“No, madam, I will soon relieve you of my presence,” replied the Lady Lochleven; “and while with you, my aged limbs can still better brook fatigue, than my mind stoop to accept of constrained courtesy.”
“Nay, Lady of Lochleven, if you take it so deeply,” said the Queen, rising and motioning to her own vacant chair, “I would rather you assumed my seat—you are not the first of your family who has done so.”
The Lady of Lochleven curtsied a negative, but seemed with much difficulty to suppress the angry answer which rose to her lips.
During this sharp conversation, the page's attention had been almost entirely occupied by the entrance of Catherine Seyton, who came from the inner apartment, in the usual dress in which she attended upon the Queen, and with nothing in her manner which marked either the hurry or confusion incident to a hasty change of disguise, or the conscious fear of detection in a perilous enterprise. Roland Graeme ventured to make her an obeisance as she entered, but she returned it with an air of the utmost indifference, which, in his opinion, was extremely inconsistent with the circumstances in which they stood towards each other.—“Surely,” he thought, “she cannot in reason expect to bully me out of the belief due to mine own eyes, as she tried to do concerning the apparition in the hostelry of Saint Michael's—I will try if I cannot make her feel that this will be but a vain task, and that confidence in me is the wiser and safer course to pursue.”
These thoughts had passed rapidly through his mind, when the Queen, having finished her altercation with the Lady of the castle, again addressed him—“What of the revels at Kinross, Roland Graeme? Methought they were gay, if I may judge from some faint sounds of mirth and distant music, which found their way so far as these grated windows, and died when they entered them, as all that is mirthful must—But thou lookest as sad as if thou hadst come from a conventicle of the Huguenots!”
“And so perchance he hath, madam,” replied the Lady of Lochleven, at whom this side-shaft was lanched. “I trust, amid yonder idle fooleries, there wanted not some pouring forth of doctrine to a better purpose than that vain mirth, which, blazing and vanishing like the crackling of dry thorns, leaves to the fools who love it nothing but dust and ashes.”
“Mary Fleming,” said the Queen, turning round and drawing her mantle about her, “I would that we had the chimney-grate supplied with a fagot or two of these same thorns which the Lady of Lochleven describes so well. Methinks the damp air from the lake, which stagnates in these vaulted rooms, renders them deadly cold.”
“Your Grace's pleasure shall be obeyed,” said the Lady of Lochleven; “yet may I presume to remind you that we are now in summer?”
“I thank you for the information, my good lady,” said the Queen; “for prisoners better learn their calender from the mouth of their jailor, than from any change they themselves feel in the seasons.—Once more, Roland Graeme, what of the revels?”
“They were gay, madam,” said the page, “but of the usual sort, and little worth your Highness's ear.”