She withdrew her hand from Sempill’s by leave, stooped over the fading lad and kissed his eyes. ‘Adieu, my truest love and last friend—adieu, adieu! I have been death to all who have had to do with me.’ She kissed him once more.
‘Sweet death,’ said Des-Essars.
‘Come,’ she said to Lord Sempill, and gave him her hand again. He led her away.
Des-Essars fell his length upon the floor. She would have turned back to him; they hurried her forward between them.
The door shut upon Queen Mary.
EPILOGUE
WHEREIN WE HAVE A GREAT MAN GREATLY MOVED
It is said that when the Earl of Moray, in France, received from the messengers sent out to him the news that he was chosen Regent of Scotland, he bowed his head in a very stately manner and said little more than ‘Sirs, I shall strive in this as in all things to do the Lord’s will.’ He added not one word which might enhance or impair so proper a declaration; he remained invisible to his friends for the three or four days he needed to be abroad; and when he set out for the north, travelled in secret and mostly by night—and still chose to keep apart. As secret in his hour of success as he had been in those of defeat, admirable as his sobriety may be, we must make allowances for the mortification of a learned man, Mr. George Buchanan, who, having laboured to be of the heralding party, found himself and his baggage of odes of no more account than any other body. Was the chilly piety of such a reception as my lord had vouchsafed them all the acknowledgment he cared to admit of ancient alliances, of sufferings shared, of hopes kept alive by mutual fostering? Could a man look forward to any community of mind in the future between a prince who would not recognise his old friends and those same tried friends frozen by such a blank reply to their embassage? Mr. Buchanan urged these questions upon his fellow-legate, Sir James Melvill of Halhill—a traveller and fine philosopher, who, with less latinity than the learned historian, had, I think, more phlegm. When Mr. Buchanan, fretfully exclaiming upon the isolation of his new master, went on to concern himself with poor Scotland’s case, and to muse aloud upon Kings Log and Stork, Sir James twiddled his thumbs; when the humanist paused for a reply, he got it. ‘Geordie, my man,’ said Sir James, ‘my counsel to you is to bide your good time, and when that time comes to ca’ canny, as we have it familiarly. Remember you, that when you sang your bit epithalamy at the marriage-door of Log, our late King, although he never stinted his largess (but rewarded you, in my opinion, abundantly), he had no notion in the world what you were about, and (as I believe) paid you the more that you might end the sooner. Late or soon you will be heard by our new gracious lord, and late or soon recompensed. He too will desire you to stop, my man: not because he does not understand you, but because he understands you too well. Mark my words now.’ This was a curious prophecy of Sir James’s, in one sense curiously fulfilled. In the very middle of his oration the orator was desired to stop by the subject of it.
Not until the Regent was in Edinburgh did a chance present itself to Mr. Buchanan of declaiming any of his Latin. This, be it said, was no fault of Mr. Buchanan’s, who, if abhorrence of the old order and acceptance of the new, expressed with passion at all times of the day, can entitle a man to notice, should certainly have had it before. Some, indeed, think that he got it by insisting upon having it; others that he proved his title by exhibiting the heads of a remarkable work which afterwards made some stir in the world: he was, at any rate, summoned to the Castle, and in the presence of the Lord Regent of Scotland, of the Lords Morton, Crawfurd, Atholl, Argyll, and Lindsay, of the Lairds of Grange and Lethington, and of others too numerous to mention, was allowed to deliver himself of an oration, long meditated, in the Ciceronian manner.