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.