'So at first they all say who come here; yet they get used to it—even those who are secret prisoners, and who, without date or name, are handed over per list from chatelain to chatelain. Ma foi! we have one in the lowest vaults who is so old that he has worn out a set of fetters, and is supposed to have been put in when M. de Salvaison was captain of the Bastille.'
'In what time did this worthy flourish?'
'In the days of Henry II.—about 1560.'
'Impossible!'
'Seventy-five years ago, monsieur.'
'It is alike horrible and incredible!'
Martin smiled faintly, and whispered,—
'He is supposed to be a kinsman of Anne du Bourg, whom the Cardinal de Lorraine, a fierce and passionate man, hanged and burned in the Place de la Grève; but only supposed, monsieur, since he never speaks now, and we know not his name.'
As if he had said too much, Martin Omelette hastily withdrew, leaving me to torture myself with dark anticipations of the future, and to spell over the prayers with which my hapless predecessor had supplicated the intercession of St. Fiacre. But my mind would recur again and again with stinging poignancy to my present predicament. I thought now of all my futile aspirations after fame; of all I had done at Bitche, at Ingweiler, and La Mothe, in the service of this ungrateful Louis of France, whose wanton war against Duke Charles of Lorraine I saw in all its wickedness. Then I thought of my distant home and the scenes I never more might see; of the green pastoral hills and the woods of Blanerne, that cast their shadows on the Dee, whose waters rush to meet the Solway; of the birchen glen, on the brow of which the towers of old Tungland Abbey raised their gray-worn pinnacles above the waving coppice; of the breezy upland slopes, where the yellow corn ripened on the long golden rigs, where the bonneted ploughboy whistled, nor dreamed there was such a thing as tyranny in the world; where the black crow and the eagle that had their eyry in St. Mark's lovely isle were wheeling aloft, and I panted for freedom and for home!
Home! Alas! I had more friends in the grave than in the world; yet their graves were in Scottish earth, and that was all the world to me.