She made no movement, and her eyes only were fixed on the dying. “And I too will die!” she said in her heart. “The day will come when I shall cease to suffer. O material life which envelops me! cease also to burden my soul, and let it flee into eternity. Let me find a refuge even in the bosom of the tomb.”
* * * * *
“My daughter, my daughter!” she suddenly cried, as though beside herself; “give her back to me, you who have torn her from my arms!”
A shudder passed over the form of Wolsey; he had heard that voice. It seemed as though a burning fire had touched him. He rose up in his bed, and, gazing at
the queen with wildly staring eyes, “Your daughter, madam!” he cried, “your daughter!… Alas! it is I who have done all. You accuse me, and yet, as God is my judge, I threw myself at the feet of the king, and tried to turn him from his evil intention; but it was too late, and I had not foreseen the fatal consequences of a policy which I believed would be advantageous and beneficial. Alas! how differently I regard it at this terrible hour. Pardon me! pardon me!… I conjure you, that I may not bear to the foot of the throne of the Sovereign Judge the fearful weight of the malediction of the widow and the orphan!” And he stretched towards her his hands, which he was no longer able to raise.
“May God forgive you,” responded the queen, “may God forgive you! But what can there be in common between you and me, unless it is suffering? You will soon be delivered from your woes; but I—I must live!”
“Ah!” cried Woolsey with expressions of the most profound wretchedness, “you hear it, brothers, already the voice of God punishes me by the mouth of this woman. And thus,” he continued, fixing his terrified gaze on the queen, “I die at enmity with you, and you will not have compassion on the condition to which I am reduced! How can one human being call down upon another without trembling the vengeance of the Most High? Are we not all formed of the same flesh and blood? Are you not horror-stricken at the thought of the judgments I must suffer and the account I must render?”
Catherine felt her blood congealed by the frightful eloquence of
this expiring man—this man whom but a moment separated from death and eternity.
At the thought of the nothingness of all created humanity, she felt the hatred she had borne Wolsey entirely effaced.