The sun was rising from the sea, and redly its morning splendour shone upon the rock-built towers of old Dunbar, as they frowned upon the bright green ocean and its snow-white foam. The estuary of the Forth shone like gold in the glory of the east; fed by the streams from a thousand hills it there expanded to an ocean, and its broad bosom, dotted by fisher boats and by Flemish caravells, swept round its rocky isles in surf, and washed with tiny waves of silver the shells and pebbles that bordered its sandy margins—margins shaded by the summer woods of Fife and Lothian, and overlooked by many a green and many a purple peak.
One great window that lit the queen’s apartment in the Agnes Tower, overlooked this beautiful prospect. It was open, and the morning breeze from the eastern sea blew freely upon Mary’s pallid cheek, and lifted her dishevelled hair; she seemed very desolate and broken-hearted. She was reclining in a large velvet chair, in the shadow of one of the thick brocaded window curtains, which made the corner she occupied so dark, that to a pair of eyes which were observing her through a hole in the arras behind the high and canopied bed, little else was visible than her snow-white hands clasped before her, a jewel that sparkled in her unbound hair, a spangle or two that glittered on the stomacher of her disordered dress, or among the folds of her torn veil—that white and flowing veil, which had won for her the romantic sobriquet of _la Reine Blanche_.
Her face was blistered by weeping; her lips were pale; she drooped her graceful head, and closed her blood-shot eyes, as if oppressed by an ocean of heavy thoughts. All that pride, energy, and indomitable courage which had sustained her unshaken amid a thousand scenes of outrage, insult, and sorrow, had now deserted her, laying her noble spirit prostrate; nothing but her gentle nature and woman softness remained behind. She was then, as she touchingly tells in one of her letters, "desolate of all council, and separated from all female attendance."
The very stupor of despair seemed to have settled upon her soul; she sat still—motionless as a statue, and nothing but the heaving of her bosom would have indicated that she lived. Yesterday she seemed so full of vivacity, so pure, so beautiful.