Covenanters -- Fiction; Historical fiction; Scotland -- History -- Stuarts, to the Union, 1371-1707 -- Fiction
Having rested some time on the sea-shore, he rose and walked along the
toilsome shingle, scarcely noting which way he went--his thoughts being
busy with the martyrdom he had witnessed, flushing one moment with a
glorious indignation, and fainting the next with despondent reflections
on his own friendless state. For he looked upon himself as adrift on the
tides of the world, believing that his patron, the Earl of Glencairn,
would to a surety condemn his lack of fortitude in not enduring the
servitude of the Archbishop, after having been in so miraculous a manner
accepted into it, even as if Providence had made him a special
instrument to achieve the discoveries which the Lords of the
Congregation had then so much at heart. And while he was walking along
in this fluctuating mood, he came suddenly upon a man who was sitting,
as he had so shortly before been himself, sad and solitary, gazing on
the sea. The stranger, on hearing him approach, rose hastily, and was
moving quickly away; but my grandfather called to him to stop and not to
be afraid, for he would harm no one.
"I thought," said the melancholy man, "that all his Grace's retainers
were at the execution of the heretic."
There was something in the way in which he uttered the latter clause of
the sentence that seemed to my grandfather as if he would have made use
of better and fitter words, and therefore, to encourage him into
confidence, he replied,--
"I belong not to his Grace."
"How is it, then, that you wear his livery, and that I saw you, with Sir
David Hamilton, enter the garden of that misguided woman?"
He could proceed no farther, for his heart swelled, and his utterance
was for a while stifled, he being no other than the misfortunate Bailie
of Crail, whose light wife had sunk into the depravity of the
Archbishop's lemane. She had been beguiled away from him and her five
babies, their children, by the temptations of a Dominican, who, by habit
and repute, was pandarus to his Grace, and the poor man had come to try
if it was possible to wile her back.
My grandfather was melted with sorrow to see his great affection for the
unworthy concubine, calling to mind the scene of her harlotry and wanton
glances, and he reasoned with him on the great folly of vexing his
spirit for a woman so far lost to all shame and given over to iniquity.
But still the good man of Crail would not be persuaded, but used many
earnest entreaties that my grandfather would assist him to see his wife,
in order that he might remonstrate with her on the eternal perils in
which she had placed her precious soul.
My grandfather, though much moved by the importunity of that weak,
honest man, nevertheless withstood his entreaties, telling him that he
was minded to depart forthwith from St Andrews, and make the best of his
way back to Edinburgh, and so could embark in no undertaking whatever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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