Chapter XIV

Summary

IT was morning. There came wafted from afar off the echo of a bell tolling slowly, every note of which seemed to pause upon the surface of the smooth waters over which it was borne. The remote solemn music summoned Christian worshippers from many a lonely glen, and many a boat glided swiftly at its signal from the neighbouring creeks and bays. To one only, of all that listened, those holy sounds, floating gently over the deep, sent no message of peace and gladness. The muffled knell, that announces to the felon the hour of his mortal doom, fell never with a more thrilling sweep of horror than did the simple melody of that Sabbath-bell upon Adam Blair’s shrinking ear.—The pulse of human agony was never stirred with a deeper throb.

He clad himself hastily, and without casting more than one hurried glance upon the sleeping partner of his guilt, walked out of the house, and followed, with trembling step, the path which winds up the face of the wooded hill immediately behind it. He turned back when he had reached the rocky summit, looked down once more for a moment upon the shining loch and its magnificent shores, and then rushed with the speed of a maniac into the gloomy and deep glen which sinks beyond. When he stopped, he threw his eyes round him, and saw nothing but a narrow circuit of heathy and stony desolation; and in the centre of the barren amphitheatre a small dark mountain tarn, the waveless waters of which reflected nothing but the surrounding gloom—and that so truly, that he stood almost on the margin ere he had discovered that there was anything but heath below him.

This melancholy tarn, formed where three hills descend into the bosom of the earth together, is of such depth that no plummet could ever sound it, and it shelves from the very brink sheer down into this unfathomable blackness.