e halls?
What were these affrighted, shrieking voices calling? What were they
screaming to the queen, and the physicians, and the priest?

Elizabeth stopped amazed, and listened. Thomas Seymour and Catharine,
arm linked in arm, stood near her. They scarcely heard what was taking
place; they looked at each other and smiled, and dreamed of love and
death and an eternity of happiness.

Now the door flew open; there was seen John Heywood's pale face: there
were the maids of honor and the court officials. And all shrieked and
all wailed: "The king is dying! He is struck with apoplexy! The king is
at the point of death!"

"The king calls you! The king desires to die in the arms of his wife!"
said John Heywood, and, as he quietly pushed Elizabeth aside and away
from the door as she was pressing violently forward, he added: "The king
will see nobody but his wife and the priest; and he has authorized me to
call the queen!"

He opened the door; and through the lines of weeping and wailing court
officials and servants, Catharine moved on, to go to the death-bed of
her royal husband.

CHAPTER XXXVII. "LE ROI EST MORT--VIVE LA REINE!"

King Henry lay a-dying. That life full of sin, full of blood and crime,
full of treachery and cunning, full of hypocrisy and sanctimonious
cruelty--that life was at last lived out. That hand, which had signed
so many death-warrants, was now clutched in the throes of death. It had
stiffened at the very moment when the king was going to sign the Duke
of Norfolk's death-warrant. [Footnote: historical. The king's own
words.--Leti, vol. I, p. 16.] And the king was dying with the gnawing
consciousness that he had no longer the power to throttle that enemy
whom he hated. The mighty king was now nothing more than a feeble,
dying old man, who was no longer able to hold the pen and sign this
death-warrant for which he had so long hankered and hoped. Now it lay
before him, and he no longer had the power to use it. God, in His wisdom
and His justice, had decreed against him the most grievous and horrible
of punishments; He had left him his consciousness; He had not crippled
him in mind, but in body only. And that motionless and rigid mass which,
growing chill in death, lay there on the couch of purple trimmed with
gold--that was the king--a king whom agony of conscience did not permit
to die, and who now shuddered and was horrified in view of death, to
which he had, with relentless cruelty, hunted