A scene that brought me to tears

I don’t often shed tears when I read, but I shed tears twice at the end of Walter Scott’s novel “Waverley”—once in the scene below and once in the scene that follows when the Englishman Edward Waverley says farewell to Fergus Mac-Ivor before he is taken away in Carlise Castle to be disembowelled, quartered, and beheaded. Mac-Ivor hopes that his head will be placed not on the Southern Gate of the Castle facing England but on the Scots Gate facing Scotland. It is. More broadly, the novel tells the story of how Waverley is caught up in the 1745 Jacobite uprising. Mac-Ivor is one the Highland chieftains who joins the uprising. He grew up in France with the Stuarts and undoubtedly supports their claim to the throne of England, but he also hopes for personal gain from the conflict. In contrast, his beautiful, cultured, and aristocratic sister Flora has no other cause but that of the Chevallier [what the Jacobites called Prince Charles]. Waverley was once in love with Flora, but she would…