The holy crucifix. Who it may be
I cannot say; the face with gauze-like silk
Is covered quite.[634]
Gutierre, with the most violent threats, requires him to enter the room and bleed to death the person who has thus laid herself out for interment. He goes in and accomplishes the will of her husband, without the least resistance on the part of his victim. But when he is conducted away, blindfold as he came, he impresses his bloody hand upon the door of the house, that he may recognize it again, and immediately reveals to the king the horrors of the scene he has just passed through.
The king rushes to the house of Gutierre, who ascribes the death of his wife to accident, not from the least desire to conceal the part he himself had in it, but from an unwillingness to explain his conduct, by revealing reasons for it which involved his honor. The king makes no direct reply, but requires him instantly to marry Leonore, a lady then present, whom Gutierre was bound in honor to have married long before, and who had already made known to the king her complaints of his falsehood. Gutierre hesitates, and asks what he should do, if the prince should visit his wife secretly and she should venture afterwards to write to him; intending by these intimations to inform the king what were the real causes of the bloody sacrifice before him, and that he would not willingly expose himself to their recurrence. But the king is peremptory, and the drama ends with the following extraordinary scene.
King.
There is a remedy for every wrong.
Don Gutierre.
A remedy for such a wrong as this?
King.