In years to come she could remember every flash and eddy of that shifting garden scene when first he came to her. A waft of scented blossom, the throb of a lute, and she could see the peacock on the wall, the gay June borders, the grass plats and bright paths in between, quivering with the heat they gave out. There was a fountain in the midst of the quincunx, on the marble brim of which she sat with her maids and cousin D’Elbœuf, dipping her hand, and now and then flicking water into their faces. A page in scarlet and white had come running up to say that the Duke was nearing with his gentlemen; and presently down the long alley she saw them moving slowly—crimson cloaks and bared heads, the Duke in the midst, wearing his jewelled bonnet. He was talking, and laughing immoderately with some one she knew not at all, who swung his hat in his hand, and to whom, as she remembered vividly, the struck poppies bowed their heads. For he hit them as he went with his hat, and looked round to see them fall. The Duke’s tale continued to the very verge of the privy garden; indeed he halted there, in the face of her usher, to finish it. She saw the stranger throw back his head to laugh. ‘What a great jowl he hath,’ she said to Mary Fleming; and she, in a hush, said, ‘Madam, it is the Earl Bothwell.’ A few moments later the man was kneeling before her, presented by the Duke himself. She had time to notice the page to whom he had thrown his hat and gloves—a pale-faced, wise-looking French boy, who knelt also, and watched her from a pair of grey eyes ‘rimmed with smut-colour.’ His name, she found out afterwards, was Jean-Marie-Baptiste Des-Essars. She liked his manly looks from the first—little knowing who and what he was to be to her. Jean-Marie-Baptiste Des-Essars! Keeper of the Secret des Secrets—where should I be without him?
The Earl of Bothwell—whom she judged (in spite of the stricken poppies) to be good-humoured—was a galliard of the type esteemed in France by those—and they were many—who pronounced vice to be their virtue. A galliard, as they say, if ever there was one, flushed with rich blood, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, with a laugh so happy and so prompt that the world, rejoicing to hear it, thought all must be well wherever he might be. He wore brave clothes, sat a brave horse, kept brave company bravely. His high colour, while it betokened high feeding, got him the credit of good health. His little eyes twinkled so merrily that you did not see they were like a pig’s, sly and greedy at once, and bloodshot. His tawny beard concealed a jaw underhung, a chin jutting and dangerous. His mouth had a cruel twist; but his laughing hid that too. The bridge of his nose had been broken; few observed it, or guessed at the brawl which must have given it him. Frankness was his great charm, careless ease in high places, an air of ‘take me or leave me, I go my way’; but some mockery latent in him, and the suspicion that whatever you said or did he would have you in derision—this was what first drew Queen Mary to consider him. And she grew to look for it—in those twinkling eyes, in that quick mouth; and to wonder about it, whether it was with him always—asleep, at prayers, fighting, furious, in love. In fine, he made her think.
Mary Livingstone liked not the looks of him from the first, and held him off as much as she could. She slept with her mistress in these days of widowhood, but refused to discuss him in bed. She said that he had a saucy eye—which was not denied—and was too masterful.
‘You can tell it by the hateful growth of hair he hath,’ she cried. ‘When he lifts up his head to laugh—and he would laugh, mind you, at the crucified Saviour!—you can see the climbing of his red beard, like rooted ivy on an old wall.’
It is true that his beard was reddish, and gross-growing; his hair, however, was dark brown, thick and curling. Mary Livingstone sniffed at his hair. He stayed ten days at Nancy, saw the Queen upon each of them, and on each held converse with her. She liked him very well, studied him, thought him more important than he really was. He laughed at her for this, and taxed her with it; but so pleasantly that she was not at all offended. The Lord James would not speak of him, nor he of the Lord James: he shrugged at any reference to him.
‘Let it be enough, madam, to own that we do not love each other,’ he said when she pressed him. ‘We view the world differently, that lord and I; for I look on the evil and the good with open face and what cheer I can muster, and he looks through his fingers and sadly. We speak little one with the other: what he thinks of me I know not. I think him a——’
‘Well, my lord? You think my brother a——?’
‘A king’s son, madam,’ he said, demurely; but she saw the gleam in his eye.
He spoke fluent French, and was very ready with his Italian. He was a latinist, a student of warfare, had read Machiavelli. He scared away a good many poetasters by a real or an affected truculence; threatened to duck one of them in the fountain, and proved that he could do it by ducking another. The effect of this was, as he had intended, that Queen Mary for a day laughed with him at the art of poetry, which was no art of his. That day he had a private half-hour, and spoke freely of himself and his ventures.
‘A man rich in desires,’ he confessed himself, ‘and therefore of great wealth. Put the peach on the wall above me, madam, and I shall surely grow to handle it. And this other possession is mine, that while I strive and stretch after my prize I can laugh at my own pains, and yet not abate them.’