‘Be sure that I tell him, madam.’
‘Good dreams to you, Mr. Secretary.’
‘And no dreams at all to your Majesty—but sweet, careless sleep!’
The Queen, turning for consolation to her Livingstone, won the relief of tears. They talked in low tones to each other for a little while, the mistress’s head on the maid’s shoulder, and her two hands held. The Queen was out of heart with Scotland, with love, with all this skirting of perils. She was for prudence just now—prudence and the English road. Then came in the tirewoman for the unrobing, and then a final argument for England.
Monsieur de Châtelard, who truly (as he had told Des-Essars) was a foredoomed man, lay hidden at this moment where no man should have lain unsanctified. I shall not deal with him and his whereabouts further than to say that, just as Frenchmen are slow to see a joke, so they are loath to let it go. He had proposed on this, of all nights of the year, to push his joke of the ballroom into chamber-practice. Some further silly babble about ‘wifely duty’ was to extenuate his great essay. If jokes had been his common food, I suppose he would have known the smell of a musty one. As it was, he had to suffer in the fire which old Huntly and his Hamilton-marriage had lit: his joke was burnt up as it left his lips. For the Queen’s words, when she found him, clung about him like flames about an oil-cask, scorched him, blistered him, shrivelled him up. He fell before them, literally, and lay, dry with fear, at her discretion. She spurned him with her heel. ‘Oh, you weed,’ she said, ‘not worthy to be burned, go, or I send for the maids with besoms to wash you into the kennel.’ He crept away to the shipping next day, pressing only the hand of Des-Essars, who could hardly refuse him. ‘His only success on this miserable occasion,’ the young man wrote afterwards, ‘was to divert the Queen’s rage from Monsieur de Gordon, and to turn her thoughts, by ever so little more, in the direction of the English marriage. He was one of those fools whose follies serve to show every man more or less ridiculous, just as a false sonnet makes sonneteering jejune.’
Lent opened, therefore, with omens; and with more came Lady Day and the new year. The Gordons, being summoned, did not answer; the Gordons, then, were put to the horn. The Queen was bitter as winter against them, with no desire but to have them at her knees. As for lovers and their loves, after George Gordon, after the crowning shame of Monsieur de Châtelard, ice-girdled Artemis was not chaster than she. My Lord of Bothwell, after an essay or two, shrugged and sought the border; the Queen was all for high alliances just now, and Mr. Secretary, their apostle, was in favour. He was hopeful, as he told Mary Fleming, to see two Queens at York; and who could say what might not come of that? And while fair Fleming wondered he was most hopeful, for like a delicate tree he needed genial air to make him bud. You saw him at such seasons at his best—a shrewd, nervous man, with a dash of poetry in him. The Queen of England always inspired him; he was frequently eloquent upon the theme. His own Queen talked freely about her ‘good sister,’ wrote her many civil letters, and treasured a few stately replies. One wonders, reading them now, that they should have found warmer quarters than a pigeon-hole, that they could ever have lain upon Queen Mary’s bosom and been beat upon by her ardent heart. Yet so it was. They know nothing of Queen Mary who know her not as the Huntress, never to be thrown out by a cold scent. Mr. Secretary, knowing her well, harped as long as she would dance. ‘Ah, madam, there is a golden trader! Thence you may win an argosy indeed. What a bargain to be struck there! Sister kingdoms, sister queens—oh, if the Majesty of England were but lodged in a man’s heart! But so in essence it is. Her royal heart is like a strong fire, leaping within a frame of steel. And your Grace’s should be the jewel which that fire would guard, the Cor Cordis, the Secret of the Rose, the Sweetness in the Strong!’
Mary Fleming, glowing to hear such periods, saw her mistress catch light from them.
‘You speak well and truly,’ said Queen Mary. ‘I would I had the Queen of England for my husband; I would love her well.’ She spoke softly, blushing like a maiden.