CHAPTER LVI.

THE TEMPTATION.

"Oh! Harpalus (thus would he say), Unhappiest under sunne; The cause of thine unhappy day By love was first begunne; As easy 'twere for to convert The frost into a flame, As for to turn a froward heart, Whom thou so fain would'st frame." _Reliq. of English Poetry_, 1557.

The clock struck in the steeple of St. Giles. Jane heard it distinctly in her prison. Each note was wafted towards her as with a solemn note of lamentation, from the vast and broad mouth of the great church bell. Every stroke vibrated painfully through her heart.

It tolled _eleven_!

She had but one hour to live. One hour! and then----

A loud and palpable murmur, as of many thousand voices, arose in the city; her heart for a moment died within her; she covered her face with her hand and burst out into a passionate prayer to Heaven--for she knew that, encompassed as she was by sorrow and despair, and engirdled by that strong tower, the eyes of God were upon her.

The broad flame of a torch, which was stuck in a tin sconce that hung upon the wall, cast a livid glare on the bare masonry of the vaulted chamber, on her kneeling figure, on her dark and disordered hair, on her white hands, and her whiter forehead.

"Roland, my Roland! thou believest these things of me? Oh, I could never have believed such of thee!"

A shudder passed over her, and it seemed as if her heart would burst. She had received a reply to that paper so cunningly devised by Redhall, the letter signed and addressed to Roland, when suffering under the agony of an artificial thirst; and that answer, which showed that he believed in her guilt, as confessed to him under her own hand, had crushed her spirit more than all the tortures, inflictions, and insults she had so unmeritedly undergone.

Signed by Roland, but written generally to his dictation by the chaplain of the fortress, an old Dominican friar, the reply was sad and sorrowful, full of regrets for her sore temptation to evil; her bitter humiliation, blended with expressions of satisfaction at her contrition; and closing with a pious hope that the sincerity of her repentance and the severity of her earthly punishments would save her from those of another life, solemnly committed her and her works to Heaven.

This unlover-like epistle, the embodying of which poor Roland, in his sorrow and confusion of mind, had left entirely to the ingenuity of the friar, appeared to Jane Seton this crowning stroke of her misfortunes. It left her nothing more to wish for, to hope for, or to bind her to the earth. Her Roland had cast her off!

For the thousandth time she drew forth the letter and gazed upon the name his hand had traced; now the paper was sorely worn and fretted by her tears. She read it over for the last time, sighed bitterly, and placed it in her bosom.

"It shall go with me to--death," she said, for, with a shudder, she reflected that by the mode of that death _even a grave_ was denied her; and there was something frightful in the idea that a week, a month, or a year hence, no one could point to a stone slab or a mound of earth, and say that she whom they remembered, or loved, or regretted, lay below--for the ashes of a witch were scattered to the four winds of heaven.

"Oh, my Roland, thou hast abandoned me! but God will not abandon me!"

"Look up, Lady Jane," said a mild voice.

She raised her eyes suddenly, but without surprise or terror, for neither of these emotions could affect her now; absorbed in her own thoughts, she had not heard any one enter.

The stately figure of Redhall stood before her. He wore a court dress of black velvet, with a white cross on his mantle, as mourning for the queen. His close-clipped beard and black moustache were trimmed with their usual care, but he seemed the shadow of what he was. His grave and noble features were pale as death, and, like her own, were attenuated to excess, but by mental rather than bodily suffering (though he had endured both), and their pallor contrasted strongly with his large, dark eyes, which were so full of light, and yet were so expressive of sorrow. Every part of his dress was black, save the shoulder-belt or scarf that sustained his silver-hilted sword, and which, like the band of his bonnet, glittered with silver embroidery and precious stones, that, ever changing in the light of the torch, sparkled with a thousand prismatic hues. He held his bonnet respectfully in his left hand, and its long black feather drooped on the floor.

"Look up, Lady Jane," he repeated; and Jane arose, with horror and aversion expressed in every feature of her face.

"You have dared to come hither? Is it to gloat upon the sorrow you have made--the poor being you have devoted to destruction--a being who never harmed you? Oh, Redhall! Redhall! what a plot of hell thy plot hath been?"

"Dost thou think me cruel?"

"Cruel?" reiterated Jane; "didst thou say _cruel_?"

"Hear me, hear me! for there is but little time, as in an hour thou art to die."

"St. Giles's bell has told me that. Begone, begone! wretch, thou horror and abomination! Leave me to prayer, I implore thee! to prepare for that death thy guilt, and not mine own, deserves."

"Lady, if I am guilty, love hath made me so."

"Love!"

"Turned to hatred by vengeance and despair! Thou didst permit me to love thee, and then destroyed the dear hopes which that permission excited. Then I hated thee and loved thee by turns; but hatred became the strongest, and I swore that never should another man wed thee. Taunted, I longed for vengeance, but on thy lover rather than on thee--yes, even as the thirsty long for water, and thou art here! It was my destiny, perhaps, to accomplish thy death, and if so, my doom and thine must be fulfilled. Thy death! and yet--yet I could love thee, even after all that hath passed--even loathing life as I do. To the storm of passions which so lately agitated me, a horrid calm has succeeded, and I can look back to the events of the last few weeks as one saved from shipwreck might do to the boiling ocean he has escaped. Thou lookest on me with horror; yet knowest thou not, Jane, that God put much of human kindness in my heart, and, until I met thee, knew thee, and most fatally loved thee, I was good and gentle, save when men wronged or thwarted me. My capacities for love and hatred have but two extremes. Thee, I could have loved for ever! Thy beauty is like that of the rose, or of the lily, born to wither, to lose form and perfume; but my love would have endured unto death, and would have passed away but with life alone. Taunted and repulsed by thee, mocked by my friends as thy plaything, vanquished by a mischance in combat with Vipont, who can wonder that the poison of hatred entered my heart? that it rankled there, and grew strong, distorting every object to my mind and eye? Life lost the few pleasures it possessed. I thought of nothing but destruction, and felt that I was predestined to accomplish, thy death, for I felt (he added, in the very words of the Jew) that if it would feed nothing else, it would feed my revenge--that revenge for which I lived alone! Oh, Jane, this is all the truth, the sad, the solemn truth. Is it not frightful to think that in less than one hour thou wilt have to die?"

"The victim of a madman--a fatalist! Just Heaven! will this be permitted?"

"Heaven has left you yet one chance of life," said Redhall, as his eyes lighted up with a wild gleam, and drawing from his bosom the pardon, which had cost the gallant Leslie so dear, the pardon which was spotted with his blood, and which bore the royal signature, "James Rex," and a seal, the well-known private signet of the king, he held it before her startled eyes. "Be silent, and listen. Your life and death are in my hands. This is a free pardon from the king, granted yesterday at Falkland. Save thyself, not one in Edinburgh knows of its existence, and, without it, you die in half an hour. Oh, ponder well on this," he added, with eyes that eloquently expressed his sorrow, triumph, eagerness, and fear, as with one hand he grasped her, and held it before her with the other, but at arm's-length, lest she might snatch it from him. "Swear before Heaven, the Mother of all Compassion, before the Apostle John and all the saints, to accept me as thy husband; to banish Vipont from thy mind for evermore, even as he has banished thee from his, and into thy hands I commit this paper, and thou art saved. Reject me, I consume it at this torch, and thou art lost!"

He held the paper within an inch of the flaring torch.

"Sir Adam Otterburn," replied Jane, firmly, and with dignity; "I have nothing now to lose but a life that thou hast made hateful to myself, and abominable in the sight of Scotland--a name thou hast covered with such shame that even he who loved me most abhors it now. Thee! the wife of thee, thou murderer and assassin of the gallant Bombie!--thou destroyer of my honour, and the honour of my family! Oh, no!--welcome, a thousand times more welcome are the grave, the gallows, the stake--death under any form, than an alliance so detested. Out upon thee, coward, demon, and tempter!" and in the wildness of her scorn and hatred, she smote him on the mouth with her clenched hand.

"Then be it so!" replied Redhall, with a horrible laugh, as an emotion of rage rose within him. "Thou shalt die as one accursed by God and man, with the flames around thee, and the yells of an assembled city in thine ears, as the meed of thy unmerited scorn. Proud and unrelenting woman, unshriven and unabsolved, even by the fantastic rites of a church that is falling, thou shalt die, with the bitter conviction that all thy sorrow, and all thy tears, and all thy pain are futile, as the wings of the demon are over thee."

And with these terrible words he thrust the pardon into the large flame of the torch, which consumed it in a moment.

Jane uttered a wild cry as he did so; for an instant the love of life had dawned strongly in her bosom.

Again she sank on her knees in despair, and covered her face with her hands; when she looked up, Redhall was gone. He had departed so silently, that she might have deemed the whole interview a vision, but for the ashes of the pardon which were floating about her.

One small fragment, which the flame had left undevoured, lay on the floor; but there was a fiery circle within it--a circle that spread and reddened--spread--spread, until it reached the edge, where it died away in blackness, even as her momentary hope had died.

At that instant she heard footsteps approaching her chamber door, and there was the knell of death in their echoes.