Over that altar hung Christ, enigmatic upon His cross. The red priest bent his head down to his book, and made God apace.
The Queen’s lips moved. ‘My Saviour Christ, I offer Thee the intention of my heart, a clean oblation. If I do amiss in error, O Bread of Heaven, visit it not upon me. I have been offended, I have been disobeyed; they call upon me to claim my just requital. But be not Thou offended with me, my Lord, and pardon Thou my disobedience. As for my punishment, I suffer it in seeking to punish.’
It is not often that women pray in words: an urgency, a subjection, a passionate reception is the most they do—and the best. But she prayed so now, because she felt the need of justifying herself before Heaven, and the ability to do it. For Bothwell was in far Liddesdale, and she on her throne.
In three days’ time she was to go to the North; and, though the country knew it not, she would go in force to punish the Gordons. You may judge by her prayers whether she was satisfied with the work. Plainly she was not. Her anger had had time to cool; she might have forgotten the very name of the clan, except that their men had had honest faces, and that two of them had certainly loved her once. But she had not been allowed to forget: the record remained, held up ever before her eyes in the white hand of Lord James. Contumacy! Contumacy! Old Huntly had been traitor before, when he trafficked with the enemies of her mother, and tried to sell herself to the English king. The Gordons would not surrender; they had mated with the Hamiltons, a stock next to hers for the throne. Was there not a shameful plot here? Would she not be stifled between these two houses? Yes, yes, she knew all that. But they were Catholics, they had shown her honest faces, two of them had loved her. She was not satisfied; she must have a sign from heaven.
God was made, the bell proclaimed Him enthroned, Queen Mary bowed her head. Now, now, if the Gordons were true men, let God make a sign! The tale was told that once, when a priest lifted up the Host above his head, the thin film dissolved, and took flesh in the shape of a naked child, who stood, burning white, upon the man’s two hands. Let some such marvel fall now! Intimacies between God and the Prince had been known. She hid her face, laid down her soul; the vague swam over her, the dark—a swooning, drowning sense. In that, for a moment, as vivid clouds chased each other across her field, she saw a face, a shape—mocking red mouth, vivacious, satirical hands, the gleam of two twinkling eyes: Bothwell, hued like a fiend, shadowing the world. She shuddered; God passed over, as the bell called up the people. With them she lifted her head, stiffened herself. The spell was broken. Without being more superstitious than her brethren, she may be pardoned for finding in this experience an ominous beginning of adventure.
Nevertheless, she so faced the heights of her task that, on the day appointed, she set out as bravely as to a hunting of stags. Jeddart pikes, bowmen from the Forest, her Lothian bodyguard—she had some five hundred men about her; too many for a progress, too few to make war. She herself rode in hunting trim, with two maids, two pages, two esquires; her brother, of course, in command; with him, of course, the Secretary. At fixed points along the road certain lords joined her: Atholl at Stirling, Glencairn and Ruthven at Perth, these with their companies. Lying at Coupar-Angus, at Glamis, at Edzell, her spirits rose as she breasted the rising country, saw the cloud-shadowed hills, the swollen rivers, the wind-swept trees, the sullen moors, the rocks. She grew happy even, for motion, newness, and physical exertion always excited her, and she was never happy unless she was excited. No fatigue daunted her. She sat out the driving days of rain, bent neither to the heat nor to the cold fog. She was always in front, always looking forward, seemed like the keen breath of war, driven before it as the wind by a rain-storm. Lethington likened her to Diana on Taygetus shrilling havoc; but the Lord James said: ‘Such similitudes are distasteful. We are serious men upon a serious business.’ She rode astraddle like a young man, longed for a breastplate and steel bonnet. She made Ruthven exercise her with the broadsword, teach her to stamp her foot and cry, ‘Ha! a touch!’ and cajoled her brother into letting her sleep one night afield. Folded in a military plaid, so indeed she did; and watched with thrills the stars shoot their autumn flights, and listened to the owls calling each other as they coursed the shrew-mice over the moor. She pillowed her head on Mary Livingstone’s knee at last, and fell asleep at about three o’clock in the morning.
In the grey mirk—sharply cold, and a fine mist drizzling—Lethington and his master came to rouse her. Mary Livingstone lifted a finger of warning. The Queen was soundly asleep, smiling a little, with parted lips and the hasty breathing of a child. Mary Seton, too, was deep, her face buried in her arm. The two men looked down at the group.
‘Come away, my lord: give them time,’ said the Secretary.
But my Lord James did not hear him. He stood broodingly, muttering to himself: ‘A girl’s frolic—this romping, fond girl! And Scotland’s neck for her footstool—and earnest men for her pastime. O King eternal, is it just? Man!’ he said aloud, ‘there’s no reason in this.’
Mr. Secretary misunderstood him, not observing his wild looks. ‘Give them a short half-hour, my lord. There are two of them sleeping; and this poor watcher hath the need of it.’