‘Madam,’ said her brother, ‘you interpret gently. This makes the slanderer’s damnation the deeper.’
She laughed. ‘It is plain, brother, that you know little of France. In France the truth goes for nothing, but the jest is all. My Lord Bothwell has been much in France.’
‘A jest, madam? This a jest?’
‘It is quite in their manner. I remember the old King——’ She broke off suddenly. ‘Oh, brother, my King is more at ease! This morning his fever left him, and there broke a great sweat.’
‘I rejoice,’ said he—‘I rejoice. But touching this horrible railer—if he should crave leave to return——’
‘He has craved it already,’ replied the Queen. ‘I answered that if he choose to come back to his prison he may do it. But not otherwise. Brother, I must go to the King.’
The King! We were there, then; and it galled him like a rowel. Although she used it warily, and only with the nine persons who were privy, he could not bear the word; for every time he heard it he was stung into remembering that he ought to have foreseen it and had not. It is to be admitted that it had never once crossed his mind—neither the word nor the thing; astute, large-minded, wide-ranging as he was, he was also that unimaginative, prim-thinking man who has pigeon-holes for the categories, knows nothing of passion that breaks all rules, nor can conceive how loyalty is like meat to women in love, and humility like wine. Lethington could have told him these things, the Italian could have told him, any of the maids; and he never to have guessed at them! Dangerously mortified at the discovery, his disgust with himself and the fact worked together into one great distemper. This it was which threw him out of his balance, and led him presently to the greatest length he ever went; but at present it was only gathering in him. It made him doubtful, distrustful of himself and all; and when he looked about for supports he could find none to his taste. One folly after another! How he had cut away his friends! There was Lethington in England. There was the Italian, who knew so much. He sickened at the thought of that capable ruffian who had helped him hasten the crowning of ‘the King.’ Very possibly—very certainly, it seemed to him now, brooding over it in stillness and the dark—very possibly the ruin of his life had been laid that night when he had sought out the creature in his den and bought him with a diamond. Argyll was here, Rothes, Glencairn, and their like, and Morton the Chancellor, whom he only half trusted. Besides, Morton was cousin of this flagrant ‘King,’ and would rise as he rose. On the whole, and for want of better, he consorted with Argyll and his friends, and dared go so far as this, to tell them that he had fears of the marriage.
‘I could have wished,’ he said to Argyll, ‘a livelier sense of favours done in so young a man; also that my sister might have judged more soberly how far to meet him. If men of age and known probity had been consulted!’
Glencairn, a passably honest man, and undoubtedly a pious man, said tentatively here, that no lord of the Council could be found to support the Prince. As for the Queen’s grace——