MERRYN goes out by the door beyond the bed.
Is it a portent now to sleep at night?
What change is here? What see you in the Queen?
Can you discern how this disease will end?
Physician:
Surmise might spring and healing follow yet,
If I could find a trouble that could heal;
But these strong inward pains that keep her ebbing
Have not their source in perishing flesh.
I have seen women creep into their beds
And sink with this blind pain because they nursed
Some bitterness or burden in the mind
That drew the life, sucklings too long at breast.
Do you know such a cause in this poor lady?
Lear:
There is no cause. How should there be a cause?
Physician:
We cannot die wholly against our wills;
And in the texture of women I have found
Harder determination than in men:
The body grows impatient of enduring,
The harried mind is from the body estranged,
And we consent to go: by the Queen's touch,
The way she moves — or does not move — in bed,
The eyes so cold and keen in her white mask,
I know she has consented.
The snarling look of a mute wounded hawk,
That would be let alone, is always hers —
Yet she was sorely tender: it may be
Some wound in her affection will not heal.
We should be careful — the mind can so be hurt
That nought can make it be unhurt again.
Where, then, did her affection most persist?
Lear:
Old bone-patcher, old digger in men's flesh,
Doctors are ever itching to be priests,
Meddling in conduct, natures, life's privacies.
We have been coupled now for twenty years,
And she has never turned from me an hour —
She knows a woman's duty and a queen's:
Whose, then, can her affection be but mine?
How can I hurt her — she is still my queen?
If her strong inward pain is a real pain
Find me some certain drug to medicine it:
When common beings have decayed past help,
There must be still some drug for a king to use;
For nothing ought to be denied to kings.