THE KING COMPLAINS OF WANT OF SLEEP.
Nov. 1.—Our king does not advance in amendment; he grows so weak that he walks like a gouty man, yet has such spirits that he has talked away his voice, and is so hoarse it is painful to hear him. The queen is evidently in great uneasiness. God send him better!
She read to me to-day a lecture of Hunter’s. During the reading, twice, at pathetic passages, my poor queen shed tears. “How nervous I am?” she cried; “I am quite a fool! Don’t you think so?”
“No, ma’am,” was all I dared answer.
She revived, however, finished the lecture, and went upstairs and played upon the Princess Augusta’s harpsichord.
The king was hunting. Her anxiety for his return was greater than ever. The moment he arrived he sent a page to desire to have coffee and take his bark in the queen’s dressing-room. She said she would pour it out herself, and sent to inquire how he drank it.
The king is very sensible of the great change there is in himself, and of her disturbance at it. It seems, but heaven avert it! a threat of a total breaking up of the constitution. This, too, seems his own idea. I was present at his first seeing Lady Effingham on his return to Windsor this last time. “My dear Effy,” he cried, “you see me, all at once, an old man.” I was so much affected by this exclamation, that I wished to run out of the room. Yet I could not but recover when Lady Effingham, in her well-meaning but literal way, composedly answered, “We must all grow old, sir,—I am sure I do.”
He then produced a walking-stick which he had just ordered. “He could not,” he said, “get on without it; his strength seemed diminishing hourly.”
He took the bark, he said, “But the queen,” he cried, “is my physician, and no man need have a better; she is my friend, and no man can have a better.”
How the queen commanded herself I cannot conceive; but there was something so touching in this speech, from his hoarse voice and altered countenance, that it overset me very much.
Nor can I ever forget him in what passed this night. When I came to the queen’s dressing-room he was still with her. He constantly conducts her to it before he retires to his own. He was begging her not to speak to him when he got to his room, that he might fall asleep, as he felt great want of that refreshment. He repeated this desire, I believe, at least a hundred times, though, far enough from need Ing it, the poor queen never uttered one syllable! He then applied to me, saying he was really very well, except in that one particular, that he could not sleep.
The kindness and benevolence of his manner all this time was most penetrating: he seemed to have no anxiety but to set the queen at rest, and no wish but to quiet and give pleasure to all around him, To me, he never yet spoke with such excess of benignity: he appeared even solicitous to satisfy me that he should do well, and to spare all alarm; but there was a hurry in his manner and voice that indicated sleep to be indeed wanted. Nor could I, all night, forbear foreseeing “He sleeps now, or to-morrow he will be surely delirious!”
Sunday, Nov. 2.—The king was better, and prevailed upon to give up going to the early prayers. The queen and princesses went. After they were gone, and I was following towards my room, the king called after me, and he kept me in discourse a full half hour nearly all the time they were away.
It was all to the same purport; that he was well, but wanted more rest; yet he said he had slept the last night like a child. But his manner, still, was so touchingly kind, so softly gracious, that it doubled my concern to see him so far from well.