“Is it not in reason to guard one’s virtue?” she said, panting.
“Nay,” he answered; “but if you guard it alone and weaponless, and the thief come in well armed and strong of body? It were reason better to yield it with a good grace.”
She threw herself upon a bench wailing, “O hence, thou beast!” And so she lay writhing—“Only to die—and they will not let me die!”
She sought and cried for death perpetually; she knew she was lost, lacking that kind friend. Was it not pitiful? she whom life had so favoured and love so moulded. She sought him, moaning and wringing her hands, at barred windows, in dusky corners; she entreated her gaolers to have pity on her, to put poison into her food, to lend her a weapon, or a pathway to the battlements whence she might cast herself down. Her every prayer but increased their watchfulness; Death was excluded from her as jealously as if he had been her outlawed lover himself.
On this day her desperation had risen to a pitch scarce endurable. There had been signs that the royal patience was near exhausted. And it was late spring without—she could see it through her window across the green flats that stretched beyond the moat, beyond her prison. Its sweetness reminded her of past days in the forest, so that her heart came near to breaking. Her lips whispered the words of the little glad song that she and her Robin had often sung together:
“Summer is a comin’ in,
Loud sing cuckoo.
Groweth seed and bloweth mead,
And springeth the wood now.
Sing cuckoo, cuckoo.”
“Sing cuckoo,” she wept, “the wanton’s shame! O Robin, my Robin!” She would never see him again—could never wish to. In a few hours, perhaps, she would be a thing for his scorn, a thing that not death, found too late, could cleanse.
In the evening came the King himself, with his frowning eyes and grim jaw that, with the thick beard clipped close on it, looked like a bulldog’s. He was in a furious mood, his Queen having vexed him, and flashed and scintillated like a scaled devil in the light of the dozen torches he brought.
“How now,” he thundered, “thou rever’s doxy! Still obdurate?”
Her very heart shook; but she stood up to him bravely.