It is not strange that a bought watcher drowses; What is most strange is that the Queen sleeps Who would not sleep for all my draughts of sleep In the last days. When did this change appear? Merryn: We shall not know--it came while Gormflaith nodded. When I awoke her and she saw the Queen She could not speak for fear: When the rekindling lamp showed certainly The bed-clothes stirring about our lady's neck, She knew there was no death, she breathed, she said She had not slept until her mistress slept And lulled her; but I asked her how her mistress Slept, and her utterance faded. She should be blamed with rods, as I was blamed For slumber, after a day and a night of watching, By the Queen's child-bed, twenty years ago. Lear: She does what she must do: let her alone. I know her watch is now: get gone and send her. [MERRYN goes out by the door beyond the bed.] Is it a portent now to sleep at night? What change is here? What see you in the Queen? Can you discern how this disease will end? Physician: Surmise might spring and healing follow yet, If I could find a trouble that could heal; But these strong inward pains that keep her ebbing Have not their source in perishing flesh. I have seen women creep into their beds And sink with this blind pain because they nursed Some bitterness or burden in the mind That drew the life, sucklings too long at breast. Do you know such a cause in this poor lady? Lear: There is no cause. How should there be a cause? Physician: We cannot die wholly against our wills; And in the texture of women I have found Harder determination than in men: The body grows impatient of enduring, The harried mind is from the body estranged, And we consent to go: by the Queen's touch, The way she moves--or does not move--in bed, The eyes so cold and keen in her white mask, I know she has consented. The snarling look of a mute wounded hawk, That would be let alone, is always hers-- Yet she was sorely tender: it may be Some wound in her affection will not heal. We should be careful--the mind can so be hurt That nought can make it be unhurt again. Where, then, did her affection most persist? Lear: Old bone-patcher, old digger in men's flesh, Doctors are ever itching to be priests, Meddling in conduct, natures, life's privacies. We have been coupled now for twenty years, And she has never turned from me an hour-- She knows a woman's duty and a queen's: Whose, then, can her affection be but mine? How can I hurt her--she is still my queen? If her strong inward pain is a real pain Find me some certain drug to medicine it: When common beings have decayed past help, There must be still some drug for a king to use; For nothing ought to be denied to kings. Physician: