearded man—like the son of that brave father whom Preston and his people foully murdered in his harness, under tryst."
"Are you come again to taunt and to torment me?" said Florence, attempting to rise; but she clutched his right hand with fiery energy.
"Sit ye there and listen!" she exclaimed. "Ye are foully bewitched—I know it. Whence got ye that devilish bauble whilk ye were worshipping even just now as if it were a saint's bone or the true cross? 'Tis an opal; and know ye not the opal is a stone from the pillars of hell, and ever worketh the destruction of the wearer? Speak, ye witless one—speak!" she continued, raising her voice, while her grey eyes flashed with fire, and her wrinkled hand struck her cane again and again into the earth. "Some cursed witch of France hath wrought this mischief, and stolen alike thy manhood and thy heart. Give it me, that I may place it in the flames from whence it came, and so destroy the spell by which Preston is spared and thou art befooled. The ring, Florence—the ring, I say!"
"Nay, mother; in this you must hold me excused. But believe me, on the honour of a gentleman, no woman or witch of France gave this trinket to me."
His mother drew back a pace, and surveyed him with a singular combination of expressions in her dark-grey eyes: maternal love, rage, pity, and shame were there displayed by turns in all their strength.
"In our house, degenerate boy, have been ten knights created, where you will never kneel, under the king's banner, when its staff was planted in a foughten field where dead men lay thick as harvest sheaves; and of these ten, every man fell in battle with his belt and spurs on; but I trow, my silken page, thou wilt die comfortably in bed and with a whole skin."
Poor Florence felt the scorn of his mother deeply, and his anger at her determined injustice now began to kindle.
"I am under no spell, mother," said he calmly; "but I love a lady who is second to none in Scotland, save the queen herself."
"Indeed!" replied his mother, a new anxiety animating her breast. "And who may this peerless one be who has captivated the timid and peaceful heart of my renegade son?"
"Still so unkind and scornful! Dearest mother——"
"Who is she?" she repeated angrily.
"One whom you have never seen, mother,"
"Her name!" she demanded imperiously.
Florence paused; to tell his mother all would be perhaps to kill her on the spot, or to draw her bitterest malediction on his head.
"Her name, I say!" she reiterated fiercely, while a flush came over her wrinkled face; "say no ignoble name to me, Florence; but remember, degenerate as ye are, that your blood is the reddest in Scotland. Still pausing—still quailing before me, eh! 'Tis a woman you are ashamed of, and as a proof thereof, you dare not utter her name to your own mother."
Florence felt that a crisis in his fate was coming fast; and that an end should be put to a conversation so unseemly, so bitter and humiliating; so he replied,—
"Her name is Madeline Home."
His mother glared at him with a startled expression, as if she deemed him an enemy.
"Did I hear you aright?" she gasped in a low voice, while trembling like an aspen bough; "what mean you?"
"Mean?" murmured Florence, dreading the effect of his communication.
"Yes," she replied, still surveying him as if she deemed him a lunatic about to become troublesome.
"Mother, to end all this, I love Madeline Home, the Countess of Yarrow."
"Love—love her?" she gasped, for she was too old and too excited to raise her voice when suffering under deep emotion; but snatching her bodkin from her busk, she would have stabbed him, had not the nurse, Maud, arrested her hand and clung in terror upon her arm. There was a long pause broken only by her sighs. Florence attempted to take her hand, but she fiercely thrust him aside; for had Claude Hamilton appeared and made her a proposal of marriage, her intense disgust, bewilderment, and rage, could not have been greater. "My husband is in his grave," she said in a low and moaning voice; "the sea of life ebbs and flows as it rolls round the place of his sleep; but he hears its billows no more. Blessed be Heaven that spared him what I now feel; BUT, if the dead know aught that passes upon earth, beware boy, lest his bones may clatter in their bloody shroud—for it was a bloody shroud in which I wound him,—and his soul, at the foot of the throne of Him who died on Calvary, may curse thee, Florence, curse thee for loving a daughter of the race of Preston!"
Her calmness was more oppressive to Florence than her usually impotent anger.
"To love her—oh, to love her!" she continued,—"a wretch whose father, Quentin Home of Yarrow, drew his sword by Preston's side, in mere wickedness against your father, and may for aught I know, be one of his slayers. Boy, on thy peril, in thy raving, forget not our righteous feud!"
"Unhappy feud; what good has it ever done us?"
"Who thinks of good, when speaking of an hereditary foe? Shame on me that I bore thee! Shame on thy father that he begot thee! for by the holy Lamp of Lothian—yea, by the cross of the true Church, thou art fitted for naught in this world but to snuff candles, swing a censer and mumble latin, like old Mass John of Tranent. Oh, ungrateful, undutiful, and false! If ever thou hast a child, may it sting thy heart to the quick, even as at this hour thou stingest me! Thy father is in his grave——"
"By its side, Claude Hamilton is ready to make every honourable and religious amend; as Christians let us forgive——"
"'Tis the cant of shorn monks,—but is it the creed of a Scottish gentleman? Give me thy sword, and take my spindle and distaff; for by the God who hears us, they will become thee better than any warlike weapon. Thanks be to Heaven that I am the mother of another son who is there; but while on earth he knew his duty to his race and name. Hear me,—hear me!" she continued deeply, and wildly grasping his right arm, as much to support her feeble form as to give energy to her words: "With this right hand on the pale corpse of my husband, and with the other raised to heaven, I swore to have a dreadful vengeance on the house of Preston! With the same hand on the corpse of my Willie—that comely corpse,—sore gashed by Preston's curtal axe, I swore again that deadly vow; by the tombs in which they moulder side by side—that brave old father and most faithful son,—and on bended knees, by God's holy altar, a thousand times have I registered the same terrible vow,—registered it in thy name, Florence! I am a weak, very weak, and sorrow-stricken old woman; my trust is in thee, Florence; and woe to thee, woe, if that trust be unworthily placed!"
Exhausted by her emotions and this outburst, she sank upon a stone bench that was near, her fingers convulsively clutching her long cane, her pale lips quivering, and her bright but hollow eyes rolling on vacancy. After another long and painful pause, she spoke again through her grinding teeth.
"She is said to be beautiful—this earl's daughter,—this border churl's brat?"
"So beautiful and so winning, mother, that you could not fail to love her——"
"What, I?"
"Yes; and so good and pious! Ask Father John if she ever misses a prayer, a mass, or other ordinance of the Church, and whether she is the mother of the poor whereever she goes."
"Marry come up!" exclaimed the fierce old dame, pressing her hands upon her throbbing heart; for this praise bestowed so ardently by her son upon one of that hated race stung her to the soul. "Oh that I had her in the vault of the tower," thought she, "or in yonder turret, or in my bower-chamber, gagged, and bound hand and foot! Verily, a hot iron would soon efface all trace of the fatal beauty by which this sorceress hath bewitched and spread a glamour ower thee!"
As this terrible idea occurred to her, she deemed it a wiser mode to dissemble with her son, than to quarrel with him, in attempting to exert an authority which at his years was absurd, and could not be enforced. So, with the cunning, rather than the wisdom of age, she gradually seemed to recover her composure; and for the purpose of luring information from her son, began to speak with pretended calmness, though her chest heaved with suppressed emotion, and when his face was averted, her eyes glared like those of a basilisk.
"These tidings of attachment are indeed something to startle and amaze," said she through her clenched teeth.
"Nothing is new under heaven, mother," said Florence, with a sigh; "the years and events that have passed are but the mirror of those to come."
"This love of thine, where hatred was wont to be, belies such musty morality. Love Madeline Home, indeed? It will be with the chance of having a score of rivals."
"Well," replied Florence smiling, "a score are better than one."
"One thou couldst kill."
"A score shall not kill me, at all events. And now, dear mother, if Madeline loves me, may not an earl's coronet, if one day blazoned in the old hall there, glint bravely in your old eyes?"
"The coronet of the Homes of Yarrow!" she said through her still grinding teeth; "and this earl's mother—who was she? An Achesson, of Gosford, or the Guseford, for they made their money in the days of the Regent Albany, by supplying the gluttons of Edinburgh with geese. Oho! of a verity, a brave alliance for one whose fathers have borne their crests on their helmets in battle five hundred years ago! But you see her frequently—this Countess of Yarrow?" she asked, on remembering her new tactics.
"Alas, no."
"Indeed! how cometh this about?" she asked, taking her son's hand in hers, with seeming fondness.
"Fate—yourself, mother, are alike adverse to us."
"When are ye to see her who hath so begowked thee—this bonnie bird, again?"
"Mother, you do not mean her evil?" asked Florence suddenly, for the expression of her eye bewildered him.
"Wherefore such a thought!" said she, as her withered cheek reddened; "but when do you meet?"
"To-night," said he, after some hesitation.
"So soon—hah! and where?"
"In the old porch of Tranent Church."
"Where they are lying—a fitting place for such a tryst!" she thought. "At what time?" she asked in a husky voice and while lowering her now stealthy eyes on the grass.
"The gloaming."
"'Tis two hours hence, by the dial. We may sit and converse yet awhile; but you look pale and weary, my bairn, and must take a cup of my medicated cordial."
"I thank you, dear lady and mother," said the unsuspecting youth, happy to perceive a change in the manner of the old lady, who summoned the nurse Maud, and, while giving her a key, whispered in her ear certain directions. In a minute after the old woman came out of the tower with a silver cup in her hand.
"Drink, my bairn—drink," said the nurse, patting the cheek of Florence; and he, heedless of what the contents might be if he pleased Lady Alison, drank them to the dregs, and turned with a smile to resume the conversation on the subject that was nearest his heart. He began to talk; but he knew not what, for his tongue seemed to speak without his control; and within five minutes his utterance became heavy and inarticulate; he made a strong effort to recover himself, but his voice was gone; his eyes wandered—the tower, the garden, the terraces, and trees, seemed to be multiplied by a hundredfold, and to be chasing each other in a circle; then a deep drowsiness, against which he strove in vain to contend, fell upon him, and he lay motionless and still, but breathing heavily.
These two stern old women—the lady and the nurse—exchanged a glance of triumph and satisfaction; but the latter kindly covered him up with a mantle, and kissed his brow; while the former, in her fiery energy, almost tore the opal ring from his finger, and in doing so pressed the spring of the secret inclosure, which Madeline had referred to, when she first gave it to Florence. The stone arose, and under it was a little coil of hair, with the ominous words—
"What ye resolve
Death shall dissolve."
"So may it fare with the resolve of the donor!" said Lady Alison. "Maud, look ye to this moonstruck fool while I look to the false witch who hath begowked him. Now, ho! to keep this gay love-tryst at the kirk of Tranent!"
In ten minutes after this, accompanied by Roger of Westmains and three other armed men, who knew no will but hers, and had no scruple in obeying it; for they regarded her with as much veneration and fear as the dingy Hindoo does Brahma, or the miserable Persian does the bearded shah, she had left the tower of Fawside, and taken the eastern path direct to the church of the vicarage.