“Is there naught I may do to save you?”
“There is nothing, mistress. Yet I love you for your pitiful heart, and I’ll promise you that on Tuesday I’ll walk the firmer for it. But do not consider me, I pray you. I do not think I am unhappy. I would that you were not, sweet mistress. Tell me why you have been used so cruelly?”
His voice was grave and beguiling, like one whose soul has deep places in it. In despite of the slow agony of her tears she had no choice but to heed it. There was in his tender speech a quality that melted her resolve as though it had been but a flake of snow.
“Tell me, sweet mistress, I pray you.”
How could she tell him of her frowardness? How could she tell him of the setting up of her stubborn will and of the grievous fashion of its breaking? How could she tell him that in a single night she was cured forever of the folly of holding herself other than she was?
But his gentle insistence was beyond her power to put off.
“I have been beaten,” she said with utter humility. “And all that has been done to me is no more than my merit.”
It was the elemental woman breaking from the soul that yesterday was so vainglorious. The young man looking upon her from his precarious coign felt his heart leap to her in her abasement. In the delicacy of her youth she was the fairest thing upon which ever he had set his eyes. It hurt him keener than his own fate that a beauty so rare should, whatever its faults, have been chastened so cruelly.
All that there was of chivalry in his tender soul went out to her in her desolation. In his three-and-twenty years of life he had never known love, but by God’s grace was it given that he would not have to die without tasting the rarest of all mortal experiences.
“Mistress”—his heart leaped in his throat so that he could hardly breathe—“Give me your name, sweet mistress, and I will promise as God is in His heaven that on Tuesday morning when Gervase Heriot comes to die by the ax he shall pass with your name upon his lips.”