While this horrible story was being told him, the Paladin fell into a profound state of thought.  After remaining silent for a little while, at the close of it he looked up, and said, “A lady then, it seems, is condemned to death for having been too kind to one lover, while thousands of our sex are playing the gallant with whomsoever they please, and not only go unpunished for it, but are admired!  Perish such infamous injustice!  The man was a madman who made such a law, and they are little better who maintain it.  I hope in God to be able to shew them their error.”

The good monks agreed, that their ancestors were very unwise to make such a law, and kings very wrong who could, but would not, put an end to it.  So, when the morning came, they speeded their guest on his noble purpose of fighting in the lady’s behalf.  A guide from the abbey took him a short cut through the forest towards the place where the matter was to be decided; but, before they arrived, they heard cries of distress in a dark quarter of the forest, and, turning their horses thither to see what it was, they observed a damsel between two vagabonds, who were standing over her with drawn swords.  The moment the wretches saw the new comer, they fled; and Rinaldo, after re-assuring the damsel, and requesting to know what had brought her to a pass so dreadful, made his guide take her up on his horse behind him, in order that they might lose no more time.  The damsel, who was very beautiful, could not speak at first, for the horror of what she had expected to undergo; but, on Rinaldo’s repeating his request, she at length found words, and, in a voice of great humility, began to relate her story.

But before she begins, the poet interferes with an impatient remark.—­“Of all the creatures in existence,” cries he, “whether they be tame or wild, whether they are in a state of peace or of war, man is the only one that lays violent hands on the female of his species.  The bear offers no injury to his; the lioness is safe by the side of the lion; the heifer has no fear of the horns of the bull.  What pest of abomination, what fury from hell, has come to disturb, in this respect, the bosom of human kind?  Husband and wife deafen one another with injurious speeches, tear one another’s faces, bathe the genial bed with tears, nay, some times with bloodshed.  In my eyes the man who can allow himself to give a blow to a woman, or to hurt even a hair of her head, is a violater of nature, and a rebel against God; but to poison her, to strangle her, to take the soul out of her body with a knife,—­he that can do that, never will I believe him to be a man at all, but a fiend out of hell with a man’s face."[3]

Such must have been the two villains who fled at the sight of Rinaldo, and who had brought the woman into this dark spot to stifle her testimony for ever.

But to return to what she was going to say.—­