e
of uneasiness came over him: he coughed, he hemmed, in order to break
the death-like stillness in which he stood. He patted the horses, he
rubbed his hand down their backs, but felt considerable surprise and
terror on finding that they both trembled, and seemed by their snorting
and tremors to partake of his own sensations. Under such terrors there
is nothing that extinguishes a man's courage so much as the review of
an ill-spent life, or the reproaches of an evil conscience. Sir Thomas
Gourlay could not see and feel, for the moment, the criminal iniquity
of his black and ungodly ambition, and the crimes into which it involved
him. Still, the consciousness of the flagitious project in which he was
engaged against the unoffending son of his brother, the influence of the
hour, and the solitude in which he stood, together with the operation
upon his mind of some unaccountable fear apart from that of personal
violence--all, when united, threw him into a commotion that resulted
from such a dread as intimated that something supernatural must be near
him. He was seized by a violent shaking of the limbs, the perspiration
burst from every pore; and as he patted the horses a second time for
relief, he again perceived that their terrors were increasing and
keeping pace with his own. At length, his hair fairly stood, and his
excitement was nearly as high as excitement of such a merely ideal
character could go, when he thought he heard a step--a heavy, solemn,
unearthly step--that sounded as if there was something denouncing and
judicial in the terrible emphasis with which it went to his heart, or
rather to his conscience. Without having the power to restrain himself,
he followed with his eyes this symbolical tread as it seemed to
approach the coach door on the side at which he stood. This was the more
surprising and frightful, as, although he heard the tramp, yet he could
for the moment see nothing in the shape of either figure or form,
from which he could resolve what he had heard into a natural sound.
At length, as he stood almost dissolved in terror, he thought that
an indistinct, or rather an unsubstantial figure stood at the
carriage-door, looked in for a moment, and then bent his glance at him,
with a severe and stem expression; after which, it began to rub out or
efface a certain portion of the armorial bearings, which he had added
to his heraldic coat in right of his wife. The noise of the chaise
approaching now reached hi