Page:Stories from Old English Poetry-1899.djvu/209

Rh that while the wicked sisters and Regan’s husband were practicing horrible tortures on the old man, one of Gloster’s servants had interfered and, trying to protect his lord, was killed, but not until he had partly avenged Gloster’s wrongs, by giving the Duke of Cornwall his death-stab. Regan, thus left a widow, had put her soldiers under command of a crafty Lord Edmund, with whom she was in love and meant to marry, and had joined her army to that of her sister Goneril, to march against the French at Dover.

Cordelia did the best so young a bride could do without her husband, and marched her army out to meet them. But she was too much taken at disadvantage. The French troops were put to flight, and Lear and Cordelia were taken prisoners, and sent to a dungeon. They were consigned to prison by the orders of the miserable Edmund, who was commander of Regan’s forces; and when the Duke of Albany, who was the rightful general of the whole army, demanded the royal prisoners, Edmund refused to give them up.

And here it came out that both these bad sisters loved this base Edmund, who was a lowborn fellow, and that Regan had intended to marry him since her husband had died, while Goneril was plotting to murder the kind-hearted