Another might have
existed in the duty which he owed to Magdalen Graeme, both by birth
and from gratitude. But he learned, ere he had been long a resident
in Avenel, that his grandmother had died at Cologne, in the
performance of a penance too severe for her age, which she had taken
upon herself in behalf of the Queen and Church of Scotland, as soon as
she heard of the defeat at Langside. The zeal of the Abbot Ambrosius
was more regulated; but he retired into the Scottish convent of
------, and so lived there, that the fraternity were inclined to claim
for him the honours of canonization. But he guessed their purpose, and
prayed them, on his death-bed, to do no honours to the body of one as
sinful as themselves; but to send his body and his heart to be buried
in Avenel burial-aisle, in the monastery of Saint Mary's, that the
last Abbot of that celebrated house of devotion might sleep among its
ruins.
[Footnote: This was not the explanation of the incident of searching
for the heart, mentioned in the introduction to the tale, which the
author originally intended. It was designed to refer to the heart of
Robert Bruce. It is generally known that that great monarch, being on
his death-bed, bequeathed to the good Lord James of Douglas, the task
of carrying his heart to the Holy Land, to fulfil in a certain degree
his own desire to perform a crusade. Upon Douglas's death, fighting
against the Moors in Spain, a sort of military hors d'oeuvre to which
he could have pleaded no regular call of duty, his followers brought
back the Bruce's heart, and deposited it in the Abbey church of
Melrose, the Kennaquhair of the tale.
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