She drew back and let the curtain drive him forward. Certainly it was plaguey dark. He saw the Queen at the far end of the chamber writing a letter, haloed in the light of a single taper. She looked up when she heard him, but did not beckon him nearer; so he stayed where he was, and, as his eyes grew used to the gloom, looked about him.
It was a spacious room, but low in the ceiling, and raftered, with heavy curtains across the windows, which were embayed. A great bed was in the midst of the wall, canopied and crowned, with plumes at the corners and hangings on all sides but one—the door side. He could not see the King lying there, though he could hear his short breaths, ‘like a dog’s with its tongue out’; but presently, to his huge discomfort, he made out a sitting figure close to the pillow on the farther side, and not six paces from him across the bed—man or woman he never knew. It might have been a dead person, he said, for all the motion that it made. ‘It sat deep in the shadow, hooded, so that you could not see its face, or whether it had a face; and one white hand supported the hood. It did not stir when the sufferer needed assistance, such as water, or the turning of a pillow, or a handkerchief. It was a silent witness of everything done and to be gone through with; gave me lead in the bowels, as they say, the horrors in the hair.’
It may have been Mary Seton, or a priest, or a watching nun; at any rate, it terrified Paris, his head already weakened by the burden of that fetid chamber. The air was overpowering, tainted to sourness, seeming to clog the eyelids and stifle the light.
By and by the Queen beckoned him forward, putting up her finger to enjoin a soft tread. He came on like a cat, and stood within touching distance of her, and saw that she was kneeling at a table, writing with extreme rapidity, tears running down her face. There was a silver crucifix in front of her, to which she turned her eyes from time to time, as if referring to it the words which cost her so much to put down. Once, after a frenzy of penmanship, she held out her hands to it in protest; then reverently took it up and kissed it, to sanctify so the words she was writing: ‘The good year send us that God knit us together for ever for the most faithful couple that ever He did knit together.’ Paris knew very well to whom she wrote so fully, who was to read this stained, passionate letter, ill scrawled on scraps of old paper, scored with guilt, blotted with shameful tears, loving, repentant, wilful, petulant, unspeakably loyal and tender, all by turns. At this moment the King called to her.
He lay, you must know, with a handkerchief over his face. Paris had believed him asleep, for his breathing, though short, was regular, and his moaning and the working of his tongue counted for little in a sick man’s slumber. But while she was in the thick of her work at the table he coughed and called out to her in distress, ‘Mary, O Mary! where are you gone?’ And when she did not answer, but went on with the unspinning of the thought in her mind, and let him call ‘Mary, O Mary!’ Paris, looking from one to the other—and awfully on that shrouded third—found blame for her in his heart.
She finished her line, got up, and went to the foot of the bed. ‘You call me? What is your pleasure?’
‘His pleasure! Faith of a Christian!’ thinks Paris.
The King whispered, ‘Water, in Christ’s name’; and Paris heard the clicking of his dry tongue. Nevertheless he said, ‘Let me fetch you the water, madam.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘fetch it you. And I would that one of us could be drowned in the water.’
He poured some into a cup and took it to her.