“God send us a good one,” said Sancho; “and where may her ladyship the adventure be?”
“Where, Sancho?” replied Don Quixote; “turn thine eyes and look, and thou wilt see stretched there a knight-errant, who, it strikes me, is not over and above happy, for I saw him fling himself off his horse and throw himself on the ground with a certain air of dejection, and his armour rattled as he fell.”
“Well,” said Sancho, “how does your worship make out that to be an adventure?”
“I do not mean to say,” returned Don Quixote, “that it is a complete adventure, but that it is the beginning of one, for it is in this way adventures begin. But listen, for it seems he is tuning a lute or guitar, and from the way he is spitting and clearing his chest he must be getting ready to sing something.”
“Faith, you are right,” said Sancho, “and no doubt he is some enamoured knight.”
“There is no knight-errant that is not,” said Don Quixote; “but let us listen to him, for, if he sings, by that thread we shall extract the ball of his thoughts; because out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”
Sancho was about to reply to his master, but the Knight of the Grove’s voice, which was neither very bad nor very good, stopped him, and listening attentively the pair heard him sing this
SONNET
Your pleasure, prithee, lady mine, unfold;
Declare the terms that I am to obey;
My will to yours submissively I mould,
And from your law my feet shall never stray.
Would you I die, to silent grief a prey?
Then count me even now as dead and cold;
Would you I tell my woes in some new way?
Then shall my tale by Love itself be told.
The unison of opposites to prove,
Of the soft wax and diamond hard am I;
But still, obedient to the laws of love,
Here, hard or soft, I offer you my breast,
Whate’er you grave or stamp thereon shall rest
Indelible for all eternity.
With an “Ah me!” that seemed to be drawn from the inmost recesses of his heart, the Knight of the Grove brought his lay to an end, and shortly afterwards exclaimed in a melancholy and piteous voice, “O fairest and most ungrateful woman on earth! What! can it be, most serene Casildea de Vandalia, that thou wilt suffer this thy captive knight to waste away and perish in ceaseless wanderings and rude and arduous toils? It is not enough that I have compelled all the knights of Navarre, all the Leonese, all the Tartesians, all the Castilians, and finally all the knights of La Mancha, to confess thee the most beautiful in the world?”
“Not so,” said Don Quixote at this, “for I am of La Mancha, and I have never confessed anything of the sort, nor could I nor should I confess a thing so much to the prejudice of my lady’s beauty; thou seest how this knight is raving, Sancho. But let us listen, perhaps he will tell us more about himself.”