He answered coldly, but with great respect, and only kept the messenger back two days.

CHAPTER III
DESCANT UPON A THEME AS OLD AS JASON

It is from Des-Essars that I borrowed that similitude of Lord Bothwell to a violin-player. The young man pictures him as such, at this very time, sitting deep in his chair at the Hermitage, his instrument upon his crossed knee—his lovely, sensitive instrument! He screws at the keys, in his leisurely, strong way, and now and again plucks out a chord, ‘until, under the throbbing notes, he judges that he hath wrung up his music to the tragic pitch.’ The figure is adroit in its fitness to the persons involved, but puzzling in this respect—that with executant so deliberate and instrument so fine the pitch should be so slow of attainment.

Face the facts, as she herself did (with a shiver of self-pity), and ask yourself what on earth he was about. Consider his fury at her dismissal of the King, his coldness through her appeals for mercy: what could they point to but one thing? ‘Over and over again,’ says Des-Essars, ‘my mistress told me that his lordship would do nothing overt while the King her husband was alive; and I acquiesced in silence. It was too evident. She added, immediately, “And I, Baptist—what can I do? What will become of me? I cannot live without my Beloved—nay, I cannot discern life or death under the canopy of Heaven unless he is there moving and directing it. As well ask me to behold a vista of days in which the sun should never shine. This is a thing which forbids thought, for it denies the wish to live.” To such effect she expressed herself often, and then would remain silent, as to be sure did I, each of us, no doubt, pondering the next question (or its answer)—What stood in the way of her happiness? What kept the King alive? The answer lay on the tip of the tongue. She! She only preserved the worthless life; she only stood in her own light. Ah, she knew that well enough, and so did I, and so did every man in Scotland save one—the blind upstart himself.

‘A dangerous knowledge, truly: dangerous by reason of the ease with which she could provide remedy for her pain. Let her move a finger, let her wink an eyelid, shrug a shoulder, and from one side or another would come on a king’s executioner, clothed in the livery of Justice, Proper Resentment, Vengeance, Envy, Greed or Malice—for under one and all of these ensigns he was threatened by death. And I will answer for it that the question flickered hourly in flame-red letters before her eyes, Why standeth the Queen of Scots in the way of Justice? O specious enemy! O reasonable Satan! What! this fellow, a drunkard, a vile thing, treacherous, a liar, a craven—this, whom to kill were to serve God, alone to shut her out from good days? I know that her hand must have itched to give the signal; I know that the Devil prevailed; but not yet, not yet awhile—not till she was reeling, faint, caught up, swirled, overwhelmed by misery and terror. At this time, though suffering made her eyes gaunt and her mouth to grin, she kept her hands rigidly from any sign.

‘It is, withal, a curious thing, not to be disregarded by the judicious, that the Countess of Bothwell, and her claims and pretentions, never entered her thoughts. In her opinion, women—other women—were the toys of men. This world of ours she saw as a garden, a flowery desert place in which stood two persons, the Lover and the Beloved. Observe this, you who read the tale; for presently after my Lord Bothwell observed it, and, by playing upon it, attuned her to his tragic pitch.’

She left Jedburgh on 10th November, her terrible beleaguering question not yet answered. She went a kind of progress by the Tweed valley, by Kelso, Wark, Hume, Langton, Berwick, stayed in the gaunt houses which are still to be seen fretting the ramparts of that lonely road—towers reared upon woody bluffs to command all ways of danger, square, turreted fortresses looking keenly out upon the bare lands which they scarcely called their own and had grown lean in defending. All about her as she went were the lords, every man of them with his own game in his head, watching the moves of every other. Argyll and Glencairn were shadows of Moray; Crawfurd and Atholl for the moment held with Huntly and the throne. Lethington was the dog of whoso would throw him a task; Livingstone, jocular still, kept mostly with the women.

The Queen’s moods, as she journeyed slowly through that wintering country, changed as the weather does in late autumn. Winds blow hot and winds blow cold, tempests are never far off; frost follows, when the sun glitters but is chill, and the ice-splinters lie late, like poniards in the ridged ways. She rode sometimes for a whole day in bitter silence, her face as bleak as the upland bents, and sometimes she spurred furiously in front, her hair blown back and face on fire with her mad thoughts. Unseen of any, she clenched her fists, she clenched her teeth. ‘I am a queen, a queen! I choose to do it. It is my right, it is my need.’

She had fits of uncontrollable weeping; they caught her unawares now and then, her face all blurred with tears. This was when she had been pitying herself as victim of a new torment—new at least to her. ‘He sits alone with a woman who hates me. He pinches her chin—they laugh together over my letters. Fool! I will write no more.’ The more a fool in that she wrote within the next hour.

When she grew frightened to find how solitary she was, she turned in the saddle more than once, and hunted all faces for a friendly one. Wearisome quest, foredoomed to failure! Moray, with his straight rock of brow, sat like a cliff, looking steadfastly before him; Argyll counted the sheep on the hillside; Livingstone, a ruddy old fool, hummed a tune, or said, ‘H’m, h’m! All’s for the best in this braw world, come rain come sun.’

And the maids, the Maries, once her bosom familiars! There Livingstone bites her prudish lip, here Fleming peers askance at Lethington; Seton says something sharply witty to Lady Argyll, and makes the grim lady hinny like a mare.

Far behind, in the ruck of the cavalcade, she may catch sight of a youth on a jennet, a pale-faced youth with a widish nose and smut-rimmed light eyes. He has a French soul; he loves her. There, at least, is one that judges nothing, condemns nothing, approves nothing. She is she, and he her slave. Is she angry?—The sun’s hidden then. Does she smile?—The sun rises. Does she kiss him?—Ho! the sun atop of summer. Suppose that she were Medea: suppose for a moment that she slew—no, no, the term is inexact—suppose that she stood aside, and men justly offended came in and slew King Jason? This slave of hers would say, ‘The sun, shining, hath struck one to earth.’

Yes, here was a trusty friend who would as soon blame the sun for his sunstroke, or the lightning for his flash of murder, as blame her. She would call him to her, then, and make him ride by her for half a day. She would take his hand, lean aside to kiss him, to rest her head on his shoulder, to stroke his cheek; she would call him her lover, her fere, her true and perfect knight—fool him, in fine, to the top of his bent. And to all that she said or did, Des-Essars, if we may believe him, decently replied: ‘Yes, it is quite true that I love your Majesty. I have no other thought but that, nor have I ever had.’

Thus she rode progress towards her soul’s peril, changing from fierce heat to shrivelling cold as fast as the autumn weather.

It was at Kelso that she got letters from the King, foolish and blusterous letters in the Quos ego ...! style which the Master of Sempill admired. Let her Majesty understand his mind was made up. Let her Majesty receive him in Edinburgh, or ... this was their tenor; with them in her hand and one from Bothwell burning in her bosom she showed Mr. Secretary a disturbed, dangerous face. Pale as she was nowadays, and thin, he was shocked to see her hungry lines. He thought her like some queen of old, Jocasta or Althæa, with whom the Furies held midnight traffic. ‘Do you see this? Is it never to end?’

He did not stay to peruse the letters. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘let us take order in these painful matters. Leave them to your faithful friends, and all shall be to your contentation.’

She turned away; her staring eyes saw nothing but misery. ‘Take order, say you? If you fear so much as to speak above a whisper, how shall you dare do anything? Friends! what friend have I but one? Death is my patient, waiting friend; and so I shall prove him before many more days.’

‘Alas, madam, speak not so wildly.’

She looked fiercely, wrinkling up her eyes at him. ‘But I tell you, sir, that if this load be not lifted from me, I shall end it my own way.’

That night a plan was laid before the Earls of Moray and Argyll. Lethington spoke it, but Huntly stood over him as stiffly imminent as a pine, or he had never found a word to say.

After a great deal of elliptic talk he came to terms, by saying, ‘The business can be done promptly and without scandalous parade of force. When her Majesty is at Craigmillar making ready for the Prince’s baptism, he will certainly come, for he would never endure to be passed over at such a time, when the ambassadors of France and England may be brought to acknowledge him. Well, then, my lords, if we confront him with our proofs of his oft-meditated treason he will deny them. If we essay to apprehend him he will resist us; and resistance, doubtless, might provoke our men to—to——’ Here he looked about him.

‘You have said enough, Lethington,’ Huntly broke in. ‘We shall be ready, those of us who are true men.’ He watched Moray darkly as he spoke, but drew forth no reply. It was Argyll who took up the talk—took it up to the rafters as it were, since he leaned back in his chair and cast up his eyes.

‘Look at him for a Lennox Stuart, God help us! Lennox Stuart and rank Papist he is. To leave at large the like of that is to have a collie turned rogue ranging your hillside. Why, gentlemen,’ and he looked from man to man, ‘shall we leave him to raven the flock?’

‘I adhere to the plan,’ said Huntly. ‘Count upon me and mine. I take it you stand in with us, my Lord of Argyll. What says my Lord of Moray?’

The great man became judicial. He gave them the feeling, as he intended, that he had been surveying a far wider field than they could scan. Under that arching sky, which he was able to range in, and from whose study they had called him down, their little schemes took up that just inch which was their proper scope. If he had not remarked them earlier, not his the all-seeing eye; but he was obliged to his friends for drawing him to the care of matters so curious, so well-deserving of a quiet hour.

‘We must talk at large of these somewhat serious concerns, my lords. We must take our time, hasten so far as we may, but with a temperate spur—ay, a temperate spur. We must consult, discriminate those who stand our friends from those who are unfriendly; from those who cry, not without reason, for recognition. We must not omit those who are afar off, nor those who will come about us asking questions—what is to be lost, what gained? Many considerations rise up on the instant, others will crowd upon us. Where are my lords of Crawfurd and Atholl? Are they behind you? I cannot see them. What says my lord of Lindsay, that very steadfast Christian? Where, alas, is my lord of Morton’s honour?’

‘Sir,’ cried Huntly, fuming, ‘we can resolve your many questions when you have answered our one. We asked you not, what says one or what says another? but, rather, what says your lordship?’

Lord Moray smiled. ‘Ah, my Lord Chancellor, if your lordship had not been so long a stranger to my poor house, your question had hardly been put to me. Those who know me best, my lord, do not need to confirm by vain assurances my love of country, or desire to serve the throne of my dear sister. Forgive me if I say that, with older eyes than your lordship’s, I take a wider range. I see your distresses—perhaps I see a remedy. Perhaps your proposal is one, perhaps it is a danger worse than the disease. It may be——’

He threatened to become interminable, so Huntly, with no patience at command, left him in the midst. With disapproval in every prim line of his face Lord Moray watched him go. He said nothing more; and why should he say anything, when all was forwarding as he wished? He did repeat to the Secretary, afterwards and in private, that it was sore pity to have the Earl of Morton still in exile—a saying which that worthy misapprehended. But here the Councils stopped, though the Queen did not, but pushed on to Berwick, and reached Edinburgh by mid-November. At Craigmillar, where she chose to stay, they were resumed under the more hopeful auspices of Lord Bothwell, whom at last she summoned to her side out of Liddesdale.

This is because jealousy, that canker in the green-wood, was groping in her now, though not, even yet, of that sordid kind which is concerned with its own wound. She no longer wrote to Bothwell save on details of business, because she conceived her letters distasteful to him; and she would not have recalled him had not Lethington assured her of the common need of his counsel. The sort of jealousy she suffered filled her, rather, with a kind of noble zeal to do him honour. Although she would not write to him, she could never rest without news of his daily doings. So when she heard that he and his Countess were reading Petrarch together, many hurt lines, but no vulgar splenetic lines, were committed to the casket.

She wrote, and believed, that she grudged Lady Bothwell nothing:

‘God pity this poor lady!’ Des-Essars bursts forth, having been imparted these outrageous lines. ‘She who could believe that my Lord Bothwell was without peer in beauty, kindness, and constancy, might very well believe that she herself was not jealous of his wife.’

Jealous or no, it was jealousy of a strange kind. When her beloved answered his summons by attending her at Craigmillar, she received him with a dewy gratefulness which went near to touch him. ‘You have come, then! Oh, but you are good to your friend,’—a speech which for the moment bereft him of speech. She asked after the Countess, spoke of her as her sister, pitied her sitting alone at Hermitage, and inspired the gross-minded man with enthusiasm for her exalted mood.

He threw himself into the plotting and whispering with which the Court was rife, talked long hours with Lethington, was civil to Moray and his ‘flock,’ as he called Argyll and the rest. Nothing much came of it all. Moray went so far as to suggest divorce. Lethington thought much of it, and carried it to Bothwell, who thought nothing of it. He declined to discuss it with her Majesty.

‘Take your proposal to her if you choose,’ he said; ‘lay it before her. I know what she will say, and agree with her beforehand. This is no way of doing for men, or for crowned women.’

He had the rights of it. ‘What!’ she cried, ‘and make my son a bastard! And he to be King of England! I think they have had bastards enough on that throne. Your plan is foolish.’

Lethington was upon his mettle. He was to be married come Christmas, and, indebted for this prospect to the Queen and Bothwell, was desirous to owe her as much more as she would lend him. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I cannot admit my plan to be so dangerous to the Prince’s highness; but I will content you yet. Give me leave to devise yet once more.’

‘Devise as you will, sir,’ said she, ‘but be quick, or I shall begin with devices of my own. You know that a foumart in a trap scruples not to use tooth and claw. And he is wise, since soft glances are never likely to help him.’ Almost immediately she began to cry at the thought of herself in a trap, ‘to cry and torment herself,’ says the annalist. And one night, at supper with a few of them, she lashed out in a fury at her impotence. ‘Ah, it is too much, what I suffer among you all! I have borne him a son, and he would steal him from my breast. He would tip that innocent tongue with poison that he may envenom his mother. If I am not soon quit of this there is but one end to it.’

Patience, they counselled. ‘Ay, madam,’ said foolish old Livingstone, ‘patience, and shuffle the cards.’

‘Shuffle you yours, my lord,’ she said, looking lofty, ‘if you think them worthy of Fortune’s second thoughts. For me, I know a shorter way to end the game.’

In private, she and Bothwell were in full accord. She was to obey him, and leave him alone. ‘No questions, my soul!’ he was for ever saying to her, half jocularly, half with meaning that she was to be blind, deaf, and dumb. She shut her eyes and mouth and put her fingers to her ears; and in time this became a habit. ‘My prince, my master,’ she said once, and gave him both her hands, ‘I am your servant, and submit to you in all things. Use me well.’ He kissed her fondly as he swore that so he would.

It was after the King had visited her and gone again, whither no one knew, that Lethington produced his second plan. As before, he was careful to submit it to Bothwell. What did his good lordship think of this? The King was to meet her Majesty at Stirling for the Prince’s baptism; he would be ill received by the ambassadors, and therefore mutinous, probably with outcry. Let one then, with all proofs in his hands, indict him of treason. Let him be summoned to answer, and upon refusal, arrested. He would certainly resist, with violence. The end was sure. Now, what did his good lordship think?

His good lordship spoke his plain mind, as he always did to Lethington, whom he scorned. ‘You don’t kill a sheep with hounds and horn. Pray, my friend, where will be my lord of Moray all this while? Will he wind the horn? I do not remember that that is his way. Or will he find occasions to be in his lands? Or turn his coat and cry, God bless our King-Consort and the True Kirk?’

Lethington had a late autumnal smile, with teeth showing through like the first frost. ‘I will tell your lordship what he will do. He will see and not see. He will look on and not behold.’

‘You mean, I gather, that he will be at his prayers, looking through his fingers while we foul ours?’

‘Your lordship is most precise.’

However, his plan went before the Queen, who gave it a gloomy approval. ‘He is so clogged with treason, he will never run. You will have an easy capture. Let nothing be done till my son be christened.’

Immediately afterwards she was instructed by Bothwell that the project was as vain as wind, because it depended upon two unstable things. First, if he allowed himself to be taken, what on earth was to be done with him? There must be an assize. And to which side in that would Moray lean?

She could not answer him.

‘No,’ said he, ‘you cannot; nor can any man in Scotland.’

‘I am of your mind,’ she said—superfluous assurance!

‘Well, then,’ he went on, ‘let them stir their broth of grouts. They are all greedy knaves together: perchance one or another will tumble into the stew and we be quit of him.’

‘But if we leave them,’ she hesitated, ‘they may attempt to take him—and then——’

Bothwell laughed. ‘Nay, I will see to it that they do not. Oh, madam, trust your honest lover, and all shall go greatly for you and me.’

She threw herself into his arms. Trust him! O God, had she not found a man at last?

When they all met at Stirling to christen the Prince, the King was so ill received that, as Lethington had expected, he refused to leave his lodging even for the ceremony. He was literally alone, without his father, without any Scots lord to his name; sitting for the most part in a small room, drinking and playing cards. He used to ride out at night so that he need not tempt the discourtesy of the wayfarers; and once, when the guard at the gate hesitated about passing him in, he flew into a tempest of rage, drew, and killed the man on the spot. Lethington flew from lord to lord. What better opportunity than this?

Everything was prepared, all the proofs gathered in. There were letters of his to the Queen-Mother of France, to his own mother, Lady Lennox, to the English Catholics, to the Duke of Norfolk, to certain Jesuits in the West. One Highgate brought intercepted papers—a chart of Scilly, a plan of Scarborough Castle: and some other fellow was fished up, a bladder full of whispers of a plot to steal the Prince. Lastly, to crown the image of a perfect traitor, there was a draft proclamation of himself as Regent of Scotland. Enough here to hang a better man!

‘Well,’ said Huntly, when Lethington showed him the whole budget, ‘take your measures, show me my place, and meet me at your own time. I’ll not fail you.’

That night Lord Bothwell came into the Queen’s chamber while she was at her prayers. She saw him, but pretended that she did not, finished her rosary, and bowed her head over it; then got up and kissed him before all her circle. Very soon they were alone together.

‘I disturbed you,’ he said; ‘I regret it.’

‘Regret it not—it was sweet disturbance. My heart flew faster than my beads.’

He took her hand up. ‘Why do you tell me such things? Do you know what disorder they work in me?’

She pretended that she must disengage her hand, but he would not allow it.

‘Alas, sir,’ she said, ‘we whip each other, you and I. Each is a torment to the other. One runs, the other chases,—but whither?’

‘Quick, quick to the goal!’

‘Take me thither in your arms, my Bothwell. Carry me, lest I faint by the way.’

‘No fainting now. The hour is come, and I with it. I have counsel for you.’

‘Counsel me—I will be faithful.’

‘I recommend, then, to your clemency the Earl of Morton, his kinsman Douglas of Whittinghame, and all their factions.’

She pondered the saying, not discerning at first what it purported, yet fearing to ask him lest he should be impatient of her stupidity. No man had ever made her feel stupid but this one.

‘Do you wish it?’ she asked him.

‘I advise it.’

‘They are no friends of yours?’

‘They may become so.’

‘And you remember that they greatly offended me?’

‘Oh, madam,’ he cried out irritably, ‘who has not offended you in this wicked land? Did not your sour brother offend you? Has not Lethington offended? Have not Huntly and I? Believe me, this Morton has himself been offended, and by the very man who has offended you more vilely than any other. There was one who betrayed you to the Douglases, but that same man betrayed the Douglases to you. Therefore I say, if you wish to redeem your honour, let Morton redeem his, and your affair is done. You force me to speak plainly.’

She saw his meaning now, and her eyes grew blank with fear. ‘Hush,’ she said, ‘speak no plainer. Those two will kill him.’

He shrugged. ‘You speak plainer than I. In advising you, however, to send open letters of pardon to Morton and his cousin, I have but done my duty, as we had agreed it should be. But it is for your Majesty to follow or to leave, as you will. I am still the servant.’

She went slowly to him, took up his hands and put them on her shoulders. He let her have the weight. ‘Now I feel your strong hands, Bothwell.’

‘It is you that put them there.’

‘It is where they should be. Servants use not so their hands, but only masters. And good servants soon grow to love the yoke.’ Suddenly she dropped to his feet and embraced his knees. ‘I am yours, I am yours! Do as you will with me and all.’

Open letters were despatched to Lord Morton and Mr. Archie Douglas, that, on certain terms, they and their factions might gain pardon and remission of forfeitures. On the evening of the same day the King left Stirling without any farewells and sped to Glasgow.

Lethington, completely fooled, ran open-mouthed to Bothwell. ‘Here is a discomfiture, my lord! I am dumbfounded. Just when we were sure of him.’

‘Maybe you were too sure. There will be a vent-hole in your body politic.’

‘My lord, I can answer for the entirety of it. Tush, my credit is gone! I am vexed to death.’

‘I see that it puts you out. But courage, man! you will find a way yet.’

‘If I find one now, after this rebuff, it will be owing to your lordship’s good opinion,’ said the guileless Lethington: ‘a sharp spur to me, I do assure you.’

Bothwell took him by the arm. ‘Do you feel so sure,’ he asked him, ‘that our man hath not had a fright?’

‘What fright? Not possible—or I am not up with your lordship.’

Bothwell half-closed his eyes. ‘How do you suppose he would look upon the return of Morton and the Douglases?’

Lethington started, then stared at the floor. ‘Ay,’ he said—‘ay! I had not given that a thought. Man, Lord Bothwell,’ he whispered, ‘yon’s his death-warrant, and he knows it.’

Lord Bothwell clacked his tongue.

CHAPTER IV
SHE LOOKS BACK ONCE

Just at this point in the story Des-Essars confesses to the desire having been hot within him to assassinate the Earl of Bothwell; and writing it down when the opportunity had come and was gone, he may well say, ‘What would have been the pain and loss of dear blood, had I done it, in comparison to present anguish?’ He is, however, forced to admit that he did not meditate so violent a deed for the sake of avoiding future disaster, but rather to make the present more tolerable. It was his lot to be much with the Queen and her chosen lover; he owns that he found the constant fret of their intercourse almost impossible to be borne. ‘I declare before God and the angels,’ he says, ‘that her dreadful lavishing of herself during these weeks of waste and desire caused my heart to bleed. She stripped herself bare of every grace of mind, spirit, and person, and strewed it in his way, heaping one upon another until he seemed to be wading knee-deep in her charms. Nay, but he wallowed in them like a brute-beast, unrecognising and unthankful—a state of affairs unparalleled since Galahad (who was a good knight) lay abed and was nourished upon the blood of a king’s virgin daughter. How different this knight from that, let these pages declare; and my mistress’s high mind, how similar to that spending martyr’s. For it is most certain that all her acts towards the Lord Bothwell were moved by magnanimity. Stripping herself nobly, she stood the more noble for her nakedness. She suffered horribly: his the horrible sin. Love—in the great manner of it—should be a conflict of generosity; either lover should be emulous of pain and loss. But here she gave and this accursed butcher took; she spent and he got.

‘I saw them together at their various houses of sojourn during this winter: at Drymen in Perth, a house of my Lord Drummond’s; at Tullibardine, at Callander, and again in Edinburgh. Little joy had they of each other, God wot! There are two kinds of lovers’ joys, as I think—the mellow and the sharp. The one is rooted in the heart and the other in the sense, but both alike need leisure of mind if they are to bear fruit; for in the contemplation of our happiness lies the greatest happiness of all. Now, these two were never at rest; they could never look upon each other and let the eyes dwell there with the thought, My Beloved is mine and I am his, and as it is now so it shall be. No, but they looked beyond each other through a tangle of sin and error, searching until their eyeballs ached if haply they might discover a gleam beyond of that windless garden of the Hesperides wherein was put their hope. Fond searching, fond hope! they could never win the garden. Her desires were boundless, unappeasable, and so were his; for she sought to be perfect slave and he to be absolute master. And how was she to be his servant, who was born a queen? and how he the master he sought to be, when no empire the world ever saw would have contented him? But the greatest bar of severance between them was this: there was no community of interest possible between them. For, to her, this Bothwell was the only End; and to him this fair sweet Queen was only a Means. This is a pregnant oracle of mine, worth your travail. Perpend it, you who read.’

Des-Essars did not believe that Lord Bothwell loved the Queen. He had been often at Hermitage, you must remember, and seen the Earl and Countess together. My lord was not regardful of bystanders when he chose to fondle his handsome wife. When the two were separated, as now they were, the observant young man was aware that they wrote frequently to each other: French Paris was for ever coming and going between Liddesdale and his master’s lodging, wherever that might chance to be. He was certain, too, that the Queen knew it. ‘Paris used to deliver to my lord his wife’s letters, and he read them in the Queen’s very presence, with scarce a “By your leave, ma’am”; and at such times I have seen her Majesty pace about the garden in great misery, pull at the rowan berries until she scattered them, pluck at the branches of trees and send the dry leaves flying; and once—as I shall never forget—she thrust her hand and bare arm into a thicket of nettles, and when she drew it out it was all red to the elbow, with sore white blotches upon it where the poison had boiled the blood. Her arm went stiff afterwards, but she never let him know the reason.’

After the christening, about Christmas-time, the Earl of Morton and his friends came home to Scotland, were introduced into the Queen’s presence by the Earls of Bothwell and Huntly, and upon submission (and their knees) restored to their former estates. She had nothing to say to them, but sat like one entranced, looking fixedly at the floor while Bothwell made his speech, and Morton after him, in his bluff way, expressed his contrition and desire to be of service in the future. Mr. Archie Douglas, one of a crowd of repentant rebels, contented himself with cheering. ‘God save your Majesty!’ was his cry, and ‘Confusion to all your enemies!’ whereupon my Lord Morton bethought him of the real occasion of his recall, and added to his speech a few words more.

‘Oh, ay!’ he said: ‘by our fruits you shall judge us, madam, whether we be gratefully replanted in this dear soil or no. Try us, madam, upon whomsoever hath aggrieved you, or endangered your throne, or the thrones of them that are to follow you—try us, I say, and see whether our appetites to serve you are not whetted by our long absence.’

She had started and looked hastily at Bothwell,—evidently she was frightened. Her lips moved for some time before any sound came forth from them, but presently she said that she should not fail to call for service in the field when she required it. ‘But the realm is now at peace,’ she added, ‘and I hope will remain so.’

Morton said: ‘Amen to that. Yet be prepared, madam, as the sailors are, when they lie becalmed upon a sea like oil, but see a brown haze hang where sky and water meet. And, madam, trust yourself to them that are weatherwise in this country.’

She stammered. ‘I know not what you need fear for me—I hardly understand. I am very well served—very well advised—but I thank you for your friendly warning....’ She forced herself to speak, but could not make a coherent sentence. Bothwell intervened, and presently took away his new friends.

Lord Morton went to the Douglas house of Whittingehame, a leafy place in Haddington, not far from the sea. Thither in the first days of January repaired Bothwell and Huntly, while the Queen stayed in Edinburgh, friendless, except for Des-Essars and Mary Seton. She passed her days like one in a dream, speaking seldom, kneeling at altars but not praying, negligent of her surroundings, sometimes of her person, only alert when a messenger might be looked for with a letter. Often found in tears, either she could not or she would not account for them. One day she bade Des-Essars go with her letter-carriers to Whittingehame. ‘What would you have me do there, madam?’ he asked.

She played drearily with his sword-strap. ‘Do? What do spies in general? See—judge for yourself—look through my eyes if you can.’

He turned to go, and she caught at his arm. ‘Baptist,’ she said, ‘I am in the dark, and horribly afraid. Look you, I know not what they are doing there together. They whisper and wink and nod at each other; they say little and mean much. I cannot divine what they intend—or what they will presently ask me to do. I saw Archie Douglas grin like a wolf that day he was here—I know not what he grinned at. They tell me nothing—nothing! Do not suppose but that I trust my lord; but, Baptist, find out something. I need courage.’ She lay back exhausted, and when he came to her waved him off, whispering that he was to be quick and go.

He departed, reached Whittingehame within the day, saw what he could—which was precisely nothing, for Lord Bothwell was away and Lord Morton not visible—and on his road home again heard that the King lay dangerously ill at Glasgow, of smallpox or worse. He took that news in his pocket, and none that he could have gleaned from the whispers of Whittingehame could have had effect so surprising. For the first time for many a month he saw his Queen sane, sweet, crying woman. She fell on her knees, hiding her face in his sleeve, and gave thanks to God. When she rose up and went back to her chair he saw the tears in her eyes. She asked him no further of Bothwell and Morton at their secrets, or of Archie’s grins. When he came and knelt before her she took his face in her hands and kissed it. ‘God hath saved me, my dear, and by you,’ she said. ‘He hath heard my prayers. I am sure now that I shall find mercy. O fortunate messenger! O happy soul, whom thou hast redeemed!’

‘Madam,’ he said eagerly, seeing now why she was so thankful, ‘let me go to Glasgow. You cannot otherwise be sure of this report. The King may be ill, and yet not mortally. Let us be sure before we give thanks.’

She was crying freely. ‘I have not deserved so great a mercy, God knoweth. I have been near to deadly sin. Yes, yes—go, Baptist. Go at once, and return with speed.’ It was settled that he should take with him her physician and a message of excuse that business kept her from him. He went to prepare himself; she to write to Bothwell a brave and hopeful letter concerning this streak of blue in her storm-packed sky. Before dark Des-Essars was away on a fresh horse.

Up from Whittingehame in a day or two came Mr. Secretary Lethington, very busy; and had private speech with the Queen, reporting the councils of her friends down there. She listened idly to his urgings of this and that. What interest had she now in plots woven under yew trees or in panelled chambers, when high Heaven itself had declared for her quarrel? Did Archie grin like a wolf, Morton flush and handle his dagger? Let them—let them! An angel with a flaming sword stood on the house-roof at Glasgow, and their little rages were nought.

At the end of his circuitous oration—‘Well, have you ended?’ she asked him.

‘Madam, I have no more to say.’

She took a scrap of paper and scribbled on it with a pen. ‘Read that, if you please, and take it with you back again.’

‘Show to the Earl of Morton,’ he read, ‘that the Queen will hear no speech of the matter arranged with him.’

Bothwell laughed to see the dropped jaws, aghast at this rebuff. But she, confident in the help of high Heaven—which had plucked her, as she said, from the brink of the pit—had recovered all her audacity. And so she waited, almost happy again, for the return of her messenger.

Des-Essars was gone for more than a week; it was not until the ninth day from his departure that he brought back his report. I know not what she had expected—some miraculous dealing or another by which God was to signify that she was set free to follow her desires; but whatever it was, the young Brabanter could not end her suspense. So far as the doctors could judge, the King’s illness might be sweated out of him: they were trying that when he left. The fever must run its course; no one could say that it must needs end fatally. Her Majesty was to hope, said the doctors; and so said Des-Essars, giving the word a twist round. To hope! She was worn thin with hoping.

The King was horrible, he told her, and wore a taffeta mask. He was peevish, but not furious; had not enough strength left him for that. He lay and snapped at all who came near him, harmlessly, like a snake robbed of its fang. The light hurt his eyes, so he lay in the dark; but, being extremely curious about himself, he had a candle burning constantly beside him, and a hand-glass on the bed, in which he was always looking at his face: a sign of morbid affection of the brain, the doctors considered. The Queen said carelessly, ‘Why, what else hath he ever cared for in life but his own person?’

She asked what he had replied to her message of excuse. Des-Essars, who had not been allowed to talk with him, and had only seen what he did see when the sick man slept, had delivered it by Standen. Through Standen also came the answer. The King’s words were, ‘This much you shall say to the Queen: that I wish Stirling were Jedburgh, and Glasgow the Hermitage, and I the Earl of Bothwell as I lie here; and then I doubt not but she would be quickly with me undesired.’

She flushed, but not with shame. ‘Doth he think me at Stirling? He is out there; but otherwise, my dear, he is right enough.’ She turned away with a sigh. ‘Well, what can I do but wait?’ She was not allowed to wait long.

Bothwell came to see her, and stayed till near midnight in secret talk. It was wild and snowy, much like that night, as Des-Essars remembered, in which Davy had been slain, near a year ago; one of those nights when the mind, unhappy and querulous, calls up every nerve to the extreme point of tension. The young man, apprehensive of any and every evil, kept the watch. He heard the door shut, Bothwell’s step in the corridor; he flew to the antechamber, hoping that she might send for him. But though he waited there an hour or more in miserable suspense, neither daring to show himself nor to leave the place, he heard nothing. Between two and three o’clock in the morning he fell asleep over the table, wrapped in his cloak. As once before, she came in, a candle in her hand, and awoke him by touching his head.

He sprang up, broad awake in an instant; he saw her. ‘Oh, your face!’ he cried out. ‘Haunted! haunted!’ It was a face all grey, and as still as marble save for the looming eyes.

‘You sleep,’ she said, ‘but I keep vigil. Bid me good-bye. I am going away.’

He said, ‘Where you go, I go. I dare not leave you as now you are.’

She was in a stare. ‘I am going to the King.’

‘To the King!’ It horrified him. ‘You—alone?’

‘I am sent: I must go.’

‘I go with you.’

She shook her head. ‘You cannot. What I do I must do myself. Now bid me good speed upon my journey.’

He folded his arms. ‘I think I will not. I think the best wish I could make for you would be that you should die.’

This she did not deny; but said she: ‘Vain wishing! I know that I shall not die until my lord has made me his. After that it had better be soon.’

He asked her, with trembling voice, what she wanted with the King; for he verily thought that she was going there for one dreadful purpose. She avoided the question. The King had been asking for her, she said, and it was her duty to obey him. ‘He is mending fast, they tell me; and with his health his strength will return. I had rather’—she said it with a sick shudder—‘I had rather see him before he is able to move.’

‘Madam,’ urged the young man, much agitated, ‘I entreat you, for the love of Christ! You must not touch him, or allow.... He is one sore—hideous—poisoned through and through. On my knees I beg of you. Nay, before you go you shall kill me.’

She looked beside and beyond him in her set, pinched way; he saw the doom written plain on her face. In an agony, not knowing what he did, he confronted her boldly. ‘I shall prevent you. You shall not go.’

She said, looking at him now with softened eyes: ‘Oh, if it were possible even now that I might be as once I was, even now I would say to thee, my friend, Take me, O true heart, for I would be true like thee! Ah, if it were possible! Ah, if it were possible!’ Her great eyes seemed homes of mournful light; so longingly did she look that, for a moment, he thought he had conquered her. She gave a shake of the head, and when she looked at him again the kindly hue had gone. ‘But it is not possible—and I am a soiled woman, wounded in the side and defiled by my own blood; for my desire is not as thine.’

‘Oh,’ cried he, ‘what are you saying? Do you condemn yourself?’

She shook her head. ‘I neither condemn nor condone: I speak the truth. I ache for my lover; I must work my fingers to the bone for him.’

‘Not while I have mine—to work for you—to sin for you.’

‘You cannot. Your fingers are too tender.’

This angered him. ‘How can you say that, madam? How can you hurt me so? You know that I love you. Is it nothing to you? Less than nothing?’

She said, ‘It is much. Come, you and I will kiss together for the last time.’ She smiled a welcome, held out her arms; sobbing, he put them down and took her in his own instead, and held her close. There for a while she was content to be. But when he began to take more than his due, she gently disengaged herself, having won her object, which was to depart without him. ‘Adieu, dear faithful friend,’ she said—‘pray for me’; and as he knelt before her, she stooped down and lifted up his head by the chin, and kissed him on the forehead, and was gone. After that, she was inaccessible to him, her door denied.

In three days’ time—on the 23rd of January—she started for Glasgow with Lords Livingstone, Herries, and Traquair. Bothwell went part of her way, to where the roads divide. Her last public act had been to allow of the marriage between Fleming and Lethington. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘I shall have but one Mary left, who came hither with four. So endeth our Maids’ Adventure.’ But if I am right, it had ended long before. Now she was but a beast driven by the herdsmen to the market, there to be cheapened by the butcher.

Of his own moving adventure of the night when, for one moment, she assuredly looked back over her shoulder, Des-Essars writes what I consider his most fatuous page. ‘There was,’ he says, ‘a kind of very passion in that close embrace; and I knew, by the way she returned my kisses, that she was strongly inclined to me. Indeed, she said as much when she told me that it would have been possible, at an earlier day, for her to love me as she had once loved the King; with ardour, namely, like a fanciful child, in the secret mind, with the body but little concerned in the matter.[7] But it was too late. She owned herself tainted; he had taught her vice. She could be child no more, girl in love no more; alas, no, but a thirsty nymph stung by an evil spirit, ever restless, ever craving, never to be appeased....’

There is more in the same strain, which I say is fatuous. Whether she had a tenderness for him or not—and no doubt she had one—she was not revealing it then. Far from it, she wanted to escape, and this was her readiest way. She was at her old cajolery when she let him embrace and kiss her; and maybe she did kiss back. It is to be observed that she got her way immediately afterwards.