“Are you the slave that with your slander slew my innocent child?” he asked of Borachio.
“Yes, even I alone.”
“No, not so, villain; you belie yourself,” said Leonato. “Here stand a pair of honourable men; a third is fled that had a hand in it. I thank you, Princes, for my daughter’s death: it was bravely done, if you bethink you of it.”
Claudio was overwhelmed with remorse; he dared not ask pardon of the deeply-wronged Leonato, but he besought him to chose his own revenge, and to impose on him any penance he choose to invent. Don Pedro also joined him in expressing his deep penitence.
“I cannot bid you bid my daughter live,” replied Leonato, “but I pray you both proclaim to all the people in Messina how innocent she died. Hang an epitaph upon her tomb, and sing it there to-night. To-morrow morning come to my house, and since you cannot be my son-in-law, be my nephew. My brother has a daughter almost the copy of my child that’s dead. Marry her, as you would have married her cousin, and so dies my revenge.”
Claudio willingly agreed to carry out this suggestion, and that night he went to the church with a solemn company, and read aloud the following scroll:
“Done to death by slanderous tongues Was the Hero that here lies; Death, in guerdon of her wrongs, Gives her fame which never dies. So the life that died with shame Lives in death with glorious fame.”
“Hang thou there upon the tomb, praising her when I am dumb,” he added, placing the scroll on the family monument of Leonato.
The following morning a large company again assembled in Leonato’s house, for another wedding was to take place. This time all the ladies were veiled, and it was not until the words were spoken in which Claudio took an unknown maiden to be his wife that the bride threw back her veil and revealed the well-loved face of Hero.