Page:The Canterbury tales of Geoffrey Chaucer.djvu/178

 death your lineage should cease, and a strange successor should take your heritage, oh, woe were us alive! Wherefore we pray you right soon to wed!"

Their meek prayer and their piteous look made the heart of the marquis to have pity. "Mine own people dear," quoth he, "ye would constrain me to what I never thought ere now. I rejoiced in my liberty; seldom is it found in marriage. Where till now I was free, I should enter into servitude. Natheless I see your loyal meaning and trust in your wit, and ever have done; wherefore of my free consent I will wed me, as soon as ever I may. Yet though ye have but now offered to choose me a wife, I release you of that choice, and pray you to stint of that offer. For God wot that children oft be unlike their worthy elders before them. Goodness cometh all of God, not of the strain of which they be engendered and born. I trust in God's goodness and therefore I commit to him my marriage and mine estate and my repose ; he may do as he list. Let me alone in the choosing of my wife ; that charge I will take upon mine own back. But I pray you, and charge you upon your souls, that whatsoever wife I take, ye promise me to honour her, while her life may endure, in word and work, here and everywhere, as she were an emperor's daughter. Furthermore ye shall swear this, that ye shall neither contend nor grumble against my choice; for sith I am to forego my liberty at your request, where my heart is set, there, as I hope for heaven, will I wive; and unless ye will assent to this, I pray you speak no more of the matter."

With hearty will, they swore and assented to all this; no wight said nay; and they besought him of his grace, ere they went that he would grant them a certain day for his espousal,