as she binds her kerchief round the child’s eyes is far more moving in its simplicity than the most harrowing description could be. And here again, as Constance lulls the baby in her arms, Chaucer puts into her mouth a beautifully simple and touching prayer to the Virgin Mother:—
“Thou sawe thy child y-slayn bifor thy yën,
And yet now liveth my litel child, parfay!
Now, lady bright, to whom alle woful cryen,
Thou glorie of wommanhede, thou faire may,[66]
Thou haven of refut, brighte sterre of day
Rewe on[67] my child, that of thy gentilesse
Rewest on every rewful[68] in distresse.”
With these words on her lips she turns to Elda and holding up the child cries
“And if thou darst not saven him for blame,
So kis him ones in his fadres name,”
and without further complaint
She blesseth hir; and in-to ship she wente.
The whole passage has a breathing human passion in it of which Trivet’s chronicle knows nothing. We forget the absurdity of the story, the impossible repetition of an impossible situation, and see only a cruelly wronged wife and mother meeting her fate with simple dignity and faith.
Trivet gives us lurid details concerning the vengeance that falls on Alle’s mother. Chaucer, who never takes pleasure in horrors, remarks briefly that he “his moder slow,” and hastens on to tell of Constance’s adventures off the coast of Spain. Here again, we find a break in the narrative, as the author pauses to comment on the evils of self-indulgence, and to explain how God sends weak women the “spirit of vigour” that they may save themselves in time of need. The rest of the story follows Trivet’s chronicle very closely, though the description of Alle’s meeting with his wife is Chaucer’s own:—
I trowe an hundred tymes been they kist,
And swich a blisse is ther bitwix hem two
That, save the joye that lasteth evermo
Ther is non lyk, that any creature
Hath seyn or shal whyl that the world may dure.
And he also adds a brief comment on the instability of human happiness.