The room into which we looked was of fair size and circular in shape. Three windows lit it, and between us and the nearest knelt Dom Basilio, busy with a web of linen which he was tearing into bandages. His was the voice that had commanded us to enter; and passing in, I was aware that the room had two other occupants; for behind the door stood a truckle bed, and along the bed lay my father, pale as death and swathed in bandages; and by the foot of the bed, on a stool, with a spinning-wheel beside her, sat a woman.
It needed no second look to tell me her name. Mean cell though it was that held her, and mean her seat, the worn face could belong to no one meaner than a Queen. A spool of thread had rolled from her hand, across the floor; yet her hands upon her lap were shaped as though they still held it. As she sat now, rigid, with her eyes on the bed, she must have been sitting for minutes. So, while Dom Basilio snipped and rent at his bandages, she gazed at my father on the bed, and my father gazed back into her eyes, drinking the love in them; and the faces of both seemed to shine with a solemn awe.
I think we must have been standing there on the threshold, we three, for close upon a minute before my father turned his eyes towards me— so far beyond this life was he travelling, and so far had the sound of our entrance to follow and overtake his dying senses.
"Prosper! . . ."
"My father!"
He lifted a hand weakly toward the bandages wrapping his breast. "These—these are of her spinning, lad. This is her bed they have laid me on. . . . Who is it stands there behind your shoulder?"
"It is the Princess, father. You remember the Princess Camilla? Yes, madam"—I turned to the Queen—"it is your daughter I bring— your daughter, and, with your blessing, my wife."
The Queen, though her daughter knelt, did not offer to embrace her, but lifted two feeble hands over the bowed head as though to bless, while over her hands her gaze still rested on my father.
"We have had brave work, lad," he panted. "I am sorry you come late for it—but you were bound on your own business, eh?" He turned with a ghost of his old smile. "Nay, child, and you did right; I am not blaming you—The young to the young, and let the dead bury the dead! Kiss me, lad, if you can find room between these plaguey bandages. Your pardon, Dom Basilio: you have done your best, and, if I seem ungrateful, let me make amends and thank you for giving me this last, best hour. . . . Indeed, Dom Basilio, I am a dead man, but your bandages are tying my soul here for a while, where it would stay. Gervase"—he reached out a hand to my uncle, who was past hiding his tears—"Gervase—brother—there needs no talk, no thanks, between you and me. . . ."
I drew back and, touching Dom Basilio by the shoulder, led him to the window. "He has no single wound that in itself would be fatal," the Trappist whispered; "but a twenty that together have bled him to death. He hacked his way up this stair through half a score of Genoese; at the door here, there was none left to hinder him, and we, having found and followed with the keys, climbed over bodies to find him stretched before it."