by his side.”  He murmured something, but she could not hear what it was; she thought he was speaking in French.  Then all at once he began to arrange his hair, “just as he used to do when well and he was dressing.”  “Es kleines Frauchen,” she whispered to him; and he seemed to understand.  For a moment, towards the evening, she went into another room, but was immediately called back; she saw at a glance that a ghastly change had taken place.  As she knelt by the bed, he breathed deeply, breathed gently, breathed at last no more.  His features became perfectly rigid; she shrieked one long wild shriek that rang through the terror-stricken castle and understood that she had lost him for ever.

CHAPTER VII.  WIDOWHOOD

I

The death of the Prince Consort was the central turning-point in the history of Queen Victoria.  She herself felt that her true life had ceased with her husband’s, and that the remainder of her days upon earth was of a twilight nature—­an epilogue to a drama that was done.  Nor is it possible that her biographer should escape a similar impression.  For him, too, there is a darkness over the latter half of that long career.  The first forty—­two years of the Queen’s life are illuminated by a great and varied quantity of authentic information.  With Albert’s death a veil descends.  Only occasionally, at fitful and disconnected intervals, does it lift for a moment or two; a few main outlines, a few remarkable details may be discerned; the rest is all conjecture and ambiguity.  Thus, though the Queen survived her great bereavement for almost as many years as she had lived before it, the chronicle of those years can bear no proportion to the tale of her earlier life.  We must be content in our ignorance with a brief and summary relation.

The sudden removal of the Prince was not merely a matter of overwhelming personal concern to Victoria; it was an event of national, of European importance.  He was only forty-two, and in the ordinary course of nature he might have been expected to live at least thirty years longer.  Had he done so it can hardly be doubted that the whole development of the English polity would have been changed.  Already at the time of his death he filled a unique place in English public life; already among the inner circle of politicians he was accepted as a necessary and useful part of the mechanism of the State.  Lord Clarendon, for instance, spoke of his death as “a national calamity of far greater importance than the public dream of,” and lamented the loss of his “sagacity and foresight,” which, he declared, would have been “more than ever valuable” in the event of an American war.  And, as time went on, the Prince’s influence must have enormously increased.  For, in addition to his intellectual and moral qualities, he enjoyed, by virtue of his position, one supreme advantage which every other holder of high office