The Queen's Caprice Page 9

  The Queen lay back in her chair and smiled. At first she listened with discreet interest to all his wise judgments and shrewd remarks, putting in now and then a gentle comment of her own. Then she grew tired of these pretences and broke out into open mockery.

  “Why are you so dull and heavy to-day? You are like one of your own puritanical creatures, James, with your formality.”

  But he had determined, before he engaged on this interview, that she should not move him to anger, nor incite him to any display of emotion, and he had been prepared for some such test as this. So he answered dryly:

  “There must be in this kingdom of yours some responsible person to manage these matters.”

  She did not answer, save by an increase of the smile on her painted lips.

  “Someone,” he said, keeping his voice steady, “must work for your comfort, your luxury, and your estate.”

  “Did I ask you to do so?” she murmured very softly, and he answered her challenge, still keeping his voice low.

  “Have you asked any other man to do so?”

  “Now you would play the tyrant,” she pouted, “and find out all my secrets.”

  “No,” he shook his head. His serenity was not feigned, for he felt master of her when she was in this kind of mood. “It is not your secrets which trouble me, but those things which everyone talks about, even the rabble in the streets.”

  “Ah, so I must face my faults again!” sighed the Queen, mischievously. “What are they? Tell me them all, James! How happy I was in Stirling without your rebukes.”

  “And yet when you returned I felt so safe.”

  “Ah!” said the Queen, “there’s the crux of it! You felt so safe, James, but I, perhaps I never felt safe since I returned to Scotland.”

  He was armed against her; he had come prepared to withstand her artfulness.

  “The people are condemning your behaviour: the favours you show Lennox and his young son.” He paused to give his taunts emphasis. “This young, insolent boy.”

  “So you find him,” said the Queen, unmoved.

  Moray looked down into her pale, smooth features. How could he ever have trusted her, how ever have gone surety for her honesty to Maitland — Maitland who understood so much better than himself this sly creature with whom it was their great misfortune to deal!

  “I tell you, Mary, that you have betrayed us all. You do not realize the perils in which we stand and I am here to warn you. Perhaps I alone care enough for you to do so. You behave so carelessly that anyone might believe—” he paused, remembering his resolve to hold back his anger.

  “I have no reason to care what they believe. No one in this country has ever loved me, no one cares for my name nor reputation save those few whom I brought with me and that very man you mock me with … ”

  “A pauper!” took up Moray, breathing quickly, “a coarse boy! One who has neither character nor estate.”

  The Queen’s hand rose to her breast.

  “He has the right!” she whispered, “he has the right! He is a prince and as well-born as I am. I know why you hate him, Moray.”

  He turned his head away, pausing for a second, because she had used his formal title.

  “I did not say I hated him.”

  “I know it,” smiled the Queen, “look at me and say you do not.”

  He returned the challenge of her cruelty:

  “It would be truer to say that I despise him, Mary. I never thought to see my work for Scotland or for you hampered by someone like him. Remember,” he added, “there is no one behind you — none — except those I choose to put there, and if you take him—”

  “If I choose him,” murmured the Queen, motionless as she sat in the great chair.

  “He’ll not last long,” sighed Moray, “and it might be, in his fall, that he would drag you down.”

  The Queen sat up suddenly and leaned forward.

  “Do you threaten me?” she asked. She seemed neither alarmed nor offended, but rather as if she were excited, stimulated, even pleased by Moray’s bold front.

  “It is Scotland who menaces you,” he answered with admirable calm. “You must not take this boy. I have stood aside since you returned from Stirling. But it has gone on too long. A caprice is all very well; but it must come and go like a spurt of wildfire. Gifts are exchanged—”

  “But if it is not a caprice?” interrupted the Queen, smiling. “Suppose this is the man for me? Suppose I choose him, take him, crown him, place him above you in estate?”

  Moray leant towards her from the high ornate table where he sat; the likeness between the two faces, the heavy lined face of the man and the delicate face of the woman, was very apparent in that moment of emotion. Something subtle, almost indefinable in the two countenances, showed distinctly — the similarity in the thick lids, the almost invisible slanting brows, the curved full lips. They defied each other and the Queen’s spirit rose to the encounter. She seemed to relish this conflict with this man of her own blood, the only one who up to now had been her master.

  “What do you suspect me of?” she asked directly.

  “It is not a question of what I suspect you of, but what is said in the streets and taverns, what the Lords whisper when they meet together, what the women sneer when they nudge each other as you pass — one word that I must not say.”

  Then, very carefully, for he was making a fierce effort over rising fury, he said:

  “If you are fond of him, Mary, teach him not to be so insolent, teach him to be civil, at least to me.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and answered carelessly: “I shall make him Earl of Ross.”

  Moray looked down at his hands. He was glad to see that his firm fingers did not quiver; he had command over himself, perhaps still over her — even if she was what the common people said.

  “There is another person you must warn,” he said — his tone was that of a king to a subject — “that presumptuous, strutting Italian.”

  “Whom do you mean?” The Queen still smiled.

  “I mean Lord Darnley’s lackey whom he keeps to run his errands and fawn on him.”

  The Queen had a little plume of black feathers at her waist set in a mirror encircled by pearls. She raised this and waved it to and fro with a wide sweeping movement so that the sable tips almost touched Moray’s cheeks and then her own.

  “Do you think that I should interfere in my cousin’s household?”

  “You cannot twist words with me, Mary. I say what I have come to say, I speak from what I know. I warn you, Mary, not a man in Scotland who has any worth does not detest these two.”

  But the black fan continued to wave slowly to and fro. Moray felt it brush against his cold cheek.

  “If you intend to have your own way,” he said, rising, “be sure that I shall oppose you.”

  “Perhaps, if it should come to that,” smiled the Queen, without moving, “I too have my friends.”

  “Madame, I do not think so. Except what rabble Lennox could call together there is no one who would stand behind you and that boy.”

  “Ah! If you … ” breathed the Queen, almost as if she watched something reach a desired climax. “Ah! That now! If you were to call a rebellion, now!”

  He made no denial. In silence, carefully, with the precise movements of a business man, he gathered up his papers and parchments, folded them, and put them into his portfolio. Then, as a retreating enemy makes one last backward sally, he demanded:

  “How did Henry Stewart come by the small red ring?”

  She turned this glancingly aside with another question:

  “When have you see it before?”

  “Perhaps the same place where you gave it him, Mary — when you were abed.”

  The Queen laughed loudly, throwing back her head.

  “When I was abed, James, when I was abed!”

  *

  Mary Seaton sat near the window so that the thin light of a fitful May afternoon might fall upon her work: she was embroiderin
g a map of Scotland. At a long table in the centre of the room the Queen and Lord Darnley played at billiards. The Italian secretary stood near Mary Seaton and handed her the strands of silk as she required them.

  The fifth person in the chamber was one who did not often seek this company — Lord Moray, whose watchful, silent presence seemed to be like a spell to keep the others dumb, for no one spoke; there was an air of tension in all they did. Even the Queen had not her usual mocking good-humour.

  She kept her glance on the small balls of ivory and never once raised her eyes to meet her half-brother’s profound gaze.

  Moray, leaning against the arras, made no concealment of his keen observation of these three people whom he seemed to be, in a manner, judging: the Queen, mute and secretive, every line of whose face and figure was so well known to him; Henry Stewart, tall and heavy, who seemed, uneasily reserved, yet who now and then turned a smile of boyish simplicity towards his opponent and who sometimes looked about him as if he were endeavouring to discover some way of escape. Mary Seaton, usually so placid, to-day seemed grieved and troubled. She peered continually over her shoulder at the two playing billiards and watched them as she took the silk from David Rizzio. Often she seemed about to speak, yet was silent, not knowing how to choose her words.

  The Italian himself was quite complacent. His dark eyes, expressionless as those of an animal, returned blankly Moray’s sharp stare. He was very patient in matching the difficult colours of the map of Scotland and was unmoved by Moray’s contemptuous scrutiny. He had the calm of one whose singleness of purpose could endure any amount of analysis.

  Moray hated this upstart with an instinctive and exhaustive loathing. To him the Italian, raised by the whim of Henry Stewart out of obscurity to this intimate servitude, was detestable as a scorpion, a snake, a toad, any fabled creature that carries poison and disaster.

  This bitter judgment of Moray was not disturbed by the fact that there was nothing offensive in the exterior of the Italian. His shape was elegant and set off clothes that, though rich and well-chosen, were not beyond his station. His elegantly modelled face expressed melancholy and refinement, tenderness, and a desire to please. There was something attractive in the foreign fashion in which he wore his long, smooth hair, which looked the colour of old bronze. His hands, too, were fine, those of a careful penman, of a musician — of a picker of locks and pockets, thought Moray, with a rising disgust. He was not deceived by this superficial grace; his wits, naturally acute, had been sharpened by a wide experience; he was certain that the Italian was evil. Had he been able to do so, he would instantly have called up two honest Scotch fellows and had Rizzio thrown out of the Queen’s apartments, nay, out of the palace, on to the dungheap, there to rot amid the stench and corruption that was his due, and from whence, doubtless, he had sprung.

  *

  Lord Darnley found the presence of Moray and the tension of the room intolerable. He glanced angrily at the silent, sombre man leaning against the tapestry and, with a piteous affectation of ease, sauntered over to where Mary Seaton worked in the fitful light. The Italian, eager to please his master, pointed out how prettily the contours of Scotland were growing on the canvas.

  “Where are Lord Moray’s possessions?” asked the young man in a loud voice.

  Mary Seaton looked bewildered and did not respond, but David Rizzio, with a deft finger, pointed out Lord Moray’s lands, tracing them here, there, on the half-filled-in canvas.

  “It is too much,” said Henry Stewart, “too much for a subject!” He looked defiantly at the Queen as if at once challenging her anger and appealing for her support.

  Moray said quietly:

  “Sir, you must ask my pardon for that.”

  The Queen, the billiard cue still in her hand, stood silent a second and no one knew which way her humour would go. Then she turned her back on Lord Darnley and, smiling at her half-brother, said:

  “Of course he will ask your pardon.”

  She looked over her shoulder at the young man and commanded him to do this.

  Henry Stewart stared. He could not credit that he was being rebuked. A slow fury seemed gathering behind his silence, and the Italian, effacing himself, bending with humble interest over the silks, contrived to touch his arm, a gentle yet forcible pressure.

  Lord Darnley, in an expressionless voice, said:

  “I am sorry, sir, my words have given you offence. I withdraw them and apologize.”

  Moray bent his head and left the room, but not before he had seen the strange glance of the Italian, no longer like that of an animal, placid and meaningless, but full of calculating wickedness.

  As the door closed Henry Stewart broke out into a passion of distress. How long was he thus to be baited, goaded, how long to be set beneath everyone when he should lead all! He turned impetuously on his servant, whose restraining touch he had almost mechanically obeyed as the slow mind will obey the signal of the quick one, as the mule responds to the flick of his driver’s whip and afterwards kicks.

  “You should have allowed me to say what I wished to say. Why should I have apologized?”

  “But, sir,” replied the Italian, “by doing that you had the victory. You left him dumb, defeated. You showed your breeding, your princely nature, made him appear boorish and clumsy. Sir,” and the southern voice was like a caress, “you can afford to wait.”

  Without any regard for the presence of the Queen or that of Mary Seaton, who hung constrained and hesitating over her unfortunate embroidery, Lord Darnley began to rail against Moray, against his followers, against all the lords and nobles of Scotland who had all flouted him, insulted him and done their best to injure him since he had first come to Scotland.

  The Queen, still leaning against the billiard table, listened with seeming idleness. Her attitude was one of fatigue. She considered the two men disputing before her in the window-place, the master so harsh and haughty, choosing his words with impatient clumsiness and small command of language, repeating again and again the same phrases, frowning, keeping his hand on his hips, moving awkwardly in an ill-expressed, almost inarticulate rage: the servant, elegant, sly, with his strange, exquisitely modelled face, all his words clever, adroit, elegantly chosen, flattering, pleasing, soothing. There was something leonine about Henry, so large, imposing and golden, and something of the delicate fox about the Italian, so elegant and clever. Yes, she smiled to her self at her own simile. She had seen a picture in a book, The Lion and the Fox, a large, stupid beast being at once soothed and deceived by the wiles and flatterings of the small, crafty animal.

  What a deal of trouble David Rizzio saves me, she thought; if he were not here it would be I who should have to coax this stupid boy into a good mood.

  She looked warmly at the Italian, silently thanking him for his brilliancy, his gaiety, and his quickness.

  Lord Darnley grumbled himself to silence; he was appeased but not satisfied. He still muttered that everyone treated him with uncivil, contemptuous bitterness. And why? He had offended none.

  *

  Moray waited like a lackey on his mistress’s pleasure in the corridor close to the door through which the Queen must pass, soon, to the council chamber. He felt full of discord, misery, and unrest, yet knew he was able to control these distresses. He seemed a peaceful man; there had been no change during the last few weeks in his placid demeanour, no neglect in his exercise of his duties, his attention to his necessary business. Yet his whole complex nature was at war, with himself and with outside influences.

  The Queen came, opening and shutting the door impetuously, and turned as if to pass him; a quick sweep of a black gown, a swing of her white veil, a lift of her shoulder and a laugh and Moray had caught her wrist.

  “It does not matter in the least whether or not you go to the council to-day, but it matters that I speak to you, perhaps for the last time.”

  She was at once mocking:

  “For the last time! You have said that before.”

 
“One warning,” he reminded her, “like one kiss, must be the last.” He stared at her in agony. He could not believe that this passionate and pleasant woman was really lost to all his dreams of her — a crowned queen of his race, a noble queen. Pride of family, possessive affection and bitter jealousy coloured his words, though he tried to keep them impersonal and be the mentor talking to the scholar, the man rebuking the child.

  “Those three in there, Mary, become your close, almost your only intimates — a stupid boy who does not know himself, a rascal whose name I detest, a silly girl with her head full of superstition.”

  “Let go my wrist,” smiled the Queen, pulling free of him. She did not attempt to escape but leaned against the dark panelling of the corridor and looked at him with no loss of temper nor dignity. They had this in common, these two children of the same king, that all they did was touched with greatness and nobility, though in the woman this was light and smiling, in the man, heavy and austere.

  “So you put them all together in a breath,” she said. “A prince, a gentlewoman, a servant.”

  “You put them all together in your affections, Mary.”

  He took her hand again, and now with unconscious tenderness. “Before God, I speak only for your sake. I would keep you unsmirched. There are some things I would not even have you know, there are some creatures at whom I would not have you look. These hangers-on of the court make but a dance of marionettes. Heed them not! They are lawless and uncontrolled and seek only their own advantage.”

  “Alas!” she mocked softly, “who does not?”

  “Perhaps,” said he, speaking low and hurriedly, for he knew not when the door might open and Henry Stewart and his Italian and the half-imbecile Mary Seaton come out, “perhaps you put me on that level, and there you are wrong. I have before pledged myself to keep you where you are, smooth your way, keep the ugly and the cruel and the coarse-grained from you—”

  “I know, I know!” she interrupted again, “and I have promised that you shall do it. I have said that I am glad and thankful that you shall do it, but—”

  He saw by the look in her eyes that she was about to lie to him, to make neat, pretty excuses, perhaps only the little lies and the trivial excuses she so loved and that were so unimportant, but he was not in the mood for anything but truth.