The unfortunate nobleman was too much wrapped up in his own confused and distracted reflections, to notice the rude expressions of savage fidelity, in which, even in the latest ebb of life, the unhappy author of his misfortunes seemed to find a stern and stubborn source of consolation.
“Great Heaven!” he exclaimed, “I am then free from a guilt the most horrible with which man can be stained, and the sense of which, however involuntary, has wrecked my peace, destroyed my health, and bowed me down to an untimely grave. Accept,” he fervently uttered, lifting his eyes upwards, “accept my humble thanks! If I live miserable, at least I shall not die stained with that unnatural guilt!—And thou—proceed if thou hast more to tell—proceed, while thou hast voice to speak it, and I have powers to listen.”
“Yes,” answered the beldam, “the hour when you shall hear, and I shall speak, is indeed passing rapidly away. Death has crossed your brow with his finger, and I find his grasp turning every day coulder at my heart. Interrupt me nae mair with exclamations and groans and accusations, but hear my tale to an end! And then—if ye be indeed sic a Lord of Glenallan as I hae heard of in my day—make your merrymen gather the thorn, and the brier, and the green hollin, till they heap them as high as the house-riggin’, and burn! burn! burn! the auld witch Elspeth, and a’ that can put ye in mind that sic a creature ever crawled upon the land!”
“Go on,” said the Earl, “go on—I will not again interrupt you.”
He spoke in a half-suffocated yet determined voice, resolved that no irritability on his part should deprive him of this opportunity of acquiring proofs of the wonderful tale he then heard. But Elspeth had become exhausted by a continuous narration of such unusual length; the subsequent part of her story was more broken, and though still distinctly intelligible in most parts, had no longer the lucid conciseness which the first part of her narrative had displayed to such an astonishing degree. Lord Glenallan found it necessary, when she had made some attempts to continue her narrative without success, to prompt her memory by demanding—“What proofs she could propose to bring of the truth of a narrative so different from that which she had originally told?”
“The evidence,” she replied, “of Eveline Neville’s real birth was in the Countess’s possession, with reasons for its being for some time kept private;—they may yet be found, if she has not destroyed them, in the left hand drawer of the ebony cabinet that stood in the dressing-room. These she meant to suppress for the time, until you went abroad again, when she trusted, before your return, to send Miss Neville back to her ain country, or to get her settled in marriage.”
“But did you not show me letters of my father’s, which seemed to me, unless my senses altogether failed me in that horrible moment, to avow his relationship to—to the unhappy”—
“We did; and, with my testimony, how could you doubt the fact, or her either? But we suppressed the true explanation of these letters, and that was, that your father thought it right the young leddy should pass for his daughter for a while, on account o’some family reasons that were amang them.”
“But wherefore, when you learned our union, was this dreadful artifice persisted in?”
“It wasna,” she replied, “till Lady Glenallan had communicated this fause tale, that she suspected ye had actually made a marriage—nor even then did you avow it sae as to satisfy her whether the ceremony had in verity passed atween ye or no—But ye remember, O ye canna but remember weel, what passed in that awfu’ meeting!”