Old Huntly ran forward to the bed, fell on his knees beside it, and took the girl’s hand. The tears he now felt were kindlier, and he let them come. ‘Oh, if you and I could deal, my Queen,’ he said, ‘all Scotland should go laughing. If we could deal, as now we have, with the hearts’ doors open, and none between! Why, I see the brave days yet! I shall bring back Findlater, fear not for it; and there shall be Gordons about you like a green forest—and yourself the bonny, bonny rose bowered in the midst! God give your Majesty comfort, who have given back comfort and pride unto me!’
The Queen’s eyes shone with wet as she laughed her pleasure. ‘Go then, my lord; deal fairly by me.’
He left her there and then, swelling with pride, emotion, and vanity inflamed, meaning to do well if any man ever did. He brushed aside Lethington with a sweep of the arm—‘Clear a way there—clear a way!’
In this Gordon conflict the iniquities of Lord Bothwell were forgotten, for the Queen’s mind was now set upon kind offices. She took young Adam into her house and visited him every day. As you might have expected, where the lad was handsome and the lady predisposed to be generous, she looked more than she said, and said more than she need. Young Adam fell in love with this glimmering, murmuring, golden princess. Fell, do I say? He slipped, rather, as in summer one lets oneself slip into the warm still water. Even so slipped he, and was over the ears before he was aware. Whatever she may have said, he made mighty little reply: the Gordons were always modest before women, and this one but a boy. He hardly dared look at her when she came, though for a matter of three hours before he had never taken his eyes from the door through which she was to glide in upon him like a Queen of Fays. And the fragrance she carried about her, the wonder of her which filled the little chamber where he lay, the sense of a goddess unveiling, of daily miracle, of her stooping (glorious condescension!), and of his lifting-up—ah, let him who has deified a lady tell the glory if he dare! The work was done: she was amused, the miracle wrought. She had found him a sulky boy, she left him a budded knight. Here was one of the conquests she made every day without the drawing of a sword. Most women loved her, and all boys and girls. But although these are, after all, the pick of the world—to whom she was the Rose of roses—we must consider, unhappily, the refuse. They were the flies at the Honeypot.
Mary Livingstone, not seriously, chid her mistress. ‘Oh, fie! oh, fie!’ she would say. ‘Do you waste your sweet store on a bairn? They call you too fond already. Do you wish to have none but fools about you?’
‘If it is foolish to love me, child,’ said the Queen, pretending to pout, ‘you condemn yourself. And if it is foolish of me to love you, or to love Love—again you condemn yourself, who teach me day by day. Are you jealous of the little Gordon, or of the little Jean-Marie? Or is it Monsieur de Châtelard whom you fear?’
‘Châtelard, forsooth! A parrokeet!’
The Queen laughed. ‘If you are jealous, Mary Livingstone, you must cut off my hands and seal my mouth; for should you take away all my lovers, I should stroke the pillars of the house till they were warm, and kiss the maids in the kitchen until they were clean. I must love, my dear, and be loved: that I devoutly believe.’