They took her to a house by the Tron Church, a house in the High Street, and shut her in an upper room, setting a guard about the door. The white banner was planted before the windows, and the crowd swarmed all about it, shrieking her name, calling her to come out and dance before them. Her dancing was notorious, poor soul; many a mad bout had she had in her careless days. ‘Show your legs, my bonnie wife!’ cried some hoarse shoemaker. ‘You had no shame to do it syne.’ This lasted till near midnight—for when it grew dark torcheswere kindled from end to end of the street, drums and pipes were set going, and many a couple danced. The Queen during this hellish night was crouched upon the floor, hiding her face upon Mary Seton’s bosom. Des-Essars knelt by her, screening her from the windows. She neither spoke nor wept—seemed in a stupor. Food was brought her, but she would not move to take it; nor would she open her mouth when the cup was held at her lips.
Next morning, having had a few hours’ peace, the tumult began betimes—by six o’clock the din was deafening. She had had a sop in wine, and was calmer; talked a little, even peeped through the curtain at the gathering crowd. She watched it for, perhaps, an hour, until they brought the mermaid picture into action—herself naked to the waist, with a fish-tail—confronted it with the murder flag, and jigged it up against it. This angered her; colour burned in her white cheeks. ‘Infamous! Swine that they are! I will brave them all.’
Before they could stop her she had thrown open the window, and stood outside on the balcony, proudly surveying and surveyed.
At first there was a hush—‘Whisht! She will likely speak till us,’ they told each other. But she said nothing, and gave them time to mark her tumbled bodice and short kirtle, her wild hair and stained face. They howled at her, mocking and gibing at her—the two banners flacked like tailless kites. Presently a horseman came at a foot’s pace through the press. The rider when he saw her pulled his hat down over his eyes—but it was too late. She had seen Lethington. ‘Ha, traitor, whose rat-life I saved once,’ she called out, in a voice desperately clear and cold, ‘are you come to join your friends against me? Stay, Mr. Secretary, and greet your Queen in the way they will teach you. Or go, fetch your wife, that she may thank her benefactress with you. Do you go, Mr. Secretary?’
He was, in fact, going; for the crowd had turned against him and was bidding him fetch his wife. ‘Give us the Popish Maries together, sir, and we’ll redd Scotland of them a’.’
‘Rid Scotland of this fellow, good people,’ cried the Queen, ‘and there will be room for one honest man.’
They jeered at her for her pains. ‘Who shall be honest where ye are, woman? Hide yourself—pray to your idols—that they keep ye from the fire.’
‘Oh, men, you do me wrong,’ she began to moan. ‘Oh, sirs, be pitiful to a woman. Have I ever harmed any?’
They shrieked her down, cursing her for a witch and a husband-killer. The flags were jigged together again—a stone broke the window over her head. Des-Essars then got her back by force.
It is amazing that she could have a thought in such a riot of fiends—yet the sight of Lethington had given her one. She feared his grey, rat’s face. She whispered it to Des-Essars. ‘Baptist, you can save me. Quick, for the love of Christ! The coffer! the coffer!’
He knew what she meant. That coffer contained her letters to Bothwell, her sonnets—therefore, her life. He understood her, and went away without a word. He took his sword, put a hood over his head, got out of the backside of the house, over a wall, into the wynd. Hence, being perfectly unknown, he entered the crowd in the High Street and worked his way down the Canongate. He intended to get into Holyroodhouse by the wall and the kitchen window, as he had done many a time, and notably on the night of David’s slaughter.[12]
Des-Essars had gone to save her life; but whether he did it or no, he did not come back. She wore herself to thread, padding up and down the room, wondering and fretting about him. This new anxiety made her forget the street; but towards evening, when her nerves were frayed and raw, it began to infuriate her—as an incessant cry always will. She suddenly began panting, and stood holding her breasts, staring, moving her lips, her bosom heavingin spite of her hands. ‘God! Mother of God! Aid me: I go mad,’ she cried, strangling, and ‘Air! I suffocate!’ and once more threw open the windows and let in the hubbub.
She was really tormented for air and breath. She tore at her bodice, split it open and showed herself naked to the middle.
‘Yes—yes—you shall look upon me as I was made. You shall see that I am a woman—loved once—loved much. See, see, my flesh!’ Horrible scandal!—but the poor soul was mad.
Soon after this some of the lords came to her—Lindsay, Morton, and Atholl. The windows, they said, must be closed at once; they feared a riot. They would take her back to Holyroodhouse if she would be patient. But she must be rendered decent: Atholl gave her his cloak. She had quieted immediately they came, and thanked them meekly.
They took her away at once. Mary Seton followed close, but was gently pushed back by Lord Morton. ‘No, no: she must come alone. You shall see her after a little. You cannot come now.’ For the first time in her life, as I believe, Mary Seton shed tears.
A very strong guard, with pikes presented, hedged her in. She reached Holyrood on foot, and was shut into her own cabinet. It was empty and dark but for the candle they had left with her. She snatched it up, and began a mad, fruitless hunt for her casket. It was not in its place—it was nowhere. She hunted until she dropped. She began to tear at herself and to shriek. Doom! Doom! She must be burned. They had taken her coffer. She was alone—condemned and alone.
Then Des-Essars crawled out of the dark on his hands and one knee, dragging a broken leg after him, and fell close beside her, and kissed the hem of her petticoat.
[12]The casket, which was not at Holyrood, is supposed to have been secured by Bothwell in the Castle, where it was to be found in due time. But Des-Essars did not know that. Nor is it clear to me how Bothwell had found opportunity to get it there.
[12]The casket, which was not at Holyrood, is supposed to have been secured by Bothwell in the Castle, where it was to be found in due time. But Des-Essars did not know that. Nor is it clear to me how Bothwell had found opportunity to get it there.
[12]The casket, which was not at Holyrood, is supposed to have been secured by Bothwell in the Castle, where it was to be found in due time. But Des-Essars did not know that. Nor is it clear to me how Bothwell had found opportunity to get it there.
She sat on the floor, and had his head at rest on her lap. Her hands were upon him, and so he rested. The great tears fell fast and wetted his hair.
Her grief was silent and altogether gentle. Still as she sat there, looking before her with wide unwinking eyes and lips a little parted, she was unconscious of what she was suffering or had suffered: all about her was the blankness of dark, and without her knowledge the night fell; the dusk like a vast cloak gathered round about her, fold over fold; and still she sat and looked at nothing with her wide unwinking eyes. Slowly they filled and brimmed, and slowly the great tears, as they ripened, fell. There were no other forms of grief, none of grief’s high acts: only their bitter symbol—lamentation embodied in tears, and nakedly there.
‘Nay, move not your hands—nay, touch my brows: my head aches—I am blind.’ The lad supine in her lap pleaded in whispers.
Gentle-voiced she answered him. ‘There is no work left for my hands to do but to tend thee, my dear.’
He lay dumb for a while; then said he: ‘You shall not blame me. It is not here—not in the house. I know not where it is. They are seeking it now. He came here with two archers. He snarled like a fox to find me.’
‘Who was this, Baptist? Was it Lethington?’
‘Lethington. He believed it was here. He forced that knowledge from his wife——’
She said, ‘Fleming too?’
‘——I fought. They tried to make me tell them where I had hid it. They lifted and threw me. I am hurt—cannot move. Oh, they will have it now.’
‘Rest, my dear, rest. Think no more of it. They have all but me.’ Out of the heart of this poor nameless youth she was to learn good love; but to learn it only to know its impossibility. Not for her now, not for her! Not so could she ever have loved; no! but she could be kind. She stooped her head over him and breathed softly through the dark—‘and I, Baptist, am yours if you will.’
He sighed. ‘Oh, that it were possible! That night when you looked back—that night——you let me take——remember you of that?’
She knew his thought and all his heart. Her own were at leagues of distance: but she could not now refuse him kindness. She stooped her head lower towards his, and whispered, ‘Baptist, can you hear me?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘My last gift—all I have left: yours by right. Do you hear me? Listen—understand. I am yours now—I am forsaken by all but you.’
He moved uneasily, sighed again. ‘Too late, too late: I lie dying here.’
She leaned down yet nearer; he felt her warm breath beat upon him—quick and short and eager. ‘If I die this night, and if thou die, I will love thee first.’
‘Ah!’ said he, ‘I know very well that you desire to love me now.’
‘How knowest thou, my love?’
‘By the way you lean to me, and by other things.’
She said, ‘You are well schooled in love.’
‘Not so well,’ he answered; ‘but I am well schooled in you, my Queen.’
‘Prove me, then—desire of me—ask—take. I shall never deny thee anything.’
Again he said, ‘Too late, too late. You cannot—and I lie dying. Yet, since the dead can do you no wrong, let me lie here at rest, that I may die loving you.’
She stooped to kiss him. She anointed him with her hot tears. ‘Rest, rest, my only true lover!’
‘Peace,’ said he: ‘let me sleep. I am tired to death.’
She kissed his eyelids. He slept.
Men came about the door—more than one. She sprang from her mate and kneeled to face that way, screening him where he lay short-breathing. They knocked, then opened. The torchlight beat upon her, and showed her dishevelled and undone. She covered her bosom with her crossed arms. ‘What is it? Who comes?’
‘Madam’—this was Lord Lindsay—‘it is I. I have horses beyond the wall. It is time to be going. You and I must take the road.’
‘Whither, sir? Whither will you take me so late?’
‘To Lochleven, ma’am.’
‘You order me? By whose warrant?’
‘By the Council’s. In the name of the Prince.’
‘It is infamy that you do. I cannot go. I am alone here.’
‘Women, clothing, all, shall follow with good speed, madam. But we must be speedier.’
‘If I refuse you—if I command——?’
‘I cannot consider with your Majesty the effect of that.’
‘Do you take me, Lindsay—you alone? No, but I will die here sooner.’
Lord Sempill spoke. ‘I offer myself to your Majesty, with the consent of the Lords.’
She rose up then. ‘I thank you, Lord Sempill: I will go with you.’
She gave him her hand, which, having kissed, he held. He would have taken her away then and there, but that she pulled against him. ‘I leave my servant dead here. He loved me well, and I him. Let me pray a while; then I will go.’
Des-Essars turned and rose to his arm’s length from the ground. He could not move his legs. ‘I am a prisoner also—take me.’
‘You, my man?’ says Lindsay: ‘unlikely.’
She withdrew her hand from Sempill’s by leave, stoopedover the fading lad and kissed his eyes. ‘Adieu, my truest love and last friend—adieu, adieu! I have been death to all who have had to do with me.’ She kissed him once more.
‘Sweet death,’ said Des-Essars.
‘Come,’ she said to Lord Sempill, and gave him her hand again. He led her away.
Des-Essars fell his length upon the floor. She would have turned back to him; they hurried her forward between them.
The door shut upon Queen Mary.
It is said that when the Earl of Moray, in France, received from the messengers sent out to him the news that he was chosen Regent of Scotland, he bowed his head in a very stately manner and said little more than ‘Sirs, I shall strive in this as in all things to do the Lord’s will.’ He added not one word which might enhance or impair so proper a declaration; he remained invisible to his friends for the three or four days he needed to be abroad; and when he set out for the north, travelled in secret and mostly by night—and still chose to keep apart. As secret in his hour of success as he had been in those of defeat, admirable as his sobriety may be, we must make allowances for the mortification of a learned man, Mr. George Buchanan, who, having laboured to be of the heralding party, found himself and his baggage of odes of no more account than any other body. Was the chilly piety of such a reception as my lord had vouchsafed them all the acknowledgment he cared to admit of ancient alliances, of sufferings shared, of hopes kept alive by mutual fostering? Could a man look forward to any community of mind in the future between a prince who would not recognise his old friends and those same tried friends frozen by such a blank reply to their embassage? Mr. Buchanan urged these questions upon his fellow-legate, Sir James Melvill of Halhill—a traveller and fine philosopher, who, with less latinity than the learned historian, had, I think, more phlegm. When Mr. Buchanan, fretfully exclaiming upon the isolation of his new master, went on toconcern himself with poor Scotland’s case, and to muse aloud upon Kings Log and Stork, Sir James twiddled his thumbs; when the humanist paused for a reply, he got it. ‘Geordie, my man,’ said Sir James, ‘my counsel to you is to bide your good time, and when that time comes to ca’ canny, as we have it familiarly. Remember you, that when you sang your bit epithalamy at the marriage-door of Log, our late King, although he never stinted his largess (but rewarded you, in my opinion, abundantly), he had no notion in the world what you were about, and (as I believe) paid you the more that you might end the sooner. Late or soon you will be heard by our new gracious lord, and late or soon recompensed. He too will desire you to stop, my man: not because he does not understand you, but because he understands you too well. Mark my words now.’ This was a curious prophecy of Sir James’s, in one sense curiously fulfilled. In the very middle of his oration the orator was desired to stop by the subject of it.
Not until the Regent was in Edinburgh did a chance present itself to Mr. Buchanan of declaiming any of his Latin. This, be it said, was no fault of Mr. Buchanan’s, who, if abhorrence of the old order and acceptance of the new, expressed with passion at all times of the day, can entitle a man to notice, should certainly have had it before. Some, indeed, think that he got it by insisting upon having it; others that he proved his title by exhibiting the heads of a remarkable work which afterwards made some stir in the world: he was, at any rate, summoned to the Castle, and in the presence of the Lord Regent of Scotland, of the Lords Morton, Crawfurd, Atholl, Argyll, and Lindsay, of the Lairds of Grange and Lethington, and of others too numerous to mention, was allowed to deliver himself of an oration, long meditated, in the Ciceronian manner.
The occasion was weighty, the theme worthy, the orator equal.Tantæ molis eratwas the burden of his discourse, wherein the late miseries of God’s people were shown clearly to be, as it were, the travail-pangs of the august mother of new-born Scotland. From these, by a series of circuits which it would be long to follow, he passed to consider the Hero of the hour; and you may be sure thatthe extraordinary dignity and reserve which this personage had recently shown were not forgotten. They were, said the orator,reasonable, not only as coming from a man who had never failed of humility before God, but as crowning a life-long trial of such qualities. The child is father of the man. Who that had ever known this magnanimous prince had seen him otherwise than remote, alone in contemplation,unspotted from the world? In a peroration which was so finely eloquent that enthusiasm broke in upon it and prevented it from ever being finished, he spoke to this effect:—
‘It is furthermore,’ he said, ‘a singular merit of your lordship’s, in these days of brawl and advertisement, that you have always approved, and still do approve yourself one who, like the nightingale (that choice bird), avoids the multitude, but enriches it,quasiout of the dark. For as the little songster in his plain suit of brown, hardly to be seen in the twiggy brake, pours forth his notes upon the wayfarer; so has your lordship, hiding from the painful dusty mart, ravished the traffickers therein to better things by your most melodious, half-hidden deeds. O coy benefactor of Scotland! O reluctantly a king! O hermit Hercules! O thou doer-of-good-by-stealth!’ Here he turned to the Lords of the Privy Council. ‘Conscript Fathers, we have prevailed upon our Cincinnatus to quit his plough lest haply the State had perished; but with him have come to succour us those virtues which are his peculiar—to which, no less than to those which he hath in community with all saviours of Commonwealths, our extreme tribute is due. Let us respect Austerity whenas we find it, respect True Religion, respect Abnegation, respect, above all, the tender feelings of Blood and Family, lacerated (alas!) of late in a princely bosom. Great and altogether lovely are these things in any man: in a statesman how much the more dear in that they are rare! But a greater thing than austerity and the crown of true religion is this, Conscript Fathers, that a man should live through blood-shedding, andnot see it; that he should converse with bloody men, andkeep clean hands! For King David said, “I will wash my handsin innocency,” and said well, having some need of the ablution. Conscript Fathers! this man hath the rather said, “But I will keep my hands innocently clean, lest at any time lustral water fail me and I perish.” O wise and honourable resolve——’
Irrepressible applause broke in upon this peroration, and just here. The Regent was observed to be deeply moved. He had covered his face with his hand; he could not bear (it was thought) to hear himself so openly praised. When silence was restored, in obedience to his lifted hand, speaking with difficulty, he said, ‘I thank you, Mr. Buchanan, for your honourable and earnest words; none the less honourable in yourself in that the subject of your praise is unworthy of them. Alas! what can a man do, set in the midst of so many and great dangers, but keep his eyes fixed upon the hope of his calling? He may suffer grievous wounds in the heart and affections, grievous bruises to the conscience, grievous languors of the will and mind: but his hopes are fixed, his eyes are set to look forward; he cannot altogether perish. Yourself, sir, whose godly office it is to direct the motions of princes and governors that way which is indeed the way, the truth, and the life, can but add to the obligations which this young (as new-born) nation must feel towards you, by continuing me steadfast in those things for which you praise me. I am touched by many compunctious thorns—I cannot say all that I would. I have suffered long and in private—I feel myself strangely—I am not strong enough as yet. So do you, Mr. Buchanan, so do you to me-ward, that I may run, sir; and that, running—please the Lord and Father of us all—that, running, I may obtain.’
It was felt on all hands that more would have been a superfluity. Mr. Buchanan was very ready to have continued; but my Lord Regent had need of repose; and my Lord of Morton moved the rest of their lordships that they go to supper: which was agreed to, and so done.
THE END
New Canterbury Tales
By MAURICE HEWLETT
Author of “The Forest Lovers,” etc., etc.
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY
Being Impressions and Translations of Maurice Hewlett, with Illustrations by James Kerr Lawson
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CONTENTS
PAN AND THE YOUNG SHEPHERD
A PASTORAL IN TWO ACTS
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SONGS AND MEDITATIONS
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