“I know the name—continue.”
“He told me that though he had been wedded, and loved his wife the princess, who was a very royal woman, that many times had risked her life for his, ay, even to lying at his side upon the stone of sacrifice and of her own free will, yet the memory of this maiden to whom he was once betrothed had companioned him through life and was strong upon him now at its close. Therefore he prayed me for our friendship’s sake to seek her out when I returned to Europe, should she still live, and to give her a message from him, and to make a prayer to her on his behalf.”
“What message and what prayer?” Lily whispered.
“This: that he loved her at the end of his life as he had loved her at its beginning; that he humbly prayed her forgiveness because he had broken the troth which they two swore beneath the beech at Ditchingham.”
“Sir,” she cried, “what do you know of that?”
“Only what my friend told me, señora.”
“Your friendship must have been close and your memory must be good,” she murmured.
“Which he had done,” I went on, “under strange circumstances, so strange indeed that he dared to hope that his broken troth might be renewed in some better world than this. His last prayer was that she should say to me, his messenger, that she forgave him and still loved him, as to his death he loved her.”
“And how can such forgiveness or such an avowal advantage a dead man?” Lily asked, watching me keenly through the shadows. “Have the dead then eyes to see and ears to hear?”
“How can I know, señora? I do but execute my mission.”