The Queen's Caprice Read online

  “I can but watch,” he said.

  Her gaiety clouded over, her voice became sad.

  “Come apart with me, James, into the — no, you will not enter the chapel nor my oratory. I thought if we prayed together it would make these tangles easier to unravel, but I had forgotten for a while that you are a heretic.”

  He was not offended at this absurdity. She led him down the corridor, their fingers linked together, into a tall room which their father had used. The shelves were filled by fine clasped books with gold stamped backs and long markers hanging from the seldom opened pages. The narrow lancet window looked on the park where from this distance May leaves looked like a gaudy veil on the green boughs. Moray remembered that winter day when he had stood in the midst of that park and seen the hare leer at him, and his thoughts were full of sorcery, of witchcraft, and of infernal incitements. Yet he put these away from him and faced the woman, quietly putting before her the claims of reason, of prudence, and of common sense. Then his rhetoric was broken, his voice faltered and fell silent. He perceived that she, sitting at the narrow table where her father had often mourned in a brooding solitude, was sighing sadly.

  A compassionate fondness overwhelmed him, everything was forgotten in a terror lest this brilliant, brittle creature should languish, fade, and perhaps die. Lately his secret, anxious scrutiny had noticed her as much altered, not so swift and laughing, falling sometimes into melancholy, her dignity changed into false merriment, her lively speech overcast.

  She was whispering in French to herself and he could not understand what she said, for her voice was so low, her lips hidden behind the shielding hands. He offered her in eager single-heartedness all that he had to offer — his talents, his power, his strength, his influence, his wealth, the promise that he had made so often before, to keep Scotland and the throne for her and for her only.

  “I know you think I have worked because of ambition, Mary, and love of authority, but that is not so, or only partly so. It is for you, you only!”

  She looked up at him; her face, marred by tears, was the colour of a pearl. He had his second ecstasy; he believed that they understood each other perfectly. She accepted his homage and his assurance that he would be able to perform with triumphant success all that he promised. Nothing was any longer dark or confused between them. But she withdrew herself from this clarity, which for that second he had believed transfigured their relations.

  He began to smile; he knew that she was going to use him, to lull him, perhaps to flatter. He flung out his hand sternly and said;

  “No! I’ll be neither cheated nor soothed.”

  She touched her moist eyes fastidiously with her handkerchief, “I am going to speak to you of Earl Bothwell,” she smiled. “He never came to answer the charges against him. I think he has returned to France.”

  “It often pleases you,” returned Moray, livid, “when I talk to you seriously, to put Earl Bothwell before me. While I rule in Scotland he will not stay long, even on the Border.”

  “While you rule,” said the Queen under her breath.

  “So I said, Mary — while I rule! Take care, my child, how you displace me and make another your master.”

  He left her with a firm and resolute step.

  *

  The Queen remained alone in the little closet where she was sure no one would find her. She would not, after all, go to the council chamber to-day; very likely they would not miss her. It would not matter; they took no heed of what she said, she had no influence over any of them. She felt towards them all a deep hostility.

  She was not interested in Scotland nor in its inhabitants. Sometimes she thought that she hated the country, though she liked the rides between the hills, over the heather, and beside the riverlets; she liked even sometimes the misty, rainy weather, the high winds. She had contrived to get some of the palaces to her liking, yet what was the country to her but an antique relic, handed down from one of her forbears to another until at last it came to rest in her frail, indifferent hands. Whatever her contempt of the country she would be queen in it; since she could not rule in France she would rule in Scotland.

  She thought of the father whom she had never seen, who had sat in this closet with his melancholy reflections, his ambitious designs mute in his mind. A gallant, brilliant, handsome man, dead of a broken heart. The same malady had vanquished her grandfather. Beyond that, all the kings from whom she was descended had died violently.

  She rose, sighed, and put her hands on her waist. She hated making plans or looking ahead. When the crisis came she would make and follow out a rapid, clever decision. Taken by surprise she could always act with promptitude and courage, but to plan ahead, think out something prudent and cunning, that she cared for not at all. Yet she liked beguiling and deceiving people, weaving nets of looks and glances and sighs and half-heard words about them; this, to have any pleasure in it, must be done carelessly in a matter of a moment, on impulse.

  She turned over in her mind with slow relish the recollection of the emotion of the man who had just stood beside her, the man who should have been a great prince, who was also a child of the king who had once mused in this quiet closet.

  She liked to think she had his tormented but steadfast love to fall back on. That, and the sly love of Maitland, had a different quality from any other passion she had inspired. She believed that she could not exhaust it, that she might do as she chose and always find this devoted love for her dominant in the heart and mind of those two men. Moray would do as he had promised — hold her steady on her throne.

  And for the rest of it? She sighed again, walking up and down. Moray would rage when he discovered that she had chosen Henry Stewart. That would almost destroy his fidelity, but not quite. He had said always intolerable things when he had preached and rated; but she would only have to smile and speak humbly, plead in a suppliant tone and he would come forward to serve her again, but that would have to be on other terms. She could do without him, his conscientiousness, his ability, his hard work. Yet, she would like to be free of him, of Maitland, of all of them who clustered so close about her; menacing, rebuking, spying, she would disperse them all.

  She considered carefully the terms in which Moray had spoken of her three attendants — Henry Stewart and his servant and Mary Seaton. Fools, rascals, and imbeciles, he had named them. Well, he was only wise in one instance. Her fleeting thoughts dwelt on Henry Stewart to whom she had so impetuously and proudly pledged herself. Sometimes he wearied her, sometimes he was difficult and tedious, sometimes even, she seemed to have no power over him; he would prefer his sports, his games, his English gentlemen and servants. Yet, in the evenings, when Mary Seaton would admit him by the secret ways to her chamber, when David Rizzio would guard the door, when she would be perfumed, painted, clad in thin gauze, her hair fastened with gold pins, then he loved her as she loved him, in so intense and beautiful a fashion that the whole world seemed heroic.

  Her smile deepened with her memories. She teased him, she vexed him, they were estranged for days together; but always there was the reunion when his beauty, his simplicity, and his strength seemed to her like precious jewels brought out from a casket and secretly delighted in.

  Two people made these hidden joys possible — Mary Seaton, who was almost weak-minded and ought to have been a nun, no doubt, and who was faithful and reliable, and the Italian, very like, as Moray had said, what men would call a rascal — a pimp. But how dexterous, subtle, pliable, and unscrupulous! The Queen put her finger to her lips as she thought of David Rizzio. No doubt he loved her too; he did not serve her and her furtively wedded husband wholly for pay. He loved her, in an odd profound fashion; he valued, even cherished, her prodigal beauty.

  One day while they were at Stirling she had been seated by the fire in the twilight of her tall room, while a late storm of hail beat upon the windows. The Italian had come in, with his step so trained to lightness that she had not known he was there till he was close to her chair. He h
ad been looking, he whispered, for his master, and she had said that Darnley was not there, but, she thought, in the oratory. Though he was not religious minded there were times when he would pray with childish fervour.

  Then the Italian had sunk down at her feet and stretched himself out like a hound on the silk rugs, quite still and tranquil, the waves of his dark hair touching the tips of her shoes. She had said nothing, accepting his silence graciously. It had seemed to her that something had passed between them, that they had been engaged together in some spiritual adventure, some stimulation of the mind, which they had shared. It was as if he made a confession to her of his miserable origin, his base struggles, of his vile and subservient conditions, and it was as if she gave him absolution in that moment of secluded peace.

  *

  The Queen blazed at Easter. She held the great Feast of the Resurrection as no man could remember it being held in Scotland before, not even in the days before the monasteries were despoiled and John Knox and the Lords of the Congregation set up over the land.

  There was more music, more lights, more priests and vestments, more singing and flowers than ever there had been before. The Queen put off her mourning dress, her languid ways, her air of waiting on circumstance; there was something about her step and her look that was assured and triumphant. Hitherto an organ had been sufficient to make the music in the royal chapel, but now there must be violins, sackbuts, lutes, and harps, as well as drums and trumpets to celebrate the rising of Christ from the tomb.

  The Queen appeared among her courtiers and before her subjects as if at a hazardous pitch of exaltation. She rejoiced and expanded in this great festival of the Church, while the Puritans drew aside, sour and menacing, on the verge of rebellion.

  The bells pealed, music played; the Roman Catholics in the Queen’s household — French, English, and Scotch — went joyously arrayed, laughed and talked confidently together as if they believed the true Church could be replanted in this barren land from which it had been torn up and flung aside on the mudheap.

  Feeling among the people in the city, among the Lords and the preachers, was duly reported to the Queen. Thomas Randolph, Queen Elizabeth’s envoy, spoke to her as boldly as he dared of the scandal her conduct was giving, of the indecorum of this flaunting of the forbidden Faith, the offence given to England by the pampering of Henry Stewart, the favouritism shown to his father; they almost alone among the Lords were Papists and could follow her to her gaudy, Romish festivals.

  The Queen looked at him out of her soft eyes and her words were quite cool and alert:

  “I have taken much good advice from England, been very deferential to my sister the Queen, perhaps the time is approaching when I shall choose for myself, take my own way.”

  “To inevitable perdition,” muttered Mr. Randolph in his heart.

  But she was so gracious and gentle even when she spoke these defiant words that he could feel nothing for her but compassion. He thought her position desperate — she had no money, no credit, no ally; the whole country was hostile to her mood. She had compromised herself almost past redemption with that shallow, detested youth. And as if that were not sufficient folly, she had chosen the most unlikely favourite a prince could light on; an Italian scoundrel whom no one had heard of before, who never had the air of a gentleman. She said he wrote her foreign letters for her, that she trusted him with most of her secrets. The Englishman could find no cue to this labyrinth of the Queen’s emotions and knew not what to report to the English Court nor what to believe himself.

  Elizabeth had summoned Lennox and his son home, for they were English subjects and had, their mistress declared, outstayed their leave in Scotland. Randolph had taken this opportunity to wait upon the Earl and under the excuse of pressing his Queen’s demands, to endeavour to learn something of the secret mind of these two penniless princes.

  Lennox had excused himself in incoherent bluster, a stupid man’s defence which might have meant anything or nothing, but Mr. Randolph thought he had detected some deep emotion in the young man’s bewildered, almost piteous, “What would you do if you were in my place, Mr. Randolph? Before God, I do not know what to do, yet I do not think I shall return.”

  *

  When the imposing religious festival of Easter was over, the Queen turned her volatile mind to earthly splendour. She gave great banquets in the long gallery at Holyrood, when anyone who wished might come to drink and eat, to jest and laugh. In the evening there was dancing by the light of torches, where the Queen gave her hand to any of her court who asked for it, where she moved sparkling with her famous jewels, the gems of France and Scotland, through the skilful patterns of the pavan or galliard.

  Then her extravagance took another turn: she put on a plain gown and, with such of her gentlewomen as could be induced to countenance the prank, ran abroad in the streets and by-ways of Edinburgh, collecting money from every passer-by until she could hardly carry the velvet bags of coins. With the money thus obtained she gave a banquet at which she sat herself, while all the citizens were allowed to pass along the gallery and stare. Afterwards there was free wine and sweetmeats, toys and trifles, and the remainder of the money flung back again to the pushing, curious, half-hostile crowd.

  Yet through all this, however common she made herself, she was nevertheless a creature of moonshine and of youth, a star of celestial radiance that could flash in the mud and out again untainted.

  On one of these wild days Mary Seaton wept while she unbraided the bright chestnut hair.

  “Why do you cry, Mary?” asked the Queen. “Are not these happy hours? Do you not know how soon we shall be free?”

  “I weep because of the things that people say of you, because of the way the vulgar talk. Because — oh, madame! — because you are a wedded wife before God and none knows it.”

  The Queen unlaced her gown and looked at her white, pure bosom in the mirror.

  “What would you have me be, Mary?”

  “Unspotted before God, madame.”

  “You would have me honest, chaste?”

  “Every woman should be that, madame.”

  “It is only the stupid who can be so single-minded, so good. Don’t you understand? — I am not simple.”

  She kicked off her slippers and looked down at her perfect bare feet.

  “I do nothing wrong, I harm nobody.”

  Mary Seaton did not reply. Sadly she picked up the Queen’s jewels where they had dropped on to the silk carpet. The windows were open on the June night and the faint warmth blew into the perfumed room. Mary Seaton knew, and the Queen knew, that beyond the palace and the park was much tumult and half-suppressed discontent. The little city was full of armed men; most of the nobles had called up their retainers from their estates and villages. Everywhere you turned in the streets of Edinburgh you could see soldiers in armour, rough fellows from the north armed with swords and daggers.

  Moray and Maitland were perpetually in each other’s houses. Those who waited in their ante-chambers could often hear their voices raised high in altercation.

  Ruthven, Argyll, Cassilis, Hume, Herries, went up and down with airs of agitation and haste.

  “When will you tell them you are married?” urged Mary Seaton.

  The Queen loosened her hair.

  “Oh, Mary, I like this game I play. When it is known he is my husband shall I love him so well?”

  “Oh, madame, you name it love!”

  “For want of a better word, child.”

  “Am I to admit him, madame, if he comes to-night?”

  “No, nor yet to-morrow night.”

  “Is it not cruel to him, madame, this holding off? Yesterday he was almost in tears, I thought.”

  “And yet he raged!”

  “Madame, you are making a fool of him. Can he forget that? It is a blight upon his manhood!”

  “He must do as I bid,” said the Queen. “You are his friend, Mary. Warn him to be careful lest he should weary me.”

  “Al
as, madame, would he take such a warning from me?”

  “It were the better for him that he took it from someone,” replied the Queen carelessly. “We must think out some device for Mary Fleming’s wedding. That must be both choice and splendid. But could you fancy William Maitland as a lover?”

  “I think, madame, I have no heart or spirit for more festivals. I have danced and sung and sat up late — so often; too much.”

  “Hush, Mary!” The Queen put her soft hand over the complaining mouth. “You have done it all for love of me and that absolves you in the eyes of Heaven.”

  The pious girl kissed her mistress’s fingers dutifully. She sighed and said:

  “Everything is so uneasy abroad. I never saw so many soldiers and armed men in Edinburgh. Everywhere, one thinks there are spies.”

  “Hush, again!” said the Queen. “I know well enough how the country stands.”

  “There are lampoons everywhere, ugly pamphlets and ballads. They say there were even some pasted on the palace gates.”

  “What does it matter if we need not read them?”

  The Queen took up a blue velvet gown from the bed and threw it over her shift.

  “If the Italian should come, admit him.”

  “Madame, I do not like to do that.”

  The Queen laughed good-humouredly.

  “But, Mary, he comes to write letters for me, as you know. If you wish, you may stay there all the time and watch us at work.”

  “Madame, I know that Lord Darnley begins to detest him.”

  “You should call him the Earl of Ross now. Maybe, despite the English protests, I’ll make him Duke of Albany.”

  “Oh, my lord Earl, or my lord Duke, or what you will, my lord your husband, madame … !”

  “That’s a galling word,” smiled the Queen. “Do as I bid you. When Rizzio comes and scratches on the panel, admit him. Come, I will tell you a secret. He writes privately for me to the Pope, the King of Spain, France — letters I would not have anyone in Scotland see or know of. His brother, Giuseppe, who is a clever lad, has found means to take them out of Scotland.”