For in the
half-spandrel wall between the first arch and the bank they might
have spied a small window looking down on the sullen, silent gloom,
foam-flecked with past commotion, that crept languidly away from
beneath. It belonged to a little vaulted chamber in the bridge,
devised by some vanished lord as a kind of summer-house--long
neglected, but having in it yet a mouldering table, a broken chair
or two and a rough bench. A little path led steep from the end of
the parapet down to its hidden door. It was now used only by the
game-keepers for traps and fishing-gear and odds and ends of things,
and was generally supposed to be locked up. The laird had, however,
found it open, and his refuge in it had been connived at by one of the
men, who, as they heard afterward, had given him the key and assisted
him in carrying out a plan he had devised for barricading the door.
It was from this place he had so suddenly risen at the call of Blue
Peter, and to it he had as suddenly withdrawn again--to pass in
silence and loneliness through his last purgatorial pain.[1]
[Footnote 1:
Com' io fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro
Gittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi,
Tant' era ivi lo'ncendio senza metro.
_Del Purgatorio_, xxvii. 49.]
Mrs. Stewart was sitting in her drawing-room alone: she seldom had
visitors at Kirkbyres--not that she liked being alone, or indeed being
there at all, for she would have lived on the Continent, but that her
son's trustees, partly to indulge their own aversion to her, taking
upon them a larger discretionary power than rightly belonged to them,
kept her too straitened, which no doubt in the recoil had its share
in poor Stephen's misery.
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