A Duet, with an Occasional ChorusDoyle, Arthur Conan
General
A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus
Doyle, Arthur Conan
Married people -- Fiction
‘This way, ladies and gentlemen,’ cried the hurrying guide, and they all
clattered over the stone pavement. He stopped beside a tomb upon which a
lady with a sad worn face was lying. ‘Mary, Queen of Scots,’ said he,
‘the greatest beauty of her day. This monument was erected by her son,
James the First.’
‘Isn’t she just perfectly sweet?’ said one of the American girls.
‘Well, I don’t know. I expected more of her than that,’ the other
answered.
‘I reckon,’ remarked the father, ‘that if any one went through as much as
that lady did, it would not tend to improve her beauty. Now what age
might the lady be, sir?’
‘Forty-four years of age at the time of her execution,’ said the guide.
‘Ah weel, she’s young for her years,’ muttered the Scotchman, and the
party moved on. Frank and Maude lingered to have a further look at the
unfortunate princess, the bright French butterfly, who wandered from the
light and warmth into that grim country, a land of blood and of psalms.
‘She was as hard as nails under all her gentle grace,’ said Frank. ‘She
rode eighty miles and hardly drew rein after the battle of Langside.’
‘She looks as if she were tired, poor dear!’ said Maude; ‘I don’t think
that she was sorry to be at rest.’
The guide was narrating the names of the owners of the tombs at the
further end of the chapel. ‘Queen Anne is here, and Mary the wife of
William the Third is beside her. And here is William himself. The king
was very short and the queen very tall, so in the sculptures the king is
depicted standing upon a stool so as to bring their heads level. In the
vaults beyond there are thirty-eight Stuarts.’
Thirty-eight Stuarts! Princes, bishops, generals, once the salt of the
earth, the mightiest of men, and now lumped carelessly together as
thirty-eight Stuarts. So Death the Republican and Time the Radical can
drag down the highest from his throne.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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