He paused at times, and listened; he knew not why. The night was very still, and there came no sound on the passing wind. A pulse was beating in his head. How loud and palpable it was!
There was ever before him the last unearthly glare of those despairing eyes. It was ever in his ears, that expiring wail, sinking into a convulsive sob—ever—ever, turn where he would; if he walked fast—to leave his burning thoughts behind him; if he stood still—that cry and the deathlike visage were ever before him.
"O! to be as I have been—as I was but one long hour ago!" he exclaimed, shaking his clenched hands above his head. "O! for the waves of Lethe to wash the past for ever from my memory! Satan—prince of hell—hear me! Hear me, who dares not now to address his God!"
His frightful thirst still continued, until its agony became insupportable; and he looked around to find wherewith to quench it. On the side of St. John's hill, a green and solitary knoll that rose some sixty feet in height on the wayside, a light attracted his attention; and, supposing that it shone from a lonely cottage or small change-house, he approached to procure a draught of any thing that could be had for money—any liquid, from water to lachryma Christi, to quench the maddening thirst that seemed to consume him.
The light shone from an aperture in the door of a half-ruined barn. Bothwell grasped his sword, and adjusted his mask; but ere he knocked, a voice within, deep and musically solemn, arrested him by saying—
"Confiteor Deo Omnipotenti, beatæ Mariæ semper Virgini, beato Michaeli archangelo, beato Joanni Baptistæ, Sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo, omnibus Sanctis et tibi, Pater, quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et operâ. Meâ culpâ! meâ culpâ! meâ maximâ culpâ!"
Astonished by these words, which form part of the office of mass, and struck to the very soul in hearing them at such a time, when their application was so painfully direct, he paused a moment. The door was opened by a man in complete armour; but the Earl entered immediately, to behold—what appalled and bewildered him still more.
The rude barn had been hurriedly adapted to the purposes of a chapel. A rough table, representing the altar, occupied one end; six candles burned thereon, three on each side of a plain wooden crucifix, which stood before an old representation of the crucifixion, that whilome had adorned some more consecrated fane.
Bowing down before this rude altar, with eyes full of fervour, and piety, and glory, was the aged priest, who, not a hundred yards from the same spot, had, but a few hours before, craved and received alms from the hands of the regicide noble; but now his aspect was very different, for he wore the rich vestments of other days, when he was one of St. Giles' sixteen prebendaries; and he held aloft a round silver chalice, which he had saved from the plunder of the church by the bailies of Edinburgh. The bell was ringing, and he was in the act of celebrating mass, before an anxious and fearful, but devout few, who, despite the terrible laws passed against them by the men of the new regime, met thus in secret to worship God after the fashion of their fathers, preferring the mystical forms and ceremonies which had been handed down to them by the priests of other years, to a new hierarchy, upheld by the swords of the unlettered peers and homicidal barons of 1560. The women, fearful and pale, were muffled in their hoods and plaids; the men were all well armed, and not a few grasped their poniards, and keenly scrutinized the Earl on his entrance.
All the long-forgotten piety of his childhood—all the memory of those days of innocence, when his pious mother, Agnes of Sinclair, taught him first to raise his little hands in prayer in Blantyre's stately Priory—gushed back upon his heart. Making a sign of the cross, he knelt down among the people; and, overcome by the influence of old associations, by the sudden vision of an altar and the mass, and by the terrible knowledge of what he was now in the sight of that Being whom he trembled to address, he burst into an agony of prayer.