‘I excused him readily, however,’ he writes in his Memoirs, ‘considering the agitation we all suffered at the time. And where he felled me there I lay, and slept like a child.’
CHAPTER VI
VENUS IN THE TOILS
Sir James Melvill, whom readers must remember at Saint Andrews as a shrewd, elderly courtier, expert in diplomacy and not otherwise without humours of a dry sort, plumed himself upon habit—‘Dear Mother Use-and-Wont,’ as he used to say. A man is sane at thirty, rich at forty, wise at fifty, or never; and what health exacts, wealth secures, and wisdom requires, is the orderly, punctual performance of the customary. You may have him now putting his theory into severest practice: for though he had seen what was to be seen during that night of murder and alarm, though he had lain down to sleep in his cloak no earlier than five o’clock in the small hours, by seven, which was his Sunday time, he was up and about, stamping his booted feet to get the blood down, flacking his arms, and talking encouragement to himself—as, ‘Hey, my bonny man, how’s a’ with you the morn?’ Very soon after you might have seen him over the ashes of the fire, raking for red embers and blowing some life into them with his frosted breath. All about lay his snoring fellows, though it was too dark to see them. Every man lay that night where he could find his length, and slept like the dead in their graves. There seemed no soul left in a body but in his own.
He went presently to the doors, thinking to open them unhindered. But no! a sitting sentry barred the way with a halberd. ‘May one not look at the weather, my fine young man?’ says Sir James.
‘’Tis as foul as the grave, master, and a black black frost. No way out the now.’
Sir James, who intended to get out, threw his cloak over his shoulder and gravely paced the hall until the chances should mend. One has not warred with the Margrave, held a hand at cards with the Emperor Charles at Innspruck, loitered at Greenwich in attendance upon Queen Elizabeth, or endured the King of France in one of his foaming rages, without learning patience. He proposed to walk steadily up and down the hall until nine o’clock. Then he would get out.
The women said afterwards that the Queen had quieted down very soon, dried her eyes, gone to bed, and slept almost immediately ‘as calm as a babe new-born.’ However that may be, she awoke as early as Sir James, and, finding herself in Mary Fleming’s arms, awoke her too in her ordinary manner by biting her shoulder, not hard. ‘My lamb, my lamb!’ cooed the maid; but the Queen in a brisk voice said, ‘What’s o’clock?’ The lamp showed it to be gone seven.