Benedict. This looks not like a . Much Ado About Nothing.
Master George Heriot had no sooner returned to the king's apartment, than James inquired of Maxwell if the Earl of Huntinglen was in attendance, and, receiving an answer in the affirmative, desired that he should be admitted. The old Scottish Lord having made his in the usual manner, the king extended his hand to be kissed, and then began to address him in a tone of great sympathy.
“We told your lordship in our secret epistle of this morning, written with our ain hand, in we have neither pretermitted nor forgotten your faithful service, that we had that to communicate to you that would require both patience and to endure, and therefore you to some of the most passages of Seneca, and of Boethius de Consolatione, that the back may be, as we say, fitted for the burden—This we commend to you from our ain experience.
'Non ignara mail, miseris succurrere disco,'
sayeth Dido, and I might say in my own person, non ignarus; but to change the would affect the , whereof our southern subjects are . So, my Lord of Huntinglen, I trust you have acted by our advice, and studied patience before ye need it—venienti occurrite morbo—mix the medicament when the disease is coming on.”
“May it please your ,” answered Lord Huntinglen, “I am more of an old soldier than a scholar—and if my own rough nature will not bear me out in any , I hope I shall have grace to try a text of to boot.”
“Ay, man, are you there with your bears?” said the king; “The Bible, man,” (touching his cap,) “is indeed principium et fons—but it is pity your lordship cannot peruse it in the original. For although we did ourselves promote that work of translation,—since ye may read, at the beginning of every Bible, that when some palpable clouds of darkness were thought like to have overshadowed the land, after the setting of that bright occidental star, Queen Elizabeth; yet our appearance, like that of the sun in his strength, instantly these mists,—I say, that although, as therein mentioned, we the preaching of the gospel, and especially the translation of the out of the original sacred tongues; yet nevertheless, we ourselves confess to have found a comfort in consulting them in the original Hebrew, whilk we do not perceive even in the Latin version of the Septuagint, much less in the English traduction.”
“Please your Majesty,” said Lord Huntinglen, “if your Majesty delays communicating the bad news with which your honoured letter threatens me, until I am capable to read Hebrew like your Majesty, I fear I shall die in ignorance of the misfortune which hath befallen, or is about to befall, my house.”
“You will learn it but too soon, my lord,” replied the king. “I grieve to say it, but your son Dalgarno, whom I thought a very saint, as he was so much with Steenie and Baby Charles, hath turned out a very .”
“Villain!” repeated Lord Huntinglen; and though he instantly checked himself, and added, “but it is your Majesty speaks the word,” the effect of his first tone made the king step back as if he had received a blow. He also recovered himself again, and said in the way which usually indicated his displeasure—“Yes, my lord, it was we that said it—non surdo canis—we are not deaf—we pray you not to raise your voice in speech with us—there is the bonny memorial—read, and judge for yourself.”
The king then thrust into the old nobleman's hand a paper, containing the story of the Lady Hermione, with the evidence by which it was supported, so and clearly, that the of Lord Dalgarno, the lover by whom she had been so deceived, seemed undeniable. But a father yields not up so easily the cause of his son.
“May it please your Majesty,” he said, “why was this tale not sooner told? This woman hath been here for years—wherefore was the claim on my son not made the instant she touched English ground?”
“Tell him how that came about, Geordie,” said the king, Heriot.
“I grieve to my Lord Huntinglen,” said Heriot; “but I must speak the truth. For a long time the Lady Hermione could not the idea of making her situation public; and when her mind became changed in that particular, it was necessary to recover the evidence of the false marriage, and letters and papers connected with it, which, when she came to Paris, and just before I saw her, she had deposited with a correspondent of her father in that city. He became afterwards bankrupt, and in consequence of that misfortune the lady's papers passed into other hands, and it was only a few days since I traced and recovered them. Without these documents of evidence, it would have been imprudent for her to have preferred her complaint, favoured as Lord Dalgarno is by powerful friends.”
“Ye are to say sae,” said the king; “I what ye mean weel eneugh—ye think Steenie wad hae putten the weight of his foot into the scales of justice, and garr'd them whomle the bucket—ye forget, Geordie, wha it is whose hand uphaulds them. And ye do poor Steenie the mair wrang, for he confessed it ance before us and our council, that Dalgarno would have put the quean aff on him, the puir simple bairn, making him trow that she was a light-o'-love; in whilk mind he remained assured even when he parted from her, Steenie might hae weel thought ane of thae cattle wadna hae resisted the like of him.”
“The Lady Hermione,” said George Heriot, “has always done the utmost justice to the conduct of the duke, who, although strongly with prejudice against her character, yet scorned to avail himself of her distress, and on the contrary supplied her with the means of herself from her difficulties.”
“It was e'en like himsell—blessings on his bonny face!” said the king; “and I believed this lady's tale the mair readily, my Lord Huntinglen, that she spake nae ill of Steenie—and to make a lang tale short, my lord, it is the opinion of our council and ourself, as weel as of Baby Charles and Steenie, that your son maun his wrong by wedding this lady, or undergo such disgrace and discountenance as we can .”
The person to whom he was of answering him. He stood before the king motionless, and glaring with eyes of which even the lids seemed immovable, as if suddenly converted into an ancient statue of the times of , so instantly had his hard features and strong limbs been arrested into by the blow he had received—And in a second afterwards, like the same statue when the lightning breaks upon it, he sunk at once to the ground with a heavy . The king was in the utmost alarm, called upon Heriot and Maxwell for help, and, presence of mind not being his , ran to and fro in his cabinet, exclaiming—“My ancient and beloved servant—who saved our anointed self! vae atque dolor! My Lord of Huntinglen, look up—look up, man, and your son may marry the Queen of Sheba if he will.”
By this time Maxwell and Heriot had raised the old nobleman, and placed him on a chair; while the king, observing that he began to recover himself, continued his more methodically.
“Haud up your head—haud up your head, and listen to your ain kind native Prince. If there is shame, man, it comesna empty-handed—there is siller to it—a gude tocher, and no that bad a pedigree;—if she has been a , it was your son made her sae, and he can make her an honest woman again.”
These suggestions, however reasonable in the common case, gave no comfort to Lord Huntinglen, if indeed he comprehended them; but the blubbering of his good-natured old master, which began to accompany and interrupt his royal speech, produced more rapid effect. The large tear reluctantly from his eye, as he kissed the hands, which the king, weeping with less dignity and restraint, abandoned to him, first alternately and then both together, until the feelings of the man getting the better of the Sovereign's sense of dignity, he grasped and shook Lord Huntinglen's hands with the sympathy of an equal and a familiar friend.
“Compone lachrymas,” said the ; “be patient, man, be patient; the council, and Baby Charles, and Steenie, may a' gang to the deevil—he shall not marry her since it moves you so deeply.”
“He shall marry her, by God!” answered the earl, drawing himself up, dashing the tear from his eyes, and endeavouring to recover his composure. “I pray your Majesty's pardon, but he shall marry her, with her for her dowry, were she the veriest courtezan in all Spain—If he gave his word, he shall make his word good, were it to the meanest creature that haunts the streets—he shall do it, or my own shall take the life that I gave him. If he could stoop to use so base a fraud, though to deceive infamy, let him infamy.”
“No, no!” the Monarch continued to , “things are not so bad as that—Steenie himself never thought of her being a streetwalker, even when he thought the worst of her.”
“If it can at all console my Lord of Huntinglen,” said the citizen, “I can assure him of this lady's good birth, and most fair and unspotted fame.”
“I am sorry for it,” said Lord Huntinglen—then interrupting himself, he said—“Heaven forgive me for being ungrateful for such comfort!—but I am well-nigh sorry she should be as you represent her, so much better than the villain deserves. To be to wed beauty and and honest birth—”
“Ay, and wealth, my lord—wealth,” the king, “is a better sentence than his has deserved.”
“It is long,” said the father, “since I saw he was selfish and hardhearted; but to be a liar—I never that such a would have fallen on my race! I will never look on him again.”
“ ay, my lord, hoot ay,” said the king; “ye maun tak him to task roundly. I grant you should speak more in the of Demea than Mitio, vi nempe et via pervulgata patrum; but as for not seeing him again, and he your only son, that is altogether out of reason. I tell ye, man, (but I would not for a boddle that Baby Charles heard me,) that he might gie the glaiks to half the lasses of Lonnun, ere I could find in my heart speak such harsh words as you have said of this deil of a Dalgarno of yours.”
“May it please your Majesty to permit me to retire,” said Lord Huntinglen, “and dispose of the case according to your own royal sense of justice, for I desire no favour for him.”
“Aweel, my lord, so be it; and if your lordship can think,” added the Monarch, “of any thing in our power which might comfort you—”
“Your Majesty's gracious sympathy,” said Lord Huntinglen, “has already comforted me as far as earth can; the rest must be from the King of kings.”
“To Him I commend you, my and faithful servant,” said James with emotion, as the earl withdrew from his presence. The king remained in thought for some time, and then said to Heriot, “ Geordie, ye ken all the privy doings of our Court, and have so these thirty years, though, like a wise man, ye hear, and see, and say nothing. Now, there is a thing I fain wad ken, in the way of inquiry—Did you ever hear of the umquhile Lady Huntinglen, the departed Countess of this noble earl, ganging a wee bit gleed in her walk through the world; I mean in the way of slipping a foot, casting a leglin-girth, or the like, ye understand me?”
[Footnote: A leglin-girth is the lowest upon a leglin, or milk-pail. Allan Ramsay applies the phrase in the same sense.
“Or bairns can read, they first maun spell, I learn'd this frae my
mammy, And cast a leglin-girth mysell,
Lang ere I married Tammy.”
Christ's Kirk On The Green.]
“On my word as an honest man,” said George Heriot, somewhat surprised at the question, “I never heard her wronged by the slightest breath of suspicion. She was a lady, very in her walk, and lived in great with her husband, save that the good Countess was something of a puritan, and kept more company with ministers than was altogether agreeable to Lord Huntinglen, who is, as your Majesty well knows, a man of the old rough world, that will drink and swear.”
“O Geordie!” exclaimed the king, “these are auld-warld , of whilk we dare not pronounce even ourselves absolutely free. But the warld grows worse from day to day, Geordie. The of this age may weel say with the poet—
'Aetas parentum, pejor avis, tulit Nos nequiores—'
This Dalgarno does not drink so much, or swear so much, as his father; but he wenches, Geordie, and he breaks his word and oath baith. As to what you say of the leddy, and the ministers, we are a' fallible creatures, Geordie, priests and kings, as weel as others; and wha but what that may account for the difference between this Dalgarno and his father? The earl is the vera soul of honour, and cares nae mair for warld's gear than a noble hound for the quest of a foulmart; but as for his son, he was like to us a' out—ourselves, Steenie, Baby Charles, and our council—till he heard of the tocher, and then, by my kingly crown, he lap like a cock at a grossart! These are betwixt parent and son not to be accounted for naturally, according to Baptista Porta, Michael Scott de secretis, and others.—Ah, Jingling Geordie, if your the caldron, and jingling on pots, pans, and veshels of all manner of metal, hadna a' your grammar out of your head, I could have touched on that matter to you at mair length.”
Heriot was too plain-spoken to express much concern for the loss of his grammar learning on this occasion; but after modestly hinting that he had seen many men who could not fill their father's , though no one had been suspected of wearing their father's nightcap, he inquired “whether Lord Dalgarno had consented to do the Lady Hermione justice.”
“Troth, man, I ............