‘Traitor!’ thus she stabbed him—‘Traitor, son of a traitor, take and kiss it if you dare.’ She laid above her caught hand that other, cool and firm, and opened it to show him the handle of his own dagger. She took the blade by the point and held the thing up, swinging before his shocked eyes. ‘Lick that, hound!’ she said: ‘you should know the taste of it better than I.’
He dropped her one hand, stared stupidly at the other: but as his gaze concentrated upon the long smear on the blade you could have seen the sweat rising on his temples.
She had read him exquisitely. After the first brunt of terror, rage was what he felt—furious rage against the man whom he supposed to have betrayed him. ‘Oh, horrible traitor!’ he muttered by the window, whither he had betaken himself for refuge,—‘Oh, Archie Douglas, if I could be even with thee for this! Oh, man, man, man, what a curious, beastly villain!’ He was much too angry now to be tender of his wife—either of her pity or revenge; he turned upon her, threatening her from his window.
‘You shall not intimidate me. I am no baby in your hands. This man is a villain, I tell you, whom I shall pursue till he is below my heel. He has laid this, look you for a trap. This was got by theft, and displayed by malice—devilish craft of a traitor. And do you suppose I shall let it go by? You mistake me, by God, if you do. Foul thief!—black, foul theft!’
She pointed to the smear on the blade. ‘And this?’ she asked him: ‘what of this? Was this got by theft, my lord? Was this dry blood thieved from a dead man? Or do I mistake, as you suppose? Nay, wretch, but you know that I do not. The man was dead long before you dared touch him. Dead and in rags—and then the King drove in his blade!’ Her face—Hecate in the winter—withered him more than her words. Though these contained a dreadful truth, the other chilled his blood. He crept aimlessly about the room, feeling his heart fritter to water, and all the remains of his heat congested in his head. He tried to straighten his back, his knees: there seemed no sap in his bones. And she sat on, with cold critical eyes, and her lips hard together.
‘My Mary,’ he began to stammer, ‘this is all a plot against my life—surely, surely you see it. I have enemies, the worse in that they are concealed—I see now that all the past has been but a plot—why, yes, it is plain as the daylight! I entreat you to hear me: this is most dangerous villainy—I can prove it. They swore to stand my friends—fast, fast they swore it. And here—to your hand—is proof positive. Surely, surely, you see how I am trapped by these shameful traffickers!’
Her eyes never left his face, but followed him about the room on his aimless tour; and whether he turned from the window or the wall, so sure as he looked up he saw them on him. They drove him into speech. ‘I meant honestly,’ he began again, shifting away from those watchful lights; ‘I meant honestly indeed. I have lived amiss—oh, I know it well! A man is led into sin, and one sin leads to another. But I am punished, threatened, in peril. Let me escape these nets and snares, I may do well yet. My Mary, all may be well! Let us stand together—you and I’—he came towards her with his hands out, stopped, started back. ‘Look away—look away; take your eyes from off me—they burn!’ He covered his own. ‘O God, my God, how miserable I am!’
‘You are a prisoner as I am,’ said the Queen. ‘We stand together because we are tied together. And as for my eyes, what you abhor in them is what you have put there. But since we are fellow-prisoners, methinks——’
He looked wildly. ‘Who says I am prisoner? If I am—if I am—why, I am betrayed on all hands. My kinsmen—my father—no, no, no! That is foolishness. Madam,’ he asked her, being desperate, ‘who told you that I was a prisoner?’
She glanced at the dagger. ‘This tells me. Why, think you, should Archie Douglas have laid that in the grave, except for me to find it there?’