"Dependant? have I not given thee a fee of four hundred pounds Scots per year, and what the devil more?"
"Between your own necessities and your butler's villany, not a plack of it have I seen since Lammas-tide."
"This shall be seen to. Come, come, Beatrix, my merry old lass, thou art as petulant as when I led you into this chamber twenty years ago. You want gold, I know; but, faith! I have devilish little of that." He spread a few French crowns on the table.
"'Tis but white money," said the hag, her eyes sparkling as, with clutching hands, she swept the coins into her lap.
"Greedy Gled! if thou art faithful, the gold will come in bushels anon."
"On what ill errand come ye now? Is there any one to be poisoned--hah! any poor flower to be torn from its stem, and trod under foot when its perfume is gone?"
"Harkee! Lucky Gilruth," said the Lord, striking his clenched hand on the table; "thou knowest me well, I think."
"O would to Heaven I had never, never known thee!" said Beatrix, with a tearless sob. "I know little of thee that is good."
"Say forth, old Barebones--I care not. I am one----"
"Who never spared a man in his hatred or a woman in his lust! A renegade covenanter!--a relentless persecutor of the pious and the holy!--a perjured lover!--a faithless husband!--a false friend!--one to whom Lord Solis of old, and the Marquis de Laval, were as saints in comparison. Randal Clermont, thou art a fiend in the form of a man!"
"With a heigh lillilu and a how lo lan! ha! ha!" laughed Clermistonlee, shaking back his feathers and long cavalier locks, while regarding Beatrix with a sardonic glance, for her words stung him deeply. "And I know thee for one whom the tar-barrels and thumb-screws await, if ye prove false to me. Ay, woman, I doubt not my learned gossip Mersington would soon find the devil's mark on that poor hide of thine. But I came to arrange, not to quarrel with thee--ha! ha! I want my fortune read."
Beatrix gave him a long steady glance; her bleared eyes were glaring with insanity, and a certain degree of intoxication; but she quailed before the dark basilisk eye of her former lover, for the ferocity of her expression relaxed, and she burst into a horrid laugh.
"Thy fortune? ho! ho! I tell thee, Randal, that the blade is forged and tempered that will drink thy heart's blood!"