“It is decided, then,” cried Murray; and not a voice replied, for none had the presumption to dispute the fitness of the choice which thus had fallen on a leader so renowned for strength and valor. “Herald,” he continued, “go bear our greeting to her majesty of Scotland, and say to her, we do accept the challenge. An hour’s truce we grant—an equal field here, on this hill of Carbury. The noble earl of Lyndesay will here prove, upon the crest and limbs of that false recreant, James, some time the earl of Bothwell, the justice of our cause: and so may God defend the right!”
The shout which rang from earth to heaven, at the noble confidence of Murray, bore to the ears of Mary and her trembling followers the assurance that the challenge was accepted; an assurance that sounded joyfully in every ear but that of his who uttered the bravado. Many a time and oft had Bothwell’s crest shone foremost in the tide of battle; many a time had he confronted deadliest odds with an undaunted visage and a victorious blade. Yet now he faltered; his bold brow blanched with sudden apprehension; his frame, muscular and lofty as a giant’s, actually shook with terror; and his quivering lip paled, ere he heard the name of his antagonist. Whether it was that guilt sat heavy on his heart, and weighed his strong arm down, or that his soul was cowed by the consciousness that he was unsupported and forsaken by all his friends, he turned upon his heel, and, muttering some inarticulate sounds, half lost within the hollows of his beaver, he strode to his pavilion, and thence sent his squire forth, to say that he was ill at ease, and could not fight until the morrow! Mary herself—the fond, confiding, deceived Mary—burst on the instant into loud contempt at this hardly-credible baseness.
“What! James of Bothwell false!” she cried; “then perish hope! I yield me to the malice of my foes; I will resist no longer. O man, man—base, coward, miserable man!—is it for this we give our hearts, our lives, ourselves, to your vile guidance? is it for this that I have given thee mine all—mine honor, and, perchance, my soul? that thou shouldst cowardly desert me at mine utmost need! Little, oh how little, doth the cold world know of woman’s heart and woman’s courage! For thee would I have perished, oh, how joyfully!—and thou, O God! O God! it is a bitter, bitter punishment for my credulity and love: but if I have deserved to suffer, I deserved it not at thy hands, James of Bothwell! Seyton, true friend, to thee I trust mine all. Go summon Kirkaldy to a parley: say Mary, queen of Scotland, rather than look upon the blood of Scottishmen, will grant to her rebellious lords those terms which they desire! Nay, interrupt us not, Lord Seyton. We care not what befall that frozen viper whom we warmed within our bosom till he stung us! Away!—let Orkney quit our camp; for, by the glorious light of heaven, we never will behold him more!”
She spoke with an elevated voice, and features glowing with contending passions, till the faithful baron had departed on his mission; but then, then the false strength yielded to despair, and in an agony of unfettered grief she sank into the arms of her attendants, murmuring amid her tears, “O God, how I did adore that man!” and was borne, almost a corpse, into her tent.
An hour passed heavily away, and at its close Mary came forth, with a brow from which, though pale as the first dawning, every trace of grief had vanished. The terms had been accepted. Without a tear she saw the man for whom she had sacrificed all—all, to her very reputation—mount and depart for ever! Without a tear she backed her own brave palfrey, and rode, attended by a dozen servitors, faithful amid her sorrows as they had been in brighter days, into the rebel host. Little was there of courtesy, of that demeanor which becomes a subject in presence of his queen, a true knight before a lady. Amid the taunts and jeers of the vile soldiery, covered with dust and humiliation, she entered upon that fatal progress which, commencing in a conditional surrender, ended only when she was immured, beyond a hope of rescue or redemption, within the dungeon-towers of Loch Leven!
THE CAPTIVITY.
“Long years!—It tries the thrilling frame to bear,
And eagle-spirit of a child of song—
Long years of outrage, calumny, and wrong;
And the mind’s canker in its savage mood,
When the impatient thirst of light and air
Scorches the heart; and the abhorred grate,
Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade,
Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brain
With a hot sense of heaviness and pain!”—Lament of Tasso.
Eighteen long years of solitary grief—of that most wretched sickness that arises, even to a proverb, from hope too long deferred—had already passed away since, in the fatal action of Langside, the wretched Mary had for the last time seen her banner fall, and her adherents scattered like chaff before the wind by the determined valor of her foes. All, all was lost! It had been the work of months to draw that gallant army to a head, of which so many now lay stark in their curdled gore; while the miserable remnant were hunted like beasts of chase, to perish, when taken, upon the ignominious scaffold. And now, of all the noble gentlemen who had thronged to her bridle-rein on that fatal morning, high in hope as in valor, the merest had escaped to guard the person of that sovereign whom they loved so truly, and in behalf of whom they had endured so deeply. Her crown was lost for ever; nor her crown only, but her country.
Of all the glorious gifts which, at an earlier period of her eventful life, nature appeared to shower upon her head, freedom alone remained. The palfrey which bore her from the battle-field was now the sole possession of the titular monarch of three fair domains; the wild moors, over which she fled in desperate haste, her only refuge from persecutors the most unrelenting that ever joined sagacity to hatred in the performance of their plans; the dozen gallant hearts who rallied yet around their queen, beneath the guiding of the stout and loyal Herries, her only court, her only subjects. Still she was free; and to one who for months before had never seen the blessed light of heaven but its lustre was sullied by the dim panes through which it forced its way, to lend no solace to her captivity, the fresh breeze which eddied across the purple moorlands of her native land had still the power to impart a sense of pleasure, fleeting, it is true, and doubtful, but still, in all its forms and essentials, absolute and real pleasure.