DUNBLANE.
"For human bliss and woe in the frail thread
Of human life are all so closely twined,
That till the shears of Fate the texture shred,
The close succession cannot be disjoined,
Nor dare we from one hour judge that which comes behind."
_Harold the Dauntless_.
The information of Sauchie was all correct, save in that part which
referred to the coronation of Margaret, which James intended should
take place at the same time as his own, not in the little episcopal
city of Dunblane, but in the capital city of Edinburgh, amid all the
splendour with which he could invest it; and already the Lord High
Treasurer, Sir William Knollis, better known as Lord St. John of
Jerusalem, being Preceptor of the Scottish Knights of Rhodes, the
Lord Chancellor, the Secretary of State, and the Lords of the Privy
Council, were making the necessary arrangements for the great
ceremonial at Holyrood.
The king's influence, united to Barton's acknowledged worth and
landed possessions, operated so far on Lord Drummond, as to make him
sullenly acquiesce in the marriage of Euphemia to one whose betrothal
could not, in a Catholic age, be broken without incurring the penalty
of sin; and, in the same spirit, he permitted arrangements to be made
for Sir David Falconer, whom James called "the gentlest and the
bravest knight at court," wedding Sybilla; meanwhile the old lord
consoled himself for thus stooping to the royal will by reflecting
that he still had two other daughters growing up--Beatrice and
Elizabeth--who should be forced bongré malgré to marry the first
eligible earls upon whom he could lay the hands of a father-in-law.
The king's train was received with all honour by the Baron Bailie of
Dunblane, and Sir Edmund Hay of Melginch, the chamberlain of the
diocese, who marshalled them to the palace of the good old bishop,
James Chisholm, whose name must not be confounded with that of his
successor, William Chisholm, a base and irreverend prelate, who
robbed the see of its revenues to maintain his children, and
desecrated the episcopal palace by scenes of licentiousness.
This palace stood to the southward of the magnificent cathedral, on
the edge of the declivity which slopes down towards the river Allan.
It was surrounded by thick old copsewood and by striking and
picturesque scenery; but it has long since fallen into shapeless
ruin, and now only a few vestiges of its lower apartments can be
traced.
The four lovers were so happy that we shall not presume to intrude
upon them, or attempt to transfer to paper any description of their
joy, but will leave them to their quiet and dreamy rambles, arm in
arm, or hand in hand, in that deep and finely wooded glen below
Dunblane, where the precipices overhang the Allan, and the windings
of the dell give so many lovely glimpses of foliaged scenery; and to
their sport of shooting at the butts with feathered arrows, in the
smooth park without the old cathedral walls, where many hundred years
of careful pasturage and mowing had made the green grass as smooth as
velvet; for now it was never brushed by other feet than those of the
gliding deer or the lighter-footed hares and rabbits; and there the
young king, and even the kind bishop, with some of the prebends, drew
the bow to please the three beautiful Drummonds; and Margaret, with
her blonde hair and sweet blue eyes, was voted the best shot of them
all--for James and his two favourite subjects were too gallant to
beat her shooting, and the most reverend father, by Divine permission
Bishop of Dunblane, was somewhat too stout and pursy to draw a shaft
like her.
They were all happy, and pure joy beamed in their eyes; it glowed in
their young hearts and mantled in their cheeks.
Two alone were grave; viz., old Lord Drummond, because he was
somewhat perplexed, or felt that he cut rather a foolish figure, and
was about to have for sons-in-law two men on whom James dared not yet
bestow nobility for fear of raising the anger of older patentees; and
on the young king's brow a cloud was resting, for on the morrow he
was to receive from the Bishop's hand "the sackcloth shirt and iron
belt," which he was to wear as the self-imposed penance of filial
disobedience;
"While for his royal father's soul,
The chanters sung, the bells did toll;"
and kindly and consolingly the white-haired bishop sought to soothe
the sorrow and disperse the gloom which the young monarch strove in
vain to overcome.
Could it be that a mysterious presentiment of approaching evil was
hovering in his heart? In Scotland, we often hear of such
forebodings still.
On the day following the intended sentence of excommunication,
Margaret was to behold one sister wedded to Robert Barton and another
to David Falconer; and on that day the _Yellow Frigate_ and her
consorts would startle the broad blue Firth that rolls before Dundee
by a loud and merry salvo from their brass culverins and iron
arquebusses à croc.
Already had each beautiful bride playfully tried the espousal
ring--the emblem of eternity--upon her pretty finger--that third
finger of the left hand from which, according to an old superstition,
there ran one mysterious fibre directly to the heart; and now we may
inform our fair readers, whom such items may interest, that the said
rings were not the plain hoops used in our own day, but each was
massive and chased, inscribed by a holy legend, and having on it two
ruby hearts, surmounted by a little crown of diamonds, for such was
the fashion in the olden time.
And now, as the day on which the sisters were to receive communion at
mass in the cathedral, dawned in sunny glory and splendour, lighting
up the painted lattices, the grey walls, and green woods of the old
episcopal palace, and tinting with its brightest hues the rapid
waters of the Allan, the old bishop patted their silken tresses, and
called them his "good children," as they knelt to receive his morning
blessing in the dining-hall, reminding them with a smile, that "happy
was the bride whom the sun shone on, and that he hoped the god of day
would not rise less brightly on the morrow."
And they all smiled to each other timidly and fondly, for, alas! they
little knew that for some of them to-morrow was--eternity.
Margaret, the Queen of Scotland--for such indeed was she now--was to
receive the communion with her sisters; but Barton and Falconer
having, we may suppose, obtained it but recently, or for some other
reason now unknown, _did not_ share it with them, which will account
for their escaping the perilous web which English guile and Scottish
treason were weaving around them all.