“Mind!” she exclaimed with bitterness; “I have learned my lesson, and there is no more to mind.” But she fondled the thing concealed in her plaid, and her man walked quickly towards the wan lights of the tenements, leaving her all alone.
For a moment only she heard his footsteps, the sound of them soon lost in the din of nature—the uproar of the forest trees, whose ponderous branches creaked; the wind, canorous, blowing between the mountains; the booming crepitation of the sea upon the rocks. And yet no sense of solitude depressed her, for her mind was occupied by one triumphant thought—that young John Clerk should at least be spared the horror and shame of a public execution.
She had drawn, at first, the drenched plaid over her head to shield her and shut her in from the noise of tempest; but her hands in a little while were so busily engaged with her secret possession that the tartan screen at last rolled back on her shoulders, and she was aware of another sound than those of nature—the near, faint clang of chains. It was scarcely audible, but unmistakable—the beat of a loose end of iron links against wood, somewhere above her head, as she sat in the cart by the side of Creag-nan-caoraich. She stared up into the darkness and saw nothing, then stood to her feet and felt above her with trembling hand.
Her fingers searched along a beam with a rope attached to it, whose meaning flooded to her brain with a gush that stunned; she touched a dead man’s feet! and the pitiless clouds that had swept all night across the heavens heaved for a moment from the face of the reeling moon, and she saw the wretch upon the gibbet!
“My son! my son!” she screamed till the rocks and trees gave back the echo, and yet the distant lights of the burgh town glowed on with unconcern.
* * * * *
Her cries had ceased; she was sunk in a listless torpor in the bottom of the cart when her man returned in a state as wretched as her own, running with stumbling feet along the rutted highway.
“My God! my God!” said he, “I have learned of something dreadful!”
“I have learned it for myself,” said his wife. “You’re a day behind the fair.”
“Not one day, but eleven of them,” said her husband, hardly taking her meaning. “It is the fifteenth of September, and I’m so fearful of the worst. I dared not rap at a door in the town and ask.”