CHAPTER LXX.

THE IRON BELT.

"I love! and love hath given me sweet thoughts, to God akin; And oped a living paradise, my heart of hearts within; Oh! from this Eden of my life, God keep the serpent, Sin." GERALD MASSEY.

Pontifical high mass was performed with unusual splendour in the cathedral church of Dunblane. On this occasion, the bishop preceded by his cross-bearer, and the banner of the diocese, borne by Sir Edward Hay of Melginch, by all the prebends of the cathedral, with choristers and singing-boys, passed in procession through the centre aisle to the altar, having on his head a mitre blazing with jewels, gorgeous robes on his shoulders, and wearing scarlet gloves on his hands, which bore the identical crook by one touch of which Saint Blane restored sight to the blind, and life to the dead heir of Appilby, as we may still see recorded in the fifty-seventh folio of the Breviary of Aberdeen.

The king was on a royal seat, surrounded by the lords and ladies of the court and household, and many of the great officers of state; the Captain of his Guards, Lord Drummond, Falconer, Barton, and many more, all richly dressed in the gaudy costumes of the time, when fancy and fashion ran riot among silk and satin, velvet and miniver, feathers, jewels, and lace. Bright steel cuirasses, cloth of gold, satin doublets and velvet mantles, with the silver stars and green ribands of the Thistle, or the escallops of St. Michael, and the crosses of many a foreign Order of knighthood, made the group around the young monarch alike gay and splendid.

The entire population of the little city and of the adjacent district crowded the triple aisles of the magnificent church; and on groups of these, all of them attired in varying colours, and various fashions--for Dunblane approaches the Highland border--long hazy flakes of light fell inward from the three tall lance-headed compartments of the great western window, in which were a thousand prismatic tints, as martyred saints, crowned kings, and pallid Virgins stood amid pious scrolls and gaudy flowers, green foliage and bright armorial bearings, all woven in the brilliant glass, filling up the double mullions and grotesquely twisted tracery.

This beautiful church is less richly decorated than many others in Scotland; its mouldings and clustered capitals are without flowering; yet from the loftiness of its windows, and the general symmetry of its proportions, this effort of the architectural taste and piety of King David I. is full of grandeur and dignity. From its walls hung the banners and scutcheons of the once powerful Earls of Strathearn, with the sword of Malise, who fought at the Battle of the Standard; and the helmet of Sir Maurice of Strathearn, who was slain at the Battle of Durham; there, too, hung the trophies of the Lords of Strathallan, and the Drummonds of Drummond. Beneath the pavement, which was lettered with epitaphs, and rich with graven brasses, their bones were reposing, cered in lead, deep in the gothic vaults below; and there their effigies may yet be seen, with shield on arm, with sword at side, and hands upraised as in prayer.

The light stole through the windows with a chastened effect, and so many tapers burned upon the great altar, that with all its gilding it seemed a pyramid of flame; and in front of it were the floating garments of the bishop and his attendant priests, with the thin white smoke of the censers rising among them; while the full-toned organ, with its trumpet sound, and the harmony of a hundred voices, all melodiously attuned, rolled along the high-arched roofs, and went at once to the depth of every soul and the inmost chords of every heart--calling, as it were, to prayer and to enthusiasm, the whole being of every listener.

On the altar lay two bridal wreaths, and a peculiar belt of iron.

The wreaths were those to be worn on the morrow by Euphemia and Sybilla Drummond; the iron belt was to be the life-long penance of King James.

In the lower aisles, "a dim religious light" brooded over all; and in the solemnity of devotion, every knee and every head were bowed, and, outwardly at least, all was hushed and humble meekness.

Before the carved oak rail of the sanctuary knelt the three sisters, with their bright hair confined in golden cauls, and their faces bowed before the venerable bishop--an old man, whose days went back to those of the Regent Murdoc Stuart, and the wars of James I. with Alaster of the Isles.

Mass was performed with great solemnity; and though few Catholics--perhaps none--will believe what ensued, or that blessed wine would poison, yet we have it on record, that a Scotsman, who was Bishop of Durham in 1153, was destroyed by the wine of the Eucharist, in which a deadly drug had been placed by his enemies, some English priests.

From the prelate's hand the three fated sisters received the communion, of which he had himself partaken, impregnated, as it was, with a poison as deadly as ever human science or human villany prepared.

"_Corpus Domini nostri_," &c. &c., prayed the poor bishop, with reverence, and eyes half-closed as he signed the cross in blessing over their fair foreheads, and placed between the lips of each the wafer which he had dipped in the poisoned wine, and of which he had himself partaken!

The poor girls, with their white hands crossed upon their fluttering breasts, and their young hearts, full of pious joy, returned to the crimson canopied stall, over which their father's feudal banner, with the three bars, wavy, hung beside the royal standard, with the lion, gules, and there again they knelt in prayer beside the youthful king.

When mass was over, the bishop ascended the altar, still robed in fall pontificals, with his mitre on his head, and resigning his crook to an assistant priest who waited on the steps, he opened the famous letter of Dispensation.

"The Most Holy Father in Christ our Lord, Innocent the Eighth, by Divine Providence, _servus servorum Dei_, to his dearly beloved brother James, also by Divine mercy, Bishop of Dunblane, and to all others, &c. &c., wisheth health and benediction in the Lord."

Beginning thus, he read, in pure and sonorous Latin, the Papal authority, removing the guilt and sin committed, and absolving, dissolving, and annulling the ties of blood between James, by the grace of God, King of the Scots, and his cousin, the Lady Margaret Drummond; and thus, by the apostolical power confided to the Holy See, removing every hindrance and impediment to their lawful marriage, "dated at Rome, on the festival of Corpus Christi, and of our Pontificate then fourth year."

The bishop closed the letter which he had brought from such a distance, and which had involved him in so many personal perils, and then resumed his glittering crozier from its bearer.

Then Margaret, whose small white hand the young king had pressed repeatedly, and whose agitated heart had beat wildly, felt as if a mountain had been lifted off it; for fondly, fully, and devoutly she believed in the annulment it announced, and the authority from which it came; and her soft blue eyes beamed under her velvet hood and gold-fringed caul with the most beautiful joy, and with the purest and holiest of rapture as they met those of the young king, her husband--ay, her husband now, without secrecy, or fear, or sin.

"Margaret--my own beloved Margaret!" he whispered, and tremblingly kissed her brow, an act of respect and tenderness which stirred the hearts of all the people.

Honest Barton was spelling away industriously at his missal, content, as he thought, and said inwardly, "that Euphemia was alongside of him, and that, on the morrow, with a fair wind and a friar's blessing, they would cast anchor together in smooth riding, and in the sunny haven of matrimony;" but Falconer and Sybilla knelt hand in hand behind the high oak-screen, and deeply thanked God and the good young king, who had brought to this happy and most unexpected issue the long hushed secret of their ardent hearts.

Would that we could leave them thus; but the ways of fate, and the course of unforeseen events, are inexorable.

James IV. now received from the Bishop's hand the penance-girdle--that _Iron Belt_--to which he added every year a weight to worn in memory of his father's fall, and which he never laid aside either by day or by night, until the morning of the fatal ninth of September, 1513, thirty-five years after; and on that day he perished at Flodden, with ten thousand Scottish hearts as brave as his own!

Now old Duncan, the sacristan, supplied innumerable torches and tapers to the people, giving one to every man, woman, and child. The whole church become filled with light--a blaze, a flood of flame, till the eyes ached, and the beautiful lines of St. Paulinus seemed to be realized in the old aisles of Dunblane:

"With crowded lamps are these bright altars crowned, And waxen tapers shed perfume around, From fragrant wicks beams calm the scented ray, To gladden night, and brighten radiant day. Meridian splendours thus light up the night, And day itself, illum'd with sacred light, Wears a new glory, borrowed from those rays, That stream from countless lamps in never-ending blaze."

But this unusual glory chilled the hearts of the vast congregation who filled that great cathedral church; for now the bishop prepared to pass upon the murderers of the late king and their abettors, the heaviest fulminations of the Vatican: and in that age, when churchmen united spiritual with temporal power, everything in nature, from the king on his throne to a caterpillar on the leaf of a tree, were liable to anathema. To men, its sentence was armed with a thousand terrors. The ex-communicated person was shut out, cut off, as it were, from all social life; his servants, his wife--even his dearest children, dare not come near him, or relieve his most urgent wants by a crumb of bread or a drop of water; for he had forfeited all claims on humanity, all natural rights and legal privileges.

Any man might slay him, and under this inhuman law, even his body was denied proper burial; in some sequestered or hated, at least, unconsecrated spot, it was flung aside, and covered up with stones; and now the bells of Dunblane began to toll a solemn peal, and the inmost hearts of all the people, surrounded as they were by that blaze of light, became appalled, as the bishop, in a loud but melancholy voice, poured forth against the regicides the sentence of Pope Innocent VIII.: "In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, et benedictæ nostræ Dominæ Sanctissimæ Mariæ, atque virtute angelorum archangelorumque, &c., à sancte matris Ecclesias græmio segregamus ac perpetuæ _maledictionis anathemate condemnamus_!"

The three sisters felt a sleep stealing over their humid eyes and hushing their beating hearts, as they nestled close together, as if in terror of the spiritual thunder that rang over their heads in a language they could not comprehend; but, perhaps, it was excess of happiness at their own position--or, perhaps, the blaze of light oppressed them, for they were silent, motionless, and still.

Timidly they cast a furtive glance at their father, Lord Drummond, as he stood near them, sheathed in the same armour he had worn at the Battle of Sauchieburn, with a wax taper clutched like a lance in his gauntleted hand; unsubdued by the terrible anathema, the proud noble heard it with constitutional indifference, or concealed his inward fear under an outward smile of scorn.

But his daughters felt sick and faint.

Margaret closed her eyes and drooped her head upon the shoulder of Euphemia, whose hand was now clasped by Sybilla.

As the bishop concluded, he extinguished his taper, and every one in the church followed his example,--the prebendaries and others treading their torches vigorously underfoot, and Lord Drummond crushed his under his armed heel with as much animus as Sir Andrew Wood might have done; while the bells continued to toll the knell of the doomed souls, at long and solemn intervals, in the towers of the cathedral, the interior of which seemed to become suddenly dark and gloomy, for the day without had overcast, and dense autumn clouds, charged with mist and rain, came rolling from the Grampians across the lowering sky.

A chill--a horror of the scene, this solemn curbing with bell book and candle--had fallen upon the people, who were stealing softly and hastily away; while the poor old bishop, exhausted by the long service and its exciting nature, and more than all by the poison he had imbibed, tottered into the arms of Sir Walter Drummond, the dean, and was borne out by a side door, with all the air of a dying man.

The three sisters, as if absorbed in prayer, were still leaning forward against the oak rail, and kneeling on the velvet cushions; they remained thus very long after all the congregation had dispersed; and loth to disturb them, their happy lovers lingered in the aisle with the king and his attendants, till Lord Drummond lost all patience, and roughly summoned them.

"Effie--Maggie--by my soul, ye have gone to sleep, I think--come, arouse ye there!" he exclaimed.

Then the young king went softly over and touched Margaret on the shoulder.

She did not stir; neither did she seem to feel him.

"Sybilla--Euphemia!" said he.

But there was no answer.

For those three kneeling figures were stone dead!

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