Thus agony of mind, pain of body, and lack of food had sorely reduced her. She became apathetic, and sank into a stupor so deep, that it seemed as if no change of circumstances could ever tranquillize or restore her to existence and the sunshine of life.
Her large dark eyes were dry, hot, and tearless. In their stony aspect, they seemed never to have beamed in joy, or wept in grief. Her face had the pallor, the lividity of death, and her cheeks had become frightfully hollow, while her thin lips were a vivid and unnatural scarlet. They seemed to have shrunk, and showed more than before of her teeth; and even these seemed larger and, if possible, whiter than usual. There was something dry, arid, and parched in her whole aspect—as if the fire of inward grief was consuming her. As her stooped head rested on her hand, with eye fixed and jaw relaxed, her expression, at times, grew altogether vacant.
She had on the same dress in which she had appeared before Abbot Mylne and his tribunal, and the same pretty little angular cap, below which her fine hair was simply braided. She was destitute of ornament, having been robbed or deprived of all her rings and bracelets by Sanders Screw and others, into whose hands she had been so ruthlessly consigned.
Her haggard beauty was appalling, as the calmness of her despair was unnatural. Her whole mind seemed to be unhinged.
Her cheek reclined in the hollow of her right hand, and her elbow rested on the table; her vacant gaze was fixed on the landscape, which extended to the north and westward, for her chamber had two windows, and, from the west, the cool soft wind played on her hot, white cheek, and lifted her heavy hair.
The glorious plain that from the foot of the steep Castle Rock stretches almost to the gates of busy Glasgow, was yet hazy with the humid summer mist, from amid which stood boldly forth the lordly Pentlands, with their peaks of brilliant emerald green, or heath of russet brown, and the rugged rocks of Corstorphine; while afar off, and dim in the distance, among the Highlands of Stirlingshire, rose the pale blue cone of Ben Lomond, the king of the Scottish hills, then the fastness of the fierce Buchanans.
The sun was sinking behind the Ochills, and those who have seen it so sink behind those beautiful mountains in summer, will cease to boast of Roman skies and Venetian sunsets. A thousand hills, and isles, and rocks were mirrored in the bosom of the Forth, as a flood of sunlight was poured along its winding waters, kissing the wooded shores and dancing waves, throwing into light its bold headlands and forest vistas, or into partial shade the long deep glens and forest dells, where herd and hirsel grazed, "and the wee burnie was stealing under the lang yellow brume," as a beautiful old song has it.
Rock, isle, and ship seemed floating on its bosom, amid all the sparkling colours of the sun, till it sank behind the mountains, leaving a million of radiations shooting upward behind the dark peak of Dumiat. Then the Forth turned from gold to blue, and its shores from green to purple; and then, as the hills of Fife grew dark, the Lothian woods grew darker still, and the gentle star of evening rose above Corstorphine to replace, by its mild beauty, the brighter glories of the day that had passed.
Of all this magnificent effect of scenery and of sunset, Jane saw nothing; for her eyes were turned back (as it were) within her heart, and she saw only her own thoughts. The events of the last few weeks seemed all a horrible dream—a dream from which she had yet to awaken. A chaos, incoherent and fantastic, like the time of a fever and delirium. Amid this chaos came forth the figure of Roland—Roland, who was ever uppermost in her thoughts. Where was he? What was he doing? Or what had been done with him since that frightful day when, under twenty weapons, she had seen him beaten down and slain, as she then thought, before her very eyes.
She considered, then, the doom to be endured—the punishment by fire. She remembered the burning of Sir David Straitoun and of Father Norman Gourlay, two hapless Protestants, who, on the 27th of August, three years before, had suffered martyrdom at the Rood of Greenside, below the western brow of the Calton; and those who witnessed that frightful auto-da-fé, had described how like parchment scrolls the limbs of the victims shrivelled; how their stomachs burst and fell down among the hissing embers; and how the forky flames shot up between their scorched and blackened ribs, and were vomited forth at their open jaws and eyeless sockets, till even the morbid crowd, hardened as they were by the daily executions of that unhappy age, became sick and turned away with horror.