“Oh, my God!” cried Madame. “If you were in my pain you would not speak so quietly of waiting.”
For a while she tossed and twisted from side to side. People surged in and out of the room; none of them believed that she was in any danger; the doctor insisted that she was not, that in a while the pain would pass, that the coldness of her hands and feet was only an ordinary symptom of a chill.
Presently she called out that she would be moved; the bed had grown hot and uncomfortable and intolerable. There was a little bed in her dressing-room; they wrapped her in a blue silk mantle and Monsieur and two of her ladies carried her there. She was slight–of the weight of a child.
The clearer atmosphere of the dressing-room and the cool bed seemed to relieve her; she lay still, swathed in her mantle, her auburn hair, that was marvellously fine, in disorder on the pillow.
On the table by the bed stood a couple of candles, and by the light of these they saw her face more clearly than when she was in the curtained bed. And it startled them.
“Do the candles trouble you?” asked Monsieur, his voice unsteady.
“No, Monsieur,” she answered. “Nothing troubles me. To-morrow morning I shall be dead.”
Why did not the King come?
As she had eaten nothing since dinner, they brought her some supper on a silver tray; Monsieur showed some tenderness in holding it for her and in insisting that she should take something which at first she could not bring herself to; but at last she thanked him with a look and drank some soup. All at once her agony became so terrible that they thought she must die on the instant: she shook and stiffened with torment, like one at the stake; her face turned an ashy hue and glistened with moisture; the pupils of her eyes contracted and dilated.
“I am poisoned,” she said.