So speaking, the Queen leapt lightly from her palfrey, and flung the rein to the attending page, but as she did so she looked once more in the face of Mary Hamilton, who was dismounting, and something she saw there made her start back, and exclaim in an agitated whisper—
‘What is it, child? You frighten me! What is it?’
The other found her voice at last, but it came husky and broken to her lips.
‘For mercy sake, madam!’ said she, ‘let me unrobe you, my kind mistress, do not deny me this one favour! Let me unrobe you, and alone.’
The Queen, though still startled, blushed vividly as something crossed her mind, that yet seemed partly to reassure her, and she beckoned her maid-of-honour to follow as she entered her private apartments, then dismissing her other attendants, threw herself into a chair, and with the colour not yet faded from her brow, bade Mary Hamilton unburthen herself of this dreadful grief that was weighing on her mind.
A burst of hysterical weeping was the result, but it calmed and relieved the sufferer, until she could find words in which to offer her petition and tell her pitiful tale. Women are wonderfully patient of such affections in their own sex, and the harshest of them will be gentle and considerate with one of these outbreaks that they have agreed to call ‘nervous attacks.’ Much more so, kindly Mary Stuart; soothing her attendant like a child, she soon restored her to sufficient composure to make intelligible the boon she had all day been striving to entreat. What this was an hour or two would disclose. In the meantime, the Queen and her maiden sat whispering in the darkening twilight, till the shafts and pinnacles of the neighbouring cathedral loomed grim and fantastic in the shadows of nightfall, and the light in the sacristan’s window told that the time of vespers was already past.
At the same hour, John Knox, riding steadily along the road to Edinburgh, was beguiling the gloomy journey with a proud recollection of his resistance to the Queen’s advances, sternly reminding his conscience that animosity to the Papists was a Christian’s duty, and that forgiveness was no Christian virtue to one of another faith.
And Chastelâr in his dungeon was preparing for death by reflection on the pitiless beauty of her in whose face he would never look again.