"If he has been listening, and should undo all I have done!" thought St. Bernard, breathlessly, as he hurried down into the dark Wynd of the Blackfriars; "but his eminence has promised, and blessed be him, my poor little child is saved!"
Full of joy, and feeling as if a mountain had been removed from him, the good old prebend knelt down in the dark and deserted street, and baring his bald head, returned thanks to Heaven and his patron saint for having inclined the lord chancellor to hear favourably the prayer he had just preferred.
CHAPTER XLVI.
THIRST!
"'Twas thou, O love! whose dreaded shafts control,
The hind's rude heart, and tear the hero's soul;
Thou ruthless power, with bloodshed never cloyed,
'Twas thou thy lovely votary destroyed:
Thy thirst still burning for a deeper woe,
In vain for thee the tears of beauty flow."
The Lusiad of CAMOENS.
Aware that he had been seen by the friar in the act of listening, the lord advocate decided in a moment upon the course to pursue. He resolved that the promised pardon should never reach Edinburgh; but being too wary to make any reference to the conversation he had just heard, after simply giving the great cardinal a paper concerning an annual subsidy from the clergy, which was to be presented to James V. at Falkland on the morrow, he retired, and hastened to his own house in the Canongate, where, with the utmost impatience, he awaited the return of Nichol Birrel, whom, with Dobbie and Sanders Screw, he had sent on a devilishly contrived mission to the Castle of Edinburgh, whither we shall return to observe them.
From his window Roland had seen them enter David's Tower by the iron gate at the bottom of the stair, by which they ascended straight to the chamber where Jane Seton was confined.
After the priest had left her, the latter had become more calm, though St. Bernard had not held out to her the faintest hope of mercy or compassion from those powers which had abandoned her to die, or of rescue from that once terrible faction to which her family belonged—that faction now so scattered, crushed, and broken.
In her prison this sad and lonely being had watched the woods and water darkening far below her; had watched the stars as one by one they sparkled out upon the night; and she envied the airy freedom of the passing clouds as they rolled through the sky—the blue twilight sky of a still and beautiful summer gloaming. In masses of fleecy white on pale gold, as they were tinted by the rising moon, they sailed on the soft west wind in a thousand changing forms.
The very weariness of long grief overcame her, and she lay down on the humble pallet afforded her by the orders of the castellan, to sleep—for she had not slumbered during many nights, and on this night, like her thirst, her fatigue was excessive.