“Still as the lips that’s closed in death, Each gazer’s bosom held his breath; But yet afar, from man to man, A cold, electric shiver ran, As down the deadly blow descended, On her whose love and life thus ended.”—Parisina.

It was a dark, but lovely night; moonless, but liquid and transparent; the stars which gemmed the firmament glittered more brightly from the absence of the mightier planet, and from the influence of a slight degree of frost upon the atmosphere, although it was indeed so slight, that its presence could be traced only in the crispness of the herbage, and in the uncommon purity of the heavens. Beneath a sky such as I have vainly endeavored to portray, the towers of Fotheringay rose black and dismal above the ancestral oaks and sweeping glades of its demesne. It would have appeared to a casual observer that all were at rest, buried in utter forgetfulness of all their hopes and sorrows, within that massive pile, save the lonely sentinel, whose progress round the battlements, although invisible, might be traced by the clatter of his harness, and the sullen echoes of his steel-shod stride. But to a nearer and more accurate survey, a single light, feebly twinkling through a casement of the dungeon-keep, told a far different tale. At times that solitary ray streamed in unbroken lines far into the bosom of the darkness; at times it was momentarily obscured, as if by the passage of some opaque body, though the transit, if such it were, was too brief to reveal the form or motions of the obstacle. Once, however, the shadow paused, and then, as its outlines stood forth in strong relief against the illumination of the chamber, the delicate proportions and musing attitude of a female379 might be discerned with certainty. It was the queen of Scotland. Her earthly sorrows were drawing to their close; the peace, for which she had long ceased to look, save in the silence of the tomb, was now within her grasp. Mary’s last sun had set.

Of life she had taken her farewell long, long ago; and death—the bugbear of the happy, the terror of the dastard—dark, mysterious, unknown death—had become to her an intimate, and, as it were, familiar friend. It was not that she had lessoned her shrinking spirit to endure with calmness that which it had shuddered to encounter; it was not that she had weaned her heart, yet clinging to the vanities of a heartless world, with difficulty and trembling, to their abandonment; least of all was it that she had been taught to regard that final separation with the stoic’s apathy, or to look for that dull and sunless rest, that absence of all feelings, whether of good or evil; that total annihilation of mind, in the great hereafter, which, to a sensitive temperament, and soul not rendered wholly callous by the debasing contact with this world’s idols, must seem a punishment secondary, if secondary, only to an eternity of wo. Born to a station lofty as the most vaulting ambition could desire, nurtured in gentleness and luxury, gifted with a mind such as rarely dwells within a mortal form, and having that mind invested in a frame, by its resplendent beauty fitted to be the door of immortality, she had felt, in a succession of sorrows almost unexampled, that the very qualities which should have ministered to her for bliss, had been converted into the instruments of misery and pain. Attached to her native land with the Switzer’s patriotism, she had endured from it the extremities of scorn and hatred. Full of the warmest sympathies even for the meanest of mankind, she had never loved a single being but he had recompensed that love with coals of fire heaped upon her head; or if a few had passed unscathed through the trying ordeal of380 benefits received, they had themselves miserably perished for their gratitude toward one whose love seemed fated to blight the virtues, or destroy the being of all on whom it was bestowed. If the sun of her morning had ridden gloriously forth in a serene heaven, with the promise of a splendid noontide and an unclouded setting, yet scarcely had it scaled one half of its meridian height, ere it had been compassed about with gloom and darkness; and ere its setting the thunders had rolled and the deadly lightnings flashed between the daygod and its scattered worshippers. She had been led step by step from the keenest enjoyment to the utmost disregard of the pleasures of the earth; she had drained the cup, and knew its bitterness too well to languish for a second draught. Yet there was nothing of resentment, nothing of hard-heartedness or scorn, in the feelings with which she looked back on the world and its adorers. She did not despise the many for that they still lingered in pursuit of a star which she had found, by sad experience, to be but a delusive meteor; much less did she hate the happy few to whom that valley, which had been to her indeed a vale of tears and of the shadow of death, had been a region of perpetual sunshine and unclouded happiness.

From Mary’s earliest years there had been a deep spring of piety in her heart which, never utterly dried up, though choked at times, and turned from its true course by the thorny cares and troubles of life, had burst from the briers which so long concealed it in redoubled purity as it flowed nearer to the close. There was an innate tenderness in all her sentiments toward all men and all things which could never degenerate into hatred, much less into misanthropy. She looked then upon life in its true light; as a mingled landscape, now obscured by clouds, now called into glory by the sunshine; as a region, tangled here with forests, and cumbered with barren rocks, there swelling into hills of vintage, or subsiding into glens of verdure. A381nd if to her the landscape had been most viewed beneath the influence of a dark and threatening sky—if to her life’s path had lain, for the most part, through the wilderness and over the mountains—she knew that such was the result of her own misfortune, perhaps of her own misconduct, not of defect in the wonderful contrivance, or of improvidence in the all-glorious contriver.

In proportion as she had learned to dwell on the insufficiency of earthly good to satiate that deep thirst for happiness which is not the least among the proofs of the soul’s immortality, she had come to look upon the void of futurity as the unexplored region of bliss; upon death as the portal through which we must pass from the desert of toil and sorrow to the Eden of hope and happiness. That she was drawing rapidly near to this portal she had for a long time been aware; and, during the latter years of her captivity, she had longed to see the leaves of that gate unfolded for her exit, with a sense of pining sickness, similar to that of the imprisoned eagle. The mockery of her trial she had beheld as the avenue through which she should arrive, and that right shortly, at the desired end; and although she knew that the scaffold and the axe, or the secret knife of the assassin, must need be the key to that gate, she recked but little of the means, so that the way of escape was left open to her.

She had pleaded, it is true, with brilliant eloquence and earnestness, in behalf, not of life, but of her honor. She wished for death, and she cared not for the vulgar ignominy of the scaffold; but she did care, she did shrink from the ignominy of a condemnation—a condemnation not by the suborned commissioners, not by the jealous rival, not by the perjured and terror-stricken populace of the day, but by Time and by Eternity. This was the condemnation from which she shrank; this was the ignominy which she combated; this was the doom382 which, by the masterly and dauntless efforts of her unassisted woman heart, she turned not only from herself, but back upon her murderers.

From the departure of the commissioners, she had been convinced that she was hovering as it were on the confines of life and immortality. Happy and calm herself, she had labored to render calm and happy the little group of friends—for domestics when faithful, are friends—who still preserved their allegiance. She craved no more the wanderings in the green-wood; she had even refused to join in her once-loved sports of field and forest, which, denied to her when she would have grasped the boon, were freely proffered now, as though her enemies, with a far-reaching malignity that would stretch its arm beyond the grave, had wished to reawaken in her bosom that love for things of this life which had sunk to sleep, and to sharpen the bitterness of death by the added tortures of regret. If such, indeed, were their intentions—and who shall presume to judge?—their barbarity was frustrated; and if they indeed envied their poor victim the miserable consolation of passing cheerfully and in peace from the sphere of her sorrows, we may be assured that the frustration of their wicked views was sufficient punishment to them while here, and none can even dare to conjecture what will be their doom hereafter.

This night had brought at length the balm to all her cares—the restless eagerness to be assured of that which was to come was over—the goal was reached, the gates were half-unclosed, and, to her enthusiastic and poetical imagination, the hymns and harpings of expectant seraphs seemed to pour in their soothing chimes, whispering of peace, pardon, and beatitude for evermore between the parted portals. With a bigotry, which in these days of universal toleration it is equally difficult to conceive or to condemn sufficiently, it was denied to the departing sinner—for who that is most perfect here is other than383 a sinner—to enjoy the consolations of a priest of her own persuasion. A firm and conscientious, though not a bigoted catholic, it was a cruelty of the worst and most outrageous nature, to deny her that which she deemed of the highest importance to her eternal welfare, and which they could not deem prejudicial, without being themselves victims of a superstition so slavish as to disprove their participation in a faith which boasts itself no less a religion of freedom than of truth.

Steadily refusing the aid of the protestant divines, who harassed her with an assiduity that spoke more of polemical pride than of Christian sincerity, she had performed her orisons with deep devotion, and had arisen from their performance assured of forgiveness, confident in her own repentance, and in the mercy of Him who alone is perfect; in peace and charity even with her direst foes, and happy in the anticipation of the morrow. She had sat down to her last earthly meal with an appetite unimpaired by the knowledge that it was to be her last; she had conversed cheerfully, gayly, with her weeping friends; she had drunk one cup of wine to their health and happiness, and, in token of her own gratitude, to each she had distributed some little pledge of her affectionate regard; and then—amid the notes of dreadful preparation, the creaking of saws and the clang of hammers, busily converting the castle-hall into a place of slaughter, as it had been not long before a place of misnamed justice—she had sunk to sleep so calmly, and slumbered on with a countenance so moveless in its innocent repose, and with a bosom so regular in its healthful pulsations, that her admiring ladies began to look on her as one about to start upon a pleasant voyage to the harbor of all her wishes, rather than as one about to perish by a cruel and ignominious death on the scaffold. Hours flew over the lovely sleeper, and the eyes of her watchers waxed heavier, till they wept themselves to sleep; and one—an aged woman, who had watched her infancy and384 gloried in the promise of her youth—after her eyes were sealed in sleep, yet continued, by the heavy sobs which burst from the lips of the slumberer, to manifest the extent of that misery which abode in all its vividness within the mind, although the body was wrapt in that state which men have called oblivion.

Such had been the state of things in Mary’s chamber from the first close of evening to the dead hour of midnight; but ere the east had begun again to redden with the returning glories of its luminary, sleep, which still sat leadlike on the eyelids of her attendants, forsook the hapless sovereign. Silently she arose, and, throwing a single garment carelessly about her person, passed from her sleeping-apartment into a little oratory adjoining, without disturbing from her painful slumbers one of those faithful beings to whom the distinct consciousness of waking sorrow must have been yet more painfully acute.

Here, as with a quick but regular step she traversed the narrow turret, she viewed as it were in the space of a single hour the crowded events of a life which, unnaturally shortened as it was about to be, yet contained naught of remote and rare occurrence, but in rapid and complete succession—those events which make an epoch and an era of every hour, and lengthen years of time into ages of the mind.

Calmly, piously, without a shade of sorrow for the past or of solicitude for the future, save that mysterious and yet natural anxiety which must haunt every mind, however well prepared to endure its final separation from the body, as the hour of dissolution approaches, did she expect the morning. This anxiety and this alone was blended with the various feelings which coursed through the soul of Mary during this the last night of her existence.

It was in such a frame of mind that Mary, in the solitude of that last earthly night, diverting her attention entirely from the terrible shock she was about to undergo on the morrow, thought385 upon her native land, still dear though still ungrateful, a prey to the fierce contentions of her own factious offspring—of her son, torn at the earliest dawn of his affections from the arms of a mother, nurtured among those who would teach him to eradicate every warmer recollection—to pluck forth, as if it were an offending eye, every lingering tenderness for that being, who, amid all her sins and all her sorrows, had never ceased to love him with an entire and perfect love. There is, in truth, something more evidently divine, partaking more nearly of that which we believ............