"It's very exciting," she admitted. "I never expected, somehow, that such a thing could happen to me."
"Oh, didn't you? Why not?"
"Well, there's my red hair, which I always thought was fatal, until I saw my mother's portrait—and heard Mr. Somerled say he liked painting red-haired women."
"Red hair can be fatal, though not in the way you appear to mean," said I. "Which thrilled you more, the Castle or the proposals?"
"Oh, the Castle, of course!" she answered scornfully. "After the first one or two, they seemed like interruptions."
All five of my rivals (there might have been six, had it not been for the girl in the Highlands) having had their medicine, I was allowed almost as much as I wanted of Barrie's society during the walk down from the Castle Rock, and to Holyrood. Together she and I walked through that most romantic royal house of all the world; and long as I may live, never shall I forget those hours. Chestnut-tressed Mary herself could not have been lovelier than the red-haired girl who walked beside me, and when the royal beauty came on a day of chill, northern haar, to her Scottish realm, she was only a year older than this child we all love but think too young for love. Yet already, at nineteen, Mary was a King's widow, and had been Queen of France.
It was of Barrie's romance, Barrie's future, I thought most, as we wandered side by side through the haunted rooms where Mary danced and loved and suffered, where her grandson Charles I of England came, and left his ruby Coronation ring for remembrance, and where Prince Charlie, her far-off descendant, made hearts flutter at the great ball given in his honour. But it was the past which had all Barrie's thoughts, unless she sent a few to the man who had stayed at home reading his letters, instead of following in her train.
We looked at Queen Mary's bed with its tattered splendour of brocade: the box filled with relics of her short reign in Holyrood: her neat embroideries, her tear bottle, and Darnley's glove, which Barrie thought Mary would not like to have kept with the other things: and then, having saved the best for the last, I took the girl up to the little supper-room where Rizzio was murdered. Barrie gazed at everything in silence: and now we could both be silent when we liked, for the chastened ones had meekly trooped off to show Mrs. James the Abbey, or Royal Chapel, where Mary and Darnley were married, and where a hundred things had happened, things connected with others whose romances were as poignant if less well remembered here, than hers.
We had come up the secret stairway in the wall, because I wanted Barrie to miss no thrill this place could give; but it was not the thought of the murder-scene which most caught her imagination. She listened to my dramatic version of the tragedy of the room, and of the dark closet where Rizzio tried to hide, and shuddered a little; but soon she was drawn, as if beckoned by an unseen hand, to the bevelled mirror with scalloped edge, which Mary brought with her to Scotland from France, a dim oval full of memories, may be, of dear, dead days at Amboise and Chenonceaux.
"What does that poor piece of blurred glass make you think of so intently?" I asked, when Barrie had stood silently staring down the veiled vista of mystery for many minutes. "You look like a young modern Cassandra, crystal gazing."