"And gain me an earldom," said Shaw.
Gray placed a hand upon his mouth.
There was a pause during which the three wretches gazed upon each other in silence; for it would require a Catholic, and more especially a Scottish Catholic of that age, to feel the full effect of the chilling awe and dread the act of this apostate priest produced upon himself and his two companions. Even their hearts quailed and trembled at it; for though the infamous and unjust conduct of the popes to Scotland, in early times and during the Crusades, made the people value lightly the bulls of the Vatican—so lightly, indeed, that more than one papal legate, natheless his purple cope and scarlet stockings, has been assaulted, stripped, and driven across the English frontier, with the nation in arms, and the country flaming at his heels; still the influence of religious sentiment, whatever its phase, was, as it has ever been, strong in the hearts of the Scots; but now with Shaw and Gray it was mingled with an overpowering superstition, and veneration for ancient, incomprehensible, and mysterious rites.
"A holy horror curdled all their blood;" and thus for some minutes none of them spoke.
"This sacrilege is awful!" said Sir Patrick.
"But the Holy Eucharist will not poison," said Shaw, whom the communication had completely sobered; "so thou hast, perhaps, but fooled thyself as well as us, Master Borthwick."
"What is this, Laird of Sauchie," asked Borthwick with gloomy fury; "art thou so dull as to think so? was there not William Comyn, the Lord High Chancellor of Scotland, in the days of King Malcolm IV.—a consecrated bishop too—who was poisoned by the wine of the Eucharist, and fell stone dead, in rochet, cope, and stole, on the steps of the altar?"
Another long pause ensued, during which Gray whispered to Shaw,—
"We must now close this fellow's mouth for ever; a dagger stroke, and over the bridge with him. Be ready when I say, 'Let us part, Sir Hew."
"May the blessing, or invocation, render this poison, if not altogether null in effect, at least less fatal than death?"