This angered him. ‘How can you say that, madam? How can you hurt me so? You know that I love you. Is it nothing to you? Less than nothing?’
She said, ‘It is much. Come, you and I will kiss together for the last time.’ She smiled a welcome, held out her arms; sobbing, he put them down and took her in his own instead, and held her close. There for a while she was content to be. But when he began to take more than his due, she gently disengaged herself, having won her object, which was to depart without him. ‘Adieu, dear faithful friend,’ she said—‘pray for me’; and as he knelt before her, she stooped down and lifted up his head by the chin, and kissed him on the forehead, and was gone. After that, she was inaccessible to him, her door denied.
In three days’ time—on the 23rd of January—she started for Glasgow with Lords Livingstone, Herries, and Traquair. Bothwell went part of her way, to where the roads divide. Her last public act had been to allow of the marriage between Fleming and Lethington. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘I shall have but one Mary left, who came hither with four. So endeth our Maids’ Adventure.’ But if I am right, it had ended long before. Now she was but a beast driven by the herdsmen to the market, there to be cheapened by the butcher.
Of his own moving adventure of the night when, for one moment, she assuredly looked back over her shoulder, Des-Essars writes what I consider his most fatuous page. ‘There was,’ he says, ‘a kind of very passion in that close embrace; and I knew, by the way she returned my kisses, that she was strongly inclined to me. Indeed, she said as much when she told me that it would have been possible, at an earlier day, for her to love me as she had once loved the King; with ardour, namely, like a fanciful child, in the secret mind, with the body but little concerned in the matter.[7] But it was too late. She owned herself tainted; he had taught her vice. She could be child no more, girl in love no more; alas, no, but a thirsty nymph stung by an evil spirit, ever restless, ever craving, never to be appeased....’
There is more in the same strain, which I say is fatuous. Whether she had a tenderness for him or not—and no doubt she had one—she was not revealing it then. Far from it, she wanted to escape, and this was her readiest way. She was at her old cajolery when she let him embrace and kiss her; and maybe she did kiss back. It is to be observed that she got her way immediately afterwards.
[7] His own report stultifies him here. According to him, she did not say it would have been possible, but oh, that it had been possible.
CHAPTER V
MEDEA IN THE BEDCHAMBER
Women, in the experience of French Paris, as he once informed a select company of his acquaintance, could only be trusted to do a thing, and never to cause a thing to be done. ‘They will always find a thousand reasons why it should not be done, or why it should be done another way—their way, an older way, a newer way, any way in the world but yours. Burn the boats, burn the boats, dear sirs, when you need a woman to help you, as you constantly do in delicate affairs.’ He instanced, as a case in point, his own confidence in Queen Mary, and his master’s want of confidence, when the pair of them rode with her part of her way to Glasgow; and how he was entirely justified by her subsequent behaviour. It made little difference in the end, to be sure; but no doubt she would have been saved a good deal of distress if Bothwell had been as instructed as his lacquey. As it is, it is to be feared that he fretted her sadly. It was not only heartless to play upon her jealousy, to put her so sharply upon her honour, but it was bad policy on his part; for if the creature of your use starts a-quivering at the touch of your hand, how are you served if by your whip and spurs you set her plunging madly into the dark, shying and swerving and cracking her heart? You wear out your tool before the time. That is just what Bothwell did.