Chapter II: The Brainsick Sonata

Asked afterwards by his brother-in-law Argyll how he had survived that long battle homewards through the howling dark, the Earl of Moray, citing scripture, had replied, _Except the Lord had been on our side_—! How far he strained the text, or how far hoped of it, he did not choose to say, but in his private mind he thought he saw all the fruit ready to fall to his hand whenever he should hold it out. No need to shake the tree. The Queen’s white palfrey made a false step and went girth-deep into the moss. None could see her, for she had spurred on alone into the jaws of the weather, feeling already (it may be) the fret of the fever in her bones which afterwards overcame her; nor could any hear her, for she let no cry. And when the horse, struggling desperately, hinnied his alarms, it had not been Lord Moray who had hastened to save. Huntly, rather, it was who, shrieking her name into the wind, caught at last the faint echo of her voice, and plunged into the clinging, spongy mess to her rescue. Alas, then, was she mad? or drunk with love? ‘Here I am, Mary of Scotland, clogged and trammelled, like a bird in a net.’ And then, O Lord of Life! she had laughed snugly and stroked herself—there in the gulf of death. Huntly, a man for omens, dated all misery to come from this staring moment.

After it he would not let go of her rein for the rest of the ride, but braved (as never before) her coaxing, irony, rage—lastly her tears of mortification. Longing to be alone with her lover, hating the very shadow of any other man, she was scathing and unworthy. ‘If Bothwell were here you would not dare what now you do. You hold me because there is no man to stop you. It is a brave show you make of me here! Well, take your joy of numb flesh—how are you likely to be served with it quick?’ and so on mercilessly. Towards the end of an intolerable journey she became drowsy through fatigue, and rather light-headed. The honest gentleman put his arm round her and induced her head to his shoulder. She yawned incessantly, her wits wandered; she spoke to him as if he were Bothwell, and set his cheeks burning. For a few minutes at a time, now and again, she slept, while he supported her as best he could, all his reverent love for the exquisite, flashing, crowned creature of his memories swallowed up now in pity for the draggled huntress in her need.

She was too tired to sleep when, late at night, they had laid her abed. She tossed, threw her head and arms about, was hot, was cold, shivered, sweated, wailed to herself, chattered, sang, whined nonsense. At first the women, having her to themselves, learned all that she had been careful to hide from them; all that Huntly had shut within the chamber door at Hermitage was enacted before them—or a kind of limping, tragic travesty of it. So then they grew frightened, and lost their heads: Mary Livingstone sent after Lord Moray; Mary Fleming called in Lethington; Mary Seton, with presence of mind, fetched Des-Essars. Before a keen audience, then, she harped monotonously and grotesquely upon the day’s doings. She read scraps of her poems to Bothwell—and few had known that she had writ any! She wooed him to stoop down his head, wreathed her arms about a phantom of him, tortured and reproached herself. All was done with that straining effort to rehearse which never fails in sickbed delirium.

‘Ah, wait—wait before you judge me, my lord. I have a better piece yet—with more of my heart’s blood in the words. Now, now, how does it go?’ She began to cry and wring her hands. ‘Oh, give me my coffer before he leaves me! This one piece he must have. I wept when I wrote it—let him see the stain.’ She was running still upon her poems. Fleming was to give her the little coffer, of which the key was always round her neck.

Lord Moray was earnest that it should be given her, but would not let it be seen how earnest. ‘Maybe it will soothe her to have the coffer. Give it her, mistress,’ he said.

Des-Essars, seeing his drift, was against it, but of course could do nothing.

They gave the box into her wandering hands, and she was quiet for a while, nursing it in her arms; neither seeking to open it nor trying her memory without it. It was to be hoped, even now, that she would betray herself no further.

What need to deny that Lord Moray was curious? He shook with curiosity. The thing was of the utmost moment; and it commands my admiration of this patient man to know that he could be patient still, and sit by his sick sister’s bed, his head on his hand—and all his hopes and schemes trembling to be confirmed by a little gimcrack gilt box. The prize he fought for he got—betraying nothing, he heard her betray all. When the madness wrought in her again, she opened the coffer, and began to patter her verses as she hunted in it, turning paper after paper (every scrap her condemnation), incapable of reading any.

Her mind seemed full of words. They came over her in clouds, flocking about her—clambering, winged creatures, like the pigeons which crowd and flicker round one who calls them down. They formed themselves in phrases, in staves, in verses—laboriously drilled to them, no doubt—once coherent, but now torn from their sequence, and, like sections of a broken battle-line, absolutely, not relatively whole. Simple verse it was, untrained, ill-measured; yet with a hurt note in it, a cry, a whimper of love, infinitely touching to read now—but to have heard it then from the dry lips, to have had it come moaning from the blind, breathless, insatiable girl! Des-Essars says that he could scarcely endure it.

‘Las!’ one snatch began—

Las! n’est-il pas ja en possession
Du corps, du cœur qui ne refuse paine,
Ny dishonneur, en la vie incertaine,
Offense de parents, ni pire affliction?

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

Entre ses mains et en son plein pouvoir
Je metz mon filz, mon honneur et ma vie,
Mon pais, mes subjects, mon âme assubjectie
Est tout à luy, et n’ay autre vaulloir
Pour mon object que sans le decevoir
Suivre je veux malgré toute l’envoie
Qu’issir en peult....

Her voice broke here, and with it the thread: she could not continue, but looked from one to another, tears streaming down her cheeks, nodded her head at them, and ‘You know, you know,’ she whimpered, ‘this is the very truth.’ Alas! they could not doubt it.

And then, suddenly, as it were at the parting of a cloud, her soul looked out of her eyes sanely; she came to herself, saw the disturbed faces of her friends, and caught sight of her brother’s among them. She jumped about as quickly as a caught child, and that lightning, sentinel wit of hers sprang upon guard. But for a moment—when she saw Moray there—she betrayed herself. ‘Oh, brother, you startled me!’ she said.

He was careful. ‘Alas! I find you in grief, madam.’

‘Thoughts, brother, thoughts!’

‘Sad thoughts, I fear, madam. We are concerned to find your Majesty so disturbed.’

She eyed him vaguely, being unable just then to realise how completely she had yielded him her secret. Extreme fatigue swam over her; her head nodded even as she watched him. When Mary Livingstone laid her down gently and stroked her hair back she drowsed into a swooning sleep. Over her unconscious form a hasty little drama was enacting, very curious.

The Earl of Moray, seeing her hold relaxed, rose quietly from his chair and stretched one of his hands towards the gilt coffer. Des-Essars, in a flash of thought, nudged Huntly. ‘Quick,’ he whispered—‘take the coffer’; and Huntly whipped his arm out and reached it first. Moray drew back, as a cat his paw from a wetness, and shuddered slightly. Huntly says, in a low voice: ‘Monsieur Des-Essars, I give this casket in your charge until her Majesty shall give direction. It is open. Come with me and I will seal it.’

Moray was not the man to forgive such a thing in the Queen’s page; nor did he ever.

* * * * *

She was awake and fully conscious for a few hours of the next day. Father Lesley, an old friend, was allowed to see her, and needed not the evidence of physic, ticks of the pulse, heat of the blood: he could use his senses.

He warned her of her extremity. This was a grave matter, graver than she might suppose. Her eyes turned upon him, black and serious; but then, after a little, she smiled up saucily in his face. ‘Why, I hope,’ she said, ‘there is no need to fear death—if death it be. I am sure my friends will plead kindly for me, and as for my enemies, what can they say worse than they have said?’

‘The Christian, ma’am,’ says Lesley, ‘has no concern with friend or foe at such a time. The road he must travel, he will have no arm to bear upon, save the proffered arm of the Cross.’

‘True,’ she said. ‘I hope I shall die a Christian, as I have tried to live.’

Her mind must have been preternaturally sharp, for a chance word of the admonition which he thought good to deliver set it to work. ‘Likewise it behoveth the Christian, madam—so strict an account is required of the highly favoured—to repent him of the mischances of sleep and dreams. Unlawful, luxurious dreaming, the mutterings of sinful words when our bodies lie bound in slumber are stumbling-blocks to the soul agog to meet his Saviour at the gate.’

He rambled on and on, the godly ignoramus, the while her wits flew far. Mutterings of dreams—had she betrayed herself? Then—to whom? It behoved her to be certain. She bundled out the priest and had in the confidant. From Des-Essars she learned the extent of her delirium; he brought her the casket, unlocked, sealed by the Chancellor, from which, he told her, she had read ‘certain sonnets.’ Love-laden lady! she stopped him here, laughing as she fingered her coffer, lifting and snapping-to the lid. ‘My sonnets? They are here, many and many. I shall read them to him some day. And to you some. Shall I——?’

Positively, she was about to begin, but he implored her to lock up the box of mischief and secrete it somewhere.

‘Guard it for me, my dear,’ she said. ‘What else have I done in my fever?’

He told her, many hidden matters had been disclosed, as well of the King as of others. It was not for him to say that nothing was left unrevealed; only that he knew of nothing. She had spoken, for instance, of a token, and had pointed to where it lay. Her eyes sparkled as she flashed out her hand from under the bedclothes, holding forth a ring upon a chain. ‘Here it is! He gave it me himself, and fastened it upon me with a kiss.’

‘Ha!’ He was frightened. ‘Let me keep it safe for you, madam, until——’

‘Safe? Will they cut it from my body, think you? Never, never. You shall watch over my casket, but this is a part of me.’

He makes free to comment upon this episode. ‘And I confess,’ he says, ‘that I exulted in her constant noble courage, and found nothing amiss in it, that she had stooped from her high estate. Rather I held it matter for praise and excitation of the thought and sense. For, properly viewed, there is nothing of beauty more divine than holy humility, nor hath there ever been since once the Lord of Glory and Might bowed His sacred head.’

But when she would have had him devise with her fresh methods of concealment, dust-throwing, head-burying, and the like, he told her fairly that it was too late.

‘I am bold to assure your Majesty that there is no man nor woman about this Court that wots not throughly of your Majesty’s private affairs. And, madam, if Dolet, if Carwood, if Mistress Fleming and Mistress Seton talk to each other of them over the hearth, what think you can be hidden from my lord of Moray—to say not that he hath been constant at your bedside, and hath heard you cry verses?’

Pondering these fateful truths, suddenly she tired of shifts. ‘Well, then, come what may of it,’ she cried out, ‘let them whisper their fill. I have done with whispering.’

She said that she wished to sleep—had the maids in and composed herself to that end. About midnight she awoke terribly in pain; shivering, crying aloud that her hour was come, unable to turn. The doctors were called to her, all the house was broad awake. She began after a time to vomit blood, and so continued for a night, a day and a night, shaken to pieces and at her last gasp.

Under this new agony she weakened so fast that the crying aloud of secrets stopped for mere weakness: all believed that she must die. The Earl of Moray, who had kept aloof after his fierce little struggle with Huntly, now assumed the direction of affairs, none staying him. He took upon himself to send for the King, that being his duty, as he said, to the State. The duty was not to be denied, though there was peril in it.

‘I fear, my lord,’ said Lethington, ‘I fear the effect of the King’s presence upon her Majesty’s frail habit.’

Lord Huntly roundly said that any ill effect from such a measure would lie at his colleague’s door. ‘And I marvel much, my lord of Moray, that you, who have heard her Majesty’s wandering speech and know the extremes of her dislike, should have proposed to call hither the one person left in Scotland whom she hath reason at once to reproach and fear.’

Moray waved his hand. ‘The Queen, my sister, is at death’s door. And will you tell me who has so much right to lead her to it as her husband?’

‘To drive her to it, belike your lordship means!’ cried Huntly as he flung out of the room. His counter-stroke was to send word over to the Hermitage. Let Bothwell make haste. Adam Gordon took the message.

But before either King or lover could be looked for there dawned a day upon Jedburgh, upon the darkened grey house in the Wynd, which the Queen herself believed to be her last. She was in that state of the body when the ghostly tenant, all preened for departure, has clear dominion, and earthly affections and earthly cares are ridded and done with. In other words, she had forgotten Bothwell.

She confessed to Father Roche and received the Sacrament; she kissed her Maries—all there but Lady Boyne, who had been Beaton; called the lords about her and looked gently in the face of each in turn—not asking of them any more, but enjoining, rather, and as if requiring. ‘My lords, under the wise hands of God I lie waiting here, and what I speak is from the verge of the dark. Serve, I desire you, the prince my son, remembering his tender helpless years, and dealing patiently with his silly understanding. Be not harsh with them that are left of the old religion: you cannot tax me with severity to your own. Let Scotland serve God in peace, every man after his own conscience. I am too weak to command, and have no breath to spare for beseeching. My lords, this is my last desire. Is there any here who will refuse me?’

She looked about from one strong face to another; saw Huntly crying, Argyll struggling to keep tears back, Lethington with his head bowed down, as if he would pray. She saw her half-brother John Stuart watching her from under his brows; lastly her half-brother Moray, whose face, fixed and blanched, told her nothing. Sighing, she raised herself. Here was one for her dying breath, for one last cajolery! She put up her hand to touch his, and he started as if suddenly awakened, but commanded himself.

‘Brother,’ she said, in a whisper half audible, ‘oh, brother, vex none in Scotland, for my sake.’

He stooped, took up and kissed her hand; and she let it fall with a long sigh of content. Presently after, she straightened herself, as if conscious of the near end, joined her palms together, and began the Creed in a sharp, painful voice quite unlike her own, fantastic and heart-piercing at once. In the middle she stopped.

‘_Qui propter nos homines et propter—et propter_——I misremember the rest——’

‘_Salutem_, madam, ’tis _nostram salutem_,’ says Father Lesley, with a sob.

‘God give it me, a sinner,’ she said, and turned her cheek to the pillow, and lay caught and still. The physician put his hand to her heart, and made a sign. Lesley tiptoed to the windows and set them open.

* * * * *

The Earl of Moray lifted up his head. ‘I fear, my lords, that the worst is come upon us. The Queen, my sister—alas!’ He covered his eyes for a moment, then, in a different tone and a changed aspect, began to give order. ‘Mr. Secretary, cause messengers to ride to Glasgow to the prince’s father. My Lord Chancellor, you should convene a council of the estates. Doctor, I must have a word with you.’

By these sort of phrases he sent one and all flocking to the door like sheep about a narrow entry. Des-Essars lingered about, but what could he do? The Earl’s cold eye was upon him.

‘You, sir—what do you here? I will deal with you anon. Meantime, avoid a matter which is not for you.’

The lad went out, hanging his head.

Last to go were the weeping maids and Father Roche, the Queen’s Confessor, who, before he left her, placed his crucifix under her closed hand.

This too was observed. ‘Take up your idol, sir,’ said Lord Moray; ‘take back your idol. Suchlike are vain things.’

But Father Roche took no notice of him, and went away without his crucifix.

The physician had remained, a little twinkle-eyed man, with white eyebrows like cornices of snow. He curved and raised them before the greatest man in Scotland.

‘You need me, my lord?’

‘I do not at this present. Await my summons in the anteroom.’

He was alone with the passing soul, which even now might be adrift by the window, streaming out to its long flight.

He looked sharply and seriously about the room, omitting nothing from his scrutiny. There stood the writing-desk in the window, covered in geranium leather, with stamped ciphers in gold upon it, _F_ and _M_ interlaced, the Crown-royal of France above them. He stole to it and tried it: locked. He lifted it from the table, put it on the floor under the vallance of the bed, then went on searching with his keen eyes.

These winning him nothing, he moved softly about and tried one or two likely coverts—the curtains, the vallance; moved a hand-mirror, disturbed some books, a cloak upon a chair. He was puzzled, he put his hand to his mouth, bit his finger, hesitating. Presently he crept up to the bed and looked at her who lay there so still. He could see by the form she made that she was crouched on her side with her knees bent, and judged it extraordinary, and talked to himself about it. ‘They lie straighter—down there. They prepare themselves——Who would die twisted? What if the soul——?’ His heart gave him trouble. He stopped here and breathed hard.

The hand that held the crucifix—it was the right hand—was out: it showed a ring upon one finger, only one. The left hand he could not see—but it was very necessary to be seen. Gingerly he drew back the bedclothes, slowly, tentatively, then more boldly. They were away: and there lay the casket, enclosed within the half-hoop of the body. That she should have tricked him in her dying agony was a real shock to him, and, by angering, gave him strength. He reached out his hand to take it—he touched it—stopped, while his guilty glance sought her grey face. O King Christ! he saw her glimmering eyes, all black, fixed upon him—with lazy suspicion, without wink of eyelid or stir of the huddled body to tell him whether she lived or was dead. His tongue clove to his palate—he felt crimson with shame: to rob the dead, and the dead to see him! After a pause of terrible gazing he stepped backwards, and back, and back. He felt behind him, opened the door, and called hoarsely: ‘The Queen lives! She lives! Come in—come in!’

The passages were alive in an instant, doors banged, feet scampered the stairs. The first person to come in was Des-Essars, turned for the moment from youth to Angel of Judgment. He dashed by Moray, threw himself upon the Queen’s coffer, snatched it, and with it backed to the wall. There, with his arms about it, he stood at bay, panting and watching the enemy.

But the room was now full. Women, crowded together, were all about the bed. In the midst knelt the doctor by the Queen. Huntly, Lethington, Argyll, and Erskine stood grouped.

‘What have you, Baptist, in your hands?’ says Huntly.

‘It is her Majesty’s treasure, my lord, which you committed to my keeping.’

‘Where gat you it, man?’ asked Argyll.

But before he could be answered my Lord Moray lifted up hand and voice. ‘Let all them,’ he said, ‘that are of Christ’s true Church give thanks with me unto God for this abounding mercy.’

Lethington, Argyll, some of the women, stood with covered faces while his lordship prayed aloud. Huntly watched the Queen, and presently got his great reward. Her eyes were turned upon him; she knew him, nodded her head and smiled. He fell to his knees.

* * * * *

So quick her recovery, in two days’ time there was no more talk of the piece of Scotland or of the Credo half-remembered. The earth and the men of the earth resumed their places and re-pointed their goads; as she grew stronger so grew her anxieties. Lord Bothwell sent, by Adam Gordon (who had gone to fetch him) his humble duty to her Majesty, ‘thanking God hourly for her recovery.’ His physicians, he said, would in no wise suffer him attempt the journey as yet—no, not in a litter. The Queen chafed, and wrote him querulous letters; but nothing would tempt him out. She got very few and very guarded replies, so fell to her sonnets again.

The truth is, that the Earl of Bothwell, having set his hand to a business which, if temperately handled, promised most fair, kept rigidly to the line he had thought out for himself; and thus affords the rare example of a man who, by nature advancing upon gusts of passion, can keep himself, by shrewd calculation, to an orderly gait. The means to his end which he had appointed, and took, were of the most singular ever used by expectant lover—to French Paris, for instance, they were a cause of dismay—and yet they succeeded most exactly. They were, in fact, _to do nothing at all_. He had found out by careful study of the lady that the less he advanced the farther she would carry him, the less he asked for the more she would lay at his feet, the less he said the larger her interpretation of his hidden mind. She was a fine, sensitive instrument—like a violin, now wounded, now caressed by the bow, shrieking when he slashed at the strings, sobbing when he plucked them with callous fingers, moaning when he was gentle, shrilling when he so chose it. In a word, he had to deal with loyalty, extreme generosity, a magnanimity which knew nothing of the sale and exchange of hearts. He had known this for some years; he now based his calculations upon it without ruth—the last person in the world to whom her magnificent largess could appeal; and (as French Paris would say) of the last nation in the world. To a man like him the gift only imports, not the giving. It is an actuary’s question; while to her and her kind the act is the whole of the matter: deepest shame were to know herself rich in one poor loincloth while he had a bare patch whereon to hang it. She was that true Prodigal, most glorious when most naked.

Des-Essars, alone in her confidence during these hours of strain, makes an acute deduction. ‘Her letters of this time will show very plainly,’ he says, ‘that she was brought by his chill silence to that extreme point of desire where _sacrifice and loss seem the top of bliss_. It was no longer a man that she longed for, but an Act. Fasting for a Sacrament, the bread and wine of her need was Surrender. I say that this fond distress of hers, these absorbed eyes filled often with tears for no reason, her suspense when waiting—and vainly—for a messenger’s return; her abandonment before the altar, her cries in the night—such things, I say, were reasonable to me, and to all who, in the Florentine’s phrase, have “understanding of love.” But to the Court it seemed unreasonable.’

Unreasonable! It seemed perverse, unspeakable. The maids were dumb with shame. The one thing which Mary Fleming would not discuss with Lethington, or allow him to discuss in her hearing, was the Queen’s disease. Mary Livingstone went about like one in a trance—sand-blind, stumbling after some elfin light. She spoke to none, remembered none. Judge the feelings of her Master of Sempill, who could tell his friends in England nothing! Mary Seton, too, kept her pretty lips locked up. Once, when Fleming pressed her,—what time they were abed—she said shortly: ‘I am her servant, and shall be till I die. If you are her judge, I know it not. You are none of mine.’

‘No, no, no!’ cried poor Fleming. ‘You wrong me. Who am I to judge?’

‘Who indeed?’ said Mary Seton, and turned over.

The Court was divided in these harassing days, because the Earl of Moray drew off a large proportion of it to his own house. Thither resorted Argyll, Glencairn and Atholl, my lord of Mar when he could, and Lethington when he dared; there also and always was the Lord Lindsay, that blotched zealot, with his rumpled hair and starched frill. Huntly, of course, held closely by the Queen, refusing to admit the second Court; Lord Livingstone was faithful, as became the father of Mary Sempill. He rubbed his chapped hands over the fire, and cried three times a day that all was well: a folly so palpable that everybody laughed. Lesley stayed by her, a tearful spectacle; Lord Herries too, very gloomy. Such state as there was—and it was draggled state—Arthur Erskine and Traquair maintained; but the Queen was quite unconscious of state. Royal dignity had never been a virtue of hers; she was always either too keen or too dejected to have time for it. Whether old Lord Livingstone treated her jocosely, or old Lord Mar with implied reproof in every grating search for a word—if Bothwell had written she did not heed them; and if he had not, she sat watching for French Paris at the window, and still did not heed them.

And undoubtedly old Lord Livingstone was jocose—abounded in nods and winks. ‘Just a fond wife,’ he described her to his friends, and so treated her to her face. It is to be believed, had she heard it, that she would have been proud of the title. So, during the misty short days and long wet nights of October she cheapened herself in Love’s honour, and was held cheap by Scotch thickwits.

* * * * *

On the night of the 28th of the month the King came to see her. He arrived very late, and departed in a fury within the twenty-four hours. His clatter, his guards, his horses and himself filled the town; he took up lodging in the Abbey, and caused himself to be announced by heralds at the lowly door of the Queen’s House.

Perhaps she was worn out by watching for another comer; perhaps she was ill, perhaps angry—it is not to be known. She would hardly notice him when he came in; spoke languidly, dragging her words, and would not on any account be alone with him. He demanded, as his right, that her women should leave her; she raised her eyebrows, not her eyes, until he repeated his desire in a louder voice.

Then she said, ‘What right have you kept, what right have you ever done, that you should have any rights left you here?’

‘Madam, I have every right—that of a father, that of a consort—’

‘You have waived it—refused it—denied it—and betrayed it.’

‘Ah, never, never!’

‘Twice, sir, to my bitter cost.’

He laughed harshly to hear such words. ‘Sirs,’ he said to those with him, ‘I see how it is. Rumour for once is no fibster.’

‘Come away, my lord, come your ways,’ said old Livingstone. ‘You will do harm to yourself.’

He cried out, ‘None shall dictate to me in this realm.’

And then Moray said, ‘Sir, I would seriously advise you—for your good——’

The King stared at him, gibed at him. ‘If you seek my good, my lord, God judge me, ’tis for the first time.’

‘It is the good of us all,’ said Moray. ‘Her Grace is overwrought. Let me entreat your patience. This coming is something sudden, though so long attended. In the morning maybe——’

The King threatened. ‘And what is this but the morn? The morn! The morn’s morn I depart with the light, and for long time—be you sure of that.’

He kept his word; and she, proud of her loyalty, wrote to her lover how constant she had been. ‘He would have stayed did I but nod. Guess you how stiff I kept my head.’ That touching sentence brought Lord Bothwell hot-foot to Jedburgh—to find her waiting for him at the head of the stair.

She could hardly suffer him to come into the room: her longing seemed to choke her. ‘You have come to praise me—O generous lover! You can trust me now! Oh, tell me that I have been faithful!’

He turned shortly and shut the door. Then, ‘Madam,’ he said bluntly, ‘I cannot praise you at all, though I must not presume to do otherwise.’

She paled at that, and smiled faintly, as if to show him that the pain could be borne.

‘I am very dull, my lord. Speak plainly to me.’

So indeed he did. ‘You should at all costs have kept him by you. At all costs, madam, at all costs. Here we could have dealt with him—but now——!’ He stopped an exclamation of fury, just in time. ‘And who can tell whether he will try you again?... Oh, it was ill judged. I regret it.’

She pored upon his face, wonder fanning her eyes. ‘You regret my faith! Regret my honour, saved for you! Strange griefs, my lord.’

‘I regret ill policy. The man is treasonable up to the ears: there were many ways of doing. Now there are none at all. Gone, all gone! What have I dared to pray for—what you have deigned to offer me; what my ears have heard and my eyes seen—all that my senses have lured me to believe: this one act of your Majesty’s has belied! Ah!’ He dug his heel into the carpet. He folded his arms. ‘Well, it is not for me to reproach my Sovereign, or to complain that her realm holds one fool the more. The Lord gives and takes away—pshaw! and why not the Lady?’

She stretched out her arms to him, there being none to stay her. ‘Oh, what are you saying? Is it possible?’ She came close, she crept, touched his face. ‘If you doubt me I must die. Prove me—behold me here. Take me—I am yours.’

‘No, madam,’ he snarled like a dog, ‘a pest upon it! You are not mine: you are his.’

She sank down, kneeling by the table, and hid her face. Murmuring some excuse, that she was overwrought, that he would fetch women, he left her and went directly to Lord Moray’s house. There he found Lethington.

‘The Queen is very ill, as it seems to me,’ he said, ‘nor is it hard to see where is the core of her malady. If that loon from Glasgow comes ruffling before her again, I shall not be able to answer for what I may do. Tell you that to my lord, I care not; nay, I desire you to tell him. We should be friends, he and I, for we now have one aim and one service, and as sworn servants should do our duty without flinching. I commit these thoughts to you, Lethington, that you and I, with your patron here, may take counsel together how best to serve the Queen with a cure for her disease. It is indurate, mark you; we may need to cut deep; but it becomes not men to falter. You and I have had our differences, which I believe to be sunk in this common trouble. We may be happy yet—God knows. Devise something, devise anything, and you shall not find me behindhand. Let there be an end of our factions. Why, man, there are but two when all’s said—the Queen’s and that other’s. Count me your friend in any occasion you may have. Farewell. You will find me at Hermitage.’

Lethington was greatly moved. ‘Stay, my lord, stay,’ he said, coming forward with propitiatory hands. ‘My lord of Moray will receive you.’

‘I can’t stay. There are good reasons for going, and none for staying—now that that fellow is safe in Glasgow again. Let my lord do his part and call upon me for mine. When do you wed, Lethington?’

The Secretary blushed. ‘It stands with the Queen’s pleasure, my lord. My mistress would never fail hers, and so I must be patient.’

‘Hearken, my good friend,’ said Bothwell, with a hand on his shoulder. ‘I am pretty well in her Majesty’s favour, I believe. Now, if a word from me——’

‘Upon my soul, I am greatly obliged to your lordship.’

‘Say no more, man. You shall be sped to church. Farewell.’

He rode fast to Hermitage that day, and threw himself upon his bed. They told him that the Countess was asleep.

‘Why, then,’ says he, ‘she shall have her sleep while she can.’

As he had expected, he got a letter next noon, with tears upon it, had he cared to look for them, and in every stiff clause a cry of the heart....

I submit myself henceforward wholly unto you.... In you is all
my hope, my only friend, without whom I cannot endure.... Prove
me again: I shall not fail you. All this night I have kept
watch while the world is asleep. Now I am very sure I shall not
fail again. Sir, if I think apart, it is because I dwell apart;
but if I may trust you that shall be amended. I pray it be.
But I hear you say, It is for yourself to deal in it. Again I
beseech your patience if I am slow to learn how best to please
you. My tutors and governors praised me as a child for aptness
to learn. Now the lessons grow sharper and I the more dull....

My brother came to visit me this few hours since. He spake
kindly of you, and of him[6] as the sole mischief-worker here.
I answered as I thought myself free to do, but now misdoubt me,
fearful of your displeasure. You used harsh punishment towards
me: I feel sore beaten, as with rods. If I sleep I shall be the
stronger for it; but that is easy said. Now if I write Alas!
you may scorn me; and yet I feel directed to no other word,
save Welladay! Sir, if it should stand within your pleasure to
give pleasure to your friend, you will reply by this bearer; in
whom you may trust as much as I ask you to trust

Your discomfited, perfect friend

M. R.

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

[6] King Henry Darnley.