Her small white hands twitched now and then spasmodically, but she
seemed hardly to breathe. Eleanor knelt beside her and propped her up
higher, thrusting one arm under the pillow while she fanned her with
the other hand.
"Beatrix!" she called softly.
She thought that the girl's eyelids quivered, and she called her again;
but there was no answer, nor any movement of the hand this time, and
the face was so white and deathly that any one might have believed life
gone, but for the faintly perceptible breath that stirred the feathers
of the Greek fan when the Queen held it close to the lips. She grew
anxious and thought of calling the Norman serving-woman and of sending
for her own physician. But, in the first place, she thought that
Beatrix might have only fainted, to revive at any moment, in which case
she had things to say which were not for other ears; and as for her
physician, it suddenly occurred to her that, although he had been in
her train five years, she had never under any circumstances had
occasion to consult him, and that he was probably what he looked, a
solemn fool and an ignorant drencher, whereas there were younger men
with wise heads who had followed the army and made a fat living by
concocting draughts for those who overcloyed themselves with Greek
sweetmeats, physicians who could make salves for bruises, who knew the
cunning Italian trick of opening a vein in the instep instead of in the
arm, and who, on occasion, could cast a judicial figure of the heavens
and interpret the horoscope of the day and hour.
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