For a moment it illuminated the dark hollow where this repentant sinner lay, and gave him a startling shock; for he thought of the funeral pyre that was soon to blaze before the gates of the fortress which overhung him.
"Jane, oh Jane!" he cried, incoherently and aloud; "oh, thou whom I could have worshipped with the adoration of an idolater, but whom I have destroyed with the blind fury of a fiend! Can I not save thee without burying myself under a mountain of disgrace as well as of misery? And for this paltry tremor thou art left to die! thou, so beautiful, so innocent, so pure in spirit and so single in heart! The icy sweat is again on my brow, the iron in my heart—for all thine image is before me, as it was once, so full of smiles and pride, of bloom and high-born loveliness, as on that night at Holyrood.... Thy voice is ever in my ear, thy name on my lip!... Oh, misery! oh, for one hour of oblivion!..."
He sprang up, and slowly descending the narrow path by the base of the castle rock, below St. Margaret's Tower, approached the loch, but without any defined object. The stillness of its dark and almost waveless water had something in it that attracted him involuntarily towards it.
The loch was then full and the water deep.
"Coward that I am!" he thought; "one bold plunge and all would be over."
The temptation was a strong one: there was a rushing in his ears, a whirling in his brain, and a fearful palsy in his heart, which seemed to stand for a moment still; he looked around him hurriedly, and no one seemed near.
But a single star was visible, like a watching eye, and its rays were reflected in the motionless water under the solemn shadow of the impending rocks.
At such a moment the human mind is like a bullet which a hair may turn aside.
He took one step backward, and was about to make the desperate leap, when the sound of voices and footsteps arrested him; and, like one surprised in a guilty action, he shrunk behind a clump of wild hazel bushes, and thus was saved from the committal of another heavy crime.
Two men, whom he had not before observed, now appeared on the narrow pathway below. One was mounted, clad in half armour, and by the ostrich feather which waved in his bonnet, appeared to be a gentleman; the other was on foot, and led a horse by the bridle.