of ribbed arches, with which the devotion of elder times had secured
and protected its healing waters. These arches were now almost entirely
demolished, and the stones of which they were built were tumbled
into the well, as if for the purpose of choking up and destroying the
fountain, which, as it had shared in other days the honour of the saint,
was, in the present, doomed to partake his unpopularity. Part of the
roof had been pulled down from the house itself, and an attempt had
been made with crows and levers upon one of the angles, by which several
large corner-stones had been forced out of their place; but the solidity
of ancient mason-work had proved too great for the time or patience of
the assailants, and they had relinquished their task of destruction.
Such dilapidated buildings, after the lapse of years, during which
nature has gradually covered the effects of violence with creeping
plants, and with weather-stains, exhibit, amid their decay, a melancholy
beauty. But when the visible effects of violence appear raw and recent,
there is no feeling to mitigate the sense of devastation with which they
impress the spectators; and such was now the scene on which the youthful
page gazed, with the painful feelings it was qualified to excite.
When his first momentary surprise was over, Roland Graeme was at no loss
to conjecture the cause of these ravages. The destruction of the
Popish edifices did not take place at once throughout Scotland, but at
different times, and according to the spirit which actuated the
reformed clergy; some of whom instigated their hearers to these acts of
demolition, and others, with better taste and feeling, endeavoured to
protect the ancient shrines, while they desired to see them purified
from the objects which had attracted idolatrous devotion. From time to
time, therefore, the populace of the Scottish towns and villages,
when instigated either by their own feelings of abhorrence for Popish
superstition, or by the doctrines of the more zealous preachers, resumed
the work of destruction, and exercised it upon some sequestered church,
chapel, or cell, which had escaped the first burst of their indignation
against the religion of Rome. In many places, the vices of the Catholic
clergy, arising out of the wealth and the corruption of that tremendous
hierarchy, furnished too good an apology for wreaking vengeance upon
the splendid edifices which they inhabited; and of this an old Scottish
historian gives a remarkable instance.
“Why mourn ye,” said an aged matron, seeing the discontent of some of
the citizens, while a stately convent was burnt by the multitude,--“why
mourn ye for its destruction? If you knew half the flagitious wickedness
which has been perpetrated within that house, you would rather bless
the divine judgment, which permits not even the senseless walls that
screened such profligacy, any longer to cumber Christian ground.”
But although, in many instances, the destruction of the Roman Catholic
buildings might be, in the matron's way of judging, an act of justice,
and in others an act of policy, there is no doubt that the humour of
demolishing monuments of ancient piety and munificence, and that in a
poor country like Scotland, where there was no chance of their being
replaced, was both useless, mischievous, and barbarous.
In the present instance, the unpretending and quiet seclusion of the
monk of Saint Cuthbert's had hitherto saved him from the general
wreck; but it would seem ruin had now at length reached him. Anxious to
discover if he had at least escaped personal harm, Roland Graeme entered
the half ruined cell.
The interior of the building was in a state which fully justified the
opinion he had formed from its external injuries. The few rude utensils
of the solitary's hut were broken down, and lay scattered on the floor,
where it seemed as if a fire had been made with some of the fragments
to destroy the rest of his property, and to consume, in particular, the
rude old image of Saint Cuthbert, in its episcopal habit, which lay on
the hearth like Dagon of yore, shattered with the axe and scorched with
the flames, but only partially destroyed. In the little apartment which
served as a chapel, the altar was overthrown, and the four huge stones
of which it had been once composed lay scattered around the floor. The
large stone crucifix which occupied the niche behind the altar, and
fronted the supplicant while he paid his devotion there, had been pulled
down and dashed by its own weight into three fragments. There were marks
of sledge-hammers on each of these; yet the image had been saved from
utter demolition by the size and strength of the remaining fragments,
which, though much injured, retained enough of the original sculpture to
show what it had been intended to represent.
[Footnote: I may here observe, that this is entirely an ideal scene.
Saint Cuthbert, a person of established sanctity, had, no doubt, several
places of worship on the Borders, where he flourished whilst living;
but Tillmouth Chapel is the only one which bears some resemblance to
the hermitage described in the text. It has, indeed, a well, famous
for gratifying three wishes for every worshipper who shall quaff the
fountain with sufficient belief in its efficacy. At this spot the Saint
is said to have landed in his stone coffin, in which he sailed down the
Tweed from Melrose and here the stone coffin long lay, in evidence of
the fact. The late Sir Francis Blake Delaval is said to have taken the
exact measure of the coffin, and to have ascertained, by hydrostatic
principles, that it might have actually swum. A profane farmer in the
neighborhood announced his intention of converting this last bed of
the Saint into a trough for his swine; but the profanation was rendered
impossible, either by the Saint, or by some pious votary in his behalf,
for on the following morning the stone sarcophargus was found broken in
two fragments.
Tillmouth Chapel, with these points of resemblance, lies, however, in
exactly the opposite direction as regards Melrose, which the supposed
cell of St. Cuthbert is said to have borne towards Kennaquhair.]
Roland Graeme, secretly nursed in the tenets of Rome, saw with horror
the profanation of the most sacred emblem, according to his creed, of
our holy religion.
“It is the badge of our redemption,” he said, “which the felons have
dared to violate--would to God my weak strength were able to replace
it--my humble strength, to atone for the sacrilege!”
He stooped to the task he first meditated, and with a sudden, and to
himself almost an incredible exertion of power, he lifted up the one
extremity of the lower shaft of the cross, and rested it upon the edge
of the large stone which served for its pedestal. Encouraged by this
success, he applied his force to the other extremity, and, to his own
astonishment, succeeded so far as to erect the lower end of the limb
into the socket, out of which it had been forced, and to place this
fragment of the image upright.
While he was employed in this labour, or rather at the very moment when
he had accomplished the elevation of the fragment, a voice, in thrilling
and well-known accents, spoke behind him these words:--“Well done,
thou good and faithful servant! Thus would I again meet the child of my
love--the hope of my aged eyes.”
Roland turned round in astonishment, and the tall commanding form of
Magdalen Graeme stood beside him. She was arrayed in a sort of loose
habit, in form like that worn by penitents in Catholic countries, but
black in colour, and approaching as near to a pilgrim's cloak as it was
safe to wear in a country where the suspicion of Catholic devotion
in many places endangered the safety of those who were suspected of
attachment to the ancient faith. Roland Graeme threw himself at her
feet. She raised and embraced him, with affection indeed, but not
unmixed with gravity which amounted almost to sternness.
“Thou hast kept well,” she said, “the bird in thy bosom. [Footnote: An
expression used by Sir Ralph Percy, slain in the battle of Hedgly-moor
in 1464, when dying, to express his having preserved unstained his
fidelity to the house of Lancaster.] As a boy, as a youth, thou hast
held fast thy faith amongst heretics--thou hast kept thy secret and mine
own amongst thine enemies. I wept when I parted from you--I who seldom
weep, then shed tears, less for thy death than for thy spiritual
danger--I dared not even see thee to bid thee a last farewell--my grief,
my swelling grief, had betrayed me to these heretics. But thou hast been
faithful--down, down on thy knees before the holy sign, which evil men
injure and blaspheme; down, and praise saints and angels for the grace
they have done thee, in preserving thee from the leprous plague which
cleaves to the house in which thou wert nurtured.”
“If, my mother--so I must ever call you” replied Graeme,--“if I am
returned such as thou wouldst wish me, thou must thank the care of the
pious father Ambrose, whose instructions confirmed your early precepts,
and taught me at once to be faithful and to be silent.”
“Be he blessed for it,” said she; “blessed in the cell and in the field,
in the pulpit and at the altar--the saints rain blessings on him!--they
are just, and employ his pious care to counteract the evils which his
detested brother works against the realm and the church,--but he knew
not of thy lineage?”
“I could not myself tell him that,” answered Roland. “I knew but darkly
from your words, that Sir Halbert Glendinning holds mine inheritance,
and that I am of blood as noble as runs in the veins of any Scottish
Baron--these are things not to be forgotten, but for the explanation I
must now look to you.”
“And when time suits, thou shalt not look for it in vain. But men say,
my son, that thou art bold and sudden; and those who bear such tempers
are not lightly to be trusted with what will strongly move them.”
“Say rather, my mother,” returned Roland Graeme, “that I am laggard and
cold-blooded--what patience or endurance can you require of which _he_
is not capable, who for years has heard his religion ridiculed and
insulted, yet failed to plunge his dagger into the blasphemer's bosom!”
“Be contented, my child,” replied Magdalen Graeme; “the time, which then
and even now demands patience, will soon ripen to that of effort and
action--great events are on the wing, and thou,--thou shalt have thy
share in advancing them. Thou hast relinquished the service of the Lady
of Avenel?”
“I have been dismissed from it, my mother--I have lived to be dismissed,
as if I were the meanest of the train.”
“It is the better, my child,” replied she; “thy mind will be the more
hardened to undertake that which must be performed.”
“Let it be nothing, then, against the Lady of Avenel,” said the page,
“as thy look and words seem to imply. I have eaten her bread--I have
experienced her favour--I will neither injure nor betray her.”
“Of that hereafter, my son,” said she; “but learn this, that it is not
for thee to capitulate in thy duty, and to say this will I do, and that
will I leave undone--No, Roland! God and man will no longer abide the
wickedness of this generation. Seest thou these fragments--knowest
thou what they represent?--and canst thou think it is for thee to make
distinctions amongst a race so accursed by Heaven, that they renounce,
violate, blaspheme, and destroy, whatsoever we are commanded to believe
in, whatsoever we are commanded to reverence?”
As she spoke, she bent her head towards the broken image, with a
countenance in which strong resentment and zeal were mingled with an
expression of ecstatic devotion; she raised her left hand aloft as
in the act of making a vow, and thus proceeded; “Bear witness for me,
blessed symbol of our salvation, bear witness, holy saint, within whose
violated temple we stand, that as it is not for vengeance of my own
that my hate pursues these people, so neither, for any favour or earthly
affection towards any amongst them, will I withdraw my hand from the
plough, when it shall pass through the devoted furrow! Bear witness,
holy saint, once thyself a wanderer and fugitive as we are now--bear
witness, Mother of Mercy, Queen of Heaven--bear witness, saints and
angels!”
In this high train of enthusiasm, she stood, raising her eyes through
the fractured roof of the vault, to the stars which now began to twinkle
through the pale twilight, while the long gray tresses which hung
down over her shoulders waved in the night-breeze, which the chasm and
fractured windows admitted freely.
Roland Graeme was too much awed by early habits, as well as by the
mysterious import of her words, to ask for farther explanation of the
purpose she obscurely hinted at. Nor did she farther press him on the
subject; for, having concluded her prayer or obtestation, by clasping
her hands together with solemnity, and then signing herself with the
cross, she again addressed her grandson, in a tone more adapted to the
ordinary business of life.
“Thou must hence,” she said, “Roland, thou must hence, but not till
morning--And now, how wilt thou shift for thy night's quarters?--thou
hast been more softly bred than when we were companions in the misty
hills of Cumberland and Liddesdale.”
“I have at least preserved, my good mother, the habits which I then
learned--can lie hard, feed sparingly, and think it no hardship. Since I
was a wanderer with thee on the hills, I have been a hunter, and fisher,
and fowler, and each of these is accustomed to sleep freely in a worse
shelter than sacrilege has left us here.”
“Than sacrilege has left us here!” said the matron, repeating his words,
and pausing on them. “Most true, my son; and God's faithful children are
now worst sheltered, when they lodge in God's own house and the demesne
of his blessed saints. We shall sleep cold here, under the nightwind,
which whistles through the breaches which heresy has made. They shall
lie warmer who made them--ay, and through a long hereafter.”
Notwithstanding the wild and singular expression of this female, she
appeared to retain towards Roland Graeme, in a strong degree, that
affectionate and sedulous love which women bear to their nurslings,
and the children dependent on their care. It seemed as if she would not
permit him to do aught for himself which in former days her attention
had been used to do for him, and that she considered the tall stripling
before her as being equally dependent on her careful attention as
when he was the orphan child, who had owed all to her affectionate
solicitude.
“What hast thou to eat now?” she said, as, leaving the chapel, they went
into the deserted habitation of the priest; “or what means of kindling
a fire, to defend thee from this raw and inclement air? Poor child! thou
hast made slight provision for a long journey; nor hast thou skill to
help thyself by wit, when means are scanty. But Our Lady has placed by
thy side one to whom want, in all its forms, is as familiar as plenty
and splendour have formerly been. And with want, Roland, come the arts
of which she is the inventor.”
With an active and officious diligence, which strangely contrasted with
her late abstracted and high tone of Catholic devotion, she set about
her domestic arrangements for the evening. A pouch, which was hidden
under her garment, produced a flint and steel, and from the scattered
fragments around (those pertaining to the image of Saint Cuthbert
scrupulously excepted) she obtained splinters sufficient to raise a
sparkling and cheerful fire on the hearth of the deserted cell.
“And now,” she said, “for needful food.”
“Think not of it, mother,” said Roland, “unless you yourself feel
hunger. It is a little thing for me to endure a night's abstinence, and
a small atonement for the necessary transgression of the rules of the
Church upon which I was compelled during my stay in the castle.”
“Hunger for myself!” answered the matron--“Know, youth, that a mother
knows not hunger till that of her child is satisfied.” And with
affectionate inconsistency, totally different from her usual manner, she
added, “Roland, you must not fast; you have dispensation; you are young,
and to youth food and sleep are necessaries not to be dispensed with.
Husband your strength, my child,--your sovereign, your religion, your
country, require it. Let age macerate by fast and vigil a body which can
only suffer; let youth, in these active times, nourish the limbs and the
strength which action requires.”
While she thus spoke, the scrip, which had produced the means of
striking fire, furnished provision for a meal; of which she herself
scarce partook, but anxiously watched her charge, taking a pleasure,
resembling that of an epicure, in each morsel which he swallowed with a
youthful appetite which abstinence had rendered unusually sharp. Roland
readily obeyed her recommendations, and ate the food which she so
affectionately and earnestly placed before him. But she shook her head
when invited by him in return to partake of the refreshment her own
cares had furnished; and when his solicitude became more pressing, she
refused him in a loftier tone of rejection.
“Young man,” she said, “you know not to whom or of what you speak. They
to whom Heaven declares its purpose must merit its communication by
mortifying the senses; they have that within which requires not the
superfluity of earthly nutriment, which is necessary to those who are
without the sphere of the Vision. To them the watch spent in prayer is
a refreshing slumber, and the sense of doing the will of Heaven is a
richer banquet than the tables of monarchs can spread before them!--But
do thou sleep soft, my son,” she said, relapsing from the tone of
fanaticism into that of maternal affection and tenderness; “do thou
sleep sound while life is but young with thee, and the cares of the day
can be drowned in the slumbers of the evening. Different is thy duty and
mine, and as different the means by which we must qualify and strengthen
ourselves to perform it. From thee is demanded strength of body--from
me, strength of soul.”
When she thus spoke, she prepared with ready address a pallet-couch,
composed partly of the dried leaves which had once furnished a bed to
the solitary, and the guests who occasionally received his hospitality,
and which, neglected by the destroyers of his humble cell, had remained
little disturbed in the corner allotted for them. To these her care
added some of the vestures which lay torn and scattered on the floor.
With a zealous hand she selected all such as appeared to have made
any part of the sacerdotal vestments, laying them aside as sacred
from ordinary purposes, and with the rest she made, with dexterous
promptness, such a bed as a weary man might willingly stretch himself
on; and during the time she was preparing it, rejected, even with
acrimony, any attempt which the youth made to assist her, or any
entreaty which he urged, that she would accept of the place of rest for
her own use. “Sleep thou,” said she, “Roland Graeme, sleep thou--the
persecuted, the disinherited orphan--the son of an ill-fated
mother--sleep thou! I go to pray in the chapel beside thee.”
The manner was too enthusiastically earnest, too obstinately firm, to
permit Roland Graeme to dispute her will any farther. Yet he felt some
shame in giving way to it. It seemed as if she had forgotten the years
that had passed away since their parting; and expected to meet, in the
tall, indulged, and wilful youth, whom she had recovered, the passive
obedience of the child whom she had left in the Castle of Avenel. This
did not fail to hurt her grandson's characteristic and constitutional
pride. He obeyed, indeed, awed into submission by the sudden recurrence
of former subordination, and by feelings of affection and gratitude.
Still, however, he felt the yoke.
“Have I relinquished the hawk and the hound,” he said, “to become the
pupil of her pleasure, as if I were still a child?--I, whom even my
envious mates allowed to be superior in those exercises which they took
most pains to acquire, and which came to me naturally, as if a knowledge
of them had been my birthright? This may not, and must not be. I will be
no reclaimed sparrow-hawk, who is carried hooded on a woman's wrist,
and has his quarry only shown to him when his eyes are uncovered for his
flight. I will know her purpose ere it is proposed to me to aid it.”
These, and other thoughts, streamed through the mind of Roland Graeme;
and although wearied with the fatigues of the day, it was long ere he
could compose himself to rest.
Chapter the Ninth.
Kneel with me--swear it--'tis not in words I trust,
Save when they're fenced with an appeal to Heaven.
OLD PLAY
After passing the night in that sound sleep for which agitation and
fatigue had prepared him, Roland was awakened by the fresh morning
air, and by the beams of the rising sun. His first feeling was that of
surprise; for, instead of looking forth from a turret window on the
Lake of Avenel, which was the prospect his former apartment afforded,
an unlatticed aperture gave him the view of the demolished garden of the
banished anchorite. He sat up on his couch of leaves, and arranged in
his memory, not without wonder, the singular events of the preceding
day, which appeared the more surprising the more he considered them.
He had lost the protectress of his youth, and, in the same day, he
had recovered the guide and guardian of his childhood. The former
deprivation he felt ought to be matter of unceasing regret, and
it seemed as if the latter could hardly be the subject of unmixed
self-congratulation. He remembered this person, who had stood to him in
the relation of a mother, as equally affectionate in her attention, and
absolute in her authority. A singular mixture of love and fear attended
upon his early remembrances as they were connected with her; and the
fear that she might desire to resume the same absolute control over
his motions--a fear which her conduct of yesterday did not tend much to
dissipate--weighed heavily against the joy of this second meeting.
“She cannot mean,” said his rising pride, “to lead and direct me as
a pupil, when I am at the age of judging of my own actions?--this she
cannot mean, or meaning it, will feel herself strangely deceived.”
A sense of gratitude towards the person against whom his heart thus
rebelled, checked his course of feeling. He resisted the thoughts which
involuntarily arose in his mind, as he would have resisted an actual
instigation of the foul fiend; and, to aid him in his struggle, he felt
for his beads. But, in his hasty departure from the Castle of Avenel, he
had forgotten and left them behind him.
“This is yet worse,” he said; “but two things I learned of her under the
most deadly charge of secrecy--to tell my beads, and to conceal that I
did so; and I have kept my word till now; and when she shall ask me
for the rosary, I must say I have forgotten it! Do I deserve she should
believe me when. I say I have kept the secret of my faith, when I set so
light by its symbol?”
He paced the floor in anxious agitation. In fact, his attachment to
his faith was of a nature very different from that which animated the
enthusiastic matron, but which, notwithstanding, it would have been his
last thought to relinquish.