 the deserted hall, which now
appeared doubly lonely from the cessation of that clamour to which it had so
lately echoed. But its space was peopled by phantoms, which the imagination of
the young heir conjured up before him - the tarnished honour and degraded
fortunes of his house, the destruction of his own hopes, and the triumph of that
family by whom they had been ruined. To a mind naturally of a gloomy cast, here
was ample room for meditation, and the musings of young Ravenswood were deep and
unwitnessed.
    The peasant, who shows the ruins of the tower, which still crown the
beetling cliff and behold the war of the waves, though no more tenanted save by
the sea-mew and cormorant, even yet affirms, that on this fatal night the Master
of Ravenswood, by the bitter exclamations of his despair, evoked some evil
fiend, under whose malignant influence the future tissue of incidents was woven.
Alas! what fiend can suggest more desperate counsels, than those adopted under
the guidance of our own violent and unresisted passions?
 

                                 Chapter Second

 Over Gods forbode, then said the King,
 That thou shouldst shoot at me.
                                          William Bell, Clim o' the Cleugh, etc.
 
On the morning after the funeral, the legal officer, whose authority had been
found insufficient to effect an interruption of the funeral solemnities of the
late Lord Ravenswood, hastened to state before the Keeper the resistance which
he had met with in the execution of his office.
    The statesman was seated in a spacious library, once a banqueting-room in
the old Castle of Ravenswood, as was evident from the armorial insignia still
displayed on the carved roof, which was vaulted with Spanish chestnut, and on
the stained glass of the casement, through which gleamed a dim yet rich light,
on the long rows of shelves, bending under the weight of legal commentators and
monkish historians, whose ponderous volumes formed the chief and most valued
contents of a Scottish historian of the period. On the massive oaken table and
reading-desk lay a confused mass of letters, petitions, and parchments; to toil
amongst which was the pleasure at once and the plague of Sir William Ashton's
life. His appearance was grave and even noble, well becoming one who held a high
office in the state; and it was not, save after long and intimate conversation
with him upon topics of pressing and personal interest, that a stranger could
have discovered something vacillating and uncertain in his resolutions; an
infirmity of purpose, arising from a cautious and timid disposition, which, as
he was conscious of its internal influence on his mind,
