Jane Seton; or, The King's Advocate: A Scottish Historical Romance
important matters my service has been forgotten! and thus that I can
still appear as a creditor, and request the fulfilment of your
promise."
"Full of shame for having so long forgotten it, I swear to grant
whatever you ask, that may lie in my power to bestow."
"Oh, my Lord Cardinal, I seek nothing for myself," said the poor
priest, glancing (like Sterne's Franciscan) at the sleeve of his
threadbare garment; "my wants are few, though my years are many, and
I have neither desire nor ambition, but in the service of our Master
who is in Heaven."
The old man paused, and the great prince of the church, surrounded by
wealth and luxury, grasping all but regal power, and loaded by the
rank and riches of his Scottish, his French, and Italian titles, felt
how great was the gulf between himself and this humble but purer
follower of the apostles.
"If in my power," said he, "thy boon is granted."
"I seek the pardon of my poor penitent," replied St. Bernard,
clasping his hands: "I seek the pardon of Lady Jane Seton."
The cardinal started.
"Impossible!" he replied, "for the life of this woman is not in my
hands."
"But it is in the hands of the king; and being so, is, I may say,
also in thine, my lord. Thou alone canst save her, for, selfish in
his grief, our good king has abandoned everything to his ministers."
"Forgiveness for her--a Seton--the daughter of a Douglas, and the
grandchild of old Greysteel! Friar, thou ravest! the thing is not to
be thought of; besides, from all my lord advocate has told me, she
must have been deeply guilty."
"Oh, good my lord cardinal, dost thou, in the greatness of thy mind,
conceive that such a crime as sorcery may be?"
"I do not--I believe too implicitly in the power of God to yield so
much to that of his fallen angel; and I believe, that as Calvinism
spreads in Scotland, so will this new terror of sorcery. I have not
studied the trial, but shall do so to-night, and with care."
"A thousand grateful thanks."
"Immersed as I am among the affairs of this troublesome state (for
its chancellorship costs me dear), and sworn as I am to extinguish by
fire and sword the heresies of Calvin, which are spreading like a
wildfire among our Scottish towns and glens, I can afford but little
time for the consideration of minor matters, such as this trial.
Thou art, indeed, an auld farrand buckie," added the cardinal, with a
smile; "and well hast thou played thy cards; so rest assured, that if
David Beaton can save thy penitent, with justice--_she is saved_."
Father St. Bernard's heart was too full to reply: he raised his mild
eyes to the ceiling, and crossed his wrinkled hands upon his breast.
"On Sunday first, I am to say a solemn mass for Queen Magdalene in my
cathedral church at St. Andrew's," resumed the cardinal. "Sorely I
regret that poor girl's death; but dost thou know that the Scottish
church had much to fear from her; for, reared and educated as she had
been by her almost heretic aunt, the Queen of Navarre, she was
inclined to view too leniently this clamour raised by the heretics
for liberty of conscience, as they are pleased to term their
abominable creed--a creed by which they make our blessed Gospels like
the bagpipe, on which every man may play a tune of his own devising.
On my way to St. Andrew's, I will visit the king at Falkland, and
this time, rest assured, my reverend friend, my promise shall not be
forgotten."
"Oh, my lord!" murmured the now happy old man; "your eminence
overwhelms me."
"There is now little time to lose. Young Balquhan and twenty
arquebusiers of the king's guard must accompany me, in addition to
the pikemen of my own; and the moment the pardon or order of release
(if I deem her worthy of it, and receive it) is expede, Leslie shall
return with it on the spur to Sir James of Cranstoun-Riddel;" and, as
a sign that the interview was over, the cardinal, with an air of
elegance and grace, which he possessed above all the courtiers of his
time, gave the priest his jewelled hand to kiss, and thankfully and
reverently this good old man, who was enough to be his father,
kneeled down and kissed it.
"A thousand blessings on your eminence! _Dominus vobiscum_," said
the priest.
"_Dominus vobiscum, et cum spiritu tuo_," said the cardinal, and
stretched out his hand to a silver bell, which he rang.
Hurrying out from an inner chamber, Lord Lindesay drew back the arras
which covered the doorway.
Then, as the priest with a joyous heart was about to retire, he was
appalled by the spectral figure of Redhall (who had the private
entrée of the cardinal's apartments at all hours), standing close
behind the thick, heavy tapestry.
He started hurriedly forward, and the friar saw but too well that he
had not only been listening, but had overheard, perhaps, the whole of
their conversation.
His aspect was fearful; remorse, terror, and despair had wrought
their worst upon him. His jaws had become haggard and his visage
pallid; but the priest thought that he read a gleam of hatred and
rage in his eyes as he passed him.
"If he has been listening, and should undo all I have done!" thought
St. Bernard, breathlessly, as he hurried down into the dark Wynd of
the Blackfriars; "but his eminence has promised, and blessed be him,
my poor little child is saved!"
Full of joy, and feeling as if a mountain had been removed from him,
the good old prebend knelt down in the dark and deserted street, and
baring his bald head, returned thanks to Heaven and his patron saint
for having inclined the lord chancellor to hear favourably the prayer
he had just preferred.
CHAPTER XLVI.
THIRST!
"'Twas thou, O love! whose dreaded shafts control,
The hind's rude heart, and tear the hero's soul;
Thou ruthless power, with bloodshed never cloyed,
'Twas thou thy lovely votary destroyed:
Thy thirst still burning for a deeper woe,
In vain for thee the tears of beauty flow."
_The Lusiad of_ CAMOENS.
Aware that he had been seen by the friar in the act of listening, the
lord advocate decided in a moment upon the course to pursue. He
resolved that the promised pardon should never reach Edinburgh; but
being too wary to make any reference to the conversation he had just
heard, after simply giving the great cardinal a paper concerning an
annual subsidy from the clergy, which was to be presented to James V.
at Falkland on the morrow, he retired, and hastened to his own house
in the Canongate, where, with the utmost impatience, he awaited the
return of Nichol Birrel, whom, with Dobbie and Sanders Screw, he had
sent on a devilishly contrived mission to the Castle of Edinburgh,
whither we shall return to observe them.
From his window Roland had seen them enter David's Tower by the iron
gate at the bottom of the stair, by which they ascended straight to
the chamber where Jane Seton was confined.
After the priest had left her, the latter had become more calm,
though St. Bernard had not held out to her the faintest hope of mercy
or compassion from those powers which had abandoned her to die, or of
rescue from that once terrible faction to which her family
belonged--that faction now so scattered, crushed, and broken.
In her prison this sad and lonely being had watched the woods and
water darkening far below her; had watched the stars as one by one
they sparkled out upon the night; and she envied the airy freedom of
the passing clouds as they rolled through the sky--the blue twilight
sky of a still and beautiful summer gloaming. In masses of fleecy
white on pale gold, as they were tinted by the rising moon, they
sailed on the soft west wind in a thousand changing forms.
The very weariness of long grief overcame her, and she lay down on
the humble pallet afforded her by the orders of the castellan, to
sleep--for she had not slumbered during many nights, and on this
night, like her thirst, her fatigue was excessive.
Her couch was a mere paillasse, with a pillow; for in everything she
was made to feel painfully that she was the--condemned witch!
The bread given her during the two past days had been unusually salt
and bitter; she endured great thirst; but the warder had removed the
humble vessel that contained the water for her use, and now, without
a drop to moisten her parched lips, she lay down to sleep. Her bread
had been purposely salted to excess, and thus, having been many hours
without a drop of water, her sufferings were greatly increased; and
when she slept there arose before her visions of streams pouring in
white foam, of verdant banks or moss-green rocks, of fountains that
gushed and sparkled in marble basins, which most tantalizingly
receded or vanished when joyfully she attempted to drink of them. At
other times her kind old mother or Roland Vipont, with their
well-remembered smiles of love, approached her with cups of water or
of wine; but these dear forms faded away when the longed-for beverage
touched her lips; and then she started and awoke to solace herself
with her bitter tears--the only solace of which the cruel authorities
could not deprive her.
She slept lightly, as a bird sleeps on its perch; but not so lightly
as to hear her prison door opened by the Messrs. Birrel, Dobbie, and
Screw, whose faces were made more villanous and sinister by the
yellow rays of an oil-lamp, which darted upwards upon them. Birrel's
visage, square and mastiff in aspect, livid in colour, and surrounded
by a forest of sable hair above and below; Dobbie, with the eyes and
moustaches of a cat; and Sanders Screw, though utterly destitute of
any such appendages to his mouth, exhibiting in his nut-cracker jaws
and bleared eyes a sardonic grin of cruelty and intoxication.
He carried a large Flemish jar, which, strange to say, was brimful of
pure cold _water_.
Birrel raised his lamp, the lurid flame of which made yet more livid
his yellow visage and ruffian eyes; and its sickly rays fell on the
face of Jane; but the calm and divine smile that played upon her thin
and parted lips, failed to scare from their purpose these demons,
hardened as they were in every species of judicial cruelty.
Jane was dreaming of her lover, and in her self-embodied thoughts
originated that beautiful smile.
Softly, but soundly, after all she had endured, this poor victim of
superstition and revenge was sleeping now, and dreaming fondly and
joyously--for in a dream every sensation is a thousand times more
acute than it could be in reality--dreaming of that long life which
was denied her, on this earth at least; she felt on her cheek the
kiss of her young and gallant lover; she saw his waving plume and his
doublet of cloth-of-gold; his voice was in her ear, and it murmured
of his faith and love, that, like her own, would never die.
Her lips unclosed--an exclamation of rapture would have escaped her,
when Birrel's iron fingers grasped her tender arm--and she awoke with
a start and a cry of despair.
"Gude e'en to ye, cummer Jean," said he, insolently; "byde ye wauken,
or fare ye waur; for gif ye sleep, see, madam the sorceress," and he
shook before her eyes the steel brod, or needle, which was the badge
of his hateful office.
Seated upon one side of her bed, Jane recoiled from these men, who
regarded her with eyes that to her seemed as those of rattlesnakes,
for they were pitiless in heart, and merciless as the waves of the
sea.
We know not if we possess the power to describe the passages of that
night in the vaulted chamber of David's Tower.
In the days of the witch-mania in Scotland it was the custom, at the
desire of the lord president of the college of justice, of the lord
advocate, of the sheriff, or baillie of baron, or regality, or
whoever had tried and condemned a sorceress to subject her (even