Well had it been for her had she continued firm in that determination; but what could a weak woman’s unassisted intellect avail against the united force of talents such as those of Hatton and Burleigh? A thousand specious arguments were summoned to overcome her scruples, but summoned all in vain, till the last hint—that her unwillingness to plead could arise only from a consciousness of guilt—aroused her. Pride, fatal pride, determined the debate, and she descended. Eloquently, sorrowfully, manfully, did she plead her cause, combating the vile chicaneries, the extorted evidences, the absence or the want of legal witnesses, with the native powers of a clear and vigorous mind. Once during that judicial mockery did her passions burst the control of her judgment, and she openly, in full court, charged the secretary, Walsingham—and, as many now believe, most justly charged him—with the forgery of the only documents that bore upon her character, or on the case in point. But all was fruitless! For what eloquence should convince men resolved in any circumstances to convict? what facts should clear away the imputed guilt of one whom it was fully determined to destroy?
The trial was concluded. With the air of a queen she stood erect, with a calm brow and serene eye, as the commissioners departed, one by one. No doom had been pronounced against her, but she read it in the eyes of all; and as she saw her misnamed judges quit her presence, she muttered, in the low notes of a determined spirit: “The tragedy is well nigh closed—the last act is at hand! Peace—peace—I soon shall find thee in the grave.”
THE CLOSING SCENE.
“Still as the lips that’s closed in death,
Each gazer’s bosom held his breath;
But yet afar, from man to man,
A cold, electric shiver ran,
As down the deadly blow descended,
On her whose love and life thus ended.”—Parisina.
It was a dark, but lovely night; moonless, but liquid and transparent; the stars which gemmed the firmament glittered more brightly from the absence of the mightier planet, and from the influence of a slight degree of frost upon the atmosphere, although it was indeed so slight, that its presence could be traced only in the crispness of the herbage, and in the uncommon purity of the heavens. Beneath a sky such as I have vainly endeavored to portray, the towers of Fotheringay rose black and dismal above the ancestral oaks and sweeping glades of its demesne. It would have appeared to a casual observer that all were at rest, buried in utter forgetfulness of all their hopes and sorrows, within that massive pile, save the lonely sentinel, whose progress round the battlements, although invisible, might be traced by the clatter of his harness, and the sullen echoes of his steel-shod stride. But to a nearer and more accurate survey, a single light, feebly twinkling through a casement of the dungeon-keep, told a far different tale. At times that solitary ray streamed in unbroken lines far into the bosom of the darkness; at times it was momentarily obscured, as if by the passage of some opaque body, though the transit, if such it were, was too brief to reveal the form or motions of the obstacle. Once, however, the shadow paused, and then, as its outlines stood forth in strong relief against the illumination of the chamber, the delicate proportions and musing attitude of a female might be discerned with certainty. It was the queen of Scotland. Her earthly sorrows were drawing to their close; the peace, for which she had long ceased to look, save in the silence of the tomb, was now within her grasp. Mary’s last sun had set.
Of life she had taken her farewell long, long ago; and death—the bugbear of the happy, the terror of the dastard—dark, mysterious, unknown death—had become to her an intimate, and, as it were, familiar friend. It was not that she had lessoned her shrinking spirit to endure with calmness that which it had shuddered to encounter; it was not that she had weaned her heart, yet clinging to the vanities of a heartless world, with difficulty and trembling, to their abandonment; least of all was it that she had been taught to regard that final separation with the stoic’s apathy, or to look for that dull and sunless rest, that absence of all feelings, whether of good or evil; that total annihilation of mind, in the great hereafter, which, to a sensitive temperament, and soul not rendered wholly callous by the debasing contact with this world’s idols, must seem a punishment secondary, if secondary, only to an eternity of wo. Born to a station lofty as the most vaulting ambition could desire, nurtured in gentleness and luxury, gifted with a mind such as rarely dwells within a mortal form, and having that mind invested in a frame, by its resplendent beauty fitted to be the door of immortality, she had felt, in a succession of sorrows almost unexampled, that the very qualities which should have ministered to her for bliss, had been converted into the instruments of misery and pain. Attached to her native land with the Switzer’s patriotism, she had endured from it the extremities of scorn and hatred. Full of the warmest sympathies even for the meanest of mankind, she had never loved a single being but he had recompensed that love with coals of fire heaped upon her head; or if a few had passed unscathed through the trying ordeal of benefits received, they had themselves miserably perished for their gratitude toward one whose love seemed fated to blight the virtues, or destroy the being of all on whom it was bestowed. If the sun of her morning had ridden gloriously forth in a serene heaven, with the promise of a splendid noontide and an unclouded setting, yet scarcely had it scaled one half of its meridian height, ere it had been compassed about with gloom and darkness; and ere its setting the thunders had rolled and the deadly lightnings flashed between the daygod and its scattered worshippers. She had been led step by step from the keenest enjoyment to the utmost disregard of the pleasures of the earth; she had drained the cup, and knew its bitterness too well to languish for a second draught. Yet there was nothing of resentment, nothing of hard-heartedness or scorn, in the feelings with which she looked back on the world and its adorers. She did not despise the many for that they still lingered in pursuit of a star which she had found, by sad experience, to be but a delusive meteor; much less did she hate the happy few to whom that valley, which had been to her indeed a vale of tears and of the shadow of death, had been a region of perpetual sunshine and unclouded happiness.
From Mary’s earliest years there had been a deep spring of piety in her heart which, never utterly dried up, though choked at times, and turned from its true course by the thorny cares and troubles of life, had burst from the briers which so long concealed it in redoubled purity as it flowed nearer to the close. There was an innate tenderness in all her sentiments toward all men and all things which could never degenerate into hatred, much less into misanthropy. She looked then upon life in its true light; as a mingled landscape, now obscured by clouds, now called into glory by the sunshine; as a region, tangled here with forests, and cumbered with barren rocks, there swelling into hills of vintage, or subsiding into glens of verdure. And if to her the landscape had been most viewed beneath the influence of a dark and threatening sky—if to her life’s path had lain, for the most part, through the wilderness and over the mountains—she knew that such was the result of her own misfortune, perhaps of her own misconduct, not of defect in the wonderful contrivance, or of improvidence in the all-glorious contriver.
In proportion as she had learned to dwell on the insufficiency of earthly good to satiate that deep thirst for happiness which is not the least among the proofs of the soul’s immortality, she had come to look upon the void of futurity as the unexplored region of bliss; upon death as the portal through which we must pass from the desert of toil and sorrow to the Eden of hope and happiness. That she was drawing rapidly near to this portal she had for a long time been aware; and, during the latter years of her captivity, she had longed to see the leaves of that gate unfolded for her exit, with a sense of pining sickness, similar to that of the imprisoned eagle. The mockery of her trial she had beheld as the avenue through which she should arrive, and that right shortly, at the desired end; and although she knew that the scaffold and the axe, or the secret knife of the assassin, must need be the key to that gate, she recked but little of the means, so that the way of escape was left open to her.
She had pleaded, it is true, with brilliant eloquence and earnestness, in behalf, not of life, but of her honor. She wished for death, and she cared not for the vulgar ignominy of the scaffold; but she did care, she did shrink from the ignominy of a condemnation—a condemnation not by the suborned commissioners, not by the jealous rival, not by the perjured and terror-stricken populace of the day, but by Time and by Eternity. This was the condemnation from which she shrank; this was the ignominy which she combated; this was the doom which, by the masterly and dauntless efforts of her unassisted woman heart, she turned not only from herself, but back upon her murderers.