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.

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—

What a hearing for my Lord Moray! And again she broke out falteringly—

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....