As Maxwell entered the apartment, a long, low room, plainly furnished and crowded with armed men, he was cordially greeted by the earl’s retainers, who had mustered in great force. They had seen his hand keep his head, against heavy odds, and they warmed to him at once as a kindred nature. Their meal seemed to be concluded, but the serious part of the entertainment was yet to commence; and large jacks of strong ale, with flasks of wine, standing at no great intervals on the board, denoted ample means of quenching the thirst engendered by a long ride. The warden rose to greet his new guest with frank courtesy, and bade him to the upper end of the room, where he himself sat at a cross table surrounded by the most distinguished of his guests.
Bothwell had doffed his usual attire of steel jack and head-piece; he was now dressed in close-fitting doublet and hose, which set off the strong proportions of his figure to great advantage. Without pretensions to strict personal beauty, the warden had fine features, and a bold, frank bearing, not unpleasing. Though he had lost one of his eyes in a skirmish, the defect was scarcely observable, and the slight scar, left by the wound on his cheek and eyebrow, rather added to the characteristic expression of his face. It was that of a daring, perhaps a reckless man, one who was inured to danger and used to strife; yet was there something soft and even tender in his smile. Flushed with wine, and exchanging broad jests of the coarsest with his laughing guests, he looked a fitting leader in a revel or a charge; and yet a close observer would have detected a hollow ring in the loud laugh, a false note in the jovial strain, a capability for better things than feasting and fighting, and a self-accusing consciousness that it was lost and thrown away.
The mirth was at its highest. If Bothwell was splendidly dressed, his costume was but sombre when compared with that of his princely guest, the Marquis d’Elbœuf, who shone with satin and jewellery in all the florid brilliancy of French decoration. If the warden’s draughts were deep, and his toasts objectionable, the Lords John and Robert Stuart, the Queen’s half-brothers, pledged him freely and out-talked him shamelessly, with a happy mixture of juvenile thirst and royal audacity. When Maxwell took his seat at the upper table, amidst these and two or three more of the wilder gallants of the Court, the wine had circulated freely, and the spirits of the party had risen to that point at which discretion ceases to interfere, and reason begins to discover that she has been all day in the wrong. D’Elbœuf flung himself into the spirit of the scene with the keen zest of his nation. The Admiral of France was the last man to refuse a challenge from friend or foe.
‘You shall pledge me in turn, Bothwell,’ said he, filling a large silver measure with wine. ‘Every man of you shall do me reason. These wild lads, who ought to be nephews of my own, and who drink as if they were grandsons of Charlemagne; Mr Maxwell, there, who has just come in, and must be suffocated with thirst; your huge squire of the body, who might hold a cask; and all your gentlemen riders, rovers on land, as their chief used to be at sea. What, Count Bothwell! We have not forgotten the breeze off shore, and the bold Norwegian coast.’
‘Nay, Marquis,’ answered Bothwell, filling himself a bumper, ‘my Liddesdale lads will drink any toast you please, if they like the liquor. But down on the marches we have a saying that “he who rides in the dark should dismount before daylight,” and faith, now that I am on shore, I have forgotten all about the coast of Norway and the wild North Sea, once for all.’
‘The toast! the toast!’ exclaimed Lord John Stuart. ‘Let us have the drink first, marquis, and the tale of the warden’s wicked doings afterwards. There’s something in this wine that makes a man marvellously thirsty.’
‘Waifs and strays!’ replied the marquis, holding his beaker above his head. ‘Count Bothwell first taught me the rights of an admiral on neutral seas. Pledge me, gentlemen; the toast is quite in your own line.’ And d’Elbœuf, laughingly heartily, set his cup on the board—empty.
A dark flush swept over Bothwell’s brow. A man does not always like to be reminded of his past exploits, but the company were clamorous for an explanation of the Frenchman’s toast, and d’Elbœuf had drunk too much wine to disappoint them.
‘We were lying off the coast of Norway,’ said the admiral, ‘and our host here in his armed galliot, with the Lion of Scotland at the main, was never tired of cruising about in search of adventures. He was Admiral of Scotland, as I of France; but whilst I waited for fortune, I think he followed the jade and grasped her by the hair. Some pirates had fired a village and were carrying off the inhabitants, when your warden here caught the knaves, red-handed, in the bay;—we make short work with these gentry at sea, where ropes are so convenient, and he strung them up to the yard-arm by dozens, like Normandy apples on a tree. The poor captives were too rejoiced to go back to the ashes of their dwellings; but a breeze springing up from the land, our friend here was obliged to make sail, carrying off, inadvertently, two or three trifles belonging to the village; amongst others, a fair girl with blue eyes and golden hair, who had once inhabited the principal house. I was on board the galliot some six weeks afterwards at an entertainment given by our host, where we drank nearly as much wine as we are like to do to-night, and this fair lass filled my cup and emptied her own, nothing loth, as though she relished her wine and her company. “But shall you not send her back?” said I to my host, seeing that she had been already six weeks on board. “Shall you not send her back before her friends lose patience and a complaint is made at Court, and a coil, all for a pair of merry eyes and a wisp of yellow hair?” “Not yet,” answered your warden. “Not yet. Do you not know that waifs and strays belong to the admiral?”’
A loud laugh followed d’Elbœuf’s explanation. The sentiment was quite in accordance with the company, and the point of his narrative, turning as it did on an act of illegal appropriation, was hugely enjoyed by the carousing borderers.