‘Sad thoughts, I fear, madam. We are concerned to find your Majesty so disturbed.’
She eyed him vaguely, being unable just then to realise how completely she had yielded him her secret. Extreme fatigue swam over her; her head nodded even as she watched him. When Mary Livingstone laid her down gently and stroked her hair back she drowsed into a swooning sleep. Over her unconscious form a hasty little drama was enacting, very curious.
The Earl of Moray, seeing her hold relaxed, rose quietly from his chair and stretched one of his hands towards the gilt coffer. Des-Essars, in a flash of thought, nudged Huntly. ‘Quick,’ he whispered—‘take the coffer’; and Huntly whipped his arm out and reached it first. Moray drew back, as a cat his paw from a wetness, and shuddered slightly. Huntly says, in a low voice: ‘Monsieur Des-Essars, I give this casket in your charge until her Majesty shall give direction. It is open. Come with me and I will seal it.’
Moray was not the man to forgive such a thing in the Queen’s page; nor did he ever.
She was awake and fully conscious for a few hours of the next day. Father Lesley, an old friend, was allowed to see her, and needed not the evidence of physic, ticks of the pulse, heat of the blood: he could use his senses.
He warned her of her extremity. This was a grave matter, graver than she might suppose. Her eyes turned upon him, black and serious; but then, after a little, she smiled up saucily in his face. ‘Why, I hope,’ she said, ‘there is no need to fear death—if death it be. I am sure my friends will plead kindly for me, and as for my enemies, what can they say worse than they have said?’
‘The Christian, ma’am,’ says Lesley, ‘has no concern with friend or foe at such a time. The road he must travel, he will have no arm to bear upon, save the proffered arm of the Cross.’
‘True,’ she said. ‘I hope I shall die a Christian, as I have tried to live.’
Her mind must have been preternaturally sharp, for a chance word of the admonition which he thought good to deliver set it to work. ‘Likewise it behoveth the Christian, madam—so strict an account is required of the highly favoured—to repent him of the mischances of sleep and dreams. Unlawful, luxurious dreaming, the mutterings of sinful words when our bodies lie bound in slumber are stumbling-blocks to the soul agog to meet his Saviour at the gate.’
He rambled on and on, the godly ignoramus, the while her wits flew far. Mutterings of dreams—had she betrayed herself? Then—to whom? It behoved her to be certain. She bundled out the priest and had in the confidant. From Des-Essars she learned the extent of her delirium; he brought her the casket, unlocked, sealed by the Chancellor, from which, he told her, she had read ‘certain sonnets.’ Love-laden lady! she stopped him here, laughing as she fingered her coffer, lifting and snapping-to the lid. ‘My sonnets? They are here, many and many. I shall read them to him some day. And to you some. Shall I——?’