Up, up it came, and now its whole disc was gleaming above the dark mountain-ridge, and tipping each rock and peak with fire.
Gwendoleyne prayed in her heart that no one might come—that she might have been deceived—that Comyn, the father of her four children—but, hark! the hoofs of a horse rang hollowly on the green turf, and through the archway of the ruined enclosure rode an armed man, who sang merrily the same march to which, eight years after, Bruce marched his victorious host to Bannockburn.
"Hark to the tramp, from yonder camp,
Whence the Scottish spearmen come!
When they hear the bagpipe sounding,
Tuttie taittie to the drum!"
"'Tis the Red Comyn's favourite song!" said she, shrinking aside; "now mayest thou be accursed from the bearing cloth in which thou wert baptized to that shroud of blood in which thou shalt lie! Now by the soul of him who loved me well, the Grahame who fell at Falkirk, and by the life of my son—my dearest hope—I shall have a terrible vengeance!"
The knight, on whose head was a plumed chapel-de-fer, with a mail coif that concealed the lower part of his face, wore over his armour an embroidered cointise, with the cognisance of the Comyns, two ostriches, with the motto "Courage." He dismounted, and after looking about him for a moment, discovered Gwendoleyne, to whom he hastened with an exclamation of joy, and she recognised on the breast of the surcoat some embroidery, on which she had but too surely and too lately seen the white hands of Yolande Gifford plying the needle! What other proof of perfidy was necessary?
An arm was thrown around her, and passionately and joyously she was pressed to the breast of the new comer. But while trembling with ungovernable fury to find herself exposed to embraces intended for Yolande, she drove her poniard in the heart of the lover twice, exclaiming,
"Die, villain and deceiver—die in your adultery—die!"
"Mother—oh, mother!" cried a voice, which froze the marrow in her bones; and the frantic and wretched Gwendoleyne discovered that she had slain—not the Red Comyn—but their beloved and only son.
The plumed chapel-de-fer rang as the wearer sank to the earth.
A gurgling sound was all that followed; the ruined tower swam round that miserable woman, and, multiplied by a thousand times, the horse of the murdered knight seemed to career around her; till borne down by misery, by a revulsion of feeling, by over-tension of the heart, and by horror of what she had done, Gwendoleyne sank senseless on the body of her son.