THE CATASTROPHE.
After days of secret torture and hidden tears, after nights of
sobbing anguish and wailing sorrow, Catharine had at last attained
to inward peace; she had at last taken a firm and decisive
resolution.
The king was sick unto death; and however much she had suffered and
endured from him, still he was her husband; and she would not stand
by his deathbed as a perjured and deceitful woman; she would not be
constrained to cast down her eyes before the failing gaze of the
dying king. She would renounce her love--that love, which, however,
had been as pure and chaste as a maiden's prayer--that love, which
was as unapproachably distant as the blush of morn, and yet had
stood above her so vast and brilliant, and had irradiated the gloomy
pathway of her life with celestial light.
She would make the greatest of sacrifices; she would give her lover
to another. Elizabeth loved him. Catharine would not investigate and
thoroughly examine the point, whether Thomas Seymour returned her
love, and whether the oath he had taken to her, the queen, was
really nothing more than a fancy of the brain, or a falsehood. No,
she did not believe it; she did not believe that Thomas Seymour was
capable of treachery, of double-dealing. But Elizabeth loved him;
and she was young and beautiful, and a great future lay before her.
Catharine loved Thomas Seymour strongly enough not to want to
deprive him of this future, but gladly to present herself a
sacrifice to the happiness of her lover.
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