At last, when he implored her to speak, she attempted to say something; but her lips and tongue had lost their power; her eye grew dull, and she became insensible; her hands and her head drooped, and her long hair swept over the floor of the church as she was borne away.
The alarm had now spread to the village; so, while this scene was passing in the dusky and half-lighted church, and Florence in his grief was uttering a succession of incoherences, a crowd, principally of women, who viewed him with louring and hostile eyes, had gathered round; and by them Madeline, amid many expressions of woe (for the influence of her family was great in the neighbourhood), was borne carefully and tenderly into the vicar's house; and while she was undressed, and her wounds—two small but deep orifices—were stanched, horsemen were sent at full speed to Preston-tower, to that quaint compatriot of Rabelais, Master Posset, at Edinburgh, and to a certain nun of Haddington, Christina Hepburn, prioress of the Cistercians, a kinswoman of the Earl of Bothwell—a lady who had great skill as a leech, and enjoyed a high reputation as a woman of holiness.
Pressing his lips to the brow of Madeline, whose features were cold and passive as her clammy hands, Florence left her in charge of the vicar and her new attendants, and mounting his horse, which he knew to be swift and strong, he prepared to follow, and if possible to outride, the messenger for Edinburgh, as he had the greatest faith in Master Posset's skill; and with something like a prayer to Heaven, mingling on his lips with an imprecation on his mother, he leaped into the saddle, urged his horse across the rugged ravine which the old church and vicarage overlooked, and then galloped westward, blind with grief and confusion of thought, for his brain was yet giddy with the potent drug by which he had been so wickedly deluded, and a half-stupor hung over his senses.
Darkness, dense and gloomy, had now set in. The sky was without stars, and the country was enveloped in obscurity. As he rode on, urging his horse from time to time, to get it well up in hand, a light at the horizon caught his eye. He turned, and felt a shock like that of electricity: but they knew nought of electricity in those days.
On the brow of Soltra the red beacon was in flame; and now another, that rose on the summit of Dunprender, expanded from a star to a sheet of fire; another and another, on many a tower and hill, were lit up in rapid succession; and soon a chain of fires garlanded with flame the far horizon of the night, from the southern borders, sending to the distant Highland glens the tidings that the foe was advancing and the day of battle was at hand.
A fierce sensation, almost of joy, glowed through the throbbing and agonized heart of Florence. He considered those certain signals of the coming war—the war that in another week was to lay all Lothian desolate, like the shores of the Dead Sea—as so many flaming lights that would guide him to Madeline in the other world; for by her changed aspect and dreadful pallor, he dared not hope that she would survive the night. As he paused a moment, to watch the beacons kindling and blazing in succession on the murky sky, there came over the open plain from Tranent, a sound which made him shudder, and caused the pulses of his heart to stand still.
It was, indeed, a dreadful sound—the solemn tolling of the passing bell, which informed him that Madeline Home was dying, or was already no more!
By this old custom, which of course was abolished in Scotland at the Reformation, all the faithful were invited to pray for the departing soul; and its sound was also supposed to scare away the fiends who were in waiting to wrest it from its guardian angels, as they winged their way towards the stars.
He stood upon the bleak, open heath as if transformed to stone, every knell of the solemn soul-bell seeming to echo in his heart and in his brain; yet his thoughts were without coherence and his lips without prayer. His mother—his dreadful, blood-imbrued mother, with her tall sombre figure, seemed to tower before his vision, like a shadowed angel of destruction! He dared not think of her.
The reins fell from his hands, and covering his hot, tearless eyes, he groaned aloud in his agony, and felt as if under a horrible spell.