"Is it your purpose to mock me?" he cried. "Indeed I am not good to mock. O, ye Valkyries, ye wax over-bold, nor does this delay serve to calm my displeasure, but it spreads further like the rising tide, and reaches you too. Of what avail then are your idle words? for well I know that there in your midst ye foolishly seek to guard Brunnhilde. I bid you all then to stand off from her, for from me and from you and your company she is for ever an outcast. She has proved herself worthless. Worthless is she, and the doom of the worthless shall come upon her at my hands."
Then again once more they besought him, for they trembled for Brunnhilde who in their midst lay trembling, and they told him how in panic of fear she had fled before him, beseeching her sisters to shield and shelter her, for they knew that they could not deceive him, nor was it of any use to say that she was not with them. So ere they handed her to him they tried to soften his anger, telling him that already fear, like some ploughshare, had furrowed her heart, that heart which had never yet trembled nor turned faint. Then with one voice they besought him to have pity, remembering her mighty deeds. But their pleading but more inflamed him, for it was the very darling of his soul who had disobeyed him, and thus her sin was the more grievous, and to try to turn his wrath and beseech in this sort seemed to him a womanish deed. So again he broke out in ever fiercer anger.
"Are ye indeed Valkyries?" he said, "and can it be that I have begotten a brood so timorous of soul, and so little courageous? Women of faint heart are ye all! Were these the hearts that I moulded, which should meet war and the clash of fighting like men, sharp as steel and hard as tempered steel, that like a pack of women you whimper in this sort when I, the righteous judge, come to visit one who has failed in truth? Ah! and ye know not half."
For a moment his anger all died out and left him only very sorry, for he loved Brunnhilde with a love far deeper than any of her sisters could ever know, and his voice softened.
"Ye shall hear what she has done," he said, "and judge if it was not meeter that my tears should flow and that I rather than you should weep and wail. For to her, to Brunnhilde, my innermost being and the secrets of my heart were known as to myself, and into her soul, as into a well of water, I looked and beheld myself, and my will that had been dark to me grew clear. In her, as in the womb of a woman with child, my will matured, and from her it came to birth. Never was there love like this between any man and maid. Was that a bond to lightly loose? Yet to-day she loosed it, and she who was my will fought against me. A clear command I laid on her, and in the sight of heaven and earth she disobeyed it, and the sword of Siegmund, made by me, was directed against myself by her command. She has done this."
Crouching among her sisters.