"What!" cried the Countess, amazed. "Are these then the wages of my loyal love for you, Alarcos? Wherefore must I die? Oh, send me back to my father's house, where I can live in peace and forgetfulness, and rear my children as those of thy blood should be reared." "It may not be," answered the wretched Count. "I have pledged mine oath." "Friendless am I in the land," cried the miserable lady. "But at least let me kiss my children ere I die." "Thou mayst kiss the babe upon thy breast," groaned Alarcos. "The others thou mayst not see again. Prepare thee." The doomed Countess kissed her babe, muttered an Ave, and, rising from her knees, begged her merciless lord to be kind to their children. She pardoned her husband, but laid upon the King and his daughter the awful curse known to the people of the Middle Ages as "the Assize of the Dying," so often taken advantage of by those who were falsely accused and condemned to die, and by virtue of which the victim summoned his murderers to meet him before the throne of God ere thirty days were past and answer for their crime to their Creator. The Count strangled his wife with a silken kerchief, and when the horrid deed had been done, and she lay cold and dead, he summoned his esquires, and gave himself up to a passion of woe. Within twelve days the revengeful Infanta perished in agony. The merciless King died on the twentieth day, and ere the moon had completed her round Alarcos too drooped and died. Cruel and inevitable as Greek tragedy is the tale of Alarcos. But while perusing it and under the spell of its tragic pathos we can scarcely regard it as of the nature of legend, and we know not whom to abhor the most--the revengeful Princess, the cruel King, or the coward husband who sacrificed his innocent and devoted wife to the shadow of that aristocratic 'honour' which has to its discredit almost as great a holocaust of victims as either superstition or fanaticism. CHAPTER IX: THE ROMANCEROS OR BALLADS Iliads without a Homer. Lope de Vega