Mary Stuart by Stefan Zweig

Author:Stefan Zweig [Zweig, Stefan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: History, Biography, Non-Fiction, Classics
ISBN: 9785170212521
Google: JTTaNm5dAdsC
Amazon: 5170212399
Goodreads: 16308461
Publisher: AST
Published: 1935-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Once more we look through this letter into the shadowy room that is so distant both in time and space. We picture Mary Stuart sitting by the sick man’s bed and listening to this outburst of love and humility. Now she ought to rejoice, for her scheme has been successful; she has once more made the simple-minded lad soft and yielding. But she is too much ashamed of her deceit to rejoice. At the climax of her success she is overcome with loathing as she contemplates her own deed. Gloomily, with averted eyes, with disordered senses, she sits beside her husband, so that even Darnley is at length struck by something obscure, something incomprehensible, in this beloved woman. The poor dupe tries to console the deceiver! He wants to help her, to cheer her up, to make her happy. He implores her to stay the night in his room, dreaming, poor fool, once more of love and tenderness. It is heartbreaking to a reader of this letter to note how the weakling again clung trustfully to his wife, again felt sure of her. He could not turn away his eyes from her, or cease from enjoying the delight of renewed confidential association from which he had so long been debarred. He begged her to cut up his meat for him. In his folly, he blurted out secret after secret, revealing the names of those whom he had been employing to spy upon her. Not knowing of her passion for Bothwell, he told her of his own fierce hatred of Bothwell and Lethington.

Naturally enough, the more he gave himself away, the harder he made it for his wife to betray him, unsuspecting and helpless. Despite herself, she was touched by the credulity of her victim. She found it difficult to go on playing this despicable comedy. “You have never heard him speake better nor more humbly; and if I had not proofe of his hart to be as waxe and if myne were not as a dyamant, no stroke but coming from your hands could make me but to have pitie of him.” We see that she no longer hated Darnley, that she had forgotten all the ill the poor deceitful creature had done her. At the bottom of her soul she would gladly have spared him. She shifted the burden of vengeance onto Bothwell’s shoulders. “You are the cause thereof. For, my own revenge, I wold not doo it.” It is Bothwell’s command, which she must obey in defiance of her conscience. For love’s sake, and for no other reason, she must do this horrible thing, must turn the childlike trust of her husband to account. She burst out angrily: “You make me dissemble so much that I am afrayde thereof with horrour, and you make me almost to play the part of a traitor. Remember that if it weare not for obeyeng I had rather be dead. My heart bleedith for yt.”

But a thrall cannot defy orders. He can but groan when the lash drives him forward.

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