"Would this night were over!" muttered the Earl, passing his hand across his clammy brow. "Would to God it were!—God! how dare I to name him?".....
He gave one long, keen glance at the distant house of the Kirk-of-Field, and saw its lofty outline, with crowstepped roofs and turnpike tower, standing in dark relief between him and the blushing west; a light was beginning to twinkle in one of the apartments.
It was from that where Darnley lay.
Already, with remorse, Bothwell thought of poor Konrad of Saltzberg; for aware that, in its first fury, the popular vengeance would require some victim to glut its outpouring, Ormiston—ever cool, calculating and ruthless—had recommended, as we have stated, that the friendless foreigner should be involved in that night's deed of darkness; and rendered almost blindly selfish, in the magnitude of the risk about to be incurred by himself and so many great nobles, he had assented to this additional act of cruelty.
"Alms, noble Earl, for God and our blessed Lady's sake!" said a voice near the ruined cross. Bothwell started and turned, and encountered the reverend figure of Sir James Tarbet, leaning on a long staff; and stung to the soul by the momentary contemplation of this old man's poverty and humility, when contrasted with his own pride and guilt, he turned abruptly away.
"Thou hast not heeded me, Lord Earl," said the old man; "but may they whose names I implored, bless thee not the less."
Touched by this resignation, he approached the poor priest with averted eyes.
"Alms, sir! for the sake of the soul of old Earl Adam of Bothwell; had he been alive, I had not needed to crave them to-day. He fell by my side at Flodden; and this poor hand was raised to save him from the English billmen."
Bothwell hurriedly placed his purse in the withered fingers of the priest; and thus, with the greatest of all human virtues in his hand, and the blackest of all human crimes in his heart, he drew his bonnet over his eyes, and at a rapid pace, as if he would leave his own fierce ambition and desperate thoughts behind him, began to descend the hill of St. Leonard, towards the palace of Holyrood, where a line of brilliantly illuminated windows recalled to his memory the royal ball given in honour of the nuptials of Sebastian.
CHAPTER XXVI.