In the Queen's chariot were four ladies, who, like herself, wore the black velvet dool-cloak, the large hood of which, in the fashion of the time, was pulled so far over the face as to impart to the wearer the aspect of a mourner at a funeral.
While all his pulses quickened with eagerness and anxiety, Florence strove to pierce the crowd that stood between him and this great mis-shapen and slowly-moving vehicle, which contained the two queens and their ladies; but under their capacious hoods he failed to discover the face of her he sought.
Suddenly one raised her gloved hand and lightly threw back the front of her hood. The action gave Florence a start like an electric shock.
"'Tis she!" he exclaimed, on recognizing the soft features, the dark eyebrows and hair of his unknown. "And now I cannot fail to discover her, as many here must know the names and rank of the ladies of the tabourette."
He turned to a person who, like himself, was on horseback, but who, being completely wedged in by the crowd, sat in his saddle gazing passively at the pageant, which ascended the steep street towards the castle of Stirling. He was well armed, and wore the livery and badges of a trooper of the house of Glencairn, yet seemed, withal, to be a gentleman. In short, this person, who was gazing, apparently, with the vacant curiosity of a mere spectator, was one of the most enterprising actors in our drama—Master Edward Shelly, the Englishman. To him, all this affair was but one other feature in the perilous political game he had been ordered to play, and which, in his soul, he despised.
He knew that the beautiful, noble, and wealthy wife proposed for him by the Scottish malcontents, was among the attendants of the two queens; and though, as a soldier, a Boulogner, tolerably indifferent on the subject of matrimony in general, and, as an Englishman of 1547, especially indifferent on the matter of a Scottish wife, he certainly had some curiosity again to see this lady, whom, as yet, he had never addressed, but whom he had repeatedly passed in the streets, or seen at mass, and once at a hawking-party on Wardie Muir, when in attendance on Mary of Lorraine, like whom, she was a graceful and expert horse-woman.
The eyes of these two men were lighted by smiles, and the colour in their cheeks heightened as they saw the fair young face, so suddenly revealed from the sombre shadow of the doole-cloak; but an examination of their smiles will prove that they resulted from different emotions.
Florence expressed in his moistened eyes all his soul felt of honest joy and love on beholding one so dear to his heart—a heart as yet unhackneyed in the ways of the world; and the warm flush came and went on his smooth boyish cheek, while every pulse beat rapidly.
The smile that spread slowly over the handsome and sunburned face of Edward Shelly, expressed only satisfaction, with (it might be) a dash of triumph, that she was all we have described her to be. Even in that age he was past the years of romantic or sudden attachments. Shelly was verging on forty; and his latter twenty years had been spent in Calais and other English garrisons in France: thus, in some respects, his morality, especially as regarded women, fitted him as loosely as his leather glove.
"So ho, my future wife!" he muttered, twisting his thick moustache up to his eyes, in the clear blue of which drollery was perhaps the prevailing expression.