Farther
ornaments the tale had received from Richie himself, whose tongue,
especially when oiled with good liquor, had a considerable tendency to
amplification, and who failed not, while he retailed to his master all
the wonderful circumstances narrated by Vincent, to add to them many
conjectures of his own, which his imagination had over-hastily
converted into facts.
Yet the life which the Lady Hermione had led for two years, during
which she had been the inmate of George Heriot's house, was so
singular, as almost to sanction many of the wild reports which went
abroad. The house which the worthy goldsmith inhabited, had in former
times belonged to a powerful and wealthy baronial family, which,
during the reign of Henry VIII., terminated in a dowager lady, very
wealthy, very devout, and most unalienably attached to the Catholic
faith. The chosen friend of the Honourable Lady Foljambe was the
Abbess of Saint Roque's Nunnery, like herself a conscientious, rigid,
and devoted Papist. When the house of Saint Roque was despotically
dissolved by the fiat of the impetuous monarch, the Lady Foljambe
received her friend into her spacious mansion, together with two
vestal sisters, who, like their Abbess, were determined to follow the
tenor of their vows, instead of embracing the profane liberty which
the Monarch's will had thrown in their choice. For their residence,
the Lady Foljambe contrived, with all secrecy--for Henry might not
have relished her interference--to set apart a suite of four rooms,
with a little closet fitted up as an oratory, or chapel; the whole
apartments fenced by a stout oaken door to exclude strangers, and
accommodated with a turning wheel to receive necessaries, according to
the practice of all nunneries.
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