No father came to visit him in his cell. On the day of trial he had been missing from Moorside, and was seen next morning--(where he had been all night never was known, though it was afterwards rumoured that one like him had been seen sitting, as the gloaming darkened, on the very spot of the murder)--wandering about the hills, hither and thither, and round and round about, like a man stricken with blindness, and vainly seeking to find his home. When brought into the house, his senses were gone, and he had lost the power of speech. All he could do was to mutter some disjointed syllables, which he did continually, without one moment's cessation, one unintelligible and most rueful moan! The figure of his daughter seemed to cast no image on his eyes--blind and dumb he sat where he had been placed, perpetually wringing his hands, with his shaggy eyebrows drawn high up his forehead, and the fixed orbs--though stone-blind at least to all real things--beneath them flashing fire. He had borne up bravely--almost to the last--but had some tongue syllabled his son's doom in the solitude, and at that instant had insanity smitten him?
Such utter prostration of intellect had been expected by none; for the old man, up to the very night before the Trial, had expressed the most confident trust of his son's acquittal. Nothing had ever served to shake his conviction of his innocence--though he had always forborne speaking about the circumstances of the murder--and had communicated to nobody any of the grounds on which he more than hoped in a case so hopeless; and though a trouble in his eyes often gave the lie to his lips, when he used to say to the silent neighbours, "We shall soon see him back at Moorside." Had his belief in his Ludovic's innocence, and his trust in God that that innocence would be established and set free, been so sacred, that the blow, when it did come, struck him like a hammer, and felled him to the ground, from which he had risen with a riven brain? In whatever way the shock had been given, it had been terrible; for old Gilbert Adamson was now a confirmed lunatic, and keepers were in Moorside--not keepers from a mad-house, for his daughter could not afford such tendence--but two of her brother's friends, who sat up with him alternately, night and day, while the arms of the old man, in his distraction, had to be bound with cords. That dreadful moaning was at an end now; but the echoes of the hills responded to his yells and shrieks; and people were afraid to go near the house. It was proposed among the neighbours to take Alice and little Ann out of it, and an asylum for them was in the Manse; but Alice would not stir at all their entreaties; and as, in such a case, it would have been too shocking to tear her away by violence, she was suffered to remain with him who knew her not, but who often--it was said--stared distractedly upon her, as if she had been some fiend sent in upon his insanity from the place of punishment. Weeks passed on, and still she was there--hiding herself at times from those terrifying eyes; and from her watching corner, waiting from morn till night, and from night till morn--for she seldom lay down to sleep, and had never undressed herself since that fatal sentence--for some moment of exhausted horror, when she might steal out, and carry some slight gleam of comfort, however evanescent, to the glimmer or the gloom in which the brain of her father swam through a dream of blood. But there were no lucid intervals; and ever as she moved towards him, like a pitying angel, did he furiously rage against her, as if she had been a fiend. At last, she who, though yet so young, had lived to see the murdered corpse of her dearest friend--murdered by her own only brother, whom, in secret, that murdered maiden had most tenderly loved--that murderous brother loaded with prison-chains, and condemned to the gibbet for inexpiable and unpardonable crimes--her father raving like a demon, self-murderous were his hands but free, nor visited by one glimpse of mercy from Him who rules the skies--after having borne more than, as she meekly said, had ever poor girl borne, she took to her bed quite heart-broken, and, the night before the day of execution, died. As for poor little Ann, she had been wiled away some weeks before; and in the blessed thoughtlessness of childhood, was not without hours of happiness among her playmates on the braes.