And there, a few minutes later, she died, with Desdemona’s song of “Willow, willow, willow” on her lips, and protesting with her dying breath the innocence of her dear lady.
Now, indeed, the end had come for Othello, and all the anguish of unavailing remorse racked his soul.
“O, Desdemona, Desdemona! Dead!” his heart-broken wail rang through the room.
But it was all in vain now—vain his agony of love and sorrow; vain his pleading; vain his scalding tears; vain the bitter scorn with which he lashed his guilty spirit.
Cold, cold, pale and still, lay his beautiful young wife, her ears deaf to all voices of earth, and frozen on her silent lips the smile with which she had died.
Othello’s power and command were taken away, and Cassio ruled in Cyprus. But little cared Othello for this; all worldly ambition was over. As the gentlemen and officers were about to leave the chamber of death, taking Iago with them as their prisoner, Othello, with a dignified gesture, stayed them.
“Soft you; a word or two before you go. I have done the State some service, and they know it. No more of that. I pray you in your letters, when you shall relate these unlucky deeds, speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice. Then you must speak of one that loved not wisely but too well; of one not easily jealous, but being wrought, perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, like the base Indian, threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe.... Set you down this; and say besides, that in Aleppo once, where a malignant and a turbaned Turk beat a Venetian and traduced the State, I took by the throat the circumcised dog, and smote him—thus.” And at the last word Othello plunged a dagger into his heart.
With failing strength he dragged his steps to the bed, and fell on the dead body of Desdemona.
“I kissed thee ere I killed thee,” came his dying whisper. “No way but this: killing myself, to die upon a kiss.”