The sadness and melancholy of the apparently-resigned Effie Mearns had no effect on the noise and show of the preparations for her marriage with her old lover. The marriages of old men are well known to be celebrated with higher bugle notes from the trumpet of fame than any others. A sumptuous dinner was to be given to the neighbouring lairds, and the cotters were to be fed and regaled on the green opposite to the mansion. Dancing and music were to add their charms to the gay scene; and it was even alleged that the light of a bonfire would lend its peculiar aid, in raising the joy of the guests, predisposed to hilarity by plenteous potations, to the proper height suited to the conquest of the old bridegroom over, at once, a young woman and old Time.
For days previous to the eventful one, Effie Mearns was not heard to open her lips. She looked on all the gay preparations for her marriage as if they had been the mournful acts of the undertaker employed in laying the silver trimming on the coffin lid of a lover. The bedside of her sick parent, who was still unable to rise, was the place where she sat "shrouded in silence." She heard the conversations of her father and mother about the progress of the preparations, without exhibiting so much interest as to show that she understood them. Misgivings crossed the minds of the old couple, and brought tears to their eyes, as they contemplated the animated corpse that sat there, waiting the nod of the master of ceremonies, and ready to perform the part assigned to it in the forthcoming orgies of mournful joy; but they had gone too far to recede, and it was even a subject of satisfaction to them that the period of the celebration was so near, for otherwise they might have had reason to fear that their daughter would not have survived the intermediate time. When the bridegroom called, his ears were alarmed by the voices of the parents, who saw the necessity of endeavouring to hide the condition of their daughter; and he was satisfied, if he got, free and unrestrained, "a feast of the eyes." His love was still expressed by silent gazing; for it was too deep in his old heart for either words or tears; if, indeed, there was moisture enough in the seat of his affection for the suppliance of the softest expression of the soft passion.
The eventful day arrived. The marriage was to take place in the cottage, where David Mearns still lay confined to bed. The sick man wore a marriage favour attached to the breast of his shirt!—for Laird Cherrytrees would be contented with no less a demonstration of his participation in his unparalleled happiness. The still silent bride submitted passively to all the acts of her nimble dressers, whose laugh seemed to strike her ears like funeral bells; yet she tried—poor victim! to smile, though the clouded beam came through a tear which, by its steadfastness, seemed to belong to the orb. The bridegroom came at the very instant when he ought to have come—the hand of the clock not having had time to leave the mark of notation. He was dressed in the style of his earliest days, with cocked hat, laced coat, and a sky-blue vest, embroidered in the richest manner; while a new wig, ordered from the metropolis, imparted to him the freshness of youth. His cheek was flushed with the blood which joy had forced, for a moment, from where it was more needed, at the drying fountain of life; and his eye spoke a happiness which his parched tongue could not have achieved, without causing shame even to himself. Everything was new, spruce, perking, self-complacent. The clergyman next came, and all was prepared.
Throughout all this time and all these preparations, not the slightest change had been observed on the bride. After she was dressed, she took her seat again, silently by the side of her father's sickbed, where she sat like a statue. The ceremony was now to commence, and she stood up, when required by the clergyman, as if she obeyed the command of an executioner. It was noticed that she seemed to incline to be as near as possible to her father's bed; and her unwillingness or inability to come forward forced the clergyman and the bridegroom some paces from the situation they at first held. The ceremony proceeded till it came to the part where the consent of the parties is asked. The happy bridegroom pronounced his response, quick, sharp, and with an air of conceit, which brought a smile to the faces of the parties present. There was now a pause for the consent of the bride. All eyes were fixed on her death-like face. A severe struggle was going on in her bosom; yet her countenance was unmoved, and no one conjectured that she suffered more than sensitive females often do in her situation. The clergyman repeated his question. There was still a pause—the eyes of all were riveted on her. "I canna, I canna!" at last she exclaimed, in a voice of agony, and fell back on the bed—a corpse!
Six months after the death of Effie Mearns, Lucy Cherrytrees was married, without faint or swoon, to Lewis Campbell, who returned home, in spite of his reported death. The union was against the consent of the Laird, who soon died of either a broken heart or old age—no doctor could have told which.
GLEANINGS OF THE COVENANT.
XIV. —JAMES RENWICK.
In the times in which we live, party spirit is carried very far. Many honest tradesmen, merchants, and shopkeepers, are ruined by their votes at elections. The ordinary intercourse of social life is obstructed and deranged. Friends go up to the polling station with friends, but separate there, and become, it may be, the most inveterate enemies. This, our later reformation of 1832, has cost us much; but our sufferings are nothing to those which marked the two previous reformations from Popery and Prelacy. In the one instance, fire and faggot were the ordinary means adopted for defending political arrangements; in the other, the gallows and the maiden did the same work, and the boots and the thumbikins acted as ministering engines of torture. The whole of society was convulsed; men's blood boiled in their veins at the revolting sights which were almost daily obtruding upon their attention; and their judgments being greatly influenced by their feelings, it is not to be wondered at that they should, in a few instances, have overshot, as it were, the mark—have sacrificed their lives to the support of opinions which appear now not materially different from those which their enemies pressed upon their acceptance. It is a sad mistake to suppose that the friends of Presbytery, during the fearful twenty-eight years' persecution of Charles and James, died in the support of certain doctrines and forms of church government merely. With these were, unhappily, or rather, as things have turned out, fortunately, combined, political or civil liberty, the establishment and support of a supreme power, vested in King, Lords, and Commons—instead of being vested, by usurpation, merely in the King alone. By avoiding to call Parliaments, and by obtaining supplies of money from France and otherwise, the two last of the Stuart Despots had, in fact, broken the compact of Government, and had exposed themselves all along, through the twenty-eight years of persecution, to dethronement for high treason. This was the strong view taken by those who fought and who fell at Bothwell Bridge, and this was the view taken by nine-tenths of the inhabitants of Scotland—of the descendants and admirers of Bruce and Wallace—of Knox and Carstairs. James Renwick, the last of the martyrs in the cause of religion and liberty, was executed in Edinburgh in his twenty-sixth year. He was a young man of liberal education, conducted both at the college of Edinburgh, and Groningen, abroad—of the most amiable disposition, and the most unblemished moral character—yet, simply because he avowed, and supported, and publicly preached doctrines on which, in twelve months after his execution, the British Government was based, he was adjudged to the death, and ignominiously executed in the presence of his poor mother and other relatives, as well as of the Edinburgh public. Mr Woodrow, in his history of this man's life, alludes to some papers which he had seen, containing notices of Mr Renwick's trials and hair-breadth escapes; prior to his capture and execution—which, however, he refrains from giving to the public. It so happens that, from my acquaintance with a lineal descendent of the last of the Martyrs, I have it in my power, in some measure, to supply the deficiency; his own note, or memorandum-book, being still in existence, though it never has been, nor ever will, probably, be published.