Morton gave one of his cold and sinister smiles as he appended his name in silence; while the Marquis d'Elboeuff also smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and applied to his nostrils an exquisitely chased silver pouncet-box of fragrant essences, to conceal the merriment with which he watched the arduous operation of fixing the signatures; for writing was a slow and solemn process in those days.
A new and terrible difficulty occurred, which nearly knocked the whole affair on the head.
Very few of these potent peers could sign their names, and others objected to making their mark, which, from its resemblance to a cross, savoured of popery; but Lethington effected a conscientious compromise, by causing them to make a T, as those did who signed the first solemn league—a smallness of literary attainment which did not prevent those unlettered lords from demolishing the hierarchy of eight hundred years, and giving a new creed to a nation as ignorant as themselves.
Bothwell felt as if he trode on air when consigning this tremendous paper, which had the signatures of so many bishops, earls, and lords, the most powerful in Scotland, to the care of Pittendreich, the Lord President.
The rere-supper lasted long.
Deeply they drank that night, but none deeper than the Earl and his friends; and the morning sun was shining brightly into the narrow wynd—the city gates had been opened, and the booths which, from 1555 till 1817, clustered round St. Giles, were all unclosed for business, and carlins were brawling with the acquaoli at the Mile-end well, ere the company separated; and the Earl, accompanied by Hob Ormiston and the knights of Tallo and Bolton, with their eyes half closed, their cloaks and ruffs awry, and their gait somewhat oscillating and unsteady, threaded their way down the sunlit Canongate, and reached Bothwell's apartments in Holyrood—that turreted palace, where the unconscious Mary was perhaps asleep with her child in her bosom, and little foreseeing the storm that was about to burst on her unhappy head.
CHAPTER X.
HANS AND KONRAD.
Yes, she is ever with me! I can feel,
Here as I sit at midnight and alone,
Her gentle breathing! On my breast can feel
The presence of her head! God's benison
Rest ever on it!
Longfellow.
On this morning, the sun shone brightly on the blue bosom of the Forth, and the grey rocks of all its many isles. The sea-mews were spreading their broad white pinions to the wind, as they skimmed from their nests in the ruins of Inchcolm, and the caves of Wemyss.