am happy, I think—comforted.’
He considered her. He considered intently, every muscle at a stretch.
He bit his moustache, pressing it into his teeth with his fingers—moved
forward—stopped, like a hawk poised in mid-air: he nodded his head
savagely, came up to her, and with gentle firmness took her by the
wrists, drew her hands from her face. ‘Look now at me,’ he said.
She did not struggle to be free, but kept her face averted, strongly bent
downward.
‘Look you at me.’
She shook her head. He felt her tears fall hot on his hands.
‘But now,’ he said, ‘you must do as I bid you.’
Slowly she lifted then her head and faced him, looking up. He saw the
glittering tears; an honest tenderness gave honesty to his words. ‘My
heart!’ he said, ‘my heart!’ and kissed her where she stood.
Then he turned and left her alone; went by her into the thicket and
climbed the wall into the neighbouring garden. For a long time she
stayed, with her two hands clasped at her neck, where his had put
them—for a long time, wondering and trembling and blushing in the dark.
CHAPTER XII
SCOTCHMEN’S BUSINESS
When the Earl of Bothwell took off his boots that same night, he said, as
he threw them to his man Paris, ‘In the morning we go to business.’
‘Ha, in a good hour!’ says Paris, a boot in each hand. ‘And to what
business will your lordship be pleased to go?’
‘Man’s business, you fool,’ says the Earl; ‘carving and clearing
business; road-making business.’
Paris swung a boot. ‘I consider that there is no gentleman in this
deplorable country so apt for that business,’ he said. ‘Do you ask me
why? I will tell your lordship very willingly. It is because there is no
other gentleman in this country at all.’
‘Apt or not,’ says Lord Bothwell, scratching in his beard, ‘it is myself
who will do it.’ He stared at the floor, laughed, caught the word on his
lips and kept it suspended while he considered. Then he added, ‘And I
signed the contract, and sealed it, but an hour ago.’ He threw himself
naked on his bed, and Paris covered him with his blankets.
‘Happy dreams to your lordship, of the contract!’
‘Go to the devil,’ says my lord: ‘I’m asleep.’ And by the next moment he
was snoring.
Paris sat upon the floor, with a guttering candle beside him, and made
notches on a tally-stick. He told them over on his fingers and got them
pat before he lay down.
In the morning he sat upon the edge of his master’s bed—a familiarity
which had long been allowed him—produced his tally, and enlarged upon it.
‘Master,’ he said, ‘for your purpose these persons are the best, as I
shall shortly rehearse to you. I have chosen each and every for some
quality which is pre-eminently useful, in which I believe him to be
singular. The first is Monsieur Ker of Fawdonsyde, who, it is true, is
at the moment in disgrace for his part in the Italian’s affair. That can
be got over, I think; and if so, well so. He has the strongest wrist in
this kingdom, next to your lordship’s, and will do for a spare string to
our bow: for I take it yourself will be our first—not likely to fail, I
grant; but one must always be prepared in these cases for a sudden jerk
aside. Monsieur de Fawdonsyde may be trusted to stop that. They tell me
also of him that he can see in the dark, and I can well believe it—a
yellow-eyed man! Nothing could be more useful to us; for somebody is sure
to blow the lights out, and in the ensuing scramble the wrong man might
be hurt, and some happy household plunged into grief. Next, I certainly
think that you should have home Monsieur Archibald. He—if he do no
more—will be a comfortable stalking-horse. He is kinsman—he was greatly
beloved by _our man_ in the old days; and could make himself loved again,
for he has a supple mind. (Not so, however, his cousin, Monsieur de
Morton. He is too stiff a hater for our purpose, and could not conceal
it even if he would.) Now, I will tell you one other reason in favour of
Monsieur Archibald. I never knew a gentleman of birth who could feel for
chain mail in a more natural and loving manner, except perhaps Milord
Ruthven, unhappily deceased. His son does not take after him. But I saw
Monsieur Archibald take the late David, when there was a thought of
going to work upon him, round by the middle, and try his back in every
part—just as though he loved the very feel of him. And yet the two were
enemies! And yet David suspected nothing! It could not have been better
done: so I sincerely advise you to have him. Monsieur d’Ormiston you
will of course take with you. He has ears like a hare’s, and so nice a
valuation of his own skin that you may be sure the roads will be open for
you when the affair is happily ended. But my next choice will astonish
you. Be prepared—listen, my lord. It is Monsieur de Lennox! What! you
cry—the father to put away the son! With great respect, I hold to my
opinion. I believe Monsieur de Lennox could be persuaded—and evidently
you could have no more valuable colleague—for two little reasons of
cogency. He is miserable in the ill-favour of our Queen, and he ardently
desires to stand well again with the English Queen. This, then, would
be his opportunity of gratifying both. And it is by no means outside
experience that a father should assist at his son’s demise. There was a
well-known case at Parma, when we were in Italy; and if the Queen-Mother
did not contrive the exit of the late King Francis, then Maître Ambroise
Paré is a fool, and not a fine surgeon. Why did she have the funeral
oration prepared a week before that King’s death? Ah, the thing is
evident! Both of these are Italians, you will say? I confess it. But if
King Philip of Spain hath not an eye of the same cast upon Monseigneur
Don Carlos I shall be surprised—and mark this: Monsieur de Lennox is a
hungry man, out of favour and out of money. His lady, who has the purse,
is in the Tower of London; he himself dare not leave Glasgow, where he
starves. Moreover, he has another son. Now——’
But here the Earl of Bothwell sat up in his bed.
‘What are you talking about, you fool?’ he asked, gaping.
‘I am discussing the making of your lordship’s road,’ says Paris, ‘of
which you did me the honour to speak overnight.’
His master gave him a clout on the head, which knocked him sideways to
the floor. ‘You soiled cut-purse!’ he roared at him, ‘you famous pirate,
you jack-for-the-string, what are you about? Do you think you are at sea,
that you can talk bloody designs to the open sky? Do you think us all
thieves on a galley, and the redding of a realm as easy as to club the
warder of a bench? Astounding fool! with your blustering and botching,
you’ll bring me to a wooden bolster one of these days.’ He leaped from
his bed, and put his foot on the man’s neck. ‘If I don’t make you swallow
your infamous tally, call me a dunce!’
Paris lay still, pale but serious. ‘It is difficult to discuss matters of
moment in this posture,’ he said; ‘but I can assure your lordship that I
have given a great deal of thought to your business.’
‘And who under Heaven asked you for thought?’ cried his master. ‘Or who
in Heaven gave you the wit for it? Get up, you monkey-man, and fetch me
my clothes. We don’t go to work that way in Scotland.’
‘I am conscious of it, master,’ said Paris, ‘and pity it is. There is
a saying in Italy, which dates from a very old case of our kind, _Cosa
fatta capo ha_: _a thing done_, say they, _is done with_. Now here, a
thing is so long a-contriving that it is in danger of not being done at
all. Love of Heaven, sir! for what would you wait? What can your lordship
want beside the bounden gratitude of the Qu——.’ He stopped, because the
Earl struck him on the mouth with the back of his hand.
‘No names, you damned parrot!’
Paris, ashamed of himself, wiped his lips. ‘I admit the indiscretion, my
lord, and regret it. But my question was pertinent.’
‘It was cursed nonsense,’ said the Earl, ‘and as impertinent as yourself.
Suppose I took this road of yours—what would old Sourface be about?
Where would his prim eyes be? Looking through his fingers—seeing and not
seeing—for sure! Why, you toss-pot, we must have him roped and gagged, or
he’ll have us roped, I can tell you—and as high as Haman. Bah! you make
me ashamed that ever I held words with such a gull. Peace now, mind your
business, and get me my drink. I am going abroad—then to the Council.’
* * * * *
The first person of consequence he accosted that day was the Lord of
Lethington. The Secretary went in desperate fear of him, as you could
have told by the start he gave when he felt the heavy hand clap his
shoulder.
‘What scares you, man?’ The bluff voice was heard all over the
quadrangle, and many paused to see the play. ‘What scares you, man? You
watch me like a hare—and me your good friend and all!’
‘I hope to serve your good lordship,’ says Mr. Secretary, ‘in the service
that holds us both.’
‘Yes, yes, we had best work together. Now see here, man—come apart.’ He
took the unwilling arm, and bent towards the timorous ear. Men on the
watch saw the Secretary’s interest grow as he listened: in the midst of
their pacing he stopped of his own accord, and pulled up his companion.
‘Yes, my good lord, I could do that. There would be no harm.’
‘Let my lord of Moray understand,’ continues Lord Bothwell, ‘that signed
words cannot say all that they import. That is reasonable. But such as
they are, such as they bear, he himself must sign with the rest of us. I
shall not act without him, nor can the Queen be served. Very well. Go to
him presently, taking with you my lord of Atholl. I seek first my lord
of Argyll, next my brother Huntly. We shall have the Earl of Crawfurd
with us, Mar I doubt not also; the Lords Seton, Livingstone, Fleming,
Herries——’
‘These for certain,’ says Lethington; then hesitated.
‘Well, man? Out wi’t.’
‘There is just this. Your lordship knows my lord of Moray—a most politic
nobleman.’
‘Politic! A pest!’
‘He is ever chary of putting hand to paper. I know of one band, never
signed by him. He wrote a letter, by which all thought——But it purported
nothing. However, that is happily past.’
‘He signed away Davy,’ says Bothwell very calmly.
The Secretary turned quickly. ‘No, my lord, no! Upon my oath he never
did. Nothing would make him.’
Bothwell considered his twitching brows. ‘He signed the letter which you
now have, Lethington. By that you hold him, cunning rogue though he be.
Now, take me this way. If he signs not to me before the Council, to the
effect that what I sign there he signs also, I move no further.’
‘Your lordship will be wise. But——Oh, his fingers are stiff at the pen!’
‘Master Cecil in England can make them supple,’ says Bothwell, ‘working
at them through the palm. And so can you, my friend, if I make you.’
Mr. Secretary closed his eyes.
‘You hold his letter,’ Bothwell went on, ‘wherein he implicates himself
in Davy’s killing. Now, if I go to him with the news?’
‘Ha, my lord! But he knows very well that I have it.’
‘Of course he knows. But the Queen does not know it.[5] Now, if I
tell him that you will use the letter against him with the Queen, Mr.
Secretary, you will be hanged.’
The Secretary flinched. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘what is it that you want
from me?’
‘Your master’s sign-manual, hireling,’ says Bothwell. ‘Go and get it.’
He left him to scheme it out, of all wretches in Scotland at that hour
the one I could pity the most. Lethington was a man who saw every head an
empty pot compared with his own; and yet, by mere pusillanimity, he had
to empty himself to fill them. He was a coward, must have countenance if
he were to have courage. With a brain like his, a man might lord it over
half Europe; yet the water in his heart made him bond-slave of every old
Scots thief in turn. The only two he dared to best and betray were——Well!
we shall have to see him do it soon enough. And yet, I say, pity Mr.
Secretary!
The Earl of Atholl, kindly, dull man, who was his friend through all,
went with him now to beard the Bastard of Scotland. Bolt upright in his
elbow-chair, his Bible on one hand, his sword and gloves on the other, my
lord of Moray listened to what was said without movement. His face was a
mask, his hands placid, his eyes fixed on the standish. Atholl talked,
Lethington talked, but not a word was said of Bothwell so long as the
first of these two was in the room. The moment he was out of it, the
question came sharp and short.
‘Who stands in the dark of this, Lethington? Who is at your back?’
Lethington never lied to his master. ‘My lord, it was the Earl of
Bothwell came suddenly upon me this morning.’
‘You surprise me, sir. I had not thought you shared confidences with that
lord.’
‘Nor have I ever, my lord,’ says Lethington, with much truth; ‘nor did I
to-day. Such confidence as there was came from him.’
‘Did he confide in you indeed? And what had he for your ear?’
The Secretary narrowed his eyes. ‘Matters, my lord, of such intimacy that
I still marvel how they came to his knowledge.’
‘I do not share your wonder. He is greatly trusted by the Queen.’
‘True, my lord. But such things as he knoweth are not, as I conjecture,
fully known to her Majesty.’
Now it was that the Earl of Moray looked solemnly at his servant. ‘You
shall name these things to me, Lethington, if you please.’
‘He knoweth, my lord, for certain, the names of all who were privy to the
bond for Davy’s slaughter.’
‘Why, yes, yes,’ says Lord Moray, ‘no doubt but he does. For all of them
were confessed to by the King, who, indeed, showed her Majesty the bond.’
Mr. Secretary looked out of window. ‘I said, All who were privy, my lord.
I did not refer to the bond. He knows more than is known to her Majesty;
but considers now what may be his duty in her regard.’
My Lord Moray blinked like an owl that fears the light. He looked at his
hands, sighed, cleared his brow of seams. ‘It would be well that I should
confer with his lordship upon that matter, before the Council sits,’
he said. ‘Pray you, ask him to favour me at his leisure—at his perfect
leisure, Lethington. And when he is here—if he thinks well to come—it
would be convenient that yourself were by, in case of need. The matter
is a high one, and we may be thankful of your experience. God speed you,
Lethington. God speed you well!’
Conference there then was between two acute intellects, which it would
be profitable to report, if one could translate it. But, where, in a
conversation, every other word is left out, the record must needs be
tedious. The Queen was not once mentioned, nor the King neither. The Earl
of Bothwell gave no hint that he knew his fellow-councillor dipped deep
in murder; the Earl of Moray did not let it appear that he knew the other
stripping for the same red bath. Each understood each; each was necessary
to the other; each knew how far he could go with his ally, and where
their roads must fork; above all, both were statesmen in conference,
to whom decency of debate was a tradition. Naming no names, fixing no
prices, they haggled, nevertheless, as acutely as old wives on the
quayside; and Mr. Secretary, nimble between them, reduced into writing
the incomprehensible. Thus it was that the Earl of Bothwell promised
under his hand to be the friend of the Earl of Moray, ‘so far as lay
within the Queen’s obedience’; the Earl of Moray signified by the same
tokens that he would attend the Council and further the Queen’s service
in the matters to be moved by the Earl of Bothwell, ‘so far as lay within
the province of a Christian.’ Then Lord Bothwell, apparently satisfied,
went away to his friend and brother-in-law, my Lord Huntly.
* * * * *
To the Council—it was the seventh of October—came the lords: the Queen
not present. It was a short and curious convocation, as silent as that
of Hamlet’s politic worms, busy upon the affairs of Polonius. The Earl
of Huntly, as Chancellor, produced a parchment writing, which was held
up, but not read. ‘My lords,’ he said, ‘you shall see in the act of my
hand at the pen a service tendered to our sovereign lady, the which,
seeing you are acquainted with its nature, I do not discuss with your
lordships. Active service of the prince, my lords, may be of two kinds:
open movement against enemies avowed, and secret defence against a
masked, ambushed enemy.’ He signed the writing, and passed to the Earl
of Moray. This one looked at it, read it through twice; took a pen,
inspected the point, dipped; detected a hair in the quill, removed it,
wiped his fingers, dipped again—and signed, ‘James.’ The parchment then
went briskly about. Last to sign it, far below the others, was the Lord
of Lethington.
And what was in this famous bond? The Master of Sempill, eager for news,
got wind of it, and enshrined it in his Diurnall. He has—
_October the 9._—At a council two days since—the Q—— not
present, but the Earl of Both. returned from the country—I hear
from my wife, who had it from her father (there present), there
was a band passed round the board, read silently and signed by
each lord present. _Its terms_: That the Q—— only should be
obeyed as natural sovereign, and the authority of her dearest
consort, and of all others whomsoever, of no force without her
pleasure first known. The Lords Both., Hun(tley), Mor(ay),
Arg(yll), Atholl, and the Secretary signed this, among others.
My father _not_ present. Thus goeth a King out of Scotland.
_Mem._ Great news for my lord of Mort(on) here....
The Q. will go to Jedburgh, I hear, to a Justice Court; my
wife with her. She took leave of the lord of Bothw. after the
Council. A long time together....
The Master was out in his dates. The very night after the Council Lord
Bothwell rode fast into Liddesdale; and next day the Queen, with her
brothers, Lord Huntly, and the Court, went over the hills to Jedburgh.
The King was believed to be in the West with his father, but no one knew
for certain where he was.
[5] My lord was wrong there. She knew it perfectly well.
END OF MEN’S BUSINESS
BOOK THE THIRD
MARKET OF WOMEN
CHAPTER I
STORMY OPENING
It is rather better than five years since you first met with Des-Essars
in the sunny garden at Nancy, and as yet I have but dipped into the
curious little furtive book which, for my own part, although its
authenticity has been disputed, I attribute to him without hesitation—_Le
Secret des Secrets_, as it is called. For such neglect as this may
be I have the first-rate excuse that it contains nothing to what has
been my purpose; all that there is of it, prior to the October 1566
where now we are, seeming to have been added by way of prologue to the
Revealed Mysteries he thought himself inspired to declare. Probably, no
secrets had, so far, come in his way, or none worth speaking of. ‘Boys’
secrets,’ as he says somewhere, ‘are truly but a mode of communicating
news, which when it is particularly urgent to be spread, is called _a
secret_. The term ensures that it will be listened to with attention
and repeated instantly.’ You may gather, therefore, that _Le Secret des
Secrets_ was not of this order, more especially since he tells us himself
that it would never have been imparted at all but for the Queen’s, his
mistress’s, danger. Plainly, then, he compiled his book in Queen Mary’s
extreme hour of need, when her neck was beneath her ‘good Sister’s’
heel—and only in the hope of withdrawing it. Those were hasty times for
all who loved the poor lady; the _Secret des Secrets_ bears signs of
haste. Its author scamped his prologue, took his title for granted, and
plunged off into the turmoil of his matter like the swimmer who goes to
save life. But you and I, who know something about him by this time, have
intelligence enough to determine whether he was worthy, or likely to be
judged worthy, of the keeping of a Queen’s heart. So much only I have
thought fit to declare concerning the origin of a curious little book:
for curious it is, partly in the facts it contains, and even more in the
facts it seems to search for—facts of mental process, as I may call them.
He begins in this manner:—
‘About ten of the clock on the night of the 6th-7th October’—that is,
the reader sees, on the night when Bothwell kissed her in the Chequer
Garden—‘the Queen’s Majesty, who had been supposed alone, meditating
in the garden, came stilly into the house, passed the hall, up the
stair, and through the anteroom where I, Mr. Erskine, Mistress Seton and
Mistress Fleming were playing at trumps; and on to her cabinet without
word said by any one of us. We stood up as she came in, but none spake,
for her looks and motions forbade it. She walked evenly and quickly,
in a rapt state of the soul, her head bent and hands clasped together
under her chin, just as a priest will go, carrying the Sacrament to the
bedridden or dying. But presently, after she was gone, Mistress Fleming
went to see whether she had need of anything; and returned, saying that
her Majesty had been made ready for bed and lain down in it, without
word, without prayers. Shortly afterwards the ladies went to their beds,
and I sat alone in the antechamber on my duty of the night; and so
sitting fell asleep with my face in my arm.
‘I suppose that it was midnight or thereabout when I was awakened by a
touch on my head, and starting up, saw the Queen in her bedgown, her
hair all loose about her, standing above me. Being unable to sleep, she
said, she desired company. I asked her, should I read, sing, or tell her
a tale? But she, still smiling, being, as I thought, in a rapt condition
of trance, shook her head. “If you were to read I should not listen,
if you were to sing the household would wake. Stay as you are,” said
she, and began to walk about the chamber and to speak of a variety of
matters, but not at all connectedly. I replied as best I was able, which
was heavily and without wit—for I had been sound asleep a few moments
before. Something was presently said of my lord of Bothwell: I think that
she led the talk towards him. I said, I marvelled he should stay so long
in Liddesdale, with the Court here in town. She stopped her pacing and
crossed her arms at her neck, as I had seen her do when she came in from
the garden. Looking closely and strangely at me, she said, “He is not in
Liddesdale. He is here. I have seen him this night.” Then, as I wondered,
she sat down by the table, her face shaded from the candle by her hand,
and regarded me for some time without speaking.
‘She then said that, although it might seem very extraordinary to me,
she had good reason for what she was about to do; that for the present
I must believe that, and be sure that she would not impart to me her
greatest secret had she not proved me worthy of the trust. She then told
me, without any more preface, that she should be called the happiest of
women, in that, being beloved, she loved truly again. She said that she
had been consecrated a lover that very night by a pledge not only sweet
in itself, but sweet as the assurance of all sweetness. She touched her
mouth; and “Yes,” she said, “all unworthy as I am, this great treasure
hath been bestowed into my keeping. See henceforward in me, most
faithful, proved friend, not your mistress so much as your sister, a
servant even as you are, devoted to the greatest service a woman can take
upon her—subjection, namely, to Love, that _puissant and terrible lord_.”
‘While I wondered still more greatly, she grew largely eloquent. Her
soul, she said, was in two certain hands “like a caught bird”; but
such bondage was true freedom to the generous heart, being liberty to
give. She owned that she was telling me things known to no others but
herself and her beloved. “I am your sister and fellow-servant,” said
she, “whispering secrets in the dark. Marvel not at it; for women are so
made that if they cannot confide in one or another they must die of the
burning knowledge they have; and I, alas, am so placed that, with women
all about me, and loving women, there is none, no, not one, in whom I can
trust.”
‘I knew already who her lover was, and could not but agree with her in
what she had to admit of her women. One and all they were against my lord
of Bothwell. Mistress Livingstone hated him so vehemently she could not
trust herself near him; Mistress Fleming was at the discretion of Mr.
Secretary Lethington, a declared enemy of his lordship’s; Mistress Beaton
was wife to a man who did not deny that he was still the servant of Lady
Bothwell; in Mistress Seton my mistress never had confided. So she had
some reasons for what she was pleased to do—another being that I, of all
her servants, had been most familiar with his lordship—and I was certain
that she had others, not yet declared. Indeed, she hinted as much when
she said that she had proved me upon a late occasion, that she loved me,
and knew of my love for her. “In time to come,” said she—“I cannot tell
how soon or in what sort, such matters being out of my hands—I may have
to ask you other service than this of listening to my confidence; I may
require of you to dare great deeds, and to do them. If you will be my
sworn brother, I shall see in you my champion-at-need, and be the happier
for the knowledge. What say you, then, Baptist?” she asked me.
‘Kneeling before her, I promised that I would keep her secret and do all
her pleasure. I watched her throughout. She was quite composed, entirely
serious, did not seem to imagine that she was playing a love-sick
game—and was not, altogether. I am sure of that, watching her as I did.
She made me lift my right hand up, and stooped forward and kissed the
open palm before she went away. Here is the beginning of Mysteries, which
I, unworthy servant, was privileged to share.’
I am not, myself, prepared to say that there is more mystery in this than
the young man put into the telling of it. She trusted the youth, required
an outlet, and made, in the circumstances, the wisest choice.
* * * * *
Two days after the performance, at any rate, she set out for Jedburgh,
as you know, in a fine bold humour and with a fine company. She went
in state and wore her state manners; rode for the most part between her
brother Moray and the Earl of Huntly, seemed to avoid her women, and had
little to say to them when of necessity they were with her. She did her
bravest to be discreet, and there is no reason to suppose that anybody
about her had more than an inkling of the true state of her heart. Lord
Bothwell’s leave-taking had been done in public the day before, and
gallantly done. He had been at the pains to tell her that he was going to
his wife, she to smile as she commended him for his honest errand. She
had given him her hand and wished him well, and had not even followed
him with her looks to the door. The Earl of Moray, not an observant man
by nature, suspected nothing; what Lord Huntly may have guessed he kept
to himself. This poor speechless, enamoured nobleman! his trouble was
that he kept everything to himself and congested his heart as well as
his head-piece. So much so that the Queen once confessed to Adam Gordon,
his brother, that she had ‘forgotten he was a lover of hers’! She spent
the first night out at Borthwick, and next morning rode on to Jedburgh
in madcap spirits—which were destined to be rudely checked by what she
met there. A slap in the face, sharp enough to stop the breath, it was:
news with which the town was humming. It seemed that the Earl of Bothwell
had fought in the hills with Elliot of Park, had slain his man, and been
slain of him.
My Lord Moray was the first to bear her this tale; and when he told
it—just as nakedly as I have put it up there—she turned upon him a tense,
malignant face, and said that he lied. ‘Madam, I grieve,’ says he—‘my
lord of Bothwell lies dead in Liddesdale.’ ‘O liar, you lie!’ she said,
‘or God lives not and reigns.’ Many persons heard her, and saw the proud
man flinch; and then Des-Essars, young Gordon, and Lethington all broke
into the room together, each with his version gathered out of gossip. My
lord was not killed, as had been feared at first, but sorely wounded,
lying at Hermitage, three doctors about him, and despaired of. ‘One
doctor! one doctor!’ cried Adam, correcting Lethington.
‘I waited by him,’ says Des-Essars, ‘and then, while she looked wildly
from one face to another, I said that it was true there was but one
doctor, and that the case was none so desperate. She flew at me. “How do
you know this? How do you know it?” I replied that I had just got the
tale from French Paris. I think she would have fallen if I had not put
my hands out, which made her draw back in time. “French Paris!” cried
she; “why, then, my lord has sent word. Fly, fly, fly, Baptist: bring him
to me.” This I did, to the great discomfiture of one, at least, in her
company.’
Thus Des-Essars turns his honours to account.
She saw the valet alone, and sent him away with his pockets lined:
afterwards her spirits rose so high that had Moray noticed nothing he
must have been the most careless of men. She made inordinately much of
Des-Essars, fondling him in all men’s sight; she gave him a gold chain to
hang round his neck, and said, in her brother’s presence, that she would
belt him an earl when he was older; ‘for thus should the prince reward
faithful service and the spoken truth.’ He affected not to have heard
her—but it was idle to talk of secrets after that. Here was a rent in the
bag big enough for the cat’s head.
And it would appear that she herself was aware of it, for after a couple
of days, just enough time for the necessary ceremonial business of her
coming, she gave out publicly her intention to ride into Liddesdale,
and her pleasure that Moray, Huntly, and the Secretary should accompany
her. Others would she none, save grooms and a few archers. My Lord Moray
bowed his head in sign of obedience, but spoke his thoughts to no man.
He kept himself aloof from the Court as much as he could, in a house of
his own, received his suitors and friends there at all hours, maintained
considerable state—more grooms at his doors than at the Queen’s. Some
thought he was entrenching himself against the day when his place might
be required of him; some thought that day not far off. All were baffled
by the Queen’s choice of him and his acquiescence.
Betimes in a morning which broke with gales and wild fits of weeping
from the sky, she set out, going by Bedrule, Hobkirk, and the shoulder
of Windburgh Hill. Nothing recked she, singing her snatches of French
songs, whether it blew or rained; and the weather had so little mercy on
her that she was wetted through before she had won to Stitchell—the most
southerly spur of a great clump of land from which, on a fair day, you
can look down upon all Liddesdale and the Vale of Hermitage. There, on
that windy edge, in a driving rain which blew her hair to cling about and
sheathe her face like jagged bronze, she stayed, and peered down through
the mist to see her trysting-place. But a dense shower blotted out the
valleys; and the castle of the Hermitage lies low, scowling in shade be
the sun never so high. Undaunted still, although she saw nothing but the
storm drowning the lowlands, it added to her zest that what she sought
so ardently lay down there in mystery. Singing, shaking her head—all her
colours up for this day of hide-and-seek—fine carmine, gleaming nut-brown
eyes, scarlet lips parted to show her white teeth—she looked a bacchante
drunk upon fierce draughts of weather, a creature of the secret places of
the earth, stung by some sly god. The bit in her teeth, fretting, shaking
her head—who now should rein her up? Two out of the three men with her
watched her closely as she stood on Stitchell, resolving this doubt; the
third, who was Huntly, would not look at her. Primly pried my lord of
Moray out of the corners of his eyes, and pursed his lips and ruled his
back more than common stiff. But gloomily looked Mr. Secretary, as he
chewed a sour root: he felt himself too old for such a headlong service
as hers must be, and too weary of schemes to work with Moray against
her. Yet he must choose—he knew it well. Finely he could read within the
chill outlines of that Master of his destiny all the sombre exhilaration
which he was so careful to hide. ‘He hath set his lures, this dark
fowler; he hath his hand upon the cords. The silly partridge wantons in
the furrow: nearly he hath his great desire. But what to me are he and
his desires, O my God, what are they to me?’ He thought of Mary Fleming
now at her prayers, thanking her Saviour for the glory of his love. His
love—Lethington’s love! Lord, Lord, if he dared to mingle in so fragrant
a pasture as hers, what should he do raking in the midden with an Earl of
Moray? Overdriven, fragile, self-wounding wretch—pity this Lethington.
It is true that Lord Moray saw the partridge in the shadow of the net; it
is true that he was elated in his decent Scots way; but you would have
needed the trained eyesight of Lethington to detect the quiver of the
nerves. The Queen broke in upon all reflections, coming towards them at a
canter: ‘Set on, sirs, set on! The hours grow late, and we cannot see our
haven. Come with me, brother; come, my Lord Huntly.’ Down into the racing
mists they went, squelching through quag and moss.
Hermitage made the best show it could in the Sovereign’s honour. Every
horse in the country was saddled and manned by some shag-haired Hepburn
or another. Where Hermitage Water joins Liddel they met her in a troop,
which broke at her advance and lined the way.
No pleasant sight, this, for my lord of Moray. ‘The Hepburns!’ cried he,
when he saw them. ‘Caution, madam, caution here. What and if they compass
a treachery?’
‘La-la-la,’ says the Queen. ‘Methinks, I should know a traitor when I see
him. Come, my lord, come with me.’ But when he would not, she struck her
horse on the flank, and Huntly spurred to follow her close. Cantering
freely into the midst, she held out her hand, saying, ‘Sirs, you are well
met. Am I well come?’
They closed about her, howling their loyalty, and some leaned over the
saddle-peak to catch at her skirt to kiss it. She made them free of her
hand, let them jostle and mumble over that; they fought each other for
a touch of it, struck out at horses’ heads to fend them off while they
spurred on their own; they battled, cursed, and howled—for all the world
like schoolboys at a cake. To Moray’s eyes she was lost, swallowed up in
this horde of cattle-thieves; for he saw the whole party now in motion,
jingling and bickering into the white mist. He lifted up a protestant
hand. ‘Oh, Mr. Secretar, oh, sir, what cantrips are these?’
‘She is the Scythian Diana,’ says Lethington, grinning awry, ‘and these
are her true believers. We are dullards not to have known it.’
‘She is Diana of the Ephesians, I largely gather,’ his master replied.
‘Come, come, we must follow to the end.’ For his own part, he judged the
end not far.
* * * * *
Her dripping skirts so clung about her—to say nothing that she was rigid
with stiffness and shot all over with rheumatic pains—she had to be
helped from the saddle and supported by force into the house. A bound
victim of love, tied by the knees! upon Huntly’s arm and Ormiston’s
she shuffled into the hall, and stood in the midst, boldly claiming
hospitable entreaty. It was sorry to see her eager spirit hobbled to
a body so numbed. As from the trap some bright-eyed creature of the
wood looks out, so she, swaying there on two men’s arms, testified her
incurable hope by colour and quick breath. But calm and cold, as the moon
that rides above a winter night, stood the Countess of Bothwell with her
women, and stately curtsied.
The Queen laughed as she swayed. ‘I am a mermaid, my child,’ says she,
‘sadly encumbered by my weeds. I have lost my golden comb, and my
witching song is gone in a croak. You need not fear to take me in.’
The young Countess said, ‘Suffer me conduct your Majesty to the chambers.
All the household stuff is at your service.’
She shook her head. ‘Witchcraft may come back with comfort! No, no, my
dear, I will not plunder you. I shall do very well as I am.’ Madness! She
was on pin-points till she saw her lover; but it was not that which made
her refuse warmth and dry clothes. It was a word of her own, which had
turned aside as she used it and given her a stab. Would she not ‘plunder’
this lady, good lack? She had a scruple, you perceive.
Tongue-tied Huntly was in great distress. ‘I would heartily urge you,
madam——’ and so forth; and his sister made the cold addition that all was
prepared.
The Queen was now trembling. ‘You are kind—but I have no need. I am
very well, and cannot stay long. Let me fulfil my errand—see my wounded
councillor—and depart. Come, take me to him now. Will you do me this
kindness?’ She spoke like a child, with eagerness too simple to be
indecent.
‘I will prepare my lord, madam, for the high honour you propose him,’
says the Countess, after a moment’s pause.
‘Yes, yes—go now.’
She went to the fire and held her shaking hands towards it. Do what she
could, there was no staying the shivering-fits, nor the clouds of steam
that came from her, nor the ring of water round her skirts.
Huntly was miserable. ‘I beseech you, I beseech you, madam, dry yourself.
This is——Oh, but you run into grave peril. I would that I could make you
believe that all this house is yours, and all hearts in it——’
‘All hearts—all hearts—it may be,’ she said with a break in her voice;
‘but some there are here with no hearts. Ah, what heart is in a body that
would not find some pity for me?’
He was dreadfully moved, leaned ardently towards her. ‘Madam! madam! You
know my heart—I have never hid it from you. You talk of pity. Why, is not
the piteous heart acquaint with pitifulness? Ah, then pity me! Let me
serve you.’
Then her ague ceased, and she looked at him full, with brimming eyes.
‘Take me up to him, Huntly. I cannot bear myself.’
The fine colour flushed him. ‘Come, madam; I will take you.’
She followed him up the stair—and the Earl of Moray’s eyes followed her.
* * * * *
Here is one difference between imagination and fancy, that the first will
leap full-fledged into the life of the upper air from the egg of its
beginning, while the second crouches long callow in the nest, and must
be fostered into plumage before it can take its pretty flights. Here, of
these two who had been separate for a week, she had flown far beyond the
man’s wayfaring, and stood upon a height which he could scarcely hope
to see. To keep touch with her might call for all his wit. For what had
actually passed between them but a couple of snatched kisses in the dark?
No more, upon his honour, to his sense. For though he had built upon them
a fine castle—with the bricks of Spain—he would have been the first to
own himself a fool for so doing. But she! Not only had she reared a fair
solid house of chambers and courts, but she had lived with him in it, a
secret life. Here she had had him safe since the hour he left her in the
garden. In her thought he was bound to her, she to him, by sacraments;
they were, like all lovers, of eternal eld. No beginning and no end will
love own up to. It is necessary to remember this.
Therefore, while he made an effort to get up from the bed on which he
lay strapped, she had prevented him by running forward and kneeling
lover-wise by his side. As she had hoped, she was now lower than he,
nearer the floor; thence she had looked searchingly in his face, but said
nothing, too full of love, too bashful to begin. The Countess stood at
the bed-head, her brother Huntly drooped at the foot. The Queen had no
eyes for them.
‘Speak to me of your welfare—assure me. I have been in great grief.’
To this he could only stammer some words of thanks, not perceiving yet by
any means on what side to take her. But she would have none of his thanks.
‘You must speak to me, for I have dreamed deeply of this hour. Ah, how
they have stricken you!’ She touched his bandages, lingering about that
one upon his head as if she could not leave it alone. ‘Oh, curious knife,
to search so deep! Oh, greedy Park, to take so much! But I think I should
have taken more—had I been wiser.’
‘Rise, madam, rise,’ he said, ‘or I must rise. I may not see you
kneeling.’
She laughed. ‘I shall tell you my wicked thought when I knew that I
should see you lying here,’ she said, ‘and then you will not grudge me my
knees. No, but you shall shrive me again as once before you did—if you
are merciful to poor women.’
As it was evident that she disregarded and would disregard any company in
the room, Huntly began to speak, with a good deal of dignity. ‘Madam, by
your leave——’
She looked about, and saw him ready to quit her. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said,
‘do what you will’; and turned to her absorbing service.
‘Come, sister,’ says Huntly, and beckoned out the Countess, who swiftly
followed him. He shut the chamber door.
The Countess had great self-command. ‘Will you tell me what this means,
Huntly?’
He looked at her, knitting his black brows. ‘I think you know very well,
sister.’
As she was walking away from him to her own chamber, he called her back.
She had her hand on the latch. ‘Well?’ she said, ‘what more?’
‘This much,’ said he. ‘You see how it is now with those two. What you
purpose to do in the likely flow of affairs I know not; but I know my
own part. I cannot forget that I stand debtor to her for my honour, my
mere life, and all my hope in the world. She has suffered, been very
friendless, forsaken oft, betrayed on all hands—mine among them. She may
suffer yet more; but not again by me, nor I hope by any of my kin. She
will be forsaken again; but I will never forsake her now. She will need
friends in time to come: well, she may reckon upon one. Long ago I prayed
her to trust Gordon, and at the time she had little cause to do it. Now
you shall see her answer my desire—and not in vain. So much, for all that
she hath forgiven in me, and for all that she hath redeemed for me—so
much, I tell you, I owe her.’
The Countess returned his gaze with no less steadfastness, from under
brows no less serried. ‘And I,’ she said, ‘a Gordon as much as you are,
do owe her more than you choose to acknowledge for your part.’
She went into her chamber; but Huntly remained in the gallery outside the
shut doors.
CHAPTER II
THE BRAINSICK SONATA
Asked afterwards by his brother-in-law Argyll how he had survived that
long battle homewards through the howling dark, the Earl of Moray, citing
scripture, had replied, _Except the Lord had been on our side_—! How far
he strained the text, or how far hoped of it, he did not choose to say,
but in his private mind he thought he saw all the fruit ready to fall
to his hand whenever he should hold it out. No need to shake the tree.
The Queen’s white palfrey made a false step and went girth-deep into the
moss. None could see her, for she had spurred on alone into the jaws of
the weather, feeling already (it may be) the fret of the fever in her
bones which afterwards overcame her; nor could any hear her, for she let
no cry. And when the horse, struggling desperately, hinnied his alarms,
it had not been Lord Moray who had hastened to save. Huntly, rather,
it was who, shrieking her name into the wind, caught at last the faint
echo of her voice, and plunged into the clinging, spongy mess to her
rescue. Alas, then, was she mad? or drunk with love? ‘Here I am, Mary of
Scotland, clogged and trammelled, like a bird in a net.’ And then, O Lord
of Life! she had laughed snugly and stroked herself—there in the gulf
of death. Huntly, a man for omens, dated all misery to come from this
staring moment.
After it he would not let go of her rein for the rest of the ride, but
braved (as never before) her coaxing, irony, rage—lastly her tears of
mortification. Longing to be alone with her lover, hating the very
shadow of any other man, she was scathing and unworthy. ‘If Bothwell were
here you would not dare what now you do. You hold me because there is no
man to stop you. It is a brave show you make of me here! Well, take your
joy of numb flesh—how are you likely to be served with it quick?’ and
so on mercilessly. Towards the end of an intolerable journey she became
drowsy through fatigue, and rather light-headed. The honest gentleman
put his arm round her and induced her head to his shoulder. She yawned
incessantly, her wits wandered; she spoke to him as if he were Bothwell,
and set his cheeks burning. For a few minutes at a time, now and again,
she slept, while he supported her as best he could, all his reverent love
for the exquisite, flashing, crowned creature of his memories swallowed
up now in pity for the draggled huntress in her need.
She was too tired to sleep when, late at night, they had laid her abed.
She tossed, threw her head and arms about, was hot, was cold, shivered,
sweated, wailed to herself, chattered, sang, whined nonsense. At first
the women, having her to themselves, learned all that she had been
careful to hide from them; all that Huntly had shut within the chamber
door at Hermitage was enacted before them—or a kind of limping, tragic
travesty of it. So then they grew frightened, and lost their heads: Mary
Livingstone sent after Lord Moray; Mary Fleming called in Lethington;
Mary Seton, with presence of mind, fetched Des-Essars. Before a keen
audience, then, she harped monotonously and grotesquely upon the day’s
doings. She read scraps of her poems to Bothwell—and few had known that
she had writ any! She wooed him to stoop down his head, wreathed her
arms about a phantom of him, tortured and reproached herself. All was
done with that straining effort to rehearse which never fails in sickbed
delirium.
‘Ah, wait—wait before you judge me, my lord. I have a better piece
yet—with more of my heart’s blood in the words. Now, now, how does it
go?’ She began to cry and wring her hands. ‘Oh, give me my coffer before
he leaves me! This one piece he must have. I wept when I wrote it—let
him see the stain.’ She was running still upon her poems. Fleming was to
give her the little coffer, of which the key was always round her neck.
Lord Moray was earnest that it should be given her, but would not let it
be seen how earnest. ‘Maybe it will soothe her to have the coffer. Give
it her, mistress,’ he said.
Des-Essars, seeing his drift, was against it, but of course could do
nothing.
They gave the box into her wandering hands, and she was quiet for a
while, nursing it in her arms; neither seeking to open it nor trying her
memory without it. It was to be hoped, even now, that she would betray
herself no further.
What need to deny that Lord Moray was curious? He shook with curiosity.
The thing was of the utmost moment; and it commands my admiration of
this patient man to know that he could be patient still, and sit by his
sick sister’s bed, his head on his hand—and all his hopes and schemes
trembling to be confirmed by a little gimcrack gilt box. The prize he
fought for he got—betraying nothing, he heard her betray all. When the
madness wrought in her again, she opened the coffer, and began to patter
her verses as she hunted in it, turning paper after paper (every scrap
her condemnation), incapable of reading any.
Her mind seemed full of words. They came over her in clouds, flocking
about her—clambering, winged creatures, like the pigeons which crowd and
flicker round one who calls them down. They formed themselves in phrases,
in staves, in verses—laboriously drilled to them, no doubt—once coherent,
but now torn from their sequence, and, like sections of a broken
battle-line, absolutely, not relatively whole. Simple verse it was,
untrained, ill-measured; yet with a hurt note in it, a cry, a whimper
of love, infinitely touching to read now—but to have heard it then from
the dry lips, to have had it come moaning from the blind, breathless,
insatiable girl! Des-Essars says that he could scarcely endure it.
‘Las!’ one snatch began—
Las! n’est-il pas ja en possession
Du corps, du cœur qui ne refuse paine,
Ny dishonneur, en la vie incertaine,
Offense de parents, ni pire affliction?
What a hearing for my Lord Moray! And again she broke out falteringly—
Entre ses mains et en son plein pouvoir
Je metz mon filz, mon honneur et ma vie,
Mon pais, mes subjects, mon âme assubjectie
Est tout à luy, et n’ay autre vaulloir
Pour mon object que sans le decevoir
Suivre je veux malgré toute l’envoie
Qu’issir en peult....
Her voice broke here, and with it the thread: she could not continue, but
looked from one to another, tears streaming down her cheeks, nodded her
head at them, and ‘You know, you know,’ she whimpered, ‘this is the very
truth.’ Alas! they could not doubt it.
And then, suddenly, as it were at the parting of a cloud, her soul looked
out of her eyes sanely; she came to herself, saw the disturbed faces of
her friends, and caught sight of her brother’s among them. She jumped
about as quickly as a caught child, and that lightning, sentinel wit of
hers sprang upon guard. But for a moment—when she saw Moray there—she
betrayed herself. ‘Oh, brother, you startled me!’ she said.
He was careful. ‘Alas! I find you in grief, madam.’
‘Thoughts, brother, thoughts!’
‘Sad thoughts, I fear, madam. We are concerned to find your Majesty so
disturbed.’
She eyed him vaguely, being unable just then to realise how completely
she had yielded him her secret. Extreme fatigue swam over her; her head
nodded even as she watched him. When Mary Livingstone laid her down
gently and stroked her hair back she drowsed into a swooning sleep. Over
her unconscious form a hasty little drama was enacting, very curious.
The Earl of Moray, seeing her hold relaxed, rose quietly from his chair
and stretched one of his hands towards the gilt coffer. Des-Essars, in a
flash of thought, nudged Huntly. ‘Quick,’ he whispered—‘take the coffer’;
and Huntly whipped his arm out and reached it first. Moray drew back, as
a cat his paw from a wetness, and shuddered slightly. Huntly says, in a
low voice: ‘Monsieur Des-Essars, I give this casket in your charge until
her Majesty shall give direction. It is open. Come with me and I will
seal it.’
Moray was not the man to forgive such a thing in the Queen’s page; nor
did he ever.
* * * * *
She was awake and fully conscious for a few hours of the next day.
Father Lesley, an old friend, was allowed to see her, and needed not the
evidence of physic, ticks of the pulse, heat of the blood: he could use
his senses.
He warned her of her extremity. This was a grave matter, graver than
she might suppose. Her eyes turned upon him, black and serious; but
then, after a little, she smiled up saucily in his face. ‘Why, I hope,’
she said, ‘there is no need to fear death—if death it be. I am sure my
friends will plead kindly for me, and as for my enemies, what can they
say worse than they have said?’
‘The Christian, ma’am,’ says Lesley, ‘has no concern with friend or foe
at such a time. The road he must travel, he will have no arm to bear
upon, save the proffered arm of the Cross.’
‘True,’ she said. ‘I hope I shall die a Christian, as I have tried to
live.’
Her mind must have been preternaturally sharp, for a chance word of the
admonition which he thought good to deliver set it to work. ‘Likewise it
behoveth the Christian, madam—so strict an account is required of the
highly favoured—to repent him of the mischances of sleep and dreams.
Unlawful, luxurious dreaming, the mutterings of sinful words when our
bodies lie bound in slumber are stumbling-blocks to the soul agog to meet
his Saviour at the gate.’
He rambled on and on, the godly ignoramus, the while her wits flew far.
Mutterings of dreams—had she betrayed herself? Then—to whom? It behoved
her to be certain. She bundled out the priest and had in the confidant.
From Des-Essars she learned the extent of her delirium; he brought her
the casket, unlocked, sealed by the Chancellor, from which, he told her,
she had read ‘certain sonnets.’ Love-laden lady! she stopped him here,
laughing as she fingered her coffer, lifting and snapping-to the lid. ‘My
sonnets? They are here, many and many. I shall read them to him some day.
And to you some. Shall I——?’
Positively, she was about to begin, but he implored her to lock up the
box of mischief and secrete it somewhere.
‘Guard it for me, my dear,’ she said. ‘What else have I done in my fever?’
He told her, many hidden matters had been disclosed, as well of the King
as of others. It was not for him to say that nothing was left unrevealed;
only that he knew of nothing. She had spoken, for instance, of a token,
and had pointed to where it lay. Her eyes sparkled as she flashed out her
hand from under the bedclothes, holding forth a ring upon a chain. ‘Here
it is! He gave it me himself, and fastened it upon me with a kiss.’
‘Ha!’ He was frightened. ‘Let me keep it safe for you, madam, until——’
‘Safe? Will they cut it from my body, think you? Never, never. You shall
watch over my casket, but this is a part of me.’
He makes free to comment upon this episode. ‘And I confess,’ he says,
‘that I exulted in her constant noble courage, and found nothing amiss in
it, that she had stooped from her high estate. Rather I held it matter
for praise and excitation of the thought and sense. For, properly viewed,
there is nothing of beauty more divine than holy humility, nor hath there
ever been since once the Lord of Glory and Might bowed His sacred head.’
But when she would have had him devise with her fresh methods of
concealment, dust-throwing, head-burying, and the like, he told her
fairly that it was too late.
‘I am bold to assure your Majesty that there is no man nor woman about
this Court that wots not throughly of your Majesty’s private affairs.
And, madam, if Dolet, if Carwood, if Mistress Fleming and Mistress Seton
talk to each other of them over the hearth, what think you can be hidden
from my lord of Moray—to say not that he hath been constant at your
bedside, and hath heard you cry verses?’
Pondering these fateful truths, suddenly she tired of shifts. ‘Well,
then, come what may of it,’ she cried out, ‘let them whisper their fill.
I have done with whispering.’
She said that she wished to sleep—had the maids in and composed herself
to that end. About midnight she awoke terribly in pain; shivering, crying
aloud that her hour was come, unable to turn. The doctors were called
to her, all the house was broad awake. She began after a time to vomit
blood, and so continued for a night, a day and a night, shaken to pieces
and at her last gasp.
Under this new agony she weakened so fast that the crying aloud of
secrets stopped for mere weakness: all believed that she must die. The
Earl of Moray, who had kept aloof after his fierce little struggle with
Huntly, now assumed the direction of affairs, none staying him. He took
upon himself to send for the King, that being his duty, as he said, to
the State. The duty was not to be denied, though there was peril in it.
‘I fear, my lord,’ said Lethington, ‘I fear the effect of the King’s
presence upon her Majesty’s frail habit.’
Lord Huntly roundly said that any ill effect from such a measure would
lie at his colleague’s door. ‘And I marvel much, my lord of Moray, that
you, who have heard her Majesty’s wandering speech and know the extremes
of her dislike, should have proposed to call hither the one person left
in Scotland whom she hath reason at once to reproach and fear.’
Moray waved his hand. ‘The Queen, my sister, is at death’s door. And will
you tell me who has so much right to lead her to it as her husband?’
‘To drive her to it, belike your lordship means!’ cried Huntly as he
flung out of the room. His counter-stroke was to send word over to the
Hermitage. Let Bothwell make haste. Adam Gordon took the message.
But before either King or lover could be looked for there dawned a day
upon Jedburgh, upon the darkened grey house in the Wynd, which the Queen
herself believed to be her last. She was in that state of the body when
the ghostly tenant, all preened for departure, has clear dominion, and
earthly affections and earthly cares are ridded and done with. In other
words, she had forgotten Bothwell.
She confessed to Father Roche and received the Sacrament; she kissed her
Maries—all there but Lady Boyne, who had been Beaton; called the lords
about her and looked gently in the face of each in turn—not asking of
them any more, but enjoining, rather, and as if requiring. ‘My lords,
under the wise hands of God I lie waiting here, and what I speak is
from the verge of the dark. Serve, I desire you, the prince my son,
remembering his tender helpless years, and dealing patiently with his
silly understanding. Be not harsh with them that are left of the old
religion: you cannot tax me with severity to your own. Let Scotland
serve God in peace, every man after his own conscience. I am too weak to
command, and have no breath to spare for beseeching. My lords, this is my
last desire. Is there any here who will refuse me?’
She looked about from one strong face to another; saw Huntly crying,
Argyll struggling to keep tears back, Lethington with his head bowed
down, as if he would pray. She saw her half-brother John Stuart watching
her from under his brows; lastly her half-brother Moray, whose face,
fixed and blanched, told her nothing. Sighing, she raised herself. Here
was one for her dying breath, for one last cajolery! She put up her hand
to touch his, and he started as if suddenly awakened, but commanded
himself.
‘Brother,’ she said, in a whisper half audible, ‘oh, brother, vex none in
Scotland, for my sake.’
He stooped, took up and kissed her hand; and she let it fall with a
long sigh of content. Presently after, she straightened herself, as if
conscious of the near end, joined her palms together, and began the
Creed in a sharp, painful voice quite unlike her own, fantastic and
heart-piercing at once. In the middle she stopped.
‘_Qui propter nos homines et propter—et propter_——I misremember the
rest——’
‘_Salutem_, madam, ’tis _nostram salutem_,’ says Father Lesley, with a
sob.
‘God give it me, a sinner,’ she said, and turned her cheek to the pillow,
and lay caught and still. The physician put his hand to her heart, and
made a sign. Lesley tiptoed to the windows and set them open.
* * * * *
The Earl of Moray lifted up his head. ‘I fear, my lords, that the worst
is come upon us. The Queen, my sister—alas!’ He covered his eyes for
a moment, then, in a different tone and a changed aspect, began to
give order. ‘Mr. Secretary, cause messengers to ride to Glasgow to the
prince’s father. My Lord Chancellor, you should convene a council of the
estates. Doctor, I must have a word with you.’
By these sort of phrases he sent one and all flocking to the door like
sheep about a narrow entry. Des-Essars lingered about, but what could he
do? The Earl’s cold eye was upon him.
‘You, sir—what do you here? I will deal with you anon. Meantime, avoid a
matter which is not for you.’
The lad went out, hanging his head.
Last to go were the weeping maids and Father Roche, the Queen’s
Confessor, who, before he left her, placed his crucifix under her closed
hand.
This too was observed. ‘Take up your idol, sir,’ said Lord Moray; ‘take
back your idol. Suchlike are vain things.’
But Father Roche took no notice of him, and went away without his
crucifix.
The physician had remained, a little twinkle-eyed man, with white
eyebrows like cornices of snow. He curved and raised them before the
greatest man in Scotland.
‘You need me, my lord?’
‘I do not at this present. Await my summons in the anteroom.’
He was alone with the passing soul, which even now might be adrift by the
window, streaming out to its long flight.
He looked sharply and seriously about the room, omitting nothing from
his scrutiny. There stood the writing-desk in the window, covered in
geranium leather, with stamped ciphers in gold upon it, _F_ and _M_
interlaced, the Crown-royal of France above them. He stole to it and
tried it: locked. He lifted it from the table, put it on the floor under
the vallance of the bed, then went on searching with his keen eyes.
These winning him nothing, he moved softly about and tried one or two
likely coverts—the curtains, the vallance; moved a hand-mirror, disturbed
some books, a cloak upon a chair. He was puzzled, he put his hand to his
mouth, bit his finger, hesitating. Presently he crept up to the bed and
looked at her who lay there so still. He could see by the form she made
that she was crouched on her side with her knees bent, and judged it
extraordinary, and talked to himself about it. ‘They lie straighter—down
there. They prepare themselves——Who would die twisted? What if the
soul——?’ His heart gave him trouble. He stopped here and breathed hard.
The hand that held the crucifix—it was the right hand—was out: it showed
a ring upon one finger, only one. The left hand he could not see—but it
was very necessary to be seen. Gingerly he drew back the bedclothes,
slowly, tentatively, then more boldly. They were away: and there lay
the casket, enclosed within the half-hoop of the body. That she should
have tricked him in her dying agony was a real shock to him, and, by
angering, gave him strength. He reached out his hand to take it—he
touched it—stopped, while his guilty glance sought her grey face. O King
Christ! he saw her glimmering eyes, all black, fixed upon him—with lazy
suspicion, without wink of eyelid or stir of the huddled body to tell
him whether she lived or was dead. His tongue clove to his palate—he
felt crimson with shame: to rob the dead, and the dead to see him! After
a pause of terrible gazing he stepped backwards, and back, and back. He
felt behind him, opened the door, and called hoarsely: ‘The Queen lives!
She lives! Come in—come in!’
The passages were alive in an instant, doors banged, feet scampered the
stairs. The first person to come in was Des-Essars, turned for the moment
from youth to Angel of Judgment. He dashed by Moray, threw himself upon
the Queen’s coffer, snatched it, and with it backed to the wall. There,
with his arms about it, he stood at bay, panting and watching the enemy.
But the room was now full. Women, crowded together, were all about the
bed. In the midst knelt the doctor by the Queen. Huntly, Lethington,
Argyll, and Erskine stood grouped.
‘What have you, Baptist, in your hands?’ says Huntly.
‘It is her Majesty’s treasure, my lord, which you committed to my
keeping.’
‘Where gat you it, man?’ asked Argyll.
But before he could be answered my Lord Moray lifted up hand and voice.
‘Let all them,’ he said, ‘that are of Christ’s true Church give thanks
with me unto God for this abounding mercy.’
Lethington, Argyll, some of the women, stood with covered faces while his
lordship prayed aloud. Huntly watched the Queen, and presently got his
great reward. Her eyes were turned upon him; she knew him, nodded her
head and smiled. He fell to his knees.
* * * * *
So quick her recovery, in two days’ time there was no more talk of the
piece of Scotland or of the Credo half-remembered. The earth and the men
of the earth resumed their places and re-pointed their goads; as she
grew stronger so grew her anxieties. Lord Bothwell sent, by Adam Gordon
(who had gone to fetch him) his humble duty to her Majesty, ‘thanking
God hourly for her recovery.’ His physicians, he said, would in no wise
suffer him attempt the journey as yet—no, not in a litter. The Queen
chafed, and wrote him querulous letters; but nothing would tempt him out.
She got very few and very guarded replies, so fell to her sonnets again.
The truth is, that the Earl of Bothwell, having set his hand to a
business which, if temperately handled, promised most fair, kept rigidly
to the line he had thought out for himself; and thus affords the rare
example of a man who, by nature advancing upon gusts of passion, can
keep himself, by shrewd calculation, to an orderly gait. The means to
his end which he had appointed, and took, were of the most singular
ever used by expectant lover—to French Paris, for instance, they were
a cause of dismay—and yet they succeeded most exactly. They were, in
fact, _to do nothing at all_. He had found out by careful study of the
lady that the less he advanced the farther she would carry him, the less
he asked for the more she would lay at his feet, the less he said the
larger her interpretation of his hidden mind. She was a fine, sensitive
instrument—like a violin, now wounded, now caressed by the bow, shrieking
when he slashed at the strings, sobbing when he plucked them with callous
fingers, moaning when he was gentle, shrilling when he so chose it. In
a word, he had to deal with loyalty, extreme generosity, a magnanimity
which knew nothing of the sale and exchange of hearts. He had known this
for some years; he now based his calculations upon it without ruth—the
last person in the world to whom her magnificent largess could appeal;
and (as French Paris would say) of the last nation in the world. To a
man like him the gift only imports, not the giving. It is an actuary’s
question; while to her and her kind the act is the whole of the matter:
deepest shame were to know herself rich in one poor loincloth while he
had a bare patch whereon to hang it. She was that true Prodigal, most
glorious when most naked.
Des-Essars, alone in her confidence during these hours of strain, makes
an acute deduction. ‘Her letters of this time will show very plainly,’ he
says, ‘that she was brought by his chill silence to that extreme point
of desire where _sacrifice and loss seem the top of bliss_. It was no
longer a man that she longed for, but an Act. Fasting for a Sacrament,
the bread and wine of her need was Surrender. I say that this fond
distress of hers, these absorbed eyes filled often with tears for no
reason, her suspense when waiting—and vainly—for a messenger’s return;
her abandonment before the altar, her cries in the night—such things, I
say, were reasonable to me, and to all who, in the Florentine’s phrase,
have “understanding of love.” But to the Court it seemed unreasonable.’
Unreasonable! It seemed perverse, unspeakable. The maids were dumb
with shame. The one thing which Mary Fleming would not discuss with
Lethington, or allow him to discuss in her hearing, was the Queen’s
disease. Mary Livingstone went about like one in a trance—sand-blind,
stumbling after some elfin light. She spoke to none, remembered none.
Judge the feelings of her Master of Sempill, who could tell his friends
in England nothing! Mary Seton, too, kept her pretty lips locked up.
Once, when Fleming pressed her,—what time they were abed—she said
shortly: ‘I am her servant, and shall be till I die. If you are her
judge, I know it not. You are none of mine.’
‘No, no, no!’ cried poor Fleming. ‘You wrong me. Who am I to judge?’
‘Who indeed?’ said Mary Seton, and turned over.
The Court was divided in these harassing days, because the Earl of
Moray drew off a large proportion of it to his own house. Thither
resorted Argyll, Glencairn and Atholl, my lord of Mar when he could, and
Lethington when he dared; there also and always was the Lord Lindsay,
that blotched zealot, with his rumpled hair and starched frill. Huntly,
of course, held closely by the Queen, refusing to admit the second Court;
Lord Livingstone was faithful, as became the father of Mary Sempill.
He rubbed his chapped hands over the fire, and cried three times a day
that all was well: a folly so palpable that everybody laughed. Lesley
stayed by her, a tearful spectacle; Lord Herries too, very gloomy. Such
state as there was—and it was draggled state—Arthur Erskine and Traquair
maintained; but the Queen was quite unconscious of state. Royal dignity
had never been a virtue of hers; she was always either too keen or too
dejected to have time for it. Whether old Lord Livingstone treated her
jocosely, or old Lord Mar with implied reproof in every grating search
for a word—if Bothwell had written she did not heed them; and if he had
not, she sat watching for French Paris at the window, and still did not
heed them.
And undoubtedly old Lord Livingstone was jocose—abounded in nods and
winks. ‘Just a fond wife,’ he described her to his friends, and so
treated her to her face. It is to be believed, had she heard it, that she
would have been proud of the title. So, during the misty short days and
long wet nights of October she cheapened herself in Love’s honour, and
was held cheap by Scotch thickwits.
* * * * *
On the night of the 28th of the month the King came to see her. He
arrived very late, and departed in a fury within the twenty-four hours.
His clatter, his guards, his horses and himself filled the town; he took
up lodging in the Abbey, and caused himself to be announced by heralds at
the lowly door of the Queen’s House.
Perhaps she was worn out by watching for another comer; perhaps she was
ill, perhaps angry—it is not to be known. She would hardly notice him
when he came in; spoke languidly, dragging her words, and would not
on any account be alone with him. He demanded, as his right, that her
women should leave her; she raised her eyebrows, not her eyes, until he
repeated his desire in a louder voice.
Then she said, ‘What right have you kept, what right have you ever done,
that you should have any rights left you here?’
‘Madam, I have every right—that of a father, that of a consort—’
‘You have waived it—refused it—denied it—and betrayed it.’
‘Ah, never, never!’
‘Twice, sir, to my bitter cost.’
He laughed harshly to hear such words. ‘Sirs,’ he said to those with him,
‘I see how it is. Rumour for once is no fibster.’
‘Come away, my lord, come your ways,’ said old Livingstone. ‘You will do
harm to yourself.’
He cried out, ‘None shall dictate to me in this realm.’
And then Moray said, ‘Sir, I would seriously advise you—for your good——’
The King stared at him, gibed at him. ‘If you seek my good, my lord, God
judge me, ’tis for the first time.’
‘It is the good of us all,’ said Moray. ‘Her Grace is overwrought. Let me
entreat your patience. This coming is something sudden, though so long
attended. In the morning maybe——’
The King threatened. ‘And what is this but the morn? The morn! The morn’s
morn I depart with the light, and for long time—be you sure of that.’
He kept his word; and she, proud of her loyalty, wrote to her lover how
constant she had been. ‘He would have stayed did I but nod. Guess you
how stiff I kept my head.’ That touching sentence brought Lord Bothwell
hot-foot to Jedburgh—to find her waiting for him at the head of the stair.
She could hardly suffer him to come into the room: her longing seemed to
choke her. ‘You have come to praise me—O generous lover! You can trust me
now! Oh, tell me that I have been faithful!’
He turned shortly and shut the door. Then, ‘Madam,’ he said bluntly, ‘I
cannot praise you at all, though I must not presume to do otherwise.’
She paled at that, and smiled faintly, as if to show him that the pain
could be borne.
‘I am very dull, my lord. Speak plainly to me.’
So indeed he did. ‘You should at all costs have kept him by you. At all
costs, madam, at all costs. Here we could have dealt with him—but now——!’
He stopped an exclamation of fury, just in time. ‘And who can tell
whether he will try you again?... Oh, it was ill judged. I regret it.’
She pored upon his face, wonder fanning her eyes. ‘You regret my faith!
Regret my honour, saved for you! Strange griefs, my lord.’
‘I regret ill policy. The man is treasonable up to the ears: there were
many ways of doing. Now there are none at all. Gone, all gone! What have
I dared to pray for—what you have deigned to offer me; what my ears have
heard and my eyes seen—all that my senses have lured me to believe:
this one act of your Majesty’s has belied! Ah!’ He dug his heel into
the carpet. He folded his arms. ‘Well, it is not for me to reproach my
Sovereign, or to complain that her realm holds one fool the more. The
Lord gives and takes away—pshaw! and why not the Lady?’
She stretched out her arms to him, there being none to stay her. ‘Oh,
what are you saying? Is it possible?’ She came close, she crept, touched
his face. ‘If you doubt me I must die. Prove me—behold me here. Take me—I
am yours.’
‘No, madam,’ he snarled like a dog, ‘a pest upon it! You are not mine:
you are his.’
She sank down, kneeling by the table, and hid her face. Murmuring some
excuse, that she was overwrought, that he would fetch women, he left her
and went directly to Lord Moray’s house. There he found Lethington.
‘The Queen is very ill, as it seems to me,’ he said, ‘nor is it hard to
see where is the core of her malady. If that loon from Glasgow comes
ruffling before her again, I shall not be able to answer for what I may
do. Tell you that to my lord, I care not; nay, I desire you to tell him.
We should be friends, he and I, for we now have one aim and one service,
and as sworn servants should do our duty without flinching. I commit
these thoughts to you, Lethington, that you and I, with your patron here,
may take counsel together how best to serve the Queen with a cure for
her disease. It is indurate, mark you; we may need to cut deep; but it
becomes not men to falter. You and I have had our differences, which I
believe to be sunk in this common trouble. We may be happy yet—God knows.
Devise something, devise anything, and you shall not find me behindhand.
Let there be an end of our factions. Why, man, there are but two when
all’s said—the Queen’s and that other’s. Count me your friend in any
occasion you may have. Farewell. You will find me at Hermitage.’
Lethington was greatly moved. ‘Stay, my lord, stay,’ he said, coming
forward with propitiatory hands. ‘My lord of Moray will receive you.’
‘I can’t stay. There are good reasons for going, and none for staying—now
that that fellow is safe in Glasgow again. Let my lord do his part and
call upon me for mine. When do you wed, Lethington?’
The Secretary blushed. ‘It stands with the Queen’s pleasure, my lord. My
mistress would never fail hers, and so I must be patient.’
‘Hearken, my good friend,’ said Bothwell, with a hand on his shoulder. ‘I
am pretty well in her Majesty’s favour, I believe. Now, if a word from
me——’
‘Upon my soul, I am greatly obliged to your lordship.’
‘Say no more, man. You shall be sped to church. Farewell.’
He rode fast to Hermitage that day, and threw himself upon his bed. They
told him that the Countess was asleep.
‘Why, then,’ says he, ‘she shall have her sleep while she can.’
As he had expected, he got a letter next noon, with tears upon it, had he
cared to look for them, and in every stiff clause a cry of the heart....
I submit myself henceforward wholly unto you.... In you is all
my hope, my only friend, without whom I cannot endure.... Prove
me again: I shall not fail you. All this night I have kept
watch while the world is asleep. Now I am very sure I shall not
fail again. Sir, if I think apart, it is because I dwell apart;
but if I may trust you that shall be amended. I pray it be.
But I hear you say, It is for yourself to deal in it. Again I
beseech your patience if I am slow to learn how best to please
you. My tutors and governors praised me as a child for aptness
to learn. Now the lessons grow sharper and I the more dull....
My brother came to visit me this few hours since. He spake
kindly of you, and of him[6] as the sole mischief-worker here.
I answered as I thought myself free to do, but now misdoubt me,
fearful of your displeasure. You used harsh punishment towards
me: I feel sore beaten, as with rods. If I sleep I shall be the
stronger for it; but that is easy said. Now if I write Alas!
you may scorn me; and yet I feel directed to no other word,
save Welladay! Sir, if it should stand within your pleasure to
give pleasure to your friend, you will reply by this bearer; in
whom you may trust as much as I ask you to trust
Your discomfited, perfect friend
M. R.
He answered coldly, but with great respect, and only kept the messenger
back two days.
[6] King Henry Darnley.
CHAPTER III
DESCANT UPON A THEME AS OLD AS JASON
It is from Des-Essars that I borrowed that similitude of Lord Bothwell
to a violin-player. The young man pictures him as such, at this very
time, sitting deep in his chair at the Hermitage, his instrument upon his
crossed knee—his lovely, sensitive instrument! He screws at the keys, in
his leisurely, strong way, and now and again plucks out a chord, ‘until,
under the throbbing notes, he judges that he hath wrung up his music to
the tragic pitch.’ The figure is adroit in its fitness to the persons
involved, but puzzling in this respect—that with executant so deliberate
and instrument so fine the pitch should be so slow of attainment.
Face the facts, as she herself did (with a shiver of self-pity), and ask
yourself what on earth he was about. Consider his fury at her dismissal
of the King, his coldness through her appeals for mercy: what could they
point to but one thing? ‘Over and over again,’ says Des-Essars, ‘my
mistress told me that his lordship would do nothing overt while the King
her husband was alive; and I acquiesced in silence. It was too evident.
She added, immediately, “And I, Baptist—what can I do? What will become
of me? I cannot live without my Beloved—nay, I cannot discern life or
death under the canopy of Heaven unless he is there moving and directing
it. As well ask me to behold a vista of days in which the sun should
never shine. This is a thing which forbids thought, for it denies the
wish to live.” To such effect she expressed herself often, and then
would remain silent, as to be sure did I, each of us, no doubt, pondering
the next question (or its answer)—What stood in the way of her happiness?
What kept the King alive? The answer lay on the tip of the tongue. She!
She only preserved the worthless life; she only stood in her own light.
Ah, she knew that well enough, and so did I, and so did every man in
Scotland save one—the blind upstart himself.
‘A dangerous knowledge, truly: dangerous by reason of the ease with
which she could provide remedy for her pain. Let her move a finger,
let her wink an eyelid, shrug a shoulder, and from one side or another
would come on a king’s executioner, clothed in the livery of Justice,
Proper Resentment, Vengeance, Envy, Greed or Malice—for under one and
all of these ensigns he was threatened by death. And I will answer for
it that the question flickered hourly in flame-red letters before her
eyes, Why standeth the Queen of Scots in the way of Justice? O specious
enemy! O reasonable Satan! What! this fellow, a drunkard, a vile thing,
treacherous, a liar, a craven—this, whom to kill were to serve God, alone
to shut her out from good days? I know that her hand must have itched to
give the signal; I know that the Devil prevailed; but not yet, not yet
awhile—not till she was reeling, faint, caught up, swirled, overwhelmed
by misery and terror. At this time, though suffering made her eyes gaunt
and her mouth to grin, she kept her hands rigidly from any sign.
‘It is, withal, a curious thing, not to be disregarded by the judicious,
that the Countess of Bothwell, and her claims and pretentions, never
entered her thoughts. In her opinion, women—other women—were the toys of
men. This world of ours she saw as a garden, a flowery desert place in
which stood two persons, the Lover and the Beloved. Observe this, you who
read the tale; for presently after my Lord Bothwell observed it, and, by
playing upon it, attuned her to his tragic pitch.’
* * * * *
She left Jedburgh on 10th November, her terrible beleaguering question
not yet answered. She went a kind of progress by the Tweed valley, by
Kelso, Wark, Hume, Langton, Berwick, stayed in the gaunt houses which
are still to be seen fretting the ramparts of that lonely road—towers
reared upon woody bluffs to command all ways of danger, square, turreted
fortresses looking keenly out upon the bare lands which they scarcely
called their own and had grown lean in defending. All about her as she
went were the lords, every man of them with his own game in his head,
watching the moves of every other. Argyll and Glencairn were shadows
of Moray; Crawfurd and Atholl for the moment held with Huntly and
the throne. Lethington was the dog of whoso would throw him a task;
Livingstone, jocular still, kept mostly with the women.
The Queen’s moods, as she journeyed slowly through that wintering
country, changed as the weather does in late autumn. Winds blow hot
and winds blow cold, tempests are never far off; frost follows, when
the sun glitters but is chill, and the ice-splinters lie late, like
poniards in the ridged ways. She rode sometimes for a whole day in bitter
silence, her face as bleak as the upland bents, and sometimes she spurred
furiously in front, her hair blown back and face on fire with her mad
thoughts. Unseen of any, she clenched her fists, she clenched her teeth.
‘I am a queen, a queen! I choose to do it. It is my right, it is my need.’
She had fits of uncontrollable weeping; they caught her unawares now and
then, her face all blurred with tears. This was when she had been pitying
herself as victim of a new torment—new at least to her. ‘He sits alone
with a woman who hates me. He pinches her chin—they laugh together over
my letters. Fool! I will write no more.’ The more a fool in that she
wrote within the next hour.
When she grew frightened to find how solitary she was, she turned in the
saddle more than once, and hunted all faces for a friendly one. Wearisome
quest, foredoomed to failure! Moray, with his straight rock of brow, sat
like a cliff, looking steadfastly before him; Argyll counted the sheep
on the hillside; Livingstone, a ruddy old fool, hummed a tune, or said,
‘H’m, h’m! All’s for the best in this braw world, come rain come sun.’
And the maids, the Maries, once her bosom familiars! There Livingstone
bites her prudish lip, here Fleming peers askance at Lethington; Seton
says something sharply witty to Lady Argyll, and makes the grim lady
hinny like a mare.
Far behind, in the ruck of the cavalcade, she may catch sight of a youth
on a jennet, a pale-faced youth with a widish nose and smut-rimmed light
eyes. He has a French soul; he loves her. There, at least, is one that
judges nothing, condemns nothing, approves nothing. She is she, and he
her slave. Is she angry?—The sun’s hidden then. Does she smile?—The
sun rises. Does she kiss him?—Ho! the sun atop of summer. Suppose that
she were Medea: suppose for a moment that she slew—no, no, the term is
inexact—suppose that she stood aside, and men justly offended came in and
slew King Jason? This slave of hers would say, ‘The sun, shining, hath
struck one to earth.’
Yes, here was a trusty friend who would as soon blame the sun for his
sunstroke, or the lightning for his flash of murder, as blame her. She
would call him to her, then, and make him ride by her for half a day.
She would take his hand, lean aside to kiss him, to rest her head on his
shoulder, to stroke his cheek; she would call him her lover, her fere,
her true and perfect knight—fool him, in fine, to the top of his bent.
And to all that she said or did, Des-Essars, if we may believe him,
decently replied: ‘Yes, it is quite true that I love your Majesty. I have
no other thought but that, nor have I ever had.’
Thus she rode progress towards her soul’s peril, changing from fierce
heat to shrivelling cold as fast as the autumn weather.
It was at Kelso that she got letters from the King, foolish and
blusterous letters in the _Quos ego ...!_ style which the Master of
Sempill admired. Let her Majesty understand his mind was made up. Let
her Majesty receive him in Edinburgh, or ... this was their tenor; with
them in her hand and one from Bothwell burning in her bosom she showed
Mr. Secretary a disturbed, dangerous face. Pale as she was nowadays, and
thin, he was shocked to see her hungry lines. He thought her like some
queen of old, Jocasta or Althæa, with whom the Furies held midnight
traffic. ‘Do you see this? Is it never to end?’
He did not stay to peruse the letters. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘let us take
order in these painful matters. Leave them to your faithful friends, and
all shall be to your contentation.’
She turned away; her staring eyes saw nothing but misery. ‘Take order,
say you? If you fear so much as to speak above a whisper, how shall
you dare do anything? Friends! what friend have I but one? Death is my
patient, waiting friend; and so I shall prove him before many more days.’
‘Alas, madam, speak not so wildly.’
She looked fiercely, wrinkling up her eyes at him. ‘But I tell you, sir,
that if this load be not lifted from me, I shall end it my own way.’
That night a plan was laid before the Earls of Moray and Argyll.
Lethington spoke it, but Huntly stood over him as stiffly imminent as a
pine, or he had never found a word to say.
After a great deal of elliptic talk he came to terms, by saying, ‘The
business can be done promptly and without scandalous parade of force.
When her Majesty is at Craigmillar making ready for the Prince’s baptism,
he will certainly come, for he would never endure to be passed over at
such a time, when the ambassadors of France and England may be brought to
acknowledge him. Well, then, my lords, if we confront him with our proofs
of his oft-meditated treason he will deny them. If we essay to apprehend
him he will resist us; and resistance, doubtless, might provoke our men
to—to——’ Here he looked about him.
‘You have said enough, Lethington,’ Huntly broke in. ‘We shall be ready,
those of us who are true men.’ He watched Moray darkly as he spoke, but
drew forth no reply. It was Argyll who took up the talk—took it up to the
rafters as it were, since he leaned back in his chair and cast up his
eyes.
‘Look at him for a Lennox Stuart, God help us! Lennox Stuart and rank
Papist he is. To leave at large the like of that is to have a collie
turned rogue ranging your hillside. Why, gentlemen,’ and he looked from
man to man, ‘shall we leave him to raven the flock?’
‘I adhere to the plan,’ said Huntly. ‘Count upon me and mine. I take it
you stand in with us, my Lord of Argyll. What says my Lord of Moray?’
The great man became judicial. He gave them the feeling, as he intended,
that he had been surveying a far wider field than they could scan. Under
that arching sky, which he was able to range in, and from whose study
they had called him down, their little schemes took up that just inch
which was their proper scope. If he had not remarked them earlier, not
his the all-seeing eye; but he was obliged to his friends for drawing him
to the care of matters so curious, so well-deserving of a quiet hour.
‘We must talk at large of these somewhat serious concerns, my lords.
We must take our time, hasten so far as we may, but with a temperate
spur—ay, a temperate spur. We must consult, discriminate those who stand
our friends from those who are unfriendly; from those who cry, not
without reason, for recognition. We must not omit those who are afar off,
nor those who will come about us asking questions—what is to be lost,
what gained? Many considerations rise up on the instant, others will
crowd upon us. Where are my lords of Crawfurd and Atholl? Are they behind
you? I cannot see them. What says my lord of Lindsay, that very steadfast
Christian? Where, alas, is my lord of Morton’s honour?’
‘Sir,’ cried Huntly, fuming, ‘we can resolve your many questions when
you have answered our one. We asked you not, what says one or what says
another? but, rather, what says your lordship?’
Lord Moray smiled. ‘Ah, my Lord Chancellor, if your lordship had not been
so long a stranger to my poor house, your question had hardly been put
to me. Those who know me best, my lord, do not need to confirm by vain
assurances my love of country, or desire to serve the throne of my dear
sister. Forgive me if I say that, with older eyes than your lordship’s, I
take a wider range. I see your distresses—perhaps I see a remedy. Perhaps
your proposal is one, perhaps it is a danger worse than the disease. It
may be——’
He threatened to become interminable, so Huntly, with no patience at
command, left him in the midst. With disapproval in every prim line of
his face Lord Moray watched him go. He said nothing more; and why should
he say anything, when all was forwarding as he wished? He did repeat
to the Secretary, afterwards and in private, that it was sore pity
to have the Earl of Morton still in exile—a saying which that worthy
misapprehended. But here the Councils stopped, though the Queen did not,
but pushed on to Berwick, and reached Edinburgh by mid-November. At
Craigmillar, where she chose to stay, they were resumed under the more
hopeful auspices of Lord Bothwell, whom at last she summoned to her side
out of Liddesdale.
This is because jealousy, that canker in the green-wood, was groping in
her now, though not, even yet, of that sordid kind which is concerned
with its own wound. She no longer wrote to Bothwell save on details of
business, because she conceived her letters distasteful to him; and
she would not have recalled him had not Lethington assured her of the
common need of his counsel. The sort of jealousy she suffered filled
her, rather, with a kind of noble zeal to do him honour. Although she
would not write to him, she could never rest without news of his daily
doings. So when she heard that he and his Countess were reading Petrarch
together, many hurt lines, but no vulgar splenetic lines, were committed
to the casket.
Elle pour son honneur vous doibt obeyssance,
Moy vous obeyssant j’en puis recevoir blasme,
N’estant, à mon regret, comme elle, vostre femme.
She wrote, and believed, that she grudged Lady Bothwell nothing:
Je ne la playns d’aymer done ardamment
Celuy qui n’a en sens, ny en vaillance,
En beauté, en bonté, ny en constance
Point de seconde. Je vis en ceste foy.
‘God pity this poor lady!’ Des-Essars bursts forth, having been imparted
these outrageous lines. ‘She who could believe that my Lord Bothwell was
without peer in beauty, kindness, and constancy, might very well believe
that she herself was not jealous of his wife.’
Jealous or no, it was jealousy of a strange kind. When her beloved
answered his summons by attending her at Craigmillar, she received him
with a dewy gratefulness which went near to touch him. ‘You have come,
then! Oh, but you are good to your friend,’—a speech which for the
moment bereft him of speech. She asked after the Countess, spoke of her
as her sister, pitied her sitting alone at Hermitage, and inspired the
gross-minded man with enthusiasm for her exalted mood.
He threw himself into the plotting and whispering with which the Court
was rife, talked long hours with Lethington, was civil to Moray and his
‘flock,’ as he called Argyll and the rest. Nothing much came of it all.
Moray went so far as to suggest divorce. Lethington thought much of it,
and carried it to Bothwell, who thought nothing of it. He declined to
discuss it with her Majesty.
‘Take your proposal to her if you choose,’ he said; ‘lay it before her. I
know what she will say, and agree with her beforehand. This is no way of
doing for men, or for crowned women.’
He had the rights of it. ‘What!’ she cried, ‘and make my son a bastard!
And he to be King of England! I think they have had bastards enough on
that throne. Your plan is foolish.’
Lethington was upon his mettle. He was to be married come Christmas, and,
indebted for this prospect to the Queen and Bothwell, was desirous to owe
her as much more as she would lend him. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I cannot admit
my plan to be so dangerous to the Prince’s highness; but I will content
you yet. Give me leave to devise yet once more.’
‘Devise as you will, sir,’ said she, ‘but be quick, or I shall begin
with devices of my own. You know that a foumart in a trap scruples not
to use tooth and claw. And he is wise, since soft glances are never
likely to help him.’ Almost immediately she began to cry at the thought
of herself in a trap, ‘to cry and torment herself,’ says the annalist.
And one night, at supper with a few of them, she lashed out in a fury at
her impotence. ‘Ah, it is too much, what I suffer among you all! I have
borne him a son, and he would steal him from my breast. He would tip that
innocent tongue with poison that he may envenom his mother. If I am not
soon quit of this there is but one end to it.’
Patience, they counselled. ‘Ay, madam,’ said foolish old Livingstone,
‘patience, and shuffle the cards.’
‘Shuffle you yours, my lord,’ she said, looking lofty, ‘if you think them
worthy of Fortune’s second thoughts. For me, I know a shorter way to end
the game.’
In private, she and Bothwell were in full accord. She was to obey him,
and leave him alone. ‘No questions, my soul!’ he was for ever saying to
her, half jocularly, half with meaning that she was to be blind, deaf,
and dumb. She shut her eyes and mouth and put her fingers to her ears;
and in time this became a habit. ‘My prince, my master,’ she said once,
and gave him both her hands, ‘I am your servant, and submit to you in all
things. Use me well.’ He kissed her fondly as he swore that so he would.
It was after the King had visited her and gone again, whither no one
knew, that Lethington produced his second plan. As before, he was careful
to submit it to Bothwell. What did his good lordship think of this?
The King was to meet her Majesty at Stirling for the Prince’s baptism;
he would be ill received by the ambassadors, and therefore mutinous,
probably with outcry. Let one then, with all proofs in his hands,
indict him of treason. Let him be summoned to answer, and upon refusal,
arrested. He would certainly resist, with violence. The end was sure.
Now, what did his good lordship think?
His good lordship spoke his plain mind, as he always did to Lethington,
whom he scorned. ‘You don’t kill a sheep with hounds and horn. Pray, my
friend, where will be my lord of Moray all this while? Will he wind the
horn? I do not remember that that is his way. Or will he find occasions
to be in his lands? Or turn his coat and cry, God bless our King-Consort
and the True Kirk?’
Lethington had a late autumnal smile, with teeth showing through like the
first frost. ‘I will tell your lordship what he will do. He will see and
not see. He will look on and not behold.’
‘You mean, I gather, that he will be at his prayers, looking through his
fingers while we foul ours?’
‘Your lordship is most precise.’
However, his plan went before the Queen, who gave it a gloomy approval.
‘He is so clogged with treason, he will never run. You will have an easy
capture. Let nothing be done till my son be christened.’
Immediately afterwards she was instructed by Bothwell that the project
was as vain as wind, because it depended upon two unstable things. First,
if he allowed himself to be taken, what on earth was to be done with him?
There must be an assize. And to which side in that would Moray lean?
She could not answer him.
‘No,’ said he, ‘you cannot; nor can any man in Scotland.’
‘I am of your mind,’ she said—superfluous assurance!
‘Well, then,’ he went on, ‘let them stir their broth of grouts. They are
all greedy knaves together: perchance one or another will tumble into the
stew and we be quit of him.’
‘But if we leave them,’ she hesitated, ‘they may attempt to take him—and
then——’
Bothwell laughed. ‘Nay, I will see to it that they do not. Oh, madam,
trust your honest lover, and all shall go greatly for you and me.’
She threw herself into his arms. Trust him! O God, had she not found a
man at last?
* * * * *
When they all met at Stirling to christen the Prince, the King was so
ill received that, as Lethington had expected, he refused to leave his
lodging even for the ceremony. He was literally alone, without his
father, without any Scots lord to his name; sitting for the most part in
a small room, drinking and playing cards. He used to ride out at night
so that he need not tempt the discourtesy of the wayfarers; and once,
when the guard at the gate hesitated about passing him in, he flew into
a tempest of rage, drew, and killed the man on the spot. Lethington flew
from lord to lord. What better opportunity than this?
Everything was prepared, all the proofs gathered in. There were letters
of his to the Queen-Mother of France, to his own mother, Lady Lennox, to
the English Catholics, to the Duke of Norfolk, to certain Jesuits in the
West. One Highgate brought intercepted papers—a chart of Scilly, a plan
of Scarborough Castle: and some other fellow was fished up, a bladder
full of whispers of a plot to steal the Prince. Lastly, to crown the
image of a perfect traitor, there was a draft proclamation of himself as
Regent of Scotland. Enough here to hang a better man!
‘Well,’ said Huntly, when Lethington showed him the whole budget, ‘take
your measures, show me my place, and meet me at your own time. I’ll not
fail you.’
That night Lord Bothwell came into the Queen’s chamber while she was at
her prayers. She saw him, but pretended that she did not, finished her
rosary, and bowed her head over it; then got up and kissed him before all
her circle. Very soon they were alone together.
‘I disturbed you,’ he said; ‘I regret it.’
‘Regret it not—it was sweet disturbance. My heart flew faster than my
beads.’
He took her hand up. ‘Why do you tell me such things? Do you know what
disorder they work in me?’
She pretended that she must disengage her hand, but he would not allow it.
‘Alas, sir,’ she said, ‘we whip each other, you and I. Each is a torment
to the other. One runs, the other chases,—but whither?’
‘Quick, quick to the goal!’
‘Take me thither in your arms, my Bothwell. Carry me, lest I faint by the
way.’
‘No fainting now. The hour is come, and I with it. I have counsel for
you.’
‘Counsel me—I will be faithful.’
‘I recommend, then, to your clemency the Earl of Morton, his kinsman
Douglas of Whittinghame, and all their factions.’
She pondered the saying, not discerning at first what it purported, yet
fearing to ask him lest he should be impatient of her stupidity. No man
had ever made her feel stupid but this one.
‘Do you wish it?’ she asked him.
‘I advise it.’
‘They are no friends of yours?’
‘They may become so.’
‘And you remember that they greatly offended me?’
‘Oh, madam,’ he cried out irritably, ‘who has not offended you in this
wicked land? Did not your sour brother offend you? Has not Lethington
offended? Have not Huntly and I? Believe me, this Morton has himself been
offended, and by the very man who has offended you more vilely than any
other. There was one who betrayed you to the Douglases, but that same man
betrayed the Douglases to you. Therefore I say, if you wish to redeem
your honour, let Morton redeem his, and your affair is done. You force me
to speak plainly.’
She saw his meaning now, and her eyes grew blank with fear. ‘Hush,’ she
said, ‘speak no plainer. Those two will kill him.’
He shrugged. ‘You speak plainer than I. In advising you, however, to send
open letters of pardon to Morton and his cousin, I have but done my duty,
as we had agreed it should be. But it is for your Majesty to follow or to
leave, as you will. I am still the servant.’
She went slowly to him, took up his hands and put them on her shoulders.
He let her have the weight. ‘Now I feel your strong hands, Bothwell.’
‘It is you that put them there.’
‘It is where they should be. Servants use not so their hands, but only
masters. And good servants soon grow to love the yoke.’ Suddenly she
dropped to his feet and embraced his knees. ‘I am yours, I am yours! Do
as you will with me and all.’
Open letters were despatched to Lord Morton and Mr. Archie Douglas,
that, on certain terms, they and their factions might gain pardon and
remission of forfeitures. On the evening of the same day the King left
Stirling without any farewells and sped to Glasgow.
Lethington, completely fooled, ran open-mouthed to Bothwell. ‘Here is a
discomfiture, my lord! I am dumbfounded. Just when we were sure of him.’
‘Maybe you were too sure. There will be a vent-hole in your body politic.’
‘My lord, I can answer for the entirety of it. Tush, my credit is gone! I
am vexed to death.’
‘I see that it puts you out. But courage, man! you will find a way yet.’
‘If I find one now, after this rebuff, it will be owing to your
lordship’s good opinion,’ said the guileless Lethington: ‘a sharp spur to
me, I do assure you.’
Bothwell took him by the arm. ‘Do you feel so sure,’ he asked him, ‘that
our man hath not had a fright?’
‘What fright? Not possible—or I am not up with your lordship.’
Bothwell half-closed his eyes. ‘How do you suppose he would look upon the
return of Morton and the Douglases?’
Lethington started, then stared at the floor. ‘Ay,’ he said—‘ay! I had
not given that a thought. Man, Lord Bothwell,’ he whispered, ‘yon’s his
death-warrant, and he knows it.’
Lord Bothwell clacked his tongue.
CHAPTER IV
SHE LOOKS BACK ONCE
Just at this point in the story Des-Essars confesses to the desire having
been hot within him to assassinate the Earl of Bothwell; and writing
it down when the opportunity had come and was gone, he may well say,
‘What would have been the pain and loss of dear blood, had I done it,
in comparison to present anguish?’ He is, however, forced to admit that
he did not meditate so violent a deed for the sake of avoiding future
disaster, but rather to make the present more tolerable. It was his lot
to be much with the Queen and her chosen lover; he owns that he found
the constant fret of their intercourse almost impossible to be borne. ‘I
declare before God and the angels,’ he says, ‘that her dreadful lavishing
of herself during these weeks of waste and desire caused my heart to
bleed. She stripped herself bare of every grace of mind, spirit, and
person, and strewed it in his way, heaping one upon another until he
seemed to be wading knee-deep in her charms. Nay, but he wallowed in
them like a brute-beast, unrecognising and unthankful—a state of affairs
unparalleled since Galahad (who was a good knight) lay abed and was
nourished upon the blood of a king’s virgin daughter. How different this
knight from that, let these pages declare; and my mistress’s high mind,
how similar to that spending martyr’s. For it is most certain that all
her acts towards the Lord Bothwell were moved by magnanimity. Stripping
herself nobly, she stood the more noble for her nakedness. She suffered
horribly: his the horrible sin. Love—in the great manner of it—should
be a conflict of generosity; either lover should be emulous of pain and
loss. But here she gave and this accursed butcher took; she spent and he
got.
‘I saw them together at their various houses of sojourn during
this winter: at Drymen in Perth, a house of my Lord Drummond’s; at
Tullibardine, at Callander, and again in Edinburgh. Little joy had
they of each other, God wot! There are two kinds of lovers’ joys, as I
think—the mellow and the sharp. The one is rooted in the heart and the
other in the sense, but both alike need leisure of mind if they are to
bear fruit; for in the contemplation of our happiness lies the greatest
happiness of all. Now, these two were never at rest; they could never
look upon each other and let the eyes dwell there with the thought, _My
Beloved is mine and I am his, and as it is now so it shall be._ No,
but they looked beyond each other through a tangle of sin and error,
searching until their eyeballs ached if haply they might discover a gleam
beyond of that windless garden of the Hesperides wherein was put their
hope. Fond searching, fond hope! they could never win the garden. Her
desires were boundless, unappeasable, and so were his; for she sought
to be perfect slave and he to be absolute master. And how was she to be
his servant, who was born a queen? and how he the master he sought to
be, when no empire the world ever saw would have contented him? But the
greatest bar of severance between them was this: there was no community
of interest possible between them. For, to her, this Bothwell was the
only End; and to him this fair sweet Queen was only a Means. This is a
pregnant oracle of mine, worth your travail. Perpend it, you who read.’
Des-Essars did not believe that Lord Bothwell loved the Queen. He had
been often at Hermitage, you must remember, and seen the Earl and
Countess together. My lord was not regardful of bystanders when he chose
to fondle his handsome wife. When the two were separated, as now they
were, the observant young man was aware that they wrote frequently to
each other: French Paris was for ever coming and going between Liddesdale
and his master’s lodging, wherever that might chance to be. He was
certain, too, that the Queen knew it. ‘Paris used to deliver to my lord
his wife’s letters, and he read them in the Queen’s very presence, with
scarce a “By your leave, ma’am”; and at such times I have seen her
Majesty pace about the garden in great misery, pull at the rowan berries
until she scattered them, pluck at the branches of trees and send the dry
leaves flying; and once—as I shall never forget—she thrust her hand and
bare arm into a thicket of nettles, and when she drew it out it was all
red to the elbow, with sore white blotches upon it where the poison had
boiled the blood. Her arm went stiff afterwards, but she never let him
know the reason.’
* * * * *
After the christening, about Christmas-time, the Earl of Morton and his
friends came home to Scotland, were introduced into the Queen’s presence
by the Earls of Bothwell and Huntly, and upon submission (and their
knees) restored to their former estates. She had nothing to say to them,
but sat like one entranced, looking fixedly at the floor while Bothwell
made his speech, and Morton after him, in his bluff way, expressed his
contrition and desire to be of service in the future. Mr. Archie Douglas,
one of a crowd of repentant rebels, contented himself with cheering. ‘God
save your Majesty!’ was his cry, and ‘Confusion to all your enemies!’
whereupon my Lord Morton bethought him of the real occasion of his
recall, and added to his speech a few words more.
‘Oh, ay!’ he said: ‘by our fruits you shall judge us, madam, whether
we be gratefully replanted in this dear soil or no. Try us, madam,
upon whomsoever hath aggrieved you, or endangered your throne, or the
thrones of them that are to follow you—try us, I say, and see whether our
appetites to serve you are not whetted by our long absence.’
She had started and looked hastily at Bothwell,—evidently she was
frightened. Her lips moved for some time before any sound came forth from
them, but presently she said that she should not fail to call for service
in the field when she required it. ‘But the realm is now at peace,’ she
added, ‘and I hope will remain so.’
Morton said: ‘Amen to that. Yet be prepared, madam, as the sailors are,
when they lie becalmed upon a sea like oil, but see a brown haze hang
where sky and water meet. And, madam, trust yourself to them that are
weatherwise in this country.’
She stammered. ‘I know not what you need fear for me—I hardly understand.
I am very well served—very well advised—but I thank you for your friendly
warning....’ She forced herself to speak, but could not make a coherent
sentence. Bothwell intervened, and presently took away his new friends.
Lord Morton went to the Douglas house of Whittingehame, a leafy place in
Haddington, not far from the sea. Thither in the first days of January
repaired Bothwell and Huntly, while the Queen stayed in Edinburgh,
friendless, except for Des-Essars and Mary Seton. She passed her days
like one in a dream, speaking seldom, kneeling at altars but not praying,
negligent of her surroundings, sometimes of her person, only alert when
a messenger might be looked for with a letter. Often found in tears,
either she could not or she would not account for them. One day she bade
Des-Essars go with her letter-carriers to Whittingehame. ‘What would you
have me do there, madam?’ he asked.
She played drearily with his sword-strap. ‘Do? What do spies in general?
See—judge for yourself—look through my eyes if you can.’
He turned to go, and she caught at his arm. ‘Baptist,’ she said, ‘I am in
the dark, and horribly afraid. Look you, I know not what they are doing
there together. They whisper and wink and nod at each other; they say
little and mean much. I cannot divine what they intend—or what they will
presently ask me to do. I saw Archie Douglas grin like a wolf that day he
was here—I know not what he grinned at. They tell me nothing—nothing! Do
not suppose but that I trust my lord; but, Baptist, find out something. I
need courage.’ She lay back exhausted, and when he came to her waved him
off, whispering that he was to be quick and go.
He departed, reached Whittingehame within the day, saw what he
could—which was precisely nothing, for Lord Bothwell was away and Lord
Morton not visible—and on his road home again heard that the King lay
dangerously ill at Glasgow, of smallpox or worse. He took that news in
his pocket, and none that he could have gleaned from the whispers of
Whittingehame could have had effect so surprising. For the first time
for many a month he saw his Queen sane, sweet, crying woman. She fell on
her knees, hiding her face in his sleeve, and gave thanks to God. When
she rose up and went back to her chair he saw the tears in her eyes.
She asked him no further of Bothwell and Morton at their secrets, or of
Archie’s grins. When he came and knelt before her she took his face in
her hands and kissed it. ‘God hath saved me, my dear, and by you,’ she
said. ‘He hath heard my prayers. I am sure now that I shall find mercy. O
fortunate messenger! O happy soul, whom thou hast redeemed!’