CHAPTER XXIV.
THE KING'S PAGE.
And thou, my heart,
That idly tremblest at the thought of death,
Soon in the tomb thy anxious pulse shall cease
To slumber in eternal rest.
Panthea, a Tragedy.
The chamber was dark, for its grated windows faced the east, and the time was evening; the curtains were half drawn, to exclude the light, which was already partly secluded by a great gloomy bastel-house of the town rampart. The walls of the room were panneled, and, like the ceiling, painted with a variety of grotesque designs, amid which, as usual, the thistle and fleur-de-lys bore conspicuous places; but, according to the ancient and primitive mode, the floor was strewn with green rushes, freshly pulled from the margin of the neighbouring lake.[*]
[*] Hentzner, in his Itineray, writing of Queen Elizabeth's chamber at Greenwich, says, "the floor, after the English mode, was strewed with hay," evidently meaning rushes—See Brand.
The young king was sleeping heavily and uneasily.
Raised upon a dais of steps, his bed was ancient and massive; the posts, of walnut-tree, were covered with quaint designs, and carved into four tall figures, having the heads of men, with eagle's wings and lion's bodies; rising from pedestals, they seemed like dusky demons upholding the canopy of a tomb; for the festoons of the bed were of crimson velvet, flowered by the fair hands of Mary and her ladies; the seats of the high-backed chairs were all of the same costly materials.
Sharpened and attenuated by disease, Darnley's features glimmered in the subdued light, like those of a rigid corpse; and the myriad pustules incident to the hideous ailment under which he suffered, were apparent to the louring eye of Bolton, who, remembering that night in the garden of Holyrood, gazed upon him with sensations akin to those of a tigress robbed of her cubs; and the age was not one when men sat placidly under a sense of wrong, or repressed their impulses either of good or evil.
He gave the goblet to the page, whose hand trembled, and whose eye was averted as he received it; then, creeping softly to the side of the slumberer, he placed an arm affectionately under his head, raised it, awoke him, and placed the ptisan to his parched lips, and thirstily Darnley drank of the grateful beverage.
At that moment a ray of sunset, reflected from the wall of the adjacent bastel-house, lit up the chamber, and the hollow recess of that great bed, where the kingly sufferer lay; and through the disguise of a page's jaquette and ruff, the trunk hosen and shorn hair, Bolton recognised Mariette Hubert—his lost, his fallen Mariette, with her arm round Darnley's head, that head pressed against her breast; and this was under his own eyes.