When Murray reached the couch on which the queen was extended, gasping as though in the last extremity, her case indeed was pitiable. Her long locks had burst from their confinement, and flowed over her person like a veil; her corsage had been cut asunder by the damsels of her court, and her bosom, bare in its unspeakable beauty, was disclosed to the licentious gaze of the haughty nobles. An angle of the couch, as she had fallen, had grazed her temple, and the blood streamed down her cheek and neck, giving, by the contrast of its dark crimson, an ashy, deathlike whiteness to her whole complexion. “Ha!” he whispered, with deep emotions, “what means this? Back, back, my lords, for shame, if not for pity! would ye gaze upon your sovereign, in the abandonment of utter grief, as though she were a peasant-quean? Stand back, I say, and let the halls be cleared; and hark thee, Paris,” he continued, as a cringing, terrified-looking Frenchman entered the apartment, “bid some one call Galozzi hither: the poison-vending, cozening Tuscan hath skill at least, and it shall go hardly with him so he exert it not! But ha! what ails the man? St. Andrew, he will faint! What ails thee, craven? Speak, speak, or I shake the coward soul from out thy carcass!”--and he shook the trembling servitor fiercely by the throat. “The king--the king--” he faltered forth at length, terrified yet more by the wrath of Murray than by the scene which he had witnessed. “What of the king, thou dastard? Speak--I say, what of Henry Darnley?” “Murdered, your highness--murdered!” “Nay, thou art made to say it!” “He speaks too truly, Murray,” cried Morton, entering, with his bold visage blanched, and his dark locks bristling with unwonted terror; “the king is murdered--foully, most foully murdered!” “By the villain Bothwell!” muttered Murray, between his hard-set teeth; “but he shall rue the deed! But say on, Morton, say on: how knowest thou this? Say on--and you, ladies, attend the queen.” “I saw it, Murray--with these eyes I saw it--the cold, naked, strangled corpse--flung, like a carrion-carcass, on the garden-path; and the kirk of Field a pile of smoking and steaming ruins--blown up with gunpowder, to give an air of accident to this accursed treason. I tell you, man,” he continued, as he saw Murray about to speak, “I tell you that I saw, in that drear garden, cast like a murrained sheep upon a dike, all that remained of Henry Darnley!”