A very strong guard, with pikes presented, hedged her in. She reached Holyrood on foot, and was shut into her own cabinet. It was empty and dark but for the candle they had left with her. She snatched it up, and began a mad, fruitless hunt for her casket. It was not in its place—it was nowhere. She hunted until she dropped. She began to tear at herself and to shriek. Doom! Doom! She must be burned. They had taken her coffer. She was alone—condemned and alone.
Then Des-Essars crawled out of the dark on his hands and one knee, dragging a broken leg after him, and fell close beside her, and kissed the hem of her petticoat.
[12] The casket, which was not at Holyrood, is supposed to have been secured by Bothwell in the Castle, where it was to be found in due time. But Des-Essars did not know that. Nor is it clear to me how Bothwell had found opportunity to get it there.
CHAPTER XII
ADDOLORATA
She sat on the floor, and had his head at rest on her lap. Her hands were upon him, and so he rested. The great tears fell fast and wetted his hair.
Her grief was silent and altogether gentle. Still as she sat there, looking before her with wide unwinking eyes and lips a little parted, she was unconscious of what she was suffering or had suffered: all about her was the blankness of dark, and without her knowledge the night fell; the dusk like a vast cloak gathered round about her, fold over fold; and still she sat and looked at nothing with her wide unwinking eyes. Slowly they filled and brimmed, and slowly the great tears, as they ripened, fell. There were no other forms of grief, none of grief’s high acts: only their bitter symbol—lamentation embodied in tears, and nakedly there.
‘Nay, move not your hands—nay, touch my brows: my head aches—I am blind.’ The lad supine in her lap pleaded in whispers.
Gentle-voiced she answered him. ‘There is no work left for my hands to do but to tend thee, my dear.’