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!"