"Alas, alas!" he exclaimed, "had my dear friend Lady Dunbarton been on this side of the border, I had not been thus persecuted and forgotten. And Finland, why tarries he? Friendship should bring him to me, for shame cannot withhold him; I have committed no crime."
So passed the fourth day.
Night came on again, and the poor lad felt an oppression of spirit, a longing for freedom, and abhorrence of his dungeon; so bitter and intense, that reflection became the most acute torment. He turned restlessly among the straw, its very rustle fretted him, and he started up to pace to and fro in the narrow compass of the vault. He muttered, moaned, and communing with himself, pressed his face against the rusty grating, while listening intently to catch a passing sound, and inhale the cool fresh breeze of the spring night.
Though so many thousand souls were densely packed within the fortifications of Edinburgh, and every house was like a beehive or a tower of Babel, at that hour the city was still as the grave. Walter heard only the throbbing of his heart. The last dweller in the close had long since traversed the lofty stair that ascended to his home; the heavy door at the foot of the Prison turnpike stair had long since been closed, and its sentinel had withdrawn to smoke a pipe or sip a can of twopenny by the gudeman's well-sanded ingle. From the hollow recesses of its great rood spire St. Giles's bell tolled eleven.
"Another night!—another—another!" exclaimed Walter, as he threw himself upon the straw, and wrung his hands in rage, in bitterness, and unavailing agony. "Another night!—Oh, to be taught patience, or to be free!"
From a sleepy stupor that had sunk upon him, the very torpidity of desperation, he was roused by a noise at the grating: a face appeared dimly without, and a well known voice said,
"Harkee, Fenton,—art asleep, my boy?"
"Me voila—I am here!" he exclaimed, as he sprang to the grating and pressed the hand of his friend.
"You forget, Walter, that I am not calling the roll," laughed the officer; "but me voila is very old fashioned, my lad, and hath not been used by us these two hundred years, since the battle of Banje en Anjou. By all the devils, 'tis a deuced unpleasant malheur this!"
"I thought you had forgotten me, Finland."