CHAPTER VI.

THE OLD TOLBOOTH.

Whether I was brought into this world by the usual human helps and means, or was a special creation, might admit of some controversy, as I have never known the name of parent or of kindred.--THE IMPROVISITORE.

Many of the citizens of Edinburgh may remember the old Bank close, and the edifice about to be described. On the west side of that narrow street, which descended abruptly on the southern side of the city's central hill, stood in former days a house of massive construction and sombre aspect. Its walls were enormously thick and elaborately jointed; its passages narrow, dark, and devious; its stairs ascended and descended in secret corners, and one led to the paved bartizan, which formed the roof. Many of its gloomy chambers were vaulted. Over its small and heavy doorway appeared the date 1569, encrusted by smoke and worn with time. The whole aspect of the edifice was peculiarly dismal; the walls were black as if coated over with soot, the windows were thickly grated with rusted iron stanchells, and sunk in massive frames, the little panes were obscured by the dust and cobwebs of years.

It was the ancient prison of the city. In older days it had been built by a rich citizen named Gourlay, and had held within its walls the ambassadors of England and France. From its strength it had been converted into a Tolbooth, and was used as such until the time of the Solemn League and Covenant, when the spacious and more famous prison was adopted for that purpose; but the older, darker, more obscure, and more horrid place of confinement was still used at this time.

A party of the ancient City Guard, armed with swords and Lochaber axes, buff coats, and steel bonnets, occupied one of the lower apartments entering from the turnpike stair, at the foot of which stood a sentinel with his axe, before the door, which though small, was a solid mass of iron-studded oak, bolts and long bars.

In a small but desolate chamber of this striking old edifice--the same in which the hapless Earl of Argyle passed the night of the 29th June, 1685, his last in the land of the living--Walter Fenton was confined a prisoner, while the Reverend Mr. Ichabod Bummel, Mr. Drouthy the butler, and other servitors of Lady Bruntisfield, were in close durance in the greater or upper Tolbooth. The roof, the walls, and the floor of this squalid apartment were all of squared stones, stained with damp and scrawled over with hideous visages, pious sentences, and reckless obscenity. Its only window was thickly grated within and without, and there in the sickly light the busy spiders spun their webs from bar to bar in undisturbed industry. It opened to a narrow, dark, and steep Close of dreary aspect; the opposite houses were only one yard distant, and ten stories high; the alley was like a chasm or fissure; a single ray of sunlight streamed down it, and penetrating the cobwebs and dust of the prison window, radiated through its deep embrasure, and threw the iron gratings in strong shadow on the paved floor. Though the day was a chill one, in March, there was no fire under the small archway, where one should have been, and the only articles of furniture were a coarse and heavy table like a carpenter's bench, a miserable palliasse on a truckle bedstead, and a water flagon of Flemish pewter. One or two rusty chains hung from enormous blocks in the dirty walls, for the more secure confinement of prisoners who might be more than usually dangerous or refractory, and the whole tout ensemble of the chamber when viewed by the dim and fast-fading light of the evening was cheerless, desolate, and disgusting.

The day had passed away, and now, divested of his gay accoutrements, and clad in a plain unlaced frock of grey cloth, the young prisoner awaited impatiently, perhaps apprehensively, the hour that would bring him before that terrible council whose lawless will was nevertheless the law of the land. Sunk in moody reverie, he remained with his arms folded, and his head sunk forward on his breast.

The shadow of the grating on the floor grew less and less distinct, for as the light faded, his vaulted prison became darker, until all became blackness around him. Anon the pallid moon rose slowly into its place, and from the blue southern sky poured a cold but steady flood of silver light into the cheerless room, and again, for a time, the shadow of the massive grating was thrown on the discoloured floor. All around it was involved in obscurity, from amid which the damp spots on the walls seemed like great and hideous visages, mocking and staring at the captive.

Bitter were the thoughts, and sad the memories that thronged fast upon the mind of Walter Fenton; his dark eyes were lit, his lip compressed, but there were none to behold the changes; his handsome features were alternately clouded by chagrin, contracted by anger, and softened by love. Though ever proud in spirit, and fired by an inborn nobility of soul, never until now did he feel so keenly the dependence of his situation, or so fierce a longing for an opportunity when by one brilliant act of heroism and courage, he might place himself for ever above his fortune, or--die. And Lilian! O it was the thought of her alone that raised these vivid aspirations to their utmost pitch; but his heart sank, and even hope--the lover's last rallying point--faded away when he pictured the difference of their fortunes and positions in life. Scotland was then a country where pride of birth was carried to excess; and a remnant of that feeling still exists among us. He reflected that he was poor and nameless, compelled from infancy to eat the bread of dependence and mortification, and now in manhood, having no other estate than his sword and a ring, which, as he had often told Lilian with a smile (and he knew not how prophetically he spoke) "contained the secret of his life:" she the representative of a long line of illustrious barons, whose shields had shewn their blazons on the fields of Bannockburn, Sark, and Arkinholme, the inheritrix of their honours, their pride, and their possessions. Poor Walter! but he was too thoroughly in love to lose courage altogether.

As a boy, he had sighed for Lilian, and he felt his enthusiasm kindled by her gentleness and infantile beauty, for then his heart knew not the great gulf which a few years would open up between them. The ardour of his temperament made him now feel alternately despair and hope--but the latter feeling predominated, for though the clergy railed at wealth and all the good things of this life, and took peculiar care to enjoy a good share thereof--the world was not so intensely selfish then as it is now, for a high spirit and a bold heart, when united to a gallant bearing, a velvet cloak, a tall feather, and a long sword, were valued more than an ample purse by the young ladies of that age, who were quite used to find in their ponderous folio romances, how beautiful and disinterested queens and princesses bestowed their hands, hearts, and kingdoms on those valiant knights-errant and penniless cavaliers, who alone, or by the aid of a single faithful squire, freed them from enchanted castles, and slew the wicked enchanters, giants, gnomes, and fire-vomiting dragons who had persecuted them from childhood.

To resume: poor Walter was intensely sad, for deeply at that moment he experienced the desolate feeling, that he was utterly alone in this wide world, and that within all its ample space there existed not one being with whom he could claim kindred. He felt that it was all a blank, a void to him; but his thoughts went back to those days when the suppression of the rising at Bothwell, struck terror and despair into the hearts of the Presbyterians, and filled the dungeons of the Scottish castles, and the Tolbooths of the cities with the much-enduring adherents of the Covenant, beneath the banner of which his father was supposed to have died with his sword in his hand--so with her dying lips had his mother told him, and his heart swelled and his eye moistened, as he recalled the time, the place, and her tremulous accents, with a vivid distinctness that wrung his breast with the tenderest sorrow, even after the lapse of so many years.

During the summer of 1679 those citizens of Edinburgh, whose mansions commanded a view of the Grey friars kirkyard, beheld from their windows a daily scene of suffering such as had never before been seen in Scotland.

This ancient burial-place lies to the south of the long ridge occupied by the ancient city; it is spacious, irregular, and surrounded by magnificent tombs, many of them being of great antiquity, and marking the last resting-places of those who were eminent for their virtues and talents, or distinguished by their birth. It is a melancholy place withal. For three hundred years never a day has passed without many persons being interred there; and the hideous clay, the yellow and many-coloured loam, that had once lived and breathed, and loved and spoken, has now risen several feet above the adjacent street, against the walls of the great old church in the centre, and has buried the basements of the quaint and dark monuments that surround it. The inscriptions and grotesque carving of the latter, have long since been encrusted and blackened by the smoke of the city, or worn and obliterated by the corroding and fetid atmosphere of the great grave-yard. There is not a spot in all the Lothians where the broad-leaved docken, the rank dog-grass, the long black nettle, and other weeds grow so luxuriantly, for terrible is the mass of human corruption, for ever festering and decaying beneath the verdant turf.

In the year before mentioned, this ancient city of the dead was crowded to excess with those unhappy non-conformists whom the prisons could not contain, for already were their gloomy dungeons and squalid chambers filled with the poor, the miserable, and devoted Covenanters. Strong guards and chains of sentinels watched by day and night the walls of the burial-ground; and then the buff-coated dragoon, with his broadsword and carbine, and the smart musqueteer, with his dagger and matchlock, were ever on the alert to deal instant death as the penalty of any attempt to escape. The rising at Bothwell had been quenched in blood; and these unhappy people had been collected--principally from Bathgate--by the cavalry employed in riding down the country, and being driven like a herd of cattle to the capital, were penned up in the old churchyard. And there, for months, they lay in hundreds, exposed to the scorching glare of the sun by day, and the chill dew by night--the rain and the wind and the storm! God's creatures, formed in his own image, reduced to the level of the hare and the fox, with no other canopy than the changing sky, and no other bed than the rank grass, reeds, and nettles, that sprung in such hideous luxuriance from the fetid graves beneath them.

It was a sorrowful sight; for there was the strong and athletic peasant, with his true Scottish heart of stubborn pride and rectitude, his weak and tender wife with her little infants, his aged and infirm parents. Their miseries increasing as day by day their numbers diminished, and other burial-mounds, fresh and earthy, rose amid the hollow-eyed survivors to mark the last homes of other martyrs in the cause of "the oppressed Kirk and broken Covenant." And all this terrible amount of mental misery and bodily suffering was accumulated within the walls of the capital, amid the noisy and busy streets of a densely peopled city--and for what? Religion--religion, under whose wide mantle so many thousand atrocities have been committed by men of every creed and age; and because these poor peasants had resolved to worship God after the spirit of their own hearts, and the fashion of their fathers.

When the Duke of Albany and York (afterwards James VII.) came to Edinburgh, the persecution was not continued with such rigour; but the progress of time never overcame the resolution of the covenanters, though many noble families were reduced to poverty, exile, and ruin, while their brave and moral tenantry suffered famine, torture, imprisonment, and every severity that tyrannical misgovernment could inflict, until the Presbyterians were driven to the verge of despair; intrigues with the Prince of Orange were set on foot, and for some years a storm had been gathering, which, in the shape of a Dutch invasion, was soon to burst over the whole of Britain.

Walter's memory went back to those days, when, amid the tombs and graves of that old kirk-yard, he had nestled, a little and wailing child, on the bosom of his mother, who, imprisoned there among the "common herd," had soon sunk under the combined effects of exposure, starvation, degradation, and sorrow; and he remembered when coiled up within her mantle and plaid, how he hid his little face in her fair neck, trembling with cold and fear in dreary nights, when the moon streamed its light between the flying clouds upon the vast and desolate church and its thick grave-mounds, with the long reedy grass waving on their solemn and melancholy ridges.

A mystery hung over the fortune of Walter Fenton. Of his family he knew nothing further than that his mother's name was Fenton, and his own was Walter, for so she had been wont to call him. Of his father he knew nothing, save that he had never been seen since the cavalry of Claverhouse swept over the Bridge of Bothwell, scattering its defenders in death and defeat. He had heard that his father there held high command, but was supposed to have perished either in the furious _mêlée_ on the bridge, or in the stream beneath it. Concealing her rank in the disguise of a peasant, his mother had been found in the vicinity of the battle-field, was arrested as a suspected person, sent to Edinburgh, and imprisoned with other unfortunates in the old church-yard.

Poor Walter used to remember with pleasure that they had always remained aloof from the other prisoners, and were treated by them with marked respect. Their usual shelter was under the great mausoleum of the Barons of Coates, the quaint devices and antique sculpture of which had often raised his childish fear and wonder; he recalled through the struggling and misty perceptions of infancy, how day by day her fair features became paler and more attenuated, her eye more sunken and ghastly, her voice more tremulous and weak, and her strength even less than his own; for (he had heard the soldiers say) she had been a tenderly nurtured and fragile creature, unable to endure the hardships to which she was subjected; and so she perished among the first that died there.

One morning the little boy raised his head from the coarse plaid which on the previous night her feeble hands had wrapped around him, and called as usual for her daily kiss; he twisted his dimpled fingers in the masses of her silky hair, and laid his smiling face to hers--it was cold as the marble tomb beside them; he shrank back, and again called upon her, but her still lips gave no reply; he stirred her--she did not move. Then, struck by the peculiar, the terrible aspect of her pale and once beautiful face, the ghastly eyes and relaxed jaw, the child screamed aloud on the mother that heard him no more. He dreaded alike to remain or to fly; for, alas! there was no other in whose arms he could find a refuge.

A soldier approached. He was a white-haired veteran, who had looked on many a battle-field, and speaking kindly to the desolate child, he gently stirred the dead woman with his halberd.

"Is this thy mother, my puir bairn?" said he.

The child answered only by his tears, and hid his face in the grass.

"Come away with me, my little mannikin," continued the soldier, "for thy mother hath gone to a better and bonnier place than this."

"Take me there too," sobbed the child, clinging to the soldier's hand; "oh, take me there too."

"By my faith, little one, 'tis a march I am not prepared for yet--but our parson will tell you all about it. Tush! I know the flams of the drum better than how to expound the text; so come away, my puir bairn; thy mother, God rest her, is in good hands, I warrant. Come away; and rot me, if thou shalt want while old Willie Wemyss of the Scots' Musqueteers, hath a bodle in his pouch, or a bannock in his havresack."

By the good-hearted soldier he was carried away in a paroxysm of childish grief and terror; and he saw his mother no more.

By the beauty of her person, the exceeding whiteness of her hands, and a very valuable ring found with her, she was supposed to be of higher rank than her peasant's attire indicated; and those apparent proofs of a superior birth, the soldiers never omitted an opportunity of impressing upon Walter as he grew older; and cited innumerable Low Country legends and old Scottish traditions, wherein certain heroes just so circumstanced, had become great personages in the end; and Walter was taught to consider that there was no reason why he should be an exception. But _who_ his mother was, had unfortunately remained locked in her own breast; whether from excessive debility and broken spirit she lacked strength to communicate with the other captives, or whether she feared to do so, could not be known now; her secret was buried with her, and thus a mystery was thrown over the fortune of the little boy, which through life caused him to be somewhat of a moody and reflective nature.

William Wemyss, a veteran serjeant of Dunbarton's musqueteers, became his patron and protector; and a love and friendship sprang up between them, for the orphan had none other to cling to. Wemyss often led him to the old churchyard, and showed him the grave where his mother lay--where the soldiers had interred her; and there little Walter, overcome by the mystery that involved his fate, and the loneliness of his heart, wept bitterly; for the soldier, though meaning well, was rather like one of Job's comforters, and painted his dependance in such strong colours, and reminded him how narrowly he had escaped being hanged or banished as "a covenanter's spawn," that the heart of the poor boy swelled at times almost to breaking. Then the soldier would desire him to pray for his mother, and made him repeat a curious but earnest prayer full of quaint military technicalities, in which the good old halberdier saw nothing either unusual or outré. Often little Fenton came alone to seek that well-known grave, to linger and to sit beside it, for it was the only part of all broad Scotland that his soul clung to. The weeds were now matted over it, and the waving nettles half hid the humble stone, which with his own hands the kind soldier had placed there. Walter always cleared away those luxuriant weeds, and though they stung his hands, he felt them not. It was a nameless grave too, for the real name of her who slept within it was unknown to him; and the desolate child often stretched himself down on the turf, burying his face in the long grass, and weeping, as he had done in infancy on the poor bosom that mouldered beneath, retraced in memory, days of wandering and misfortune, of danger and sorrow, which he could not comprehend. Time, and that lightness of heart which is incident to youth, enabled him at last to view the grave with composure; but he sought it not the less, until after his return from Sedgemoor; he hastened to the well-known place, but, alas! the grave had been violated, and the charm of grief was broken for ever. _Another_ had been buried there; the earth was freshly heaped up; and he rushed away, to return no more.

From childhood to youth the old Serjeant was his only protector: though poor, he was a kind and sincere one; and the little boy became the pet of the musqueteers.

A child, a dog, or a monkey is always an object of regard to an old soldier or sailor; for the human heart must love something.

Little Walter carried the halberdier's can of egg-flip when he mounted guard, learned to make up bandoliers of powder, polish a corslet, to rattle dice on a drumhead, and to beat on the drum itself; to fight with rapier and dagger; to handle a case of falchions like any sword-player; and became an adept at every game of chance, from kingly chess, to homely touch-and-take. He learned to drink "Confusion to the Covenant," in potent usquebaugh without winking once, and swear a few cavalier-like oaths. Like all such pets, he was often boxed severely, and roundly cursed too, at the caprice of his numerous masters, until the poor boy would have been altogether lost, his ideas corrupted, and his manners tainted by the roughness of camp and garrison, had not his humble patron been ordered away on the Tangier expedition; and being unable to take his little protégé with him, bethought him of craving the bounty of his commander's wife, the Countess of Dunbarton, a beautiful young English woman, who was the belle of the capital and the idol of the Scottish cavaliers. Struck with the soldier's story, envying his generosity, pitying the little boy, and pleased with his candour and beauty, she immediately took him under protection, adopting him as her page; and never was there seen a handsomer youth than Walter Fenton, when his coarse attire (a cast doublet of the serjeant) was exchanged for a coat of white velvet slashed with red and laced with gold, breeches and stockings of silk, a sash, a velvet cloak, and silver-hilted poniard; and his dark-brown hair curled and perfumed by Master Peter Pouncet, the famous frizzeur in the Bow. He parted in a flood of tears from his old patron, who slipped into his pocket a purse the Countess had bestowed on himself, drew his leather glove across his eyes, and hurried away.

At Lady Dunbarton's he had often seen Lilian Napier; she was then a little girl, and always accompanied her tall and stately relative in the vast old rumbling coach, with its two footmen behind and outriders in front, armed with sword and carbine; for the noble dame set forth in great state on all visits of ceremony. Lady Grizel's majestic aspect and frigid stateliness scared and awed the little footpage; but the prattle of the fair-haired Lilian soothed and charmed him, and he soon learned to love the little girl, to call her his sister, to be joyous when she came, and to be sad when she departed.

Young Walter, from his well-knit figure, and a determined aspect which he had acquired by his camp education, was as great a favourite among the starched little damoiselles of the Countess's withdrawing-room, as his clenched fist and bent brows made him a terror at times to the little cavaliers whose jealousy he excited; and his military preceptors (the old Royals, then battling and broiling at Tangiers) had inculcated a pugnacity of disposition that sometimes was very troublesome; and he once proceeded so far as to d--n the old Dowager of Drumsturdy pretty roundly, and draw his poniard on the young lord her son, who, with his companions, had mocked him as "a covenanter's brat." The Countess made him crave pardon of the little noble, and they shook hands like two cut-and-thrust gallants of six feet high.

But when their companions, with childish malevolence, taunted poor Walter as "my lord's loon," "the soldier's varlet," or "the powder puggy," epithets which always kindled his rage and drew tears from his eyes, Lilian, ever gentle and kind, wept with him, espoused his cause, and told that "Walter's mother was a noble lady, for the Countess had her ring of gold;" and the influence of the little nymph, with her cheeks like glowing peaches, and her bright hair flowing in sunny ringlets around a face ever beaming with happiness--was never lost, or failed to maintain peace among them. And thus days passed swiftly into years, and the girl was twelve and the boy sixteen when they were separated. Walter followed his noble patron to the field, when the landing of Argyle in the west, and Monmouth in the south, threw Britain into a flame. Dunbarton, now a general officer, marched with the Scottish forces against the former; but Walter, as a volunteer, served under Colonel Halkett, with a battalion of Scottish musqueteers, at the battle of Sedgemoor, where he felt what it was to have lead bullets rebounding from his buff coat and headpiece. Since then he had been serving as a private gentleman; but in a country like Scotland, swarming with idle young men of good birth and high spirit, who despised every occupation save that of arms, preferment came not, and he had too often experienced the mortification of seeing others obtain what he justly deemed his due, the commission of King James VII.

His recent interview with Lilian had recalled in full force all the friendship of their childhood and the dawning love of older years; but the manner in which he was now involved with the supreme authorities seemed to destroy all his hopes for ever--in Scotland at least; and yet, though that reflection wrung his heart, so little did he regret the part he had acted, that for Lilian's sake he would willingly run again, a hundred-fold greater risk. The last three years of his life had been spent amid the stirring turmoil of military duty in a discontented country, where each succeeding day the spirit of insurrection grew riper. In the rough society with which he mingled, never had he been addressed by a female so fair in face and so winning in manner as Lilian of Bruntisfield; and thus the charm of her presence acted more powerfully upon him. Her accents of entreaty and distress--her affection for Lady Grizel struggling with anxiety for himself, had in one brief interview recalled all the soft and happy impressions of his earlier and more innocent days, and love obtained a sway over his heart, that made him for a time forget his own dangerous predicament, in pondering with pleasure on the mortifications from which he had saved the ladies of Bruntisfield, the risks he had run for their sake, and consequently the debt of gratitude they owed him.

From his breast he drew forth her glove a hundred times, to admire its delicate texture and diminutive form; but he could not repress a bitter sigh when contemplating how slight were the chances of his ever again beholding the gentle owner, now when both unhappily were under the ban of the law,--she a homeless fugitive, and he a close prisoner, with death, imprisonment, or distant service in the Scots' Brigade his only prospects. Even were it otherwise,--and, oh! this idea was more tormenting than the first,--her heart might be dedicated to another; and she might, with the true pride of a noble Scottish maiden, deem it an unpardonable presumption in the poor and unhonoured pikeman to raise his eyes to the heiress of Sir Archibald Napier of Bruntisfield and the Wrytes. And thus, having introduced to the reader the grand feature upon which our story must "hinge," we shall get on with renewed ardour.