"This object once achieved," said Gray, "we must rid ourselves of Borthwick—for he knoweth over many secrets to make our heads secure on our shoulders!"
CHAPTER LXVIII.
DUNBLANE.
"For human bliss and woe in the frail thread
Of human life are all so closely twined,
That till the shears of Fate the texture shred,
The close succession cannot be disjoined,
Nor dare we from one hour judge that which comes behind."
Harold the Dauntless.
The information of Sauchie was all correct, save in that part which referred to the coronation of Margaret, which James intended should take place at the same time as his own, not in the little episcopal city of Dunblane, but in the capital city of Edinburgh, amid all the splendour with which he could invest it; and already the Lord High Treasurer, Sir William Knollis, better known as Lord St. John of Jerusalem, being Preceptor of the Scottish Knights of Rhodes, the Lord Chancellor, the Secretary of State, and the Lords of the Privy Council, were making the necessary arrangements for the great ceremonial at Holyrood.
The king's influence, united to Barton's acknowledged worth and landed possessions, operated so far on Lord Drummond, as to make him sullenly acquiesce in the marriage of Euphemia to one whose betrothal could not, in a Catholic age, be broken without incurring the penalty of sin; and, in the same spirit, he permitted arrangements to be made for Sir David Falconer, whom James called "the gentlest and the bravest knight at court," wedding Sybilla; meanwhile the old lord consoled himself for thus stooping to the royal will by reflecting that he still had two other daughters growing up—Beatrice and Elizabeth—who should be forced bongré malgré to marry the first eligible earls upon whom he could lay the hands of a father-in-law.
The king's train was received with all honour by the Baron Bailie of Dunblane, and Sir Edmund Hay of Melginch, the chamberlain of the diocese, who marshalled them to the palace of the good old bishop, James Chisholm, whose name must not be confounded with that of his successor, William Chisholm, a base and irreverend prelate, who robbed the see of its revenues to maintain his children, and desecrated the episcopal palace by scenes of licentiousness.
This palace stood to the southward of the magnificent cathedral, on the edge of the declivity which slopes down towards the river Allan. It was surrounded by thick old copsewood and by striking and picturesque scenery; but it has long since fallen into shapeless ruin, and now only a few vestiges of its lower apartments can be traced.
The four lovers were so happy that we shall not presume to intrude upon them, or attempt to transfer to paper any description of their joy, but will leave them to their quiet and dreamy rambles, arm in arm, or hand in hand, in that deep and finely wooded glen below Dunblane, where the precipices overhang the Allan, and the windings of the dell give so many lovely glimpses of foliaged scenery; and to their sport of shooting at the butts with feathered arrows, in the smooth park without the old cathedral walls, where many hundred years of careful pasturage and mowing had made the green grass as smooth as velvet; for now it was never brushed by other feet than those of the gliding deer or the lighter-footed hares and rabbits; and there the young king, and even the kind bishop, with some of the prebends, drew the bow to please the three beautiful Drummonds; and Margaret, with her blonde hair and sweet blue eyes, was voted the best shot of them all—for James and his two favourite subjects were too gallant to beat her shooting, and the most reverend father, by Divine permission Bishop of Dunblane, was somewhat too stout and pursy to draw a shaft like her.
They were all happy, and pure joy beamed in their eyes; it glowed in their young hearts and mantled in their cheeks.