The Queen's Quair; or, The Six Years' Tragedy

The Earl looked sternly at him. ‘Tell me the truth, you Archie. What devil’s trick had you played upon him?’

He looked so blankly, swore so earnestly, Nothing, upon his honour, that he had to be believed.

‘Well then,’ said Morton, ‘what may this betide?’

‘Woe can tell your lordship! Little good to you and me belike.’

Lord Morton said, ‘I doubt he’ll play us false. I doubt the knave was working the courage into him.’

And there you see why he was uneasy in his ruling of the palace. Heavy, ox-like, slow-footed man, thick-blooded, fond of thick pleasures, slow to see, slow to follow, slow to give up—he felt now, without more rhyme or reason to support him, that his peril was great. The King was about to betray him. A hot mist of rage flooded his eyes at the thought; and then his heart gave a surge upwards and he felt the thick water on his tongue. ‘If he betray me, may God help him if He cares!’

After his duties in the Little Throne-room, in this grave conjuncture, it seemed good to him to get speech with Mr. Secretary, who had been let out of the house, but had let himself in again when his master, my lord of Moray, came home.

‘Pray, Mr. Secretar,’ says he, ‘have you any tidings of my lord of Moray?’

Lethington became dry. ‘I had proposed to meet my lord, as your lordship may recollect. It seemed good to your lordship that I should not go, but that Sir James Melvill should—with results which I need not particularise. I have not been sent for by my lord of Moray since his home-coming, therefore I know no more of his lordship than your lordship’s self knows.’

The Earl of Morton rumbled his lips. ‘Prutt! Prutt! I wonder now....’ He began to feel sick of his authority.

‘The King, Mr. Secretar,’ he began again, ‘is in some distemperature at this present. I am in doubt—it is not yet plain to me—I regret the fact, I say.’

‘One should see his Majesty,’ says Lethington. ‘No doubt but Mr. Archibald here——’

‘By my soul, man,’ said Mr. Archibald with fervour, ‘I don’t go near him again for a thousand pound—English.’

‘No, no, Mr. Secretar,’ says my lord; ‘but consider whether yourself should not adventure my lord of Moray.’

‘My lord——’

Morton lifted his hand. ‘Man,’ he said, ‘you must do it. I tell you, the sooner the better.’ The hand fell upon the table with a thud. Lethington started, then left the room without a word.

Very little was said between the two gentlemen at this moment in charge of Holyrood until the Secretary’s return. The Master of Lindsay intruded upon them to report that the Earl of Lennox had left the palace, had left Edinburgh, and had ridden hard to the west. Lord Morton nodded to signify that his ears could do their duty.

‘Like son, like father,’ said Archie when the Master had gone.

Soon afterwards Lethington knocked at the door, entered, advanced to the table, and stood there, looking at the ink-horn, which he moved gently about.

‘Well, sir! We are here to listen,’ cried Morton, in a fever.

Lethington was slow to answer even then.

‘I have been admitted to my lord of Moray,—so much there is to say. He had his reader with him, but came out to me. When I began to speak he regretted at once that he could not hear me at any length. He showed me his table encumbered with business, and declined at the present to add any more to the litter. I urged your lordship’s desire to have speech with him as soon as might be; he replied that his own desire was always, in all things, to serve your lordship. I said, “Serve his lordship then in this”: upon the which he owned that he failed of strength. “I have a traveller’s ache in my bones,” saith he. “Let my Lord Morton have patience.”’

He stopped there.

Lord Morton took a turn about the room. ‘No more than that said he, Lethington? No more than that?’

‘His lordship said no more, my lord. And therefore, seeing that he plainly wished it, I took my leave.’

The Earl looked at Archie Douglas: some secret intelligence passed between them in which the Secretary had no share.

‘I am going to speak with my lord of Ruthven in his chamber,’ then said he. ‘And, cousin, do you come also.’

The guard presented arms to the great man as he went down the hall, and a few underlings—women of the house, grooms of the closet and coffer—ran after him with petitions; but he waved away all and sundry. They fell back, herded into groups and whispered together. The Secretary came out alone and paced the hall deep in thought. One or two eyed him anxiously. How did he stand now? It was a parlous time for Scotland when nobody knew to whom to cringe for a favour.

Then—two hours after dinner—word was brought down into the hall that the Queen would receive the Earl of Morton and certain other named persons in the Throne-room. Great debate over this. Lord Ruthven was for declining to go. ‘We are masters here. ’Tis for us to receive.’

But Lord Lindsay shook his ragged head. ‘No, no, Ruthven,’ he says, ‘take counsel, my fine man. It is ill to go, but worse to stay away.’

‘How’s that, then?’ cries Ruthven, white and fierce.

‘Why, thus,’ the elder replied. ‘If you go, you show that you are master. If you go not, you betray that you doubt it.’

‘I see it precisely contrary,’ says Ruthven.

‘Then,’ he was told, ‘you have a short vision. It is the strong man can afford to unbar the door.’

The Earl of Morton was clearly for going. ‘I take it, my lord of Moray is behind this message. Let us see what he will do. He is bound to us as fast as man can be.’

They sent up Lethington, who came back with the answer that my lord of Moray had been summoned in like wise, and would not fail of attendance upon her Majesty. This settled the masters of Holyrood. ‘Where he goes there must we needs be also.’

Archie Douglas and Lethington had not been required by the Queen; but when Archie was for rubbing his hands over that, the other advised him to take his time.

‘You are not the less surely hanged because they let you see you are not worth hanging,’ said the Secretary. Archie damned him for a black Genevan.

At the time set the Earls of Morton, Argyll, and Glencairn, the Lords Ruthven, Rothes, and Lindsay, and some few more, went upstairs with what state they could muster.

They found the Queen on the throne, pale, stiff in the set of her head, but perfectly self-possessed. Three of her maids and Lady Argyll were behind the throne. Upon her right hand stood the King in a long ermine cloak, upon her left the Earl of Moray in black velvet. Lord John Stuart and a sprinkling of young men held the inner door, and a secretary, in poor Davy’s shoes, sat at a little table in the window. The six lords filed in according to their degrees of ranking. Ruthven, behind Lindsay, jogged his elbow: ‘See the pair of them there. Betrayed, man, betrayed!’

None of them was pleased to see that Moray had been admitted first, and yet none of them in his heart had expected anything else. It was the King who drew all their reproaches: in some sense or another Moray was chartered in villainy.

The Queen, looking straight before her, moistened her lips twice, and spoke in a low voice, very slowly and distinctly.

‘I have sent for you, my lords, that I may hear in the presence of the King my consort, and of these my kindred and friends, what your wisdoms may have to declare concerning some late doings of yours. As I ask without heat, so I shall expect to be answered.’ Pausing here, she looked down at her hands placid in her lap. So unconscious did she seem of anything but her own dignity and sweet estate, you might have taken her for a girl at her first Communion.

The Earl of Morton moved out a step, and made the best speech he could of it. He had the gift, permitted to slow-witted men, of appearing more honest than he was; for tardiness of utterance is easily mistaken for gravity, and gravity (in due season) for uprightness. One has got into the idle habit of connecting roguery with fluency. But it must be allowed to Morton that he did not attempt to disavow his colleagues. If he urged his own great wrongs as an excuse for violence, he claimed that the wrongs of Scotland had cried to him louder still. He now held the palace, he said, for the prevention of mischief, and should be glad to be relieved of the heavy duty. Then he talked roundabout—of requitals in general—how violent griefs provoked violent medicines—how men will fight tooth and nail for their consciences. Lastly he made bolder. ‘If I fear not, madam, to invoke the holy eyes of my God upon my doings, it would not become me to quail under your Majesty’s. And if that which I hold dearest is enchained, I should be a recreant knight indeed if I failed of a rescue.’ He glanced toward the King at this point; but the young man might have been a carven effigy. His end therefore—for he knew now that he had been betrayed—was a lame one: a plea for mutual recovery of esteem, an act of oblivion, articles to be drawn up and signed, et cætera. The Queen, placidly regarding her fingers, drew on the others after him one by one.

The Earl of Glencairn had nothing to say, as he proved by every word he uttered; the Earl of Argyll began a speech, but caught his wife’s eye and never finished it. Lord Lindsay, an honest, hot-gospel, rough sort of man—who might have been a Knox in his way—said a great deal. But he was long over it, and slow, and prolix; and the Queen none too patient. At ‘Secondly, madam, you shall mark——’ she began to tap with her toe; and then one yet more impatient broke in, feeling that he must shriek under his irritation unless he could relieve it by speech. This was Lord Ruthven, a monomaniac, with one cry for the world and one upon whom to cry it. If he spoke his rages to the Queen in form, he aimed them at the King in substance, and never once looked elsewhere, or threatened with his finger any other than that stock-headed starer out of painted eyes. He thrust away Lindsay with a pawing hand, and—‘Oh, madam, will you listen to me now?’ says he. ‘We speak our pieces before ye like bairns on a bench, who have acted not long since like men, and men wronged. And who are we, when all’s said, to justify ourselves? Who was the most aggrieved among us? Let that man speak. Who had most cause to cry out, Down with the thief of my honour? Let him say it now. What was our injury compared to that man’s? If we played in his scene, who gave out the parts? If we laid hands upon our Queen, by whose command did we so? And into whose hands did we commit her royal person? Let him answer, and beat us down with his words, if to any hands but his own.’ Wrought up by his own eloquence, driving home his terrible questions, he had advanced unawares close to the man he threatened. The King jumped back with a short cry; but the Queen, who had been straining forward to listen, like a racer at his mark, interposed.

‘I am listening,’ she said; ‘continue, Ruthven.’

Ruthven, at this check, began to cast about for his words. He had lost his flow. ‘As for yon Davy, madam, I’ll not deny airt and pairt in his taking——’

‘Why, how should you indeed?’ says the Queen, smiling rather sharply.

‘I say I will not, madam,’ says Ruthven, flurried; then with a savage snarl he turned short on the King and fleshed his tooth there.

‘And you!’ he raved at him: ‘deny it you, if you dare!’

The King went white as a sheet.

‘Man,’ said the Earl of Morton finely, ‘hold your peace. I lead this company.’

Lord Ruthven said no more, and Morton took up anew his parable. What he did was well done: he did not give ground, yet was conciliatory. It was a case for terms, he said. Let articles be drawn up, lands be restored, offices stand as before the slaughter, the old forfeitures be overlooked, religion on either side be as it had been: in fact, let that come which all hoped for, the Golden Age of Peace.

The Queen consulted with her brother, ignored her husband, then accepted. Lethington was to draw up articles and submit them. For Peace’s sake, if it were possible, she would sign them. Rising from her throne, she dismissed her gaolers. She took Moray’s arm, just touched the King’s with two fingers, and walked through the lines made by her friends, a page going before to clear the way. The moment she was in her room she sent Des-Essars out with a letter, which she had ready-written, for the Earl of Bothwell.

Left with his fellow-tragedians, Ruthven for a time was ungovernable, with no words but ‘black traitor—false, perjuring beast of a thief’—and the like. Morton, to the full as bartered as himself, did not try to hold him. He too was working into a steady resentment, and kindling a grudge which would smoulder the longer but burn the more fiercely than the madman’s spluttering bonfire. And he was against all sudden follies. When Ruthven, foaming, howled that he would stab the King in the back, Morton grumbled, ‘Too quick a death for him’; and Lindsay said drily, ‘No death at all. Yon lad is wiser than Davy—wears a shirt that would turn any blade.’ ‘Then I’ll have at him in his bed,’ says Ruthven. And Lindsay, to clinch the matter, scoffs at him with, ‘Pooh, man, the Queen is his shirt of mail. Are you blind?’

Into this yeasty flood, with courage truly remarkable, the Earl of Moray steered his barque, coming sedately back from his escort of the Queen. At first they were so curious about his visit that they forgot the vehement suspicion there was of treachery from him also. The precision of his steering was admirable, but he ran too close to the rocks when he spoke of the Queen as ‘a young lady in delicate health, for whom, considering her eager temper and frail body, the worst might have been feared in the late violent doings.’

Here Morton cut in. ‘I call God to witness, my lord, and you, too, Ruthven, shall answer for me, whether or not I forbade the slaughter of that fellow before her face. For I feared, my lord, that very health of hers.’

‘And you did well to fear it, my lord,’ said the Earl of Moray; and that was the turn too much.

Said Ruthven to him dangerously, ‘You make me sick of my work.’ He peered with grinning malice into the inscrutable face. ‘Tell me, you, my lord of Moray, what did you look for in the business? What thought you would come of murder at the feet of a woman big? God in heaven, sir, what is it you look for? what is it you think of day after day?’

Lord Moray blinked—but no more. ‘Hush, hush, Lord Ruthven, lest you utter what would grieve all who love Scotland.’

Ruthven howled. ‘Man, do you talk of Scotland? Are we friends here? Are we in the kirk? If we are in council, for God’s sake talk your mind. Ah!—talk of that, my good lord——’ he pointed to the empty throne. ‘Man, man, man! there’s your kirk and your altar—you prater about Scotland’s love.’ For a moment he fairly withered the man; but then, as drowning in a flood-tide of despair, he lifted up his hands and covered his tormented eyes. ‘Oh, I am sick just,’ he said, ‘sick of your lying—sick, I tell you, sick—sick to death!’

The Earl of Moray made a little sign with his eyebrows and closed eyes; and they left him alone with Ruthven. It should never be denied of this man that he had the courage of his father’s race.

The ‘Articles of Peace and Oblivion’ were drawn up, tendered on knees, and overlooked by her Majesty.

‘I see your name here, Mr. Secretary, as in need of mercy,’ she said, with a finger on the place. Of course she had known that he was up to the chin in the plot, but she could rarely resist making the sensitive man wriggle.

He murmured something unusually fatuous, painfully conscious of his standing.

‘Oh, sir,’ she said, ‘if you seek for my pardon you shall have it. I am contented with a few things. But go you now and sue for it in the maids’ closet. You will find Fleming there. I cannot answer for her, I warn you; for if you say to a maid, “Love me, love my dog,” it is possible she may rejoin, “Serve me, serve my mistress.” That, at least, is the old-fashioned pleading in the courts of love.’

He was greatly confused, the obsequious, fertile man, and she greatly entertained.

‘Go, Mr. Secretary, and pray you find some phrases as you go. Tongues ring sharply in the closet.’ She signed the Articles, and he was backing himself out when she stopped him with a seemingly careless word. ‘Ah, I had almost forgot. These Articles breathe peace.’ She took them from him and read the words. ‘“Peace, mutual forbearance and goodwill”: very fair words, upon which we must hope for fair performance. The guard at the doors and gates is removed no doubt? See to that, Mr. Secretary, before you can hope for pardon in the maids’ closet. Your lady will not love you the more because you keep her in a cage.’

This was kittle work, as they say. Unless the guard were off she could never get out. Lethington, however, took the hint, acted upon his own responsibility, and found none to stop him. The lords—masters of Holyrood—were otherwise employed: Lord Ruthven spoke of hanging himself; the Earl of Morton was inclining to think that Articles might, for this once, make all safe. Alone, the Earl of Moray admonished his servant, not for removing the guard, but for not having done so earlier. What peace he made afterwards in the maids’ closet hath never been revealed.

The Queen went to bed very early and slept like a child in arms. Everything was in train.

At two o’clock in the morning the King was called, but answered the summons himself, fully dressed, armed and cloaked.

‘I am ready,’ he said, before the messenger could speak. ‘Fetch Standen. I go to the Queen.’

He crept along the passage to the dimly lighted cabinet, where he had of late seen murder, and had to wait there as best he could. He spent the time in walking up and down—an exercise whereby a man, in fear already, gains terror with every pace: so agitated was he that when, after an age of squittering misery, the Queen came in deeply hooded, he forgot everything and burst out with ‘O God, madam, make haste!’

She gave him no answer, but poured herself some wine, added water, and drank. It was terrible to him to see how much at her ease she was, sipping her drink, looking about the cabinet, recalling critically (if the truth is to be told) the stasimons of the late tragic scene.

Mary Seton came in, and Des-Essars, labouring with a portmantle and some pistols.

‘Drink, my children,’ she bade them in French, and they obeyed, taking stay and leisure from her.

The King bit his nails, fretted and fumed—had not had the nerve to drink, even if he had had the invitation.

Standen stood by the wall, stolid as his habit was—the flaxen, solemn English youth, with but one cherubic face for a rape, a funeral, a battle, a christening, or the sacrament. The Queen drew Seton’s attention to him in a whisper, and made the girl laugh.

Presently they heard a step, and then Stewart of Traquair was to be seen, stalwart and watchful, in the doorway.

‘Ready, Traquair?’—the Queen’s voice.

‘All’s ready, ma’am.’

She fastened her hood, patting the bows flat. ‘Come, Seton, come, Baptist,’ she said, and gave her hand into Traquair’s.

He kissed it before he led her away. Des-Essars went first with a shaded lantern.

The great dark house was perfectly quiet as they went downstairs and through the chapel by the tombs of the kings. Just here, however, the Queen stopped and called back Des-Essars. ‘Where does he lie?’ she asked him; and he pointed out the stone—she was standing almost upon it—and for many a day remembered the curious regard she had for it: how she hovered, as it were, over the place, looking at it, smiling quietly towards it, as if it afforded her some quaint thought. Words have been put into her mouth which, according to him, she never said—melodramatic words they are, rough makeshifts of some kind of art embodying what was to come. According to Des-Essars, she said nothing, neither resolved, nor promised, nor predicted; nothing broke her smiling, considering silence over this new grave.

‘To see her there,’ he says, ‘in the lantern-light, so easy, so absorbed, so amused, was terrible to more witnesses than one. It opened to me secret doors never yet suspected. Was murder only curious to her? Was horror a kind of joy?’

But it frightened Mary Seton out of her courage. ‘Oh, what do you see in there, madam?’ she whispered. ‘What moves your mirth in his grave?’

The Queen turned her head as if shaken out of a stare. She met Mary Seton’s eyes in the lantern-light, and laughed.

‘Come away, madam, come away. Look no more. There’s a taint.’

‘Yes, yes,’ says the Queen; ‘I am ready. Where is the King?’

‘The King is gone, madam,’ said Stewart of Traquair; ‘and I think your Majesty will do well to be after him.’

This was true. Arthur Erskine, holding the horses outside the town wall, told her that the King had ridden forward at once, at a gallop, with his man Standen. She was therefore left with but two—himself and Traquair—for escort; but he assured her that every step had been taken, she would be in no sort of danger.

‘Danger!’ she said, laughing lightly. ‘No, no, Erskine, I do not fear it. Ruthven’s dagger seeks not my back.’

They lifted her up, the rest mounted after her; they walked their horses clear of the suburb. After some half-mile or more of steady trotting the Queen reined up and stopped the party. She listened; they all did. Far away you could hear the regular galloping of a horse, pulsing in the dark like some muffled pendulum. Now and again another’s broke into it and confused the rhythm.

‘There rides in haste our sovereign lord,’ said the Queen. ‘Come, we must follow him.’

By Niddry House—under the lee of the wall—she found the Earls of Huntly and Bothwell, Lord Seton, and a company of twenty horsemen waiting. The hour had gone five.

‘God save Scotland!’ had called Traquair, and Bothwell’s strident voice had countercried, ‘God save the Queen of Scotland!’

‘That voice hath blithe assurance,’ said she when she heard it. She joyed in adventure and adventurers.

She asked for news of the King. ‘Where is my consort, Lord Bothwell? Rode he this way?’

‘Madam, he did, and had a most mischievous scare of us. We knew him by the way he damned us all. But he’s well away by now. You may hear him yet.’

She gloomed at that. ‘Ay,’ said she, ‘I have heard him. I shall always hear him, I think.’ Then she shivered. ‘Let us ride on, sirs; the night is chill.’

Nobody spoke much. Lord Bothwell kept close to her right hand, Lord Huntly to her left. They would change horses at Gladsmuir.

The tide was breaking over wet rocks, one pale streak of light burnished the rim of the sea, as Lord Bothwell lifted down his Queen. Astounding to feel how fresh and feat she was! The dark hull of a castle could just be seen, suspended as it seemed above a cloud-bank, with sea-birds looming suddenly large or fading to be small as they swept in and out of the fog. Little tired waves broke and recoiled near by upon the weedy stones.

‘Dunbar, madam,’ says Bothwell, his hands still holding her—‘and the good grey guard of the water.’

The King, they told her, had been in bed those three hours.

CHAPTER VIII
KING’S EVIL

Sir James Melvill, wise and mature, travelled gentleman, made nothing of a ride to Dunbar in the slush of snow. He was careful to take it before the dawn, and arrived late, to find the Queen not visible. They told him she had come in some hours after daybreak, exhausted, but not nearly so exhausted as her horse. It was hardly likely she would rise the day.

‘You’ll let her Majesty know that I’m here, with my service to ye, Mr. Erskine. And since ye’re so obliging I’ll take a mouthful just of your spiced wine.’ Thus Sir James; who was sipping at this comfortable cup when the Earl of Bothwell came in, stamping the winter from his boots, and recalled him to his privileges. To see him make his bow to a lord was to get a lesson in the niceties of precedence. He knew to the turn of a hair how far to go, and unless the occasion were extraordinary, never departed from the Decreet of Ranking. In the present case, however, all things considered, he may have judged, ‘This Earl has merited the salutation of a Prince-Bishop.’ That presupposed, the thing was well done. Sir James’s heels went smartly together—but without a click, which would have been too military for the day; the body was slightly bent, with one hand across the breast. But his head fell far, and remained down-hung in deepest reverence of the hero. It is exactly thus that a devotional traveller in a foreign town might salute, but not adore, the passing Host. ‘I will not bow the knee to Baal; no, but I will honour this people’s God.’ And thus bowed Sir James.

‘Now, who graces me so highly?’ cried Bothwell when he saw him; and immediately, ‘Eh, sirs, it is honest Sir James! So the wind hath veered in town already! Man, you’re my weathercock in this realm. Your hand, Sir James, your hand, your hand. Never stoop that venerable pow to me.’

‘Always the servant of your lordship,’ murmured Sir James, much gratified.

‘Havers, James!’ says Bothwell, and sat upon the table. He swung his leg and looked at his sea boots as he talked, reflecting aloud, rather than conversing.

‘The Queen is sound asleep,’ he said, ‘as well enough she may be. Good sakes, my man, what a proud and gladsome lady have we there! I tell you, I have seen young men ride into action more tardily than she into the perilous dark. She flung herself to the arms of foul weather like a lammock to his dam’s dug. You’d have said’—he lowered his voice—‘you’d have said she was at the hunting of a hare, if you’d seen her gallop—with Adonis fleeting before her.’

Sir James nodded, as if to say—‘A hint is more than enough for me.’

‘Well!’ cried Bothwell, ‘well! What scared the gowk, then?’

‘My lord,’ said Sir James, ‘you must observe, he had been by when Lord Ruthven’s knife was at work, slicing Davy. He knew the way of it, d’ye see?’

Bothwell flung up his head. ‘Ay! he was all in a flutter of fear. The bitter fools that they are! Every traitor of them betraying the other, and a scamper who shall do mischief and be first away. But this one here—he’s none too safe, ye ken. He’s dug his own grave, I doubt. Before long time you and I, Melvill, shall see him by Davy’s side.’

‘Ah, my lord of Bothwell——’ Sir James was scandalised.

‘Fear nothing, man—I must talk. Here, in this place, what is he? Who heeds him, where he comes or whither he goes? Why, this skipjack of Brabant is the better man!’

The skipjack of Brabant was Des-Essars, come down to call Lord Bothwell to the Queen. She was about to hold a council, and Melvill was to abide the upshot.

‘Is the King to be there, do you know, Baptist?’ says my lord, his hand on the lad’s shoulder.

‘The King sleeps, my lord,’ he replied. ‘I heard her Majesty say that he could not do better.’

‘Her Majesty has the rights of him by now,’ says Bothwell. ‘Well—we shall work none the worse without him. Sir James, your servant. If I can help you, you shall see her.’

‘So your lordship will bind me fast to your service,’ bowed Sir James, and watched the pair depart. He observed that Des-Essars’ crown was level with the Earl’s cheek-bone.

Let me deal with the fruit of this council while I may. Sir James took a seed of it, as it were, back to Edinburgh, planted and watered it, and saw an abundant harvest, of sweet and bitter mixed. As for instance,—to the Earls of Moray and Argyll went full pardons of all offences; to Glencairn and Rothes the hope of some such thing upon proof of good disposition—just enough to separate men not quite dangerous from men desperate. To them, those desperate men, came the last shock. Writs of treason were out against the Earl of Morton, Lords Ruthven and Lindsay and the Master of Lindsay, against Archibald Douglas of Whittingehame, William Kirkcaldy of Grange, Ker of Fawdonsyde and their likes; also, definitely and beyond doubt, against William Maitland, younger of Lethington. The Secretary had to thank Lord Bothwell for that, for the Queen would have spared him if she could for Mary Fleming’s sake. These writs were served that very night and copies affixed to the Market-cross. The smaller fry—men in Morton’s livery, jackals and foxes of the doors—were to be taken as they fell in and hanged at conveniency. Many were apprehended in their beds before Sir James could be snug in his own.

One may look, too, for a moment at the last conference of them that of late had been masters of Holyrood. It was had in Lord Morton’s big house—a desultory colloquy broken by long glooms.

‘If you are still for hanging yourself, Ruthven,’ said my Lord Morton, in one of these pauses, ‘you’ve time.’

And Ruthven turned his eyes about with evident pain. Those thought, who looked at him, that he had not so much time. He was horribly ill, with fever in bones and blood. ‘I’m not for that now, my lord,’ he said, ‘I have a better game than that in hand.’

‘I could name you one if you were needing it,’ said Morton again, with a glance towards Archie Douglas. Listening and watching, the grey-headed youth chuckled, and rubbed his dry hands together.

‘Ay,’ said Ruthven, observing the action, and sickening of actor and it, ‘slough your skin, snake, and bite the better.’

‘Man, Ruthven,’ said Morton impatiently, ‘you talk too much of what you will do, and spend too much of your spleen on them that would serve ye if ye would let them. Body of me, we have time before us to scheme a great propyne for this good town that spews us out like so much garbage.’

‘We have that, cousin,’ says Archie, ‘if but we accord together.’

‘Ah, traitors all, traitors all!’ Ruthven was muttering to himself; then (as he thought of the chief of traitors) burst out—‘When we have done his butcher’s work—he heels us out of doors! Sublime, he washes his hands and goes to bed. We are the night-men, look you. Foh, we smell of our trade! what king could endure us? Oh, lying, sleek, milky traitor!’

Lord Morton, whose rage lay much deeper, thought all this just wind and vapour. ‘To fret and cry treachery, Ruthven! Pooh, a French trick, never like to save your face. Why, poor splutterer, nothing will save that but to mar another’s face.’

‘Your talk against my talk,’ cried Ruthven; ‘and will you do it any better?’

Lord Morton flushed to a heavy crimson colour, and his eyes were almost hidden. ‘Ay, mark me, that I will. I will score him deep with this infamy.’ He went to the window and stood there alone. Nobody could draw him into talk again.

There was much bustle in Edinburgh during the week, and more suitors to the Earl of Moray than he had time to see. Mr. Secretary got no joy out of him; he was kind to the Earl of Morton and spoke him many hopeful words; he shook his finger at Lord Ruthven. ‘Fie, my lord,’ he said, ‘you should wear a finer face. Turn you to your God, Lord Ruthven, and store up grain against the lean years to come. Root up these darnels from your garden-plot, lest they choke the good seed sowed in you. Let stout Mr. Knox be your exemplar, then; behold how he can harden his brows. Farewell, my lord: be sure of my friendship; take kindly to the soil of England. There are stout hearts in Newcastle, a godly congregation, to which I commend you.’

Ruthven turned away from him without a word to say, and never saw him again. With Morton, Lindsay, and the rest, he took the English road. Mr. Secretary Lethington went to my lord Atholl’s in the west; my lord of Argyll became a Queen’s man. Within the bare week after the flight to Dunbar the ragged corse of the Italian lay as untrodden by enemies as if Jerusalem had been his sepulture. But we are out-running our matter: we must be back at Dunbar with Queen Mary.

From that castle Lord Bothwell wrote to his wife, to this effect:—

You can see that he had been laughing at her in the old way, not boisterously this time, but under the beard, in his little twinkling eyes; and that, in the old way, she had been braced by his bravery. He had guessed—you can see that too—that she had some need of him, and how necessary it was that her loathing for her husband should pass into mere indifference. But he had no notion at that time how pressing that need was. Not she herself had realised the horror she had until the night after reaching Dunbar, when the King, by Standen, had renewed certain proposals, frustrate before by his laches. It may have been sudden panic, it may have been a trick of memory—God knows what it was; but she had flooded with scarlet, then turned dead white, had murmured some excuse, and with bowed head and feeble, expostulating hands, had left the room. She did not come back that night. She had called Des-Essars, fled with him into the turret, found an empty chamber under the leads, had the door locked, a great coffer jammed against it—and had stayed there so till morning. The young man, writing a word or two upon it, says that she was almost rigid at first, in a waking trance; and that she sat ‘pinned to his side’ while the maids and valets hunted her high and low. ‘I did what I could,’ he writes; ‘talked nonsense, told old tales, sang saucy songs, which by that time of my life I had been glad to have forgotten, and, affecting a nonchalance which I was far from feeling, recovered her a little. She began to be curious whether they would find her, judged by the ear how the scent lay, laughed to hear Mistress Seton panting on the stair, and Carwood screaming—“There’s a great rat in my road!” Presently she slept, with her head on my knees and my jacket over her shoulders. I took her down to bed before morning, and in the daylight she had partly recovered herself. She transacted business, ate a meal; but I remarked that she trembled whenever the King entered the room, and faltered when she was obliged to reply to him—faltered and turned up her eyes, as fowls do when they are sleepy. Fortunately for her, he was sulky, and did not renew his advances.’

I suspect that she found out—for she was rigid in self-probing—that if she allowed herself to abhor him for an unspeakable affront, she would have to scorn herself even more for having given him the means of affronting her. Right punishment: she would admit that she had deserved it. She had been the basest of women (she would say) when she offered that which was to her a sacrament, in barter for mere political advantage. Why, yes! she had prepared to sell herself to this wallowing swine in order to escape her prison; and if he snored the bargain out of his head it was because he was a hog,—but then, O God! what was she? So, from not daring to think of that night of shame, she passed to fearing to think of the shameful recreants in it; and as we ever peer at what we dread, it came about that she could think of nothing else, and was in torment. Des-Essars gives none of this; it was not in his power to get at it; but he saw, what we can never see, that she suffered atrociously, that her case grew desperate. Hear him. ‘One day I came with a message to her chamber door, early; the door was half-open. I had a shocking vision of her abed, lying there in a bed of torture, like one stung; on her face, writhing and moaning, tossing her hands—short breath, tearless sobbing, sharp cries to God; while Mary Seton read aloud out of Saint-Augustin by the fog-bound cresset light. She read on through everything—pausing only to put our Mistress back into the middle of the bed, for fear lest she might fall out and hurt herself.’

If this is true—and we know that it is—why, then, out of such waking delirium, out of anguish so dry, Queen Mary must have been delivered if she were not to die of it.

The Earl of Bothwell was not a man of imagination, though he had a quick fancy. He read his Queen in this state of hers with interest at first, and some amusement, not then knowing how dire it was. He saw that she would turn white and leave any room into which King Darnley entered; he knew that she would ride far to avoid him, and sometimes, indeed, under sudden stress, would use whip and spur and fly from him like a hunted thief. When he found out something—not very much, for Des-Essars would not speak—of the events of the night in the turret, moved by good-nature, he put himself in the way to help her. He got more maids fetched from Edinburgh—Fleming and Mary Sempill—and himself stayed with her as long as he dared, and longer than he cared. And then, one day by chance, he got a full view of her haunted mind—a field of broken lights indeed! and saw how far he might travel there if he chose, and with what profit to himself.

He was with her afoot on the links behind the town—sandy hillocks of dry bents, and a grey waste at such a season, abode of the wind and the plovers; he with her, almost alone. Des-Essars, who walked behind them, had strayed with the dogs after a hare; the wind, blowing in from the sea, brought up wisps and patches of fog in which the boy was hidden. Talking as she went, carelessly, of the things of France, he listening more or less, she stopped of a sudden, choked a cry in the throat, and caught at his arm. ‘Look, look, look!’ she said: ‘what comes this way?’ He followed the direction of her fixed eyes, and saw a riderless horse loom out of the vapour, come on doubtingly at a free trot, shaking his head and snuffing about him as if he partly believed in his freedom. It shaped as a great grey Flemish horse, assuredly one of the King’s.

The Queen began to tremble, to mutter and moan. ‘Oh, oh, the great horse! Free—it’s free! Oh, if it could be so! Oh, my lord, oh——I’m afraid!’

‘It is indeed the King’s horse, madam,’ he said. ‘I fear—some misfortune.’

But she stared at him. ‘Misfortune!’ she cried out. ‘Oh, are you blind? Go and see—go and make sure. I must be assured—nothing is certain yet. Run, my lord, run fast!’

He made to obey, and instantly she clung to his arm to stop him. She was in wild fear.

‘No—no—no—you must not leave me here! There are voices in the sea-wind—too many voices. A clamour, a clamour! Those that cry at me through the door, those that are out on the sea—a many, a many! I tell you I am afraid.’ Her fear irritated her; she stamped her foot. ‘Do you hear me? I am afraid. You shall not leave me.’

There was no doubt. She was beside herself—looking all about, her teeth chattering, fingers griping his arm.

‘Why, then, I will send the lad, ma’am,’ says Bothwell. ‘You need have no fear with me. I hear no voices in the wind.’

She looked at him wonderfully. ‘Do you never hear them at night?’ Then her eyes paled, and the pupils dwindled to little specks of black. ‘Come with me,’ she said in whisper, ‘a-tiptoe; come softly with me. We must find him—we can never be sure till we see him lying. There is one way: you lift the eyelids. Better than a mirror to the nose. Come, come: I must look at him, to be very sure.’ She stared into the white sky, and gave a sudden gasp, pointing outwards while her eyes searched his face. ‘Look!’ she said: ‘the birds over there. They are about him already. Come, we shall be too late.’ She led him away in a feverish hurry, through bush and briar, talking all the time. ‘Blood on his face—on his mouth and shut hands. He gripped his dagger by the blade, and it bit to the bone. He comes and cries at my door—all foul from his work—and asks me let him in. But I hold it—I am very strong. He always comes—but now!’ She laughed insanely, and gave a skip in the air. ‘O come, my lord—hurry, hurry!’

The loose horse had trotted gaily by them as the astonished Lord Bothwell followed where he was haled. Presently, however, he heard another sound, and pulled back to listen to it. ‘Hearken a moment,’ says he. ‘Yes, yes! I thought as much. Here comes another horse—galloping like a fiend—a ridden horse.’

She started, forced herself to listen, knew the truth. ‘He is hunting! Take me—hide me—keep me safe! Bothwell, keep him off me!’

She knew not what she said or did; but he, full of pity now, drew her behind a clump of whims and held her with his arm.

‘There, there, madam, comfort yourself,’ he said. ‘None shall harm you that harm not me first. How shall you be hurt if you are not to be seen? Trust yourself to me.’

She shook in his arm like a man in an ague; uncontrollable fits of shaking possessed her, under which, as they passed through her, she shut her eyes, and with bent head endured them. So much she suffered that, if he had not let his wits go to work, he would have hailed the King as he went pounding by. He supposed that she had been shocked mad by that late business of hasty blood. Of course he was wrong, but the guess was enough to prevent him following his first purpose, and so killing her outright.

The King came rocking down the brae, red and furious, intent upon the truant horse; and as he went, Bothwell made bold to glance at the Queen. What he saw in her hag-ridden face was curious enough to set him thinking hard; curious, but yet, as he saw it, unmistakable. There was vacancy there, the inability to reason which troubles the mentally afflicted; there were despair and misery, natural enough if the poor lady was going mad—and knew it. But—oh, there was no doubt of it!—there was in the drawn lines of her face blank, undisguised disappointment. He saw it all now. She had believed him dead, her heart had leaped; and now she had just seen him alive, galloping his horse. Clang goes the cage door again upon my lady! Now, here was a state of things!

When the King was out of sight and hearing, swallowed in the growing fog, and she a little recovered, and a little ashamed, he began to talk with her; and in time she listened to what he had to say. He spoke well, neither forgetting the respect due to her, which before he had been prone to do, nor that due to himself as a man of the world. He did not disguise from her that he thought very lightly of David’s killing.

‘Saucy servants, in my opinion,’ he said, ‘must take what they deserve if they expect more than they are worth. They demand equality—well, and when they meet gentlemen with daggers, they get it.’ But he hastened to add that to have killed the fellow before her face must have been the act of beasts or madmen—‘and, saving his respect, madam, your consort was one and your Ruthven the other.’

To his great surprise she then said quietly that she was of the same mind, and not greatly afflicted by the deed, or the manner of it either. She had seen men killed in France; queens should be blooded as well as hounds. She also considered that Davy had been presumptuous. He had known his aptitudes too well. But useful he had certainly been, and she intended to have another out of the same nest—Joseph, his brother. Singular lady! she had found time to write into Piedmont for him.

‘Well then, madam,’ says Bothwell, with a shrug, ‘all this being your true mind, I own myself at a loss how to take your extreme alarms.’

She bit her lip. ‘I am better. Maybe they were foolish. Who knows? I cannot tell you any more than this. I had nearly forgot that wicked deed. But there are other offences—women find—which cannot, can never be forgotten.’ She grew impatient. ‘Ah, but it is not tolerable to discuss such things.’

Even then he did not know what she meant. She had been mortally offended by the King, and offended to the point of horror—but by something worse than murder and strife in the chamber, by something which she could not speak of! What under Heaven had that red-faced, stable-legged lad in him which could terrify her?

‘Madam,’ he said, ‘if you cannot talk of it, you cannot tell it me, and there is an end. My counsel to you is this: put the young lord and his sottishness out of your royal head. Look at him stoutly and aver that he is naught. You have shown that you can face a rebel kingdom; face now your rebel heart. For I say that your heart is a rebel against your head, swerving and backing like a jade that needs the spur. Ride your heart, madam! Ply whip to the flanks, bring it up to the boggart in the corn. Thus only your heart shall nose out the empty truth. Why, good lack! what is there to credit all your alarm but silly fed flesh and seething liquor? Look at him, judge him, flick your fingers at him, and forget him. Madam, I speak freely.’

She said faintly that he was very right. She had suffered much of late in all ways: she spoke of pains in the side, in the head, of fancies at night, etc. She owned that she desired his good opinion of her courage, and promised she would try to earn it. Looking tired and ill, smiling as if she knew only too well there was no smiling matter, she held out her hand to him at the entry of the town. He bowed over and kissed it. Mildly she thanked him and went her ways with Des-Essars.

He wrote to the countess soon after:—