"Accursed be the brood; for their swords were reddest and readiest in the fray in which your father fell!"
"They and others dogged me close on the night I landed. I fought long and bravely——"
"My own son!—my dear dead husband's only son!"
"But what could one sword avail against twenty others? Struck down at last, I would have been hewn to pieces but for the stout arm of a friendly burgher and the kindness of——of——those who salved my wounds and tended me—yea, mother, kindly and tenderly as you would have done," he added, while the colour deepened in his face, and he sank wearily into the chair in which his slain father had last sat, and which since that day none had dared to occupy, as his widow would have deemed it a sacrilege.
It required but the description of this last outrage to rouse the blood of Dame Alison and of all her domestics to boiling heat.
"Be calm, dear mother, be calm," said Florence, pressing her trembling hand to his heart. "In three days I shall be well enough to handle my sword, and then I shall scheme out vengeance for all I have endured."
"Thou hearest him, vicar?" exclaimed Lady Alison, striking her hands together, while her dark eyes shot fire. "The spirit of my buried husband lives again in his boy!"
"Lord make us thankfu' therefor!" muttered the listening servants, who shared every sentiment of their mistress.
"Be wary, madam!" said the tall thin priest. "Whence still this mad craving for revenge?"
"In the presence of this poor lamb, who has so narrowly escaped a dreadful death, weak, pale, and wounded, dost thou ask me this, thou very shaveling?" she exclaimed with scornful energy. "My husband's feud and fall!—Oh, woe is me!—and my winsome Willie's death——"