You never saw any place more
desolate from a distance, nor one that less belied its promise near
at hand.
Some crows and gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled
in. The snow had drifted into the vaults. The clachan dabbled
with snow, the white hills, the black sky, the sea marked in the
coves with faint circular wrinkles, the whole world, as it looked
from a loop-hole in Dunure, was cold, wretched, and out-at-elbows.
If you had been a wicked baron and compelled to stay there all the
afternoon, you would have had a rare fit of remorse. How you would
have heaped up the fire and gnawed your fingers! I think it would
have come to homicide before the evening - if it were only for the
pleasure of seeing something red! And the masters of Dunure, it is
to be noticed, were remarkable of old for inhumanity. One of these
vaults where the snow had drifted was that 'black route' where 'Mr.
Alane Stewart, Commendatour of Crossraguel,' endured his fiery
trials. On the 1st and 7th of September 1570 (ill dates for Mr.
Alan!), Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his baker, his
cook, his pantryman, and another servant, bound the Poor
Commendator 'betwix an iron chimlay and a fire,' and there cruelly
roasted him until he signed away his abbacy. it is one of the
ugliest stories of an ugly period, but not, somehow, without such a
flavour of the ridiculous as makes it hard to sympathise quite
seriously with the victim.
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