The hand of retribution had come heavily upon him.
That day he had seen his three companions led forth to die—to be dismembered as traitors, to have their bowels torn out from their half-strangled and yet breathing bodies, and their limbs fixed to the ramparts of the city barriers; and that day, with sorrow and contrition, he had confessed to the ministers of Moray all his share in Bothwell's plots and crimes.
As if in mockery of his sad thoughts, bright through the iron grating streamed the setting sunlight in all the beauty of a warm autumnal eve.
At that sunset he gazed long and fixedly, for it was the last he would ever behold, and the tears filled his sunken eyes and bedewed his faded cheek, for more lovely was that evening sun than ever he had seen it, as, sinking behind the long ridge of the Calton, it cast a farewell gleam on the old rood spire and abbey towers of Holyrood—on the hills of emerald green and rocks of grey basalt that overhang them—on the woods of Restalrig, and the narrow glimpse of the blue and distant ocean beyond them—and he felt that on all this his eyes were about to be closed for ever.
For ever I did his mind recoil at this terrible reflection? No; but it often trembled between the depth of thought and the abyss of despair.
Better it was to die, than to linger out a life, haunted by the burning recollection of those crimes, upon which the force of circumstances, rather than any evil propensity of his own, had hurried him.
And Mariette—since the hour when first he knew her love was lost, he had felt comparatively happy, to what he had been since that terrible night on which he took such vengeance upon her, and on her kingly lover, in the house of the Kirk-of-Field—that vengeance for which he was now to die.
As he mused on all his blighted hopes and blasted prospects—of what he was and what he might have been—the young man groaned aloud in the agony of his soul; he wreathed his hands among his heavy dark-brown hair, and bowed his head upon the hard wooden bench, which served him alike for bed and table.
The sunlight died away—the gloaming came, and the walls of the old abbey, within whose aisles the dead of ages lay, looked dark and dreary; the silence of his prison increased, and a deep reverie—a stupefaction—fell upon the mind of Bolton.
A hand that touched his shoulder lightly aroused him; he looked up, and saw—could it be possible?