Faint and flickering lights shot over the tall and many-coloured windows of the cathedral, and played between the slender tracery of their shafted mullions, or died away in the recesses of the church. Those were the tapers of monks who had received a penance of midnight prayers to say at certain tombs or shrines; and our lurker remembered the time when he too—but he turned on his heel, and strove to forget those better days and that embittering memory. "Would the tryst had been anywhere but here."
Rays of light were streaming more brightly from the smaller but strongly grated windows of the bishop's palace, and they played on the brown foliage of the woods below, and on the rushing surface of the river in the dell. One by one these rays of light faded away; at last darkness reigned in the mansion, and Borthwick shuddered, for he knew that Margaret Drummond and her sisters would then be a-bed.
He was deadly pale; and had any one passed him casually on that high and narrow bridge, his aspect, even at night, must assuredly have startled them.
To him it was strange and almost irritating, that all the life he had passed, with many of its minuter and long-forgotten incidents, should now rise before him like a long unfolding scroll, strongly, darkly, and fearfully, as it might do before one who is about to die; and a terrible tissue it was!
He recalled the awful name and fate of his parents, and the promises he had made to the humane old priest who had saved him doubly, as he was wont to say, "like a brand from the burning," and the vows he had made in youth, in that cathedral aisle, to spend a life of holiness, of usefulness, of purity, and of prayer, to atone for the real or traditional atrocities of Ewain Gavelrigg and his wife among the Sidlaw hills; and how had he kept these vows?
"Accursed be these thoughts!" said he, as he walked to and fro, and bit his nether lip, as if to control the growing fear and bitterness of his heart. At that moment something struck his face, and he sprang aside in terror uncontrollable.
"Pshaw!" said he, "a bat!"
Everything was fraught with some old memory to him now, and he remembered the old story of its origin to which he had often listened, as the monks sat round the refectory fire in the cold winter nights, when the Allan was sheeted with ice, and the blast of the snow-clad Grampians moaned in the leafless woods of Dunblane; and the voice of his old patron came back to his ears in the accents of awe with which he used to tell the story:—of how, when a boy of seven years of age, the Saviour of mankind was at play in the streets of Jerusalem, with other little Jews, and in sport they fashioned various birds and animals of clay, and then the children quarrelled among themselves, each preferring his own workmanship, and all united in laughing to scorn an uncouth bird made by the little hands of the golden-haired boy, the son of Mary, till the tears fell from his eyes; and as they dropped upon the little image, lo! it expanded its wings of clay and flew from hand to hand, and after fluttering over his head, soared into the air and became a veritable bat. On beholding this, the children fled, and on relating the story to their parents, were by them forbidden to play again with that bright-haired little boy, whom they stigmatized as an embryo sorcerer; and Borthwick remembered with mingled pity and envy the good faith, the awe, and holy interest with which the old and silver-bearded priests bent their heads around the winter hearth, and listened to legends such as this; for it was indeed an age "when old simplicity was in its prime."
At last his reveries were interrupted by perceiving at the other end of the bridge two men on foot; they had been there for some time conversing and regarding him, but unobserved by Borthwick, whose eyes and mind were turned inward, if we may say so; and now by their height, bearing, and stealthy motions, he was convinced that they were no other than Sir James Shaw of Sauchie and Sir Patrick Gray of Kyneff.
"Well met, fair sir," said the latter, with his usual courtly sneer.