Part 11

On the day succeeding that we have mentioned, when the famous scene took place at the dial-stone in the royal garden, the lieutenant of the archers, watching a time when the indefatigable royal _roue_ left Mariette alone, approached her. She was seated on a stone sofa; and she who was wont to have eyes only for him, neither saw nor heard him, till he lightly touched her soft shoulder, and then she raised her blushing face, which immediately became ashy pale.

"Thou seemest absent, dear Mariette," said he.

"I wish that thou wert absent, too," she replied, pettishly, plucking leaf by leaf a flower the king had given her.

"Mariette, look at me. What hath come over thee? Art thou bewitched?" asked the young man, in a voice of anger and tenderness curiously blended; for he could not stoop to acknowledge the suspicions which filled his heart with bitterness and rage. "Wherefore art thou now so strange, so altered, so reserved, to one who loves thee so well, whose every thought is of thee, and whose whole heart is full of thee? Oh, unkind Mariette!"

She changed colour and trembled; but, without raising her dark eyes, continued in confusion and abstraction to pluck the leaves of the flower.

"Grant me patience, Heaven!" muttered her impetuous lover, whose sorrow still overpowered his rising wrath; "dearest Mariette, the gossips of our court (God's malison on them!) say that thy heart is changed towards me; is--is this true?"

"No."

"By St. Bothan! that no sounds too like yes to mean anything else," exclaimed Bolton, giving way to his passion and jealousy; "but if thou forgettest my faithful love, and preferrest the passing admiration of this silken squire o' dames--this carpet-king and holiday moth--whose proffered love is alike insulting and dishonourable, marry, come up! I say, Mademoiselle Mariette--I wish thee joy!" and, with a profound bow and glance of irony, he turned away.

Stung by his words and manner, which were partly assumed, Mariette Hubert, who had been repenting the too serious encouragement given, and still more a fatal promise made to the young king, now bent all her thoughts upon him, and endeavoured to banish Hepburn from her memory; while he, with all a lover's indecision, walked slowly away, deploring in his heart the outburst, which he was too proud and still too indignant to repair. Mariette gazed after him with her cheek flushing, and her dark eyes full of fire, and so they parted--for the last time.

"Fool that I was to love a Frenchwoman!" thought the lover.

That night, as was his wont and duty, Hepburn, as lieutenant of the guard, made his round of the archer sentinels posted at the various gates of the palace, which was then, as we have said, a very irregular but spacious edifice, containing five courts, with various offices, stables, falconries, and kennels attached.

The night was dark and still, and a few large drops of rain plashed on the pavement as he passed through the palace yard; while the red sheet-lightning, flashing in the north, revealed at times the black outline of the Calton hill. Hepburn, in half armour, with his visor up, entered the gardens by that ancient doorway which faces the south, and is ornamented by the Scottish arms and order of the Thistle. The clock of the chapel tolled ten, and on passing the corner of James V.'s tower, he looked up to the tall casements of the Queen's apartments, to discover the usual light in that of Mariette, though he knew she would not be visible to him to-night. Every window was dark as that of the deserted chamber in which Rizzio was murdered, and the floor of which was yet stained with his blood.

As Hepburn stood among the shrubbery, he perceived two figures approach with all the caution of conspirators; and at once discovered one of them, from his stature and bearing, to be the king. He was muffled in a mantle, and wore a mask and coat-of-mail. The other was his favourite page, Master Andrew Macaige, and they carried between them a long light ladder, which they had purloined from the stable yard.

Darnley clapped his hands, and then, from amid the square colossal mass of James V.'s tower, which was all buried in darkness and obscurity, a single ray of light shot forth into the garden, a female appeared, and, while thoughts of grief, and wrath, and horror, poured like a deluge upon the mind of Hepburn, he recognised his long-loved Mariette Hubert! He remained in a stupor, and heard the ladder jar as the adventurous prince placed it against the wall, and saw him, after wrapping his mantle round his left arm, and belting his sword higher up, ascend with considerable agility into the apartment, after which the window was immediately closed, and the light extinguished. The page carried off the ladder to a secret place, not three yards from where Hepburn stood, and, rolling himself up in his mantle, lay composedly down upon it to sleep until he was summoned by the king.

The spell that had weighed like an incubus upon the faculties of the lover, now passed away. His first impulse prompted him to put his foot upon the page's neck and strangle him; his second, to wait the reappearance of the king, and slay him without mercy. But these fierce promptings were left unacted, and he turned away to seek Bothwell, of whose secret hopes and long-cherished rivalry and hatred to Darnley he had seen so many proofs. He raised his visor higher, for he felt almost suffocated as he hurried through the cloisters. There he met Hob of Ormiston, also searching for the Earl, who, an archer informed them, had just entered the Artillery Park.

With a manner that was marked by the deepest excitement, the young knight related, not very coherently, the substance of the preceding affair; and, unseen in the dark, a quiet laugh spread over Hob's malicious visage at the wrath and disappointment of his friend; but it was otherwise with the Earl, who foresaw in all this something to further his own ambitious schemes.

"I sought thee, Bothwell," said Hob, "to say, that an especial gentleman of the Lord Morton's train (no other than the knight of Spott), hath come with the Earl's best commendations to your lordship, and to say that he and the Lord Moray, and one or two others thou wottest of, are even now assembled at the castle of Craigmillar, where the queen went about sunset, and where they crave your lordship's suit, service, and attendance. I have ordered our horses!"--

"Thou ravest, Ormiston. Morton and Moray are my mortal foes; and truly no fault is it of mine that they breathe the breath of this life to-nigh! Anent what is this meeting?"

"The Lord Darnley," replied Ormiston, lowering his gruff voice.

"Ha!"

"And the best mode to rid Scotland and the queen too of his foolish misgovernment, and the tyranny of Earl Matthew and the house of Lennox, who, thou knowest, would gladly cut off thee and them, and every body but themselves, if an opportunity occurred."

"By Jove, Hob! thou art a rash knave, and a bold one, to speak thus; but thou knowest that the queen declined peremptorily the divorce offered her by several Lords of the Parliament."

"True; hence this meeting, at which thou art expected to be leader and chief, to obtain"----

"What?"

"A divorce from Darnley! that Mary may marry again, for her own happiness and the commonweal of Scotland. Thou well knowest how miserable this popinjay squire maketh her. And are we--bearded men who rebelled against James V.--to submit to this new caterpillar? I trow not!"

Bothwell's bosom glowed as Ormiston spoke; but he said sadly--

"Thou forgettest she is of the Church of Rome, and that, being so, she may not wed again. So what availeth a divorce?"

"Psha! 'tis long since I thought much about the Church of Rome."

"I am sure his Holiness, poor carle! deplored thy loss; but here is French Paris with our horses. Dismount, Nick, and give thy dapple to Bolton; so now for Craigmillar--ho! I go at all events."

They mounted and set forth by the old bridle road that ascended the hill of St. John, and in a few minutes the great facade of the palace, the tall and spectral edifices of the Canongate, the city, with its walls and gates and twinkling lights, was left behind, as they debouched upon the open country, which was all wood, and marsh, and pasture land, from the outer walls to the castle of the Provost. On their right, for a mile or two, lay the common muir of the city, bordered by the bleak hills of Braid; and on the left lay Salisbury's ridgy craigs and Arthur's seat, with the deep blue loch of Duddingstone washing its base, reflecting the stars in its bosom, and the dark shadow of the wooded knoll, where, then a ruin, lay the old Saxon kirk in solitude.

Skirting the lake, they struck into the horse-way, that, between thickets of fir, led straight to the venerable stronghold of the knights of Gourtoun, which they saw looming before them in the starlight, with its great square keep and double flanking towers, barbican, and ditch.

*CHAPTER XX.*

*THE PLOT THICKENS--THE CONFERENCE OF CRAIGMILLAR.*

There's many a feud still slumbering in its ashes, Whose embers yet are red. Nobles we have Stout as old Greysteel, and as hot as Bothwell. _Auchindrane._

The celebrated conference of Craigmillar, is recorded too particularly in our national history to be expatiated on here; nevertheless, a brief notice is necessary to preserve the unity of the Magister Absalom's narrative.

In the apartment of the Lord Argyle, in that old feudal fortress, met Bothwell and his brother-in-law Huntly, with Moray--openly their friend, and secretly their foe--for frequently had they conspired each other's death by secret fraud and open violence; and Moray had personally defeated, and caused the death of the old Earl, George of Huntly, at the recent battle of Corrichie. There, too, came the secretary of state, the great Sir William Maitland of Lethington, who, notwithstanding his skill in government and statecraft, lost his head in the desperate game of politics seven years after.

This conference was held around the dais on which stood the couch of Argyle, who was labouring under a severe illness.

Long and eloquently the talented secretary expatiated on the evils that had resulted to the Scottish people, from Mary's ill-assorted marriage with the young and profligate Lord of Darnley; the rebellion it had brought forth among the adherents of Chatelherault, in the west; among the Gordons in the north; and the general discontent it had occasioned by the peculiar religious tenets of the house of Lennox--a marriage against which Master Knox had bitterly and abusively inveighed, and which, to the loving, trusting, and devoted Mary, had become a source of hourly misery; for the passing love of the profligate, unmindful of her exalted rank, her matchless beauty, her sweetness of manner and charming vivacity, had wandered to many inferior and unworthy objects. Among these he had squandered his patrimony, and the revenues of a crown which he disgraced; thus, completely estranging the heart of the queen, by a career of insult, neglect, and riot; by the hourly scandals he committed in her palaces, and chief of all by the murder of her harmless secretary--thus, making the breach irreparable by his lacking the art and condescension to repair it.

He spoke, too, of those powerful barons who were still enduring banishment as accessories to the destruction of the hapless Rizzio, whose overweening pride and Italian birth had been his only crime; barons, noble in descent and venerated in name--the kinsmen of those he addressed; the veteran Kerr, whose ponderous ghisarma had done his country such service at Pinkiecleugh; Patrick Lord Ruthven, then lying ill of a deadly sickness in an English frontier village; the Laird of Pitarrow and the Tutor of Pitcurr all brave Scottish knights, who were enduring great misery in the land of our hereditary foes, by the seizure of their ancestral castles and the confiscation of their estates; and who, by the subversion of the house of Lennox, would be restored to their country and friends, and released from a degrading position among Englishmen--and the change he would propose, could only be effected by the divorce of the young queen from her cousin.

The Earl of Moray, (who, with Morton, had been the secretary's active colleague in the Rizzio murder,) for private and ambitious views of his own, from an early period had vehemently opposed her marriage, and even proceeded so far as to take up arms against it in 1565. He still, as we are told, "pursued the old conspiracy against the king's life," urging the divorce with all his eloquence; and it may easily be believed that, though his mortal foe, Bothwell seconded him on this occasion with an ardour the source of which the wily Earl was not slow in perceiving; and, together, they spared not the powers of invention and persuasion in obviating Argyle's many doubts that the queen "would consent to a measure so indelicate and unpleasant as a divorce."

Full of ardour, as this new ray of hope dawned upon him at a time so opportune, the Earl was more eloquent even than the subtle secretary; but the morning sun shone through the barred windows, as red amid October clouds he rose above Soltra edge, ere they came to a decision; and the Earl of Moray, and Lethington, the Machiavel of Mary's court, undertook to urge the measure upon her with all their eloquence and skill. Bothwell, with proper delicacy, and policy too, declined being one of the deputation, for whose success he would have prayed, had he not forgotten the way, in these days of reformation and misrule.

They left the apartment on their mission, for the queen was now up, and said to be walking in the castle garden, where she daily offered food to four stately swans that floated on the lake, which, in the form of a gigantic P, (the first letter of Preston, the baron's name,) occupied one half of the ground. It is still distinctly traceable to the southward of the ruins, and was then supplied by the same springs that filled the moat on the north.

Bothwell leaned against a window, watching the sunrise, and he could hear his own heart beating. Exhausted by illness, and the fatigue of the conference, Argyle, after his page had given him a drink of ptisan from a silver cup, had fallen sound asleep. Huntly, perplexed and full of bitter thoughts, turned over the leaves of an old brass-bound and wooden-boarded tome--The Chronicle of ye novel and valiant Earle of Flanders quho married the Devil; and he lay back, half-hidden in the deep recess of the tower window, and never once addressed his brother-in-law, to whose ambitious aspirations, and open neglect of his beautiful sister, he was now no stranger. And thus, though his eyes were on Jehan Trepperel's black-letter pages, it was perfectly apparent, by his knitted brows and sullen silence, that his thoughts were elsewhere.

The sun soared high in the blue vault; white as snow the morning mists rolled up from the dell that was traversed by Lothian burn, on the margin of which, a little hamlet of neatly ornamented cottages had been built for the French attendants of Mary; and these, though changed in aspect, are still known as Little France. The pale smoke ascended in columns into the pure air from the village of Niddry Mareschal, which, with its chapel, dedicated to the Holy Virgin by Wauchope, baron of Niddry, nestled among the brown autumnal copsewood to the east. The woods of Edmiston were bare and yellow; and the hill on which the lords of Craigmillar had reared up their strong square tower of the twelfth century, was arid with whins, and gloomy with clumps of the dark Scottish fir.

The time, and importance of the circumstances under which he viewed it, deeply impressed every feature of that morning landscape on the Earl's memory. His fate, and that of Scotland too, hung perhaps upon the queen's decision; and love and pride, ambition to achieve, and revenge to gratify, all kindled a glow of anxiety in his bosom, that amounted to torture.

Slowly the minutes passed on!

An hour wore away; he thought they would never reappear. Argyle still slept, and Huntly had at last become absorbed in the pages of "The Valziant Earle;" for, thanks to the tutorship of old Gavin Dunbar, he could read a little.

At last the deputation returned; Huntly closed his book, Argyle woke up, and Moray gave one of his cold and mild smiles on seeing Bothwell's paleness and anxiety.

"She hath consented, sirs?" he asked in a breathless tone.

"Nay, my lord, she declined so peremptorily that we felt our heads shake on our shoulders," replied the secretary; "and, by the rood! I never knew my statecraft and natural oiliness of tongue so far fail me in doing service to myself and friends. So here endeth all hope of a divorce; for, though King Henry hateth and feareth her, as a burnt child doth the fire, and though she wept bitterly--yea, like an abandoned Dido, at his coldness and cruelty, and small love for her--she avows that she will rather die than divorce him."

"And wherefore, thinkest thou, Sir William?"

"He was her first love, and only one; and, changed though he be, her heart yet yearneth towards him; for though a queen, we find her a very woman yet."

"Then farewell, my lords," said the Earl, assuming his cloak and mantle; "I must wend townward betimes;" and he hurried to the court-yard, summoning Ormiston and Hepburn, who had been stretched on benches by the hall fire, the one asleep, and the other nursing his wrath. They all mounted and galloped back to the city.

"Well, my lord, how went the conference?" asked Hob.

"She hath declined--proudly and wrathfully declined!"

"Cock and pie!"

"Yea, Ormiston, with anger and with tears."

"All woman's caprice. Tears! Tush! they should give thee hope. The world"--

"Malediction on the world; it smiles on all but me."

"For thy comfort, I will tell thee a project which hath just been put into my head.'

"By whom?"

"The devil, who, as thou knowest, never lies dead in the ditch. Approach me"--and, raising his visor, Ormiston whispered something to the Earl, who started; and Hepburn, who watched them with a keen eye, exclaimed--

"Speak forth, Hob of Ormiston; for I see there is assassination in thine eye, and here stand I, John Hepburn of Bolton, ready to be thine abettor, in any deed of stouthrief or bloodshed; for I am frantic in heart, frenzied in head, and ready to ride above my stirrups in the blood of the Stuarts of Lennox!"

"No, no," replied the Earl; "Hepburn, thou hast thine own wrongs, and mayest avenge them; but Ormiston, what is this thou hast said to me? No, no, get thee behind me, thou tall limb of Satan, I will have none of thy tempting."

Ormiston gave one of his deep hoarse laughs that shook every joint of the mail in which his muscular figure was sheathed; and, spurring their steeds, they rode furiously back to the city, by the old road that then passed close to the solitary chapel of St. John the Baptist, on the burgh-muir, and entered Edinburgh by the Old Horse Wynd, a street that led to the porch of Holyrood Palace.

*CHAPTER XXI.*

*FATHER TARBET.*

Let us be patient! these severe afflictions Not from the ground arise; But often times celestial benedictions Assume this dark disguise. _Longfellow._

Three months passed away, and the spring of 1567 was at hand.

Bothwell's love for Mary had grown more and more a part of his existence, fostered as it was by the cunning of her brother the Earl of Moray, whose boundless ambition made him hope that ultimately something great might accrue to himself, were this wild passion properly moulded; for Moray had early formed a hope of usurping the throne--a hope based upon the queen's unpopularity as a catholic, his own great influence, and the helpless infancy of his nephew, James, the little crown prince of Scotland.

"He hated Darnley," says Robertson; "and was no less hated by him. In order to be revenged, he entered into a sudden friendship with Bothwell, his ancient and mortal enemy. He encouraged him to crime, by giving him hopes of marrying the queen. All this was done with a design to throw upon the queen herself the imputation of being accessory to the murder (of Darnley), and under that pretext to destroy Bothwell next--to depose and imprison her, and to retain the sceptre which he had wrested out of her hands."

The "godly" Earl saw all this in the distance; and the mistaken Bothwell, whose daring hopes and unruly ambition he fostered and cajoled, now sought his society as sedulously as before he had shunned it. He had long been rid of Anna, who had been conveyed to her native Norway, in charge of Christian Alborg, in the Biornen; and as for his Countess, who resided in her father's solitary castle of Strathbolgie, among the woods and wilds of the Garioch, he never bestowed a thought on her. While her own brother, borne away by the tide of politics, and infected by the spirit of ambition and intrigue that pervaded all, had resolved to sacrifice even her to the giant projects formed by Bothwell and the nobles of his faction.

Mary had resided alternately in Holyrood, and at her summer castle of Craigmillar; but since the scene by the garden-dial, had never again given the Earl an opportunity of addressing her alone; and, even in the presence of her courtiers, she curbed her natural vivacity and gaiety of manner, and addressed him with marked reserve.

In the old tower of Holyrood, enclosed by strong grilles and vigilant archers of the guard, Konrad passed three months in hopeless and tedious monotony--hopeless, because he knew not what might be his fate; and tedious, because unmarked by any change, save the day-dawn and the sunset, the morning visit of the archer who brought his breakfast, and the nightly one of the warder, who secured all gates and doors when St. Giles' bell struck ten.

So passed the time.

Winter came, and the bleak summit of the Calton was covered with snow; the trees around the palace, and the old orchards that crowned the Abbeyhill, were leafless and bare; and drearily looked the chapel-royal and ancient cloisters, with snow mantling their carved battlements and time-worn knosps and pinnacles.

Then the poor prisoner sighed for his native hills, and night, after night his dreams brought them before him in all their wild sublimity and picturesque desolation. Again he was among them in all the happiness of boyhood, with Anna by his side, as she had beea in the days when first he learned to love her--when they had sought the wild daisy and the mountain bee by the green base of the lofty Dovrefeldt, whose summit was glistening with impending glaciers, and crowned by eternal snows; whose old primeval forests were the abode of the bear and eagle, and its unfathomed caverns, of Druid ghosts, of demon dwarfs, and one-eyed gnomes; whose sides were terrible with chasms split by the hammer of Thor, and overshadowed by the petrified giants whom, in the days of other years, his breath had turned into stone. In his dreams, too, he heard the dash of the free and boundless ocean that rolled on his native shore; and he saw the vast Moskenstrom, that dark and fearful abyss, around which for ever boil the eternal waves; in whose deep whirl the largest wrecks are sucked like reeds down--down--to be carried through the bowels of the inner earth, and vomited on the desolate shores of the Bothnian Gulf; and from these stirring dreams of his distant home, and the love and freedom of his boyhood, poor Konrad awoke, in agony to find himself a captive and a slave, a prisoner without a crime; in a foreign land, unpitied and uncared for, and without, a hope of reprieve, save death. Often he exclaimed aloud, as he clasped his lettered hands; for loneliness had taught him to commune with himself--