All the little children stood up. “Uncle,” they shouted. Hoofs sounded by the door. A man entered without knocking. When he saw me he became ceremonious as a Mandarin.
“This is a traveller,” said my host.
The messenger indulged in inquiries about my welfare, journey, and destination. My host interrupted.
“How’s mother? We have watched late to know.”
“She is much worse.” And the messenger went on to say that she might not live two days, and the doctor was a careless, indifferent dog, treating her as though she were an ordinary old woman.
“Does he still give her strychnine?”
“He won’t deny it.” The messenger explained that the doctor thought strychnine in small doses was good for old people. The scientist who gave me gingerbread should have been there to champion the doctor. In the eyes of his judges that night he was suspected of poisoning or treating with criminal folly, royalty itself.
The younger doctor was miles away, and might refuse to make the trip. The two loyal sons seemed paralyzed because the time for decision and the time for mourning came together. There were long silences, interrupted by my host repeating in a sort of primitive song, “I can’t think of anything except my dying mother. I can’t think of anything except mother is going to die.”
At last, with his brother’s consent, the messenger galloped and galloped away, to find his only hope, the younger physician. As the wife gave me the candle, sending me up stairs, I looked back at the family circle.
Helpless grief made every face rigid. I looked again at the eldest daughter. The moving shadows embroidered on her breast intricate symbols of the fair years, passing by in the ghost of tapestry, things that happened in the beginning of the world. Let the epic tell that when the stranger slept there was a magic loom by his bed that wove that history again in valiant colors, showing battles without number, and sieges, and interminable sunny love-tales, and lotus-handed ladies whispering over manuscript things too fine to be told, and ruddy warriors sitting at watch-fires on battlements eternal; and let the epic tell how, in the early dawn, the stranger half awoke, yet saw this tapestry hung round the walls. If one could remember every story for which the pictures stood, he might indeed write the world’s unwritten epic. The last tapestry to be hung changed from gold to black warp and woof upon which was written that because of a treacherous prime minister who served a poisoned wine, the Empress of the White Witches was perishing before her time, and the young wizard, with the counter-spell, was riding night and day, but all the palace knew he would arrive too late.