His own cry awoke or roused him; the glorious vision of the charging line melted into opaque darkness, and now Allan found himself weaker than ever. He thought all was nearly over with him now. He turned his thoughts to prayer, ere it might be too late, and from pondering on release and vengeance and the things of this life, he began to think, as his powers ebbed, of the life to come.
He felt that he must resign himself to the inevitable, and to die—to die there after all, and at last he became totally insensible.
CHAPTER VI.
CEAD MILLE MALOCH!
The shout uttered by Allan in his delirium had not been uttered in vain.
It chanced that Mr. Tappleton, the silver-haired old butler, who had been custodier of the wine binns and the massive old plate in its iron-bound chest, since the present Lord Aberfeldie was a baby in long clothes, had entered his dusty and cobwebbed repositories, and was seeking through their stone shelves for some fine old crusted port of a peculiar vintage, kept alone for the use of his master and himself, when the cry of Allan and some other strange sounds reached his ears, as he thought, and seriously startled him.
We say he thought, for the recess of his wine binns was an unlikely place to hear any other sound than that made by a scared rat.
It was now the dead, dull silence of midnight, when the sounds that are unknown amid the buzz of mid-day life are heard, and seem so oddly, so preternaturally loud and strange—a crack in a door panel or wainscot, the tap of a moth against the window-panes, distant noises that come we know not how or from what on the still damp air.
In a country house at night there is usually a solemn stillness that is painful and oppressive to the wakeful; and it was amidst this silence, the cry—for a human cry it was—reached the butler's startled ear.
But whence had it come? Out of the stone wall, or from the ground beneath, or from the throat of a raven in one of the great chimneys of the old house?