When Cymoënt saw her son’s white face, she fainted again, and when she had recovered from her faint, she cried and moaned so bitterly, that even the hard rocks nearly wept for sorrow.
She and her sisters carefully looked at Marinell’s wound, and one of them, who knew much about healing, felt his pulse, and found that a little life was still left in him. With their soft, silver-fringed mantles they wiped the blood from the wound, and poured in soothing balm and nectar, and bound it up. Then they strewed Cymoënt’s chariot with flowers, and lifted Marinell gently up, and laid him in it. And the dolphins, knowing to go quietly and swiftly, swam off with Cymoënt and Marinell to Cymoënt’s bower under the sea.
Deep in the bottom of the sea was the bower. It was built of hollow waves, heaped high, like stormy clouds. In it they laid Marinell, and hastily sent for the doctor of all the folk under the sea, to come and try to cure the dreadful wound. So clever and so wise was this doctor, that soon the nymphs could laugh and sport again because Marinell was well.
But Cymoënt was afraid that some other harm might come to him if he went on to the land. So she made him stay beside her, under the sea, until Marinell grew tired of doing nothing. He longed to gallop away on his horse, his sword clanking by his side, and see the green woods and grey towers of the land, instead of idling away the hours in a bower under the sea, where there was nothing for him to do, but to watch the fishes of silver and blue and red, as they chased each other through the forests of seaweed.
One day two great rivers were married, and all the sea-folk went to the wedding. A feast was given in the house of the Shepherd of the Seas, and while Cymoënt and the other nymphs were there, Marinell wandered about outside. For because Marinell’s father had been a knight and not one of the sea-folk, Marinell might not eat the food they ate.
While the feast went gaily on, Marinell heard piteous cries coming from under a black cliff. And when he listened, he knew that the voice was the voice of Florimell.
The wicked old Shepherd of the Seas had found her tossing on the waves in a little boat, and had taken her home to his deep-down caves to make her his wife. But Florimell did not love the old man. She loved only Marinell. So nothing that the shepherd could do would make Florimell say that she would marry him. At last, in a rage, he shut her up in a gloomy place under a dark rock, where no sunshine ever came.
‘She will soon grow tired of the dark and the loneliness,’ he thought, ‘and then she will give in, and become my wife.’
But Florimell would not give in. She was crying and sobbing when Marinell came to the rock, and he heard her say, ‘Marinell, Marinell, all this I suffer for love of thee.’
Marinell stood still and listened. Then he heard her say:—