It was a Friday evening in a hard February.Out-of-doors the snow lay deep in the streets of Bruges, and every canal was frozen solid so that carts rumbled along them as on a street.A wind had risen which drifted the powdery snow and blew icy draughts through every chink.The small-paned windows of the great upper-room were filled with oiled vellum, but they did not keep out the weather, and currents of cold air passed through them to the doorway, making the smoke of the four charcoal braziers eddy and swirl.
The place was warm, yet shot with bitter gusts, and the smell of burning herbs gave it the heaviness of a chapel at high mass.Hanging silver lamps, which blazed blue and smoky, lit it in patches, sufficient to show the cleanness of the rush-strewn floor, the glory of the hangings of cloth-of-gold and damask, and the burnished sheen of the metal-work.There was no costlier chamber in that rich city.
It was a strange staging for death, for the woman on the high bed was dying.Slowly, fighting every inch of the way with a grim tenacity, but indubitably dying.Her vital ardour had sunk below the mark from which it could rise again, and was now ebbing as water runs from a little crack in a pitcher.The best leeches in all Flanders and Artois had come to doctor her.They had prescribed the horrid potions of the age: tinctures of earth-worms; confections of spiders and wood-lice and viper's flesh; broth of human skulls, oil, wine, ants' eggs, and crabs' claws; the bufo preparatus, which was a live toad roasted in a pot and ground to a powder;and innumerable plaisters and electuaries.She had begun by submitting meekly, for she longed to live, and had ended, for she was a shrewd woman, by throwing the stuff at the apothecaries' heads.Now she ordained her own diet, which was of lamb's flesh lightly boiled, and woman's milk, got from a wench in the purlieus of St.Sauveur.The one medicine which she retained was powdered elk's horn, which had been taken from the beast between two festivals of the Virgin.This she had from the foresters in the Houthulst woods, and swallowed it in white wine an hour after every dawn.