“If there were naught more powerful than Darnley’s wrath,” he muttered, in the notes of deep determination, “to bar me from my towering hopes, then were I blest beyond all hopes of earth, of heaven—supremely blest!”
“What mean you, sir? We understand you not! What should there be more powerful than the wrath of thy lawful sovereign? Speak; I would not doubt you, yet methinks your words sound strangely. What be these towering hopes of thine? Pray God they tower not too high for honesty or honor! Say on, we do command thee!”
“I will say on, fair queen,” he replied, in a voice trembling as it were with the fear of offending and the anxiety of love—“I will say on, so you will hear me to the end, nor doubt the most devoted of your slaves!”
“Hear you?” she replied, considerably softened by his humility, “when did ever Mary Stuart refuse to hear the meanest of her subjects, much less a trusted and a valued friend, as thou hast ever been to her, as thou wilt ever be to her—wilt thou not, Bothwell?”
There was a heavenly purity, a confidence in his integrity, and a firm and full reliance on her own dignity, in every word she uttered, that might have converted the wildest libertine from his career of sin; that might have confirmed the wariest and most subtle spirit that its guilty craft could never prevail against a heart fortified against its attacks by purity and by the stronger and more holy influences of wedded love; but on the fixed purpose, on the interminable pride, the desperate passion, and the unscrupulous will of Bothwell, every warning was lost.
“I have adored you,” he said, slowly and impressively—“adored you, not as a queen, but as a woman. Mary, angelic Mary, pardon—pity—and oh, love me! You do, you do already love me! I have read it in your eye, I have marked it in your flushing cheek, in your heaving bosom! If this night you were free, would you not, sweet lady, lovely queen, would you not reward the adoration, the honest adoration of your devoted Bothwell?”
“Stand back, my lord of Bothwell!” cried the now indignant queen, “stand back! your words are madness! Nay, but we will be heard,” she continued, with increasing impetuosity, as he endeavored again to speak. “Thinkest thou, vain lord, that I—I, Mary of France and Scotland—because I have favored and distinguished a subject, who, God aid me, merited not favor nor distinction—thinkest thou that I, a queen anointed—a mother and a wife—that I could love so wantonly as to descend to thee? Back, sir, I say! and if I punish not at once thy daring insolence, ’tis that thy past services, in some sort, nullify thy present boldness. Oh, my lord!” she proceeded, in a softer tone, and a big tear-drop trembled in her bright eye as she spoke, “Mary has miseries enough, that thou shouldst spare to add thy quota to the general ingratitude. If thou didst love me, as thou sayest, thy love would be displayed as that of a zealous votary to the shrine at which he worships; as that of the magi bending before their particular star—not as that of a wild and wicked wanton to a frail, fickle woman!”
It may be that the words with which Mary concluded her reproof kindled again the hope which had well nigh passed away from Bothwell’s breast.
“Nay, Mary, say not thus. Do I not know thy trials? have I not marked thy miseries? and will I not avenge them? If thou wert free—did I say, if? By Heaven, fair queen, those locks of thine, that flow so unrestrained down that most glorious neck, are not more free than thou art! Did I not hear thy cry for vengeance on the slaughterers of hapless Rizzio? did I not hear, and have I not achieved the deed that secures at once thy freedom and thy vengeance?”
The spell was broken on the instant: the soft, the tender-hearted, the most gentle of women, was aroused almost to frenzy. The blood rushed in torrents to her princely brow, and left it again pale as the sculptured marble, but to return once more in deeper hues of crimson. Her eyes flashed with unnatural brightness; her bosom heaved and fell like that of a young priestess laboring with the throes of prophetic inspiration; she shook the tresses, he had dared to praise, back from her lovely face, and stamping her delicate foot in the passion of the moment on the oaken floor—