‘Those endless letters!’ exclaimed Mary Seton; ‘and all about treaties and alliances, and the most uninteresting subjects. I declare I wouldn’t change places with the Queen to have her beauty and her throne. She is harassed and wearied to death. Dear me! how I wish she would marry, and take some stout-hearted lord to share her troubles and anxieties with her once for all!’
‘I’m surprised at you!’ exclaimed Mary Beton, now completely shocked. ‘It is most indiscreet to talk on such matters, and scarce maidenly even to think of them. Is it that you might follow her example?’ she added, in a tone of severe reproof.
‘I am not sure but what I should,’ sighed the other, and relapsed into silence, which, strange to say, was not broken for the space of full five minutes.
Perhaps the last suggestion thrown out had awakened matter for reflection in the minds of each of the four Maries.
At the expiration of that period, however, Mary Beton remarked that it was getting very dark; and Mary Seton at the same moment proposed that James Geddes, the Queen’s fool, should be summoned to make sport for them during the hour of idleness preceding supper.
‘I will go for him,’ said Mary Carmichael, and, wrapping a plaid round her head and shoulders, hurried out of the room.
James Geddes, who filled the honourable and somewhat lucrative office of royal fool or jester in the palace of Holyrood, was one of those half-witted unfortunates of whom so many may be met with even in the present day in Scotland, and who occupy the intermediate space between sanity and positive imbecility. They cannot be termed lunatics, for they are usually harmless, and even amiable in disposition, showing kindly feelings towards animals, infants, and such helpless objects, and even school-children, if not tormented by the urchins beyond all endurance. They are not idiots, for, although their perceptions may be warped, they are in vigorous possession of their faculties, and indulge, indeed, in a shrewd caustic humour of their own with which few rational beings can compete. Neither can they be called actually in their right mind. Perhaps the Scottish peasant best describes the mental state of such an one when he says, in an explanatory tone, ‘Ou! he’s just a natural!’
James Geddes, accordingly, was ‘just a natural,’ and earned his wages, consisting of meat, and fee, a parti-coloured suit of clothes, and a cap and bells which he could not be persuaded to wear, by furnishing unlimited mirth to the royal household, and occasionally a jest that diverted the grave lords in council, and reached the ears of the gentle Queen herself.
Such was the wiseacre, in search of whom Mary Carmichael sped down the winding stairs that led from the Maidens’ Tower into the devious passages of the palace. Obviously the most likely place in which to find him would have been the buttery, for it is a kind compensation of nature, that weakness of brain should be accompanied by great power of the digestive organs, and James Geddes could eat as much at one meal as would last a philosopher for a week. The maid-of-honour, nevertheless, passed that well-stored apartment without stopping, and proceeded with a light step and a heaving bosom into the Abbey garden, over which the dew was falling, and the shades of evening gathering fast.
Passing through the flower-beds she had despoiled in the afternoon, and which doubtless failed not to call up tender recollections, the young lady glided like a phantom into the shade of an adjoining orchard, through the branches of which an early star or two were already beginning to twinkle down. Here she halted, and, removing the shawl from her head, peered into the darkness, and listened attentively, though for a few minutes—