My lord pricked up his ears to this royal word. ‘Ha! In a good hour, Master David!’
‘Good enough, when it comes,’ says Davy; ‘but you did not allow me to finish. Proclamation—and acclamation, I was about to add; for one is as needed as the other.’
This was a fidgety addition.
‘Pooh!’ cried the Prince, ‘the pack follows the horn.’
He set the Italian’s shoulders to work. ‘I advise you not to count upon it, my lord. In this country there is no pack of hounds, but a flock—many flocks—of sheep. And they follow the shepherd, you must know. Therefore you must be prudent; let me say, more prudent. The Queen comes to you too much; you go to her too little. It is she that pays the court, where it should be you. Dio mio! It is not decent. It is madness.’
‘She is fond of me, Davy. The truth is, she is over-fond of me.’
Signior Davy stopped himself just in time. He buried his exclamation in a prodigious shrug.
The doings of the Lennoxes, father and son, which scared the Court so finely, were the Earl of Moray’s only hope. He, in truth, was very near finding himself in the position of a man who should have lit a fire to keep wolves from his door. The flames catch the eaves and burn his house down: behold him without shelter, and the wolves coming on! This is exactly his own case. Kingship for the young man, by whose entangling he had hoped to entangle his sister, was a noose round his own neck—the mere threat of it was a noose. If he furthered it he was ruined; if he opposed it—at this hour of the day—he might equally be ruined. All his hope lay in England. Let the Queen of England send for her runaway subjects, and then—why, he could begin again. As day succeeded to day, and favour to favour—the dukedom conferred, the match in every one’s mouth, the Court at Edinburgh, the Chapel Royal in fair view—he worked incessantly. He dared not try the Italian again, lest the impudent dog should grin in his face; but he secured Argyll and his friends, the Duke of Châtelherault and his; he wrote to Lethington, to Mr. Cecil, to the Earl of Leicester, to Queen Elizabeth. And so it befel that, one certain morning, English Mr. Randolph faced the Lennoxes with his mistress’s clear commands. Father and son were to return to England, or——
Quos ego—in fact; much too late for the fair. They took the uncompromising message each after his kind: Lennox, white-haired, ape-faced and fussy, sitting in his deep leather chair, rolling his palms over the knobs of it, swinging his feet free of the ground; the Prince his son stiff as a rod, standing, with one hand to his padded hip—blockish and surly as a rogue mule.