"Did I hear you aright?" she gasped in a low voice, while trembling like an aspen bough; "what mean you?"
"Mean?" murmured Florence, dreading the effect of his communication.
"Yes," she replied, still surveying him as if she deemed him a lunatic about to become troublesome.
"Mother, to end all this, I love Madeline Home, the Countess of Yarrow."
"Love—love her?" she gasped, for she was too old and too excited to raise her voice when suffering under deep emotion; but snatching her bodkin from her busk, she would have stabbed him, had not the nurse, Maud, arrested her hand and clung in terror upon her arm. There was a long pause broken only by her sighs. Florence attempted to take her hand, but she fiercely thrust him aside; for had Claude Hamilton appeared and made her a proposal of marriage, her intense disgust, bewilderment, and rage, could not have been greater. "My husband is in his grave," she said in a low and moaning voice; "the sea of life ebbs and flows as it rolls round the place of his sleep; but he hears its billows no more. Blessed be Heaven that spared him what I now feel; BUT, if the dead know aught that passes upon earth, beware boy, lest his bones may clatter in their bloody shroud—for it was a bloody shroud in which I wound him,—and his soul, at the foot of the throne of Him who died on Calvary, may curse thee, Florence, curse thee for loving a daughter of the race of Preston!"
Her calmness was more oppressive to Florence than her usually impotent anger.
"To love her—oh, to love her!" she continued,—"a wretch whose father, Quentin Home of Yarrow, drew his sword by Preston's side, in mere wickedness against your father, and may for aught I know, be one of his slayers. Boy, on thy peril, in thy raving, forget not our righteous feud!"
"Unhappy feud; what good has it ever done us?"
"Who thinks of good, when speaking of an hereditary foe? Shame on me that I bore thee! Shame on thy father that he begot thee! for by the holy Lamp of Lothian—yea, by the cross of the true Church, thou art fitted for naught in this world but to snuff candles, swing a censer and mumble latin, like old Mass John of Tranent. Oh, ungrateful, undutiful, and false! If ever thou hast a child, may it sting thy heart to the quick, even as at this hour thou stingest me! Thy father is in his grave——"
"By its side, Claude Hamilton is ready to make every honourable and religious amend; as Christians let us forgive——"