"So it is ever with love, adorable madam!" replied the Earl, clasping his hands.
"Silence!" said the Queen trembling; "thy words are full of sin. One whisper of this to Darnley, and thou art a lost man;" and she glided away like a haughty Juno, with her long train and veil floating behind her. At this threat Bothwell's heart glowed alike with love and anger; but he remained irresolute, and confounded by her sudden transition from gaiety to gravity, and watched her approach the postern of James V.'s tower. As she was about to enter, two aged, lean, and shrivelled hands, were extended from the narrow-grated loophole of a strong and vaulted chamber in the basement story, and these immediately arrested Mary's attention. Folding her arms meekly upon her bosom, she bowed her head, and on her pure and snowy brow the forbidden sign of the cross was traced, and the hands were immediately withdrawn within the grating.
There, in that damp vault, lay Sir James Tarbet, a poor old priest, who had been discovered saying mass at midnight in the ruined chapel of St. Anthony on the Craig; and for this heinous crime had been consigned to a dungeon by those champions of toleration, who enforced the iron laws of the new regimé.
Softened by the old man's blessing, and the sentiments it called up within her, Mary, as she entered the tower, bowed to the Earl in token of forgiveness, and dropped (but whether by chance or design, the usually acute Magister Absalom sayeth not) her bouquet, of which the enamoured lord immediately possessed himself, and placed in his bosom, bowing almost to the earth as she disappeared. His heart beat like lightning; a new and triumphant glow expanded like a flame within it, and he seemed to tread on air.
"Parbleu!" said the Marquis d'Elboeuff, who had observed this scene, and came pirouetting along the walk, looking like a great grasshopper, with his long rapier and short mantle; "ha! ha! art thou still for the Salique law?"
"Blockhead!" muttered the Earl impatiently.
"Remember that clause of it which saith, 'He who squeezes the hand of a free woman shall pay a fine of fifteen golden sols.'"
"Ah! but callest thou the queen a free woman, when she is a slave to the ten thousand caprices of yonder great baboon, her husband?" said the Earl, as, with a bitterness he could not conceal, he abruptly left the Marquis, and retired from the garden.
CHAPTER XVIII.
JEALOUSY WITHOUT LOVE.