He kneel'd in prayer in a lonely room,
Raised hand and streaming eye,
With a swimming brain, and a burning heart,
And a wild and bitter cry;
And a light came down on his stormy fears,
For a time; but the light grew dim:
And now, through the gloom of the pitiless years,
What hope, what hope for him?
Lyrics of Life.
The sun had set—the evening was grey and cloudy—when consciousness slowly returned to Florence. A swimming of the sight, a throbbing in the head, with an intense cold over all his limbs, were his first sensations on awakening from the long trance into which the potent drug given him by his mother had cast him two hours before.
"My appointment—the meeting—Madeline!" were his first thoughts; and he staggered up but to sink again upon his hands, with drooping head and bewildered brain; for the garden with its walks, trees, terraces, and shrubbery—the castle, with its grated windows and round tourelles (of which the corbelling now alone remains), and its large square chimneys—seemed to be all in pursuit of each other, as when he saw them last; and, in short, some minutes elapsed before he became fully conscious of existence, or able to stand erect and think with coherence, if not with calmness.
"Madeline's ring?" It was gone.
A sudden light seemed to break upon him. He recalled his mother's hatred and denunciations against her, and upon their love; her sudden change to assumed placidity; her remarks upon the ring; and then the cup of cordial—her own "medicated cordial"—given after a sudden whisper to Maud, who for years had been in all her secrets, the partner of her loves and hates, her sorrows and her joys. He saw it all; he had been duped—most foully duped—and his ring abstracted. He rushed into the castle and sprang up-stairs in search of Lady Alison; her bower chamber was vacant; she was not in the hall; spindle, spinning-wheel, and distaff stood unused in the embayed window; and he was informed by Maud that she and Roger of Westmains, with three other armed men, had set out on horseback two hours ago.
"Strange and unusual this!" said he; "for, save to mass, my mother never leaves her own gate. Where has she gone?"
Maud replied, with eyes averted, she did not know.
"You do know!" exclaimed Florence impetuously,—"speak!"
The old woman fumbled with the lappets of her curchie, and endeavoured to withdraw.
"Speak!" continued Florence, confronting her. "I am the victim of some vile plot. Ye have half-poisoned me, beldame, by some damnable philter; for at this moment there is a bitter sickness in my heart and in my soul! Speak, old nursie, speak, or, though your foster-son, by Him who hears us on high, I will hang you over the tower wall as I would a hag of Egypt!"
"Weel," replied the woman, trembling, "she gaed by the loan end to the kirk."
"Hah—to Tranant! I see it all. Fool! fool!—dupe that I have been, not to read the cruelty that glittered in her eye, while her lips seemed to smile! My horse—quick—my horse!" he exclaimed; but, without waiting for the groom, he rushed bareheaded to the stable-yard, saddled the first nag that stood at hand, leaped on its back, and galloped madly over hedge and ditch, through field and meadow, straight for the kirk-town of Tranant.
The whole affair seemed to unravel itself now. Aware of the appointment in the gloaming, his mother had gone in his place to meet Madeline; and his heart trembled at the prospect of the terror, the insult, if not the actual danger, to which the young countess might be subjected by Lady Alison; his swollen heart beat painfully, and wildly he rode, spurring his panting horse, and pricking it with his poniard as it lingered at every desperate leap.
Much of the fine old wood which once covered the district has now been cut down, rendering the landscape somewhat dreary and bare; but though flat and (for Scottish scenery) unpicturesque, it was then, and is still, fertile and well cultivated.
On this evening it seemed particularly gloomy. The sun, long before he set beyond the dark hills of Dunblane, had been thickly enveloped in masses of dun and grey cloud, thus imparting a sombre aspect to the waves that tumbled in the estuary of the Forth, and flecked its breast with foam, while the breakers that roared and hissed upon the rugged shore were spotless as winter snow. The white sea-birds were skimming over the harvest-fields, betokening a storm at hand; and the red glare of the salt-pans, which belonged to the monks of St. Mary, and were perched upon the bleak and rifted reefs of freestone that jutted into the dashing sea, streaked the dull-grey background with sudden gleams of vertical fire, imparting a weird aspect to the scenery.
The gloom of the evening and the sombre aspect of nature inspired Florence with vague alarm, and with a strange foreboding that amounted to an emotion of horror, as he rode heedlessly and headlong towards the old church of the vicarage.
It stands upon the southern verge or slope of a long narrow vale, which was then covered by giant whins and wild gorse, and at the bottom of which a brawling brook forced its way past all obstruction to the sea. Of old it was named Travernent, which, say some, meant the hamlet in the valley; but, according to the writings of Father John, was the battle-shout of certain stout Scots who routed a party of Danish invaders and drove them into the sea. The church, a plain edifice of gloomy and forbidding aspect, built no one knows when or by whom, has a square tower and vaulted roof, and belonged of old to the monks of Holyrood. Its windows were few, and, by the immense number of dead interred for ages within and without its massive walls, this sombre temple seemed to have sunk far below the original level of the ground. On the steeple was a weather-cock, which, as the Hamiltons of Preston were wont to aver, tauntingly flapped its wings whenever a Fawside died.
The door, as in the churches of all Catholic countries, stood open, and when Florence dismounted and entered, the interior was so dark, that the only light came from the little tapers that twinkled before the altar which stood under the cross-arches of the rood-tower, and from the altar-tomb of Thorwald Lord of Travernent, whose effigy, cross-legged, for he had been a crusader, lay in the chancel, while on the wall near it there hung his rusty sword and mouldering hood of mail.
Florence passed the tombs of his father and brother with a hasty glance and with a shudder; for the memory of their faces, their fate, and the heritage of hatred they had bequeathed, came too vividly before him—too vividly at this terrible hour.
"Madeline!" he exclaimed; but there was no reply. The gloomy church was open, vacant, bare, and silent, and its solemn aspect was oppressive to his mind.
"Madeline!" he repeated, in a louder tone.
He was turning away to pursue his inquiries elsewhere. when he perceived, immediately under a monument on the wall, which still bears the shield and name of his father,
LORD Fawside of that Ilk.
and within the shadow caused by the tomb, on which his armed effigy lay, the figure of a woman stretched without motion on the floor, over which a dark stream of blood was flowing even to his feet; and with a moan of agony, rather than a cry of alarm, he sprang towards her.