"Dare?" she said; "dare?—ha! ha!"
"Yes, I repeat, dare! I am a lady of honour—Madeline Countess of Yarrow."
"And I am Alison of Fawside; and now, between these cold tombs, in each of which there lieth a murdered man—the corpse of the husband in whose kind bosom I slept for thirty years, and the corpse of the son I bore unto him and suckled at these breasts—murdered by Claude Hamilton of Preston, your nearest and only kinsman! Need I tell more to thee, Madeline Home?"
On this announcement Madeline remembered her recent dream; then a deadly terror possessed all her faculties and for a time froze her very utterance; while, as if feasting upon the fear her presence excited, the fierce old woman like an enraged Pythoness, surveyed her with gleaming eyes.
"Lady—Lady Alison, hear me; of all these horrors, I at least am innocent," faltered Madeline. "Release me, and on my knees I will unite with you in prayer for the dead."
"Prayer! thou sorceress, thou hell-doomed witch, who would rob me of my only living son!"
"Madam——"
"Nay, speak not, and crave no pity, for only such pity shall ye have as my winsome Willie had when bleeding he lay under Preston's curtal axe at the barriers of Edinburgh! And so my bonnie Florence loves thee? Aha! aha!"
"Oh God! is there no succour near?" sighed the shrinking girl; for there shone in the old woman's colourless face a pale and almost infernal light.
"He loves thee—ha! and yet thy beauty is no such wondrous matter, after all. A poor and pale-faced moppet like thee would never bear men to succeed the two stately knights who lie beside us! So, so! it is thou, witch, who wouldst rob me of the only son thy murderous race have left me—rob me of him by necromancy? Hah! Wretch! whence got ye that magic ring, that accursed opal, which I have thrown into the flames, but which hath cast a glamour in his eyes and made him love his enemies? Or got ye a love-philter from that quack apothegar, above whose door there swingeth a stuffed devil in the light of open day, Master Posset? Speak! 'Tis like the courtly ways of that woman of the house of Guise and those who serve her. Speak! thou pale-faced Jezebel—speak! lest I strangle thee!"