Jane Seton; or, The King's Advocate: A Scottish Historical Romance
with a draught of your favourite beverage. But hark you, sir," said
Roland, unsheathing his formidable sword; "thou seest this
blade?--well, if thou dost not drain this cup of wine to the bottom,
I will pass this weapon to the hilt--yea, sirrah, to the very hilt,
through thy body!"
"Of all the sights of horror and disgust," says a popular writer,
"villany transformed at the death-hour into its natural character and
original of cowardice, is among the most appalling." The
witch-finder trembled in every limb, and seemed frozen to stone by
this command.
"Ha! thou unfanged reptile, so we have thee by the throat?" cried
Roland, withdrawing his keen, sharp weapon for the death-thrust; "off
with it, to the dregs--yea, to the very dregs?"
The tongue of Birrel clove to his palate, for the fear of death and
love of life were strong in his breast; he had dropped ten grains
into the goblet--and he remembered the words of his master, that
_each grain_ was the life of a man. He gasped for breath, but could
only utter inarticulate murmurs. He turned towards the doorway, and
there stood Lintstock with his eye full of ferocity and his axe
uplifted.
"Harkee, hound! dost thou hear me?" said Vipont, spurning him with
his foot.
"Oh, Sir Roland, have mercy, have mercy! The servant is not
responsible for what he does by the orders of his master?"
"A pleasant rascal this!" said Leslie. "So thou hast a master, eh?"
Birrel stammered, and paused; for, villain as he was, he meant not to
betray Redhall.
"Think not that, by divulging his name, thou wilt save thy hang-dog
life!" said Roland--who mistook his delay--"for I swear by the God
that is in heaven! if thou drainest not this draught to the very
bottom, I will run thee through the heart without more preamble. So
quick! quick! swallow, swallow! dost think we have time to trifle
about crushing a reptile so despicable as thee!"
The villain sank upon his knees, for they refused to sustain his
weight; fear froze the very pulses of his heart, and palsied his
tongue; his countenance became livid and clayey; his eyes sank, and
his lips became blue.
"How frightful this villain is!" said Leslie. "Did ever a brave man
look thus in the face of death?"
"Mercy, sirs! mercy! I will sin no more; I will be a gudeman and
true--I will tell ye all--my master's name--but mercy, sirs! mercy!"
"Thy master's name! we seek it not," said Roland, as he smote him on
the mouth with his gauntleted hand; "we seek it not; for then our
honour would compel us to slay him wherever we met him, by holm or
hillside, at kirk or in market; and I wish not to stain my father's
sword with the blood of villains."
"A priest! then let me have a priest! but five minutes wi' a priest!
for, oh, I have mickle to say, and muckle to repent o'!"
"Dog! thou art a Protestant, I believe, and requirest not a priest.
No, go down to thy grave with the curse of the God of the living and
the God of the dead on thy brow--that dogged front where the mark of
hell is written! Drink! drink! dost thou hear me, Cain?"
Roland held the dreadful cup before his eyes by one hand, while, with
the other, he gave him a violent prick in the breast with the point
of his sword.
Birrel uttered a shriek like a fiend; and, draining the cup to the
bottom, flung it full at the face of Roland, who stooped his head,
and the wooden vessel was dashed to a thousand shreds on the opposite
wall.
"Now I have but two hours to live!" he cried, with the voice of a
damned one; "two hours! two hours! two hours!" and, darting through
the doorway, he hurled Lintstock from his path as he would a child,
and, with one bound sprang down stairs into the courtyard, where he
passed through the startled soldiers like a whirlwind, with his
visage overspread by the blue pallor of death, his mouth covered with
foam, and his matted hair streaming in elf-locks behind him.
Snatching up a cord that lay in his path, he cleared the fosse with
one bound, like an evil spirit; and, uttering a succession of
frightful cries, plunged down the steep bank, towards the rough rocky
bed of the Douglas.
"How now! is the fellow going to hang himself?" said Roland.
"Faith, poisoning might surely satisfy him," replied Leslie.
Master Birrel certainly was about to hang himself, but not by the
neck.
"I must live--I must live--oh, yes, I must, for vengeance!" he
yelled; for, coward as he was, he felt that he could have died happy,
if, by so doing, he could destroy Roland Vipont and Jane Seton--yea,
and his master too, who had sent him on an errand so fatal in its
termination.
While some of the soldiers were burying the dead, and others were
tracing the horses to the artillery, the poisoned ruffian ran wildly
to a solitary part of the river, where he threw himself on his face,
and imbibed an inordinate draught of cold water--drinking, drinking,
drinking--as if he was a mere hollow pipe. Loosening his waist-belt,
and untying the points of his doublet, he stooped and drank deeply
again, burying his face in the water until his distended stomach felt
swollen as if to bursting, and when he arose the whole landscape swam
around him. Then, selecting the branch of a tree, he clambered up to
it with the utmost difficulty, for he had turned himself into a mere
water barrel.
Then, in a horror of anxiety--for every moment wasted seemed an
eternity--he tied his ankles to the branch, and lowering his body
perpendicularly till his hands rested on the turf, he remained
suspended, head downwards, in the hope that, with the ocean of water
he had drunk, he might disgorge the frightful poison he had been
compelled to swallow. But long before this hideous operation was
over, Roland Vipont, Leslie, and their soldiers, with the royal
banners displayed, and their bright armour gleaming in the sun, were
marching down the pastoral valley, on their route to Edinburgh,
having now traversed the whole dale of the Douglas without
discovering the Earl of Ashkirk.
"Now, fare ye well, Lanarkshire, and welcome the dun summit of
Arthur's Seat," thought Roland; as, full of the most brilliant
anticipations of happiness, he spurred his gallant horse and patted
its arching neck. "In three days I will be with my dear Jeanie; and,
in a month from this, whether the king sayeth yea or nay, she shall
be my winsome bride!"
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE SECOND VISIT.
"Give me again my innocence of soul;
Give me my forfeit honour blanched anew;
Cancel my treasons to my royal master;
Restore me to my country's lost esteem,
To the sweet hope of mercy from above,
And the calm comforts of a virtuous heart."
_Edward the Black Prince_.
The soothing or sleeping draught had been duly administered by Tib
Trotter, and Jane Seton slept.
Everything of late had happened most favourably for the intriguing
lord advocate. The queen's delicate health, the king's anxiety, his
fear and suspicion of the Douglases; the imprisonment of the countess
of Inchkeith, and the retirement of the court to the Abbey of
Balmerino; but chiefly the young earl's proscription, the banishment
of all his retainers from the city, and the protracted absence of
Roland Vipont in Douglasdale, from whence it was to be hoped Birrel
would never permit him to return alive, left Archibald Seton and his
sister utterly at the mercy of Redhall, the chambers of whose mansion
were as secret and secure as those of the recently-established Holy
Office at St. Andrew's.
Animated by no new evil intention, but solely by his clamorous desire
to see her, to be near her, that he might touch her hands or kiss her
cheek unrepelled, Redhall had administered the narcotic to his fair
captive, whom he now prepared to visit.
It was midnight; his whole household was buried in slumber; and as
the moment approached when he had proposed to pay this somewhat
equivocal visit, a tremor took possession of his heart, a dimness
came over his eyes, and he imbibed more than one glass of wine, to
string his nerves and still his agitation.
"Poh!" said he, as his cheek reddened; "all this excitement about
visiting a girl--a girl who is asleep, too."
Like many other Scottish houses where the walls were strong,
Redhall's mansion was furnished with several narrow wheel-staircases,
which, like gimlet-holes, perforated the edifice from top to bottom,
communicating with the various stories. One of these descended from
the door of his apartment to another which gave entrance to Jane
Seton's, opening just behind the arras of her bed.
Redhall laid his poniard on the table, from which he took a candle,
and treading softly in his maroquin slippers, found himself at the
door of Jane's apartment, and there he paused. Though not a current
of air swept up the narrow staircase, the candle in his tremulous
hand streamed like a pennon, while a glow of fear and shame traversed
his heart like a red-hot iron.
Tib had informed him that Lady Jane kept candles burning in her room
all night; so extinguishing his, he noiselessly opened the little
private door, and drew back the arras. A sense of flowers and
perfume, mingled with the closer atmosphere of the chamber, was
wafted towards him, and, by the light of two candles which, in
massive square holders of Bruges silver, burned on the toilet-table,
he was enabled to make a survey of the whole dormitory on which he
was intruding. Though he was unconscious of any guilty intention,
there was (he mentally acknowledged) something equivocal in the time
and manner of his visit that appalled his heart. He felt shame
glowing on his cheek: he saw spies in every shadow, and heard a voice
in every echo of his own footfalls.
Softly he let the arras drop, but, in his excitement, forgot to close
behind him the door which it was intended to conceal.
Unused, from the first hour she had occupied the chamber, the
magnificent bed prepared for Jane Seton had not been disturbed, and
with its cornices of carved oak, its festooned hangings and aspiring
feathers, its heraldic blazonry and grotesque devices, it towered
upon its dais like a monument in some old abbey aisle.
Placed on each side of a mirror, the two candles reflected a bright
light upon the warmly-coloured tapestry of the apartment; the Persian
carpet of its floor, the fresh flowers that, in jars of Venetian
glass, decorated the mantelpiece, and all the innumerable little
ornaments with which the taste and policy of Redhall had furnished
it, to beguile the tedium or flatter the vanity of his unwilling
prisoner.
"She sleeps!" said he, advancing on tiptoe, and shading his eyes with
his hand, "she sleeps, and soundly too. Oh, how beautiful she is!
How pure, how innocent she looks," he added, gazing upon her with
eyes of adoration, for he loved her exceedingly, and with a depth of
regard which, though not based on the same sentiments of esteem, was
no-wise inferior perhaps to that of the more favoured Roland Vipont.
She was seated in a large arm-chair of the most luxurious
description. Carved like a gigantic clamshell, the back, with its
arms and sides, were of damask, stuffed with the softest down, and
the woodwork was elaborately gilt. She reclined within it, with a
hand, white as alabaster, resting on each of the arms; her head lay
somewhat on her right shoulder, over which her unbound hair poured in
a shower of ringlets, which, from her recumbent position, reached
nearly to the ground. Her face was pale as her hands; but some
vision was rising before her, through the depth of her slumber, and a
soft smile played on her beautiful mouth.
Though feeling certain that, under the influence of what she had
imbibed, Jane would not awake, Redhall scarcely dared to breathe;