Weariness overcame her, and she was about to drop asleep, when a sound was heard, and one of the doors of the cabinet rattled and opened; a cold wind blew upon her face; and by her recumbent position, she beheld a steep staircase winding away down into darkness she knew not where, between the masonry of the massive wall. She would have screamed, but terror chained her tongue; and almost fainting, and afraid to move or breathe, she continued to regard it with the most painful anguish and intense alarm. But up that dark and mysterious outlet, so suddenly disclosed, no sound came but the night wind, which moved the oak door of the cabinet mournfully to and fro.
Lilian's strength seemed utterly to have left her; and, though painfully anxious to learn the secrets of this staircase, which communicated so immediately with her bedchamber, she lacked equally strength to rise, and presence of mind to examine it.
But the current of air that swayed the door to and fro, closed it; the sound rumbled away in the far echoes of the tower, and all became still. Now more alarmed by the reflection that she was sleeping in this remote room alone, with a secret entrance, she bitterly regretted her imprudence in undressing, but had not the courage to rise and repair what a certain prophetic apprehension made her fear had been very unwise.
Excessive lassitude at last completely overcame her, and she slumbered.
Once in a lone and secret hour of night, When every eye was closed, and the pale moon And stars alone shone conscious of the theft, Hot with the Tuscan grape, and high in blood, Haply I stole unheeded to her chamber. FAIR PENITENT.
When Clermistonlee retired from the hall to the study or parlour, which was the only comfortably furnished apartment in the dreary old tower, he resigned himself to reflection, and sipping his mulled sack, a great tankard of which Juden placed unbidden, and quite as a matter of course, at his elbow. His thoughts at first ran in the usual channel,--a determination to possess Lilian, from the double incentives of passion and pecuniary necessity. He was on the brink of ruin; and her property, or expectations of it, were ample and noble. She was very unprotected; the land was convulsed and trembling on the verge of a great civil war, though as yet no tidings had reached Edinburgh of what was passing in England; and so, as the sack diminished in the tankard, his lordship's thoughts became in proportion more strange, more amorous, and confused. His brain wandered. He was restless and uneasy; his flowing dressing-gown seemed to fit him like a horse-hair shirt; and his disturbed manner was not unobserved by his faithful and subservient factotum.