“Invereshie!” cried the lady, her feelings strongly excited by the grandeur and beauty of the scene; and bursting forth in rapturous ecstacy, “do we not seem like the beings of another world as we stand on this giddy point, with the moon thus pouring out upon us all its potent enchantment?”
“Now God and Jesu be my guides but I will try thine enchantment!” cried Invereshie.
Steeling up his heart to the deed, and nerving his muscular arms to the utmost, he lifted the light and sylph-like form of his lady. One piercing shriek burst from her as he poised her aloft,—a benighted traveller heard it at a distance, crossed himself, and hurried onwards with trembling limbs,—and ere the lady had uttered another scream, Invereshie had thrown her, like a breeze-borne snow-wreath, far amid the bosom of the waves. The wretched man bent forward from the rock, his fingers clenched, his teeth set together, and his eyeballs stretching after the object which his hands had but just parted with.
“Holy Virgin, she floats!” cried he as he beheld her, by the light of the moonbeam playing on the ripple that followed her form as it was hurried down the stream, supported by her widespread mantle.
“Help! oh help! my love! my lord!—’twas madness!—’twas accident!—but oh! mercy and save me!—save or I am lost for ever!”
“She floats!” hoarsely muttered Invereshie, drawing his breath rapidly, and with a croaking sound in his throat that spoke the agonising torture he was enduring. “Ha! she floats! by Saint Mary then was the old woman right! Ha! she struggles at yonder tree!” He sprang from the rock to the margin of the stream, and scrambled towards the spot whither the eddy had whirled the already sinking lady. She had caught with a death-grasp by one frail twig of an alder sapling, though her strength was fast failing. Invereshie’s eyes glared over her face as her head and her long dripping hair half emerged from the water.
“Help!—oh save!—oh help!” was now all she could faintly utter, whilst her expiring looked fixed itself upon her husband.
“Help, saidst thou? thou canst well help thyself by thy foul enchantments!” cried Invereshie. “Blessed Saint Michael be mine aid! thou hadst well-nigh taken from me my all, fiend that thou art; thou may’st e’en take that twig with thee, too!” and drawing from his belt his skian dhu, he sternly divided the sapling at its very root. As it parted from its hold, the lady disappeared amid the rough surges of the rapid stream, and the blindness which superstition had thrown over him fell at once from her distracted husband.
“Holy angels, she sank!” exclaimed Invereshie with a maddening yell that overwhelmed for a moment the very roar of the flood. “My love! my wife! O murderer! murderer!”
He rushed wildly among the waters to save her. But the impenetrable cloud which had been all this time careering onwards, at that very instant blotted out the moon from the firmament, and left his soul to the midnight darkness of remorse and despair.