Chapter 24

'Tis a weary life this--
Vaults overhead, and grates and bars around me,
And my sad hours spent with as sad companions,
Whose thoughts are brooding: o'er their own mischances,
Far, far too deeply to take part in mine.
THE WOODSMAN.

The course of life to which Mary and her little retinue were doomed,
was in the last degree secluded and lonely, varied only as the weather
permitted or rendered impossible the Queen's usual walk in the garden
or on the battlements. The greater part of the morning she wrought
with her ladies at those pieces of needlework, many of which still
remain proofs of her indefatigable application. At such hours the page
was permitted the freedom of the castle and islet; nay, he was
sometimes invited to attend George Douglas when he went a-sporting
upon the lake, or on its margin; opportunities of diversion which were
only clouded by the remarkable melancholy which always seemed to brood
on that gentleman's brow, and to mark his whole demeanour,--a sadness
so profound, that Roland never observed him to smile, or to speak any
word unconnected with the immediate object of their exercise.

The most pleasant part of Roland's day, was the occasional space which
he was permitted to pass in personal attendance on the Queen and her
ladies, together with the regular dinner-time, which he always spent
with Dame Mary Fleming and Catharine Seyton. At these periods, he had
frequent occasion to admire the lively spirit and inventive
imagination of the latter damsel, who was unwearied in her
contrivances to amuse her mistress, and to banish, for a time at
least, the melancholy which preyed on her bosom. She danced, she sung,
she recited tales of ancient and modern times, with that heartfelt
exertion of talent, of which the pleasure lies not in the vanity of
displaying it to others, but in the enthusiastic consciousness that we
possess it ourselves. And yet these high accomplishments were mixed
with an air of rusticity and harebrained vivacity, which seemed rather
to belong to some village maid, the coquette of the ring around the
Maypole, than to the high-bred descendant of an ancient baron. A touch
of audacity, altogether short of effrontery, and far less approaching
to vulgarity, gave as it were a wildness to all that she did; and
Mary, while defending her from some of the occasional censures of her
grave companion, compared her to a trained singing-bird escaped from a
cage, which practises in all the luxuriance of freedom, and in full
possession of the greenwood bough, the airs which it had learned
during its earlier captivity.

The moments which the page was permitted to pass in the presence of
this fascinating creature, danced so rapidly away, that, brief as they