The girl was puzzled; she could not understand him: yesterday, so kind and loyal and frank; to-day, so distant and calm and cold. Had he been the most experienced carpet-knight that ever made war upon the sex, instead of an honest, true-hearted soldier, he could not have adopted a better method of aggression. She had never felt so much engrossed with him in her life. It is hardly fair to fight a woman with her own weapons; but we imagine it discomfits them exceedingly, the more so that they are well aware a man’s coldness, unlike their own, is the result of real displeasure, and the forerunner of a rupture.
Eventually all the ladies had chosen but Mary Carmichael; all the horsemen were selected but Walter Maxwell. She detached herself from the rest, and walked to where he was standing apart, still fastening his bridle and caressing his good horse.
She tried to speak in an easy, off-hand manner; but a duller ear than his might have detected the forced tone of her voice.
‘They are mounting,’ said she; ‘you will be left out. Will you not be my knight?’
‘For to-day,’ he answered, bowing low, and with a strained courtesy more galling than actual rudeness.
Then he too sprang into the saddle and galloped off to join his comrades. The girl bit her lip till the blood came; tears of shame and vexation rose to her eyes; and yet she had never liked him so well as at this moment.
The Queen with her ladies now returned to the gallery, from whence she could have a good view of the sports, dispensing once more amongst the crowd that good-humoured notice which is so fascinating from a sovereign. Many a reflective Scotch face smoothed its rugged brows as she passed; many a stern Protestant who followed weekly the vigorous discourses of John Knox with approval in proportion to the strength of their doctrine, and attention never diverted for a moment from the profound casuistry of their arguments, looked after her with a wistful, pitying admiration, as though loth to believe such a creature of light could be a chosen tool of the arch-enemy, and a vessel of wrath doomed to everlasting perdition. The younger members of the crowd blessed her audibly, while here and there some godless jackman, ruffling it in all the audacious freedom of inebriety, swore loudly that it was his profession and his pastime to die for the Queen.
The Earl of Moray and his bride occupied the next seats to the royal household. Matrimony had not altered the composure of the deep-scheming earl. His own attire and that of his lady were of the gravest and most sombre, rebuking by their austere simplicity the bravery of the Queen’s immediate attendants.
Moray, while he kept well with the Court, was careful not to offend the prejudices of the strict Protestant party, in whose ranks he felt lay his chief strength, and while he smiled with a melancholy forbearance on the gaieties of his brothers and his royal half-sister, he never forgot for an instant the character he had assumed, of the rigid guardian and upholder of religion; the man in whom the ‘country might have confidence,’ the prop and stay of ‘the godly’ through the length and breadth of Scotland. His bride, a comely, laughing lass when she married him, was obviously taming down, day by day, to the required pattern of decorum. Like some flower denied the sunlight, she was fading from her youthful colour and brightness, into that premature old age which is so pitiful to witness—the waning of the heart and feelings before the face is wrinkled or the locks are gray.
And now the crowd are driven from the enclosure by a score of men-at-arms wearing the royal livery. As these push their well-trained horses amongst the foot-people, much elbowing and squeezing is the result. The lads, as Scotchmen are termed up to the most advanced period of life, bear the jostling good-humouredly enough; the lasses laugh and shriek, and display extraordinary unsteadiness, and an unusual craving for protection and support. But the lists are cleared at last, and the troop of mounted masquers come down like a whirlwind, in line, till they reach the Queen’s gallery, when they wheel to right and left from their centre, and sweeping round at the same pace, take up their respective positions at either extremity of the lists.