"Lord Bothwell—in thy wounded state! I command thee, nay!"
"True—true; I thank your majesty," stammered the Earl, whose head swam between the effect of his wound and this interview. "But Hob Ormiston, with his train of lances, will see you to the gates of Jedburgh."
In five minutes more Mary was gone, after being only two hours in Hermitage, as the Lord Scrope saith quaintly, "to Bothwell's great pleasure and contentment." There was a clatter of horses in the court, a discharge of brass cannon from the keep, and all again was as still in the great and solitary castle of Hermitage as in the pit below it.
From a window the wounded Earl watched the train of the queen and her ladies, the tall and mail-clad figures of Ormiston and his men, with their long spears glinting in the glow of the western sun, as they followed the windings of the mountain stream, and traversed the long and desolate dell that led to Jedburgh.
They disappeared in the distance; and then, overcome by excitement and loss of blood, the Earl threw himself upon a couch, from which he did not rise for many days.
On Mary's return to Jedburgh, a severe cold, caught during this visit to Hermitage, ended in a fever, that was aggravated by a pain or constitutional weakness in her side, of which she had long complained; and notwithstanding that she lay on a couch of sickness so deadly, that Monsieur Picauet, her physician, despaired of her life, the conduct of Darnley was singularly cruel and ungrateful. A letter of the French ambassador shews, that he treated with contempt the tidings sent to him of the queen's illness, and that he remained spending his time in idleness and dissipation at Glasgow. It is probable that though his absence wounded her pride, it caused her no great grief, as she had almost ceased to love him.
The Earl of Bothwell, though not without a strong dash of that profligacy which tainted the Scottish nobles in the age succeeding the Reformation, was immensely inferior as a roué to Darnley; whose coldness, insolence, and brutality, formed a vivid contrast to the artfully preferred addresses, readily performed services, and gallant demeanour, of the handsome Earl.
A month passed away.
Bothwell remained at Hermitage under the care of Mass John; the queen at Jedburgh under the more able hands of M. Picauet, and slowly recovering from her illness. Hob Ormiston, and other barons, guarded her with a thousand lances, while Darnley remained at his father's house of Limmerfield, near Glasgow, wiling away the days in hunting and hawking by Kelvin grove and Campsie fells; and spending the nights in dicing, drinking, and "wantonesse" in the bordels and hostellaries of the Tron and Drygate.
Meanwhile, Konrad continued to be a close prisoner at Hermitage; for the Earl, though urged on one hand by Ormiston to dispatch him by brief border law, was advised on the other, by the gentle Hepburn of Bolton, to transmit him to the Justice Court.