in speaking of the "golden vases" and ornaments for the altars of
her new church which Margaret devised, "I myself carried out the work,"
he says. These must have been busy days in Malcolm's primitive palace
while the workmen were busy with the great cathedral close by, the mason
with his mallet, the homely sculptor with his chisel, carving those
interlaced and embossed arches which still stand, worn and gray, but
little injured, in the wonderful permanency of stone, in the nave of the
old Abbey of Dunfermline: while the Queen's rooms opened into the hall
where her ladies sat over their embroidery, among all the primitive dyes
that art had caught from herbs and traditional mixtures, on one
hand--and on the other into noisier workshops, where workmen with
skilful delicate hammers were beating out the shining gold and silver
into sacred vessels and symbols of piety. Margaret along with her stores
of more vulgar wealth, and the ingots which were consecrated to the
manufacture of crucifix and chalice, had brought many holy relics: and
no doubt the cases and shrines in which these were enclosed afforded
models for the new, over which Father Theodoric, with his monkish cape
and cowl laid aside, and his shaven crown shining in the glow of the
furnace, was so busy. What a pleasant stir of occupation and progress,
the best and most trustworthy evidences of growing civilisation, must
have arisen within the shelter of the woods which framed that centre of
development and new life: the new abbey rising day by day, a white and
splendid reality in the clearing among the trees; the bells, symbols of
peace and pleasantness, sounding out over the half-savage country; the
chants and songs of divine worship swelling upward to the skies.
Margaret's royal manufactory of beautiful things, her tapestries and
metal work, her adaptation of all the possibilities of ornament latent
in every primitive community, with the conviction, always ennobling to
art, that by these means of sacred adornment she and her assistants and
coadjutors were serving and pleasing God, no doubt consoled her ardent
and active spirit for the loss of many comforts and graces with which
she must have been familiar. At the same time her new sphere of
influence was boundless, and the means in her hand of leavening and
moulding her new country almost unlimited--a thing above all others
delightful to a woman, to whom the noiseless and gradual operation of
influence is the chief