The gloom of the evening and the sombre aspect of nature inspired Florence with vague alarm, and with a strange foreboding that amounted to an emotion of horror, as he rode heedlessly and headlong towards the old church of the vicarage.
It stands upon the southern verge or slope of a long narrow vale, which was then covered by giant whins and wild gorse, and at the bottom of which a brawling brook forced its way past all obstruction to the sea. Of old it was named Travernent, which, say some, meant the hamlet in the valley; but, according to the writings of Father John, was the battle-shout of certain stout Scots who routed a party of Danish invaders and drove them into the sea. The church, a plain edifice of gloomy and forbidding aspect, built no one knows when or by whom, has a square tower and vaulted roof, and belonged of old to the monks of Holyrood. Its windows were few, and, by the immense number of dead interred for ages within and without its massive walls, this sombre temple seemed to have sunk far below the original level of the ground. On the steeple was a weather-cock, which, as the Hamiltons of Preston were wont to aver, tauntingly flapped its wings whenever a Fawside died.
The door, as in the churches of all Catholic countries, stood open, and when Florence dismounted and entered, the interior was so dark, that the only light came from the little tapers that twinkled before the altar which stood under the cross-arches of the rood-tower, and from the altar-tomb of Thorwald Lord of Travernent, whose effigy, cross-legged, for he had been a crusader, lay in the chancel, while on the wall near it there hung his rusty sword and mouldering hood of mail.
Florence passed the tombs of his father and brother with a hasty glance and with a shudder; for the memory of their faces, their fate, and the heritage of hatred they had bequeathed, came too vividly before him—too vividly at this terrible hour.
"Madeline!" he exclaimed; but there was no reply. The gloomy church was open, vacant, bare, and silent, and its solemn aspect was oppressive to his mind.
"Madeline!" he repeated, in a louder tone.
He was turning away to pursue his inquiries elsewhere. when he perceived, immediately under a monument on the wall, which still bears the shield and name of his father,
LORD Fawside of that Ilk.
and within the shadow caused by the tomb, on which his armed effigy lay, the figure of a woman stretched without motion on the floor, over which a dark stream of blood was flowing even to his feet; and with a moan of agony, rather than a cry of alarm, he sprang towards her.