This was only the first stroke, a light one; the first snowflake of the winter that I was entering, regarded only because it tells us what’s to come. I was by no means sure that Tarin spoke truly. I am sure still that Redival was false and a fool. And for her folly the gods themselves cannot blame me; she had that from her father. But one thing was certain; I had never thought at all how it might be with her when I turned first to the Fox and then to Psyche. For it had been somehow settled in my mind from the very beginning that I was the pitiable and ill–used one. She had her gold curls, hadn’t she?
So back to my writing. And the continual labour of mind to which it put me began to overflow into my sleep. It was a labour of sifting and sorting, separating motive from motive and both from pretext; and this same sorting went on every night in my dreams, but in a changed fashion. I thought I had before me a huge, hopeless pile of seeds, wheat, barley, poppy, rye, millet, what not? and I must sort them out and make separate piles, each all of one kind. Why I must do it, I did not know; but infinite punishment would fall upon me if I rested a moment from my labour or if, when all was done, a single seed were in the wrong pile. In waking life a man would know the task impossible. The torment of the dream was that, there, it could conceivably be done. There was one chance in ten thousand of finishing the labour in time, and one in a hundred thousand of making no mistake. It was all but certain I should fail, and be punished; but not certain. And so to it: searching, peering, picking up each seed between finger and thumb. Yet not always finger and thumb. For in some dreams, more madly still, I became a little ant, and the seeds were as big as millstones; and labouring with all my might, till my six legs cracked, I carried them to their places; holding them in front of me as ants do, loads bigger than myself.
One thing that shows how wholly the gods kept me to my two labours, the day’s and the night’s, is that all this time I hardly gave Bardia a thought, save to grumble at his absence because it meant that I was more hindered in my writing. While the rage of it lasted nothing seemed to matter a straw except finishing my book. Of Bardia I only said (once and again), “Does he mean to slug abed for the rest of his life?” or, “It’s that wife of his.”
Then there came a day when that last line of the book (they have no answer) was still wet, and I found myself listening to Arnom and understanding, as if for the first time, what his looks and voice meant. “Do you mean,” I cried, “that the Lord Bardia is in danger?”
“He’s very weak, Queen,” said the priest. “I wish the Fox were with us. We are bunglers, we of Glome. It seems to me that Bardia has no strength or spirit to fight the sickness.”
“Good gods,” said I, “why did you not make me understand this before? Ho! Slave! My horse. I will go and see him.”
Arnom was an old and trusted counsellor now. He laid his hand on my arm. “Queen,” he said gently and very gravely, “it would make him the less likely to recover if you now went to him.”
“Do I carry such an infection about me?” said I. “Is there death in my aspect, even through a veil?”
“Bardia is your loyalest and most loving subject,” said Arnom. “To see you would call up all his powers; perhaps crack them. He’d rouse himself to his duty and courtesy. A hundred affairs of state on which he meant to speak to you would crowd into his mind. He’d rack his brains to remember things he has forgotten for these last nine days. It might kill him. Leave him to drowse and dream. It’s his best chance now.”
It was as bitter a truth as I’d ever tasted, but I drank it. Would I not have crouched silent in my own dungeons as long as Arnom bade me if it would add one featherweight to Bardia’s chance of life? Three days I bore it (I, the old fool, with hanging dugs and shrivelled flanks). On the fourth I said, “I can bear it no longer.” On the fifth Arnom came to me, himself weeping, and I knew his tidings without words. And this is a strange folly, that what seemed to me worst of all was that Bardia had died without ever hearing what it would have shamed him to hear. It seemed to me that all would be bearable if, once only, I could have gone to him and whispered in his ear, “Bardia, I loved you.”
When they laid him on the pyre I could only stand by to honour him. Because I was neither his wife nor kin, I might not wail nor beat the breast for him. Ah, if I could have beaten the breast, I would have put on steel gloves or hedgehog skins to do it.
I waited three days, as the custom is, and then went to comfort (so they call it) his widow. It was not only duty and usage that drove me. Because he had loved her she was, in a way, surely enough, the enemy; yet who else in the whole world could now talk to me?
They brought me into the upper room in her house where she sat at her spinning; very pale, but very calm. Calmer than I. Once I had been surprised that she was so much less beautiful than report had made her. Now, in her later years, she had won a new kind of beauty; it was a proud, still sort of face.
“Lady—Ansit,” I said, taking both her hands (she had not time to get them away from me), “what shall I say to you? How can I speak of him and not say that your loss is indeed without measure? And that’s no comfort. Unless you can think even now that it is better to have had and lost such a husband than to enjoy any man else in the world for ever.”
“The Queen does me great honour,” said Ansit, pulling her hands out of mine so as to stand with them crossed on her breast, her eyes cast down, in the court fashion.
“Oh, dear Lady, un–queen me a little, I beseech you. Is it as if you and I had never met till yesterday? After yours (never think I’d compare them) my loss is greatest. I pray you, your seat again. And your distaff; we shall talk better to that movement. And you will let me sit here beside you?”
She sat down and resumed her spinning; her face at rest and her lips a little pursed, very housewifely. She would give me no help.
“It was very unlooked for,” said I. “Did you at first see any danger in this sickness?”
“Yes.”
“Did you so? To me Arnom said it ought to have been a light matter.”
“He said that to me, Queen. He said it would be a light matter for a man who had all his strength to fight it.”
“Strength? But the Lord Bardia was a strong man.”
“Yes; as a tree that is eaten away within.”
“Eaten away? And with what? I never knew this,”
“I suppose not, Queen. He was tired. He had worked himself out; or been worked. Ten years ago he should have given over and lived as old men do. He was not made of iron or brass, but flesh.”
“He never looked nor spoke like an old man.”
“Perhaps you never saw him, Queen, at the times when a man shows his weariness. You never saw his haggard face in early morning. Nor heard his groan when you (because you had sworn to do it) must shake him and force him to rise. You never saw him come home late from the palace, hungry, yet too tired to eat. How should you, Queen? I was only his wife. He was too well–mannered, you know, to nod and yawn in a Queen’s house.”
“You mean that his work——?”
“Five wars, thirty–one battles, nineteen embassies, taking thought for this and thought for that, speaking a word in one ear, and another, and another, soothing this man and scaring that and flattering a third, devising, consulting, remembering, guessing, forecasting … and the Pillar Room and the Pillar Room. The mines are not the only place where a man can be worked to death.”
This was worse than the worst I had looked for. A flash of anger passed through me, then a horror of misgiving; could it (but that was fantastical) be true? But the misery of that mere suspicion made my own voice almost humble.