"What ye resolve
Death shall dissolve."
"So may it fare with the resolve of the donor!" said Lady Alison. "Maud, look ye to this moonstruck fool while I look to the false witch who hath begowked him. Now, ho! to keep this gay love-tryst at the kirk of Tranent!"
In ten minutes after this, accompanied by Roger of Westmains and three other armed men, who knew no will but hers, and had no scruple in obeying it; for they regarded her with as much veneration and fear as the dingy Hindoo does Brahma, or the miserable Persian does the bearded shah, she had left the tower of Fawside, and taken the eastern path direct to the church of the vicarage.
CHAPTER XL.
THE WAKENING.
He kneel'd in prayer in a lonely room,
Raised hand and streaming eye,
With a swimming brain, and a burning heart,
And a wild and bitter cry;
And a light came down on his stormy fears,
For a time; but the light grew dim:
And now, through the gloom of the pitiless years,
What hope, what hope for him?
Lyrics of Life.
The sun had set—the evening was grey and cloudy—when consciousness slowly returned to Florence. A swimming of the sight, a throbbing in the head, with an intense cold over all his limbs, were his first sensations on awakening from the long trance into which the potent drug given him by his mother had cast him two hours before.
"My appointment—the meeting—Madeline!" were his first thoughts; and he staggered up but to sink again upon his hands, with drooping head and bewildered brain; for the garden with its walks, trees, terraces, and shrubbery—the castle, with its grated windows and round tourelles (of which the corbelling now alone remains), and its large square chimneys—seemed to be all in pursuit of each other, as when he saw them last; and, in short, some minutes elapsed before he became fully conscious of existence, or able to stand erect and think with coherence, if not with calmness.
"Madeline's ring?" It was gone.
A sudden light seemed to break upon him. He recalled his mother's hatred and denunciations against her, and upon their love; her sudden change to assumed placidity; her remarks upon the ring; and then the cup of cordial—her own "medicated cordial"—given after a sudden whisper to Maud, who for years had been in all her secrets, the partner of her loves and hates, her sorrows and her joys. He saw it all; he had been duped—most foully duped—and his ring abstracted. He rushed into the castle and sprang up-stairs in search of Lady Alison; her bower chamber was vacant; she was not in the hall; spindle, spinning-wheel, and distaff stood unused in the embayed window; and he was informed by Maud that she and Roger of Westmains, with three other armed men, had set out on horseback two hours ago.