My friend, that palace-walking devil Gold

Has whispered silence to his Holiness:

70And we are left, as scorpions ringed with fire,

What should we do but strike ourselves to death?

For he who is our murderous persecutor

Is shielded by a father’s holy name,

Or I would—      [Stops abruptly.

   Orsino.  What? Fear not to speak your thought.

75Words are but holy as the deeds they cover:

A priest who has forsworn the God he serves;

A judge who makes Truth weep at his decree;

A friend who should weave counsel, as I now,

But as the mantle of some selfish guile;

80A father who is all a tyrant seems,

Were the profaner for his sacred name.

   Giacomo. Ask me not what I think; the unwilling brain

Feigns often what it would not; and we trust

Imagination with such phantasies

85As the tongue dares not fashion into words,

Which have no words, their horror makes them dim

To the mind’s eye.—My heart denies itself

To think what you demand.

   Orsino.    But a friend’s bosom

Is as the inmost cave of our own mind

90Where we sit shut from the wide gaze of day,

And from the all-communicating air.

You look what I suspected—

   Giacomo.   Spare me now!

I am as one lost in a midnight wood,

Who dares not ask some harmless passenger

95The path across the wilderness, lest he,

As my thoughts are, should be—a murderer.

I know you are my friend, and all I dare

Speak to my soul that will I trust with thee.

But now my heart is heavy and would take

100Lone counsel from a night of sleepless care.

Pardon me, that I say farewell—farewell!

I would that to my own suspected self

I could address a word so full of peace.

   Orsino. Farewell!—Be your thoughts better or more bold.

[Exit GIACOMO.

105I had disposed the Cardinal Camillo

To feed his hope with cold encouragement:

It fortunately serves my close designs

That ’tis a trick of this same family

To analyse their own and other minds.

110Such self-anatomy shall teach the will

Dangerous secrets: for it tempts our powers,

Knowing what must be thought, and may be done,

Into the depth of darkest purposes:

So Cenci fell into the pit; even I,

115Since Beatrice unveiled me to myself,

And made me shrink from what I cannot shun,

Shew a poor figure to my own esteem,

To which I grow half reconciled. I’ll do

As little mischief as I can; that thought

120Shall fee the accuser conscience.

(After a pause)    Now what harm

If Cenci should be murdered?—Yet, if murdered,

Wherefore by me? And what if I could take

The profit, yet omit the sin and peril

In such an action? Of all earthly things

125I fear a man whose blows outspeed his words;

And such is Cenci: and while Cenci lives

His daughter’s dowry were a secret grave

If a priest wins her.—Oh, fair Beatrice!

Would that I loved thee not, or loving thee

130Could but despise danger and gold and all

That frowns between my wish and its effect,

Or smiles beyond it! There is no escape …

Her bright form kneels beside me at the altar,

And follows me to the resort of men,

135And fills my slumber with tumultuous dreams,

So when I wake my blood seems liquid fire;

And if I strike my damp and dizzy head

My hot palm scorches it: her very name,

But spoken by a stranger, makes my heart

140Sicken and pant; and thus unprofitably

I clasp the phantom of unfelt delights

Till weak imagination half possesses

The self-created shadow. Yet much longer

Will I not nurse this life of feverous hours:

145From the unravelled hopes of Giacomo

I must work out my own dear purposes.

I see, as from a tower, the end of all:

Her father dead; her brother bound to me

By a dark secret, surer than the grave;

150Her mother scared and unexpostulating

From the dread manner of her wish atchieved:

And she!—Once more take courage, my faint heart;

What dares a friendless maiden matched with thee?

I have such foresight as assures success:

155Some unbeheld divinity doth ever,

When dread events are near, stir up men’s minds

To black suggestions; and he prospers best,

Not who becomes the instrument of ill,

But who can flatter the dark spirit, that makes

160Its empire and its prey of other hearts

Till it become his slave … as I will do.      [Exit.

END OF THE SECOND ACT.

ACT III

SCENE I.—An apartment in the Cenci Palace. LUCRETIA, to her enter BEATRICE.

   Beatrice. (She enters staggering, and speaks wildly.)

Reach me that handkerchief!—My brain is hurt;

My eyes are full of blood; just wipe them for me …

I see but indistinctly …

   Lucretia.  My sweet child,

You have no wound; ’tis only a cold dew

5That starts from your dear brow … Alas! Alas!

What has befallen?

   Beatrice.  How comes this hair undone?

Its wandering strings must be what blind me so,

And yet I tied it fast.—O, horrible!

The pavement sinks under my feet! The walls

10Spin round! I see a woman weeping there,

And standing calm and motionless, whilst I

Slide giddily as the world reels … My God!

The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood!

The sunshine on the floor is black! The air

15Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe

In charnel pits! Pah! I am choked! There creeps

A clinging, black, contaminating mist

About me … ’tis substantial, heavy, thick,

I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues

20My fingers and my limbs to one another,

And eats into my sinews, and dissolves

My flesh to a pollution, poisoning

The subtle, pure, and inmost spirit of life!

My God! I never knew what the mad felt

25Before; for I am mad beyond all doubt!

(More wildly.) No, I am dead! These putrefying limbs

Shut round and sepulchre the panting soul

Which would burst forth into the wandering air! (A pause.)

What hideous thought was that I had even now?

30’Tis gone; and yet its burthen remains here

O’er these dull eyes … upon this weary heart!

O, world! O, life! O, day! O, misery!

   Lucretia. What ails thee, my poor child? She answers not:

Her spirit apprehends the sense of pain,

35But not its cause; suffering has dried away

The source from which it sprung …

   Beatrice (franticly).   Like Parricide …

Misery has killed its father: yet its father

Never like mine … O, God! What thing am I?

   Lucretia. My dearest child, what has your father done?

40   Beatrice (doubtfully). Who art thou, questioner? I have no father.

(Aside.) She is the madhouse nurse who tends on me,

It is a piteous office.  [To LUCRETIA, in a slow, subdued voice.

                           Do you know

I thought I was that wretched Beatrice

Men speak of, whom her father sometimes hales

45From hall to hall by the entangled hair;

At others, pens up naked in damp cells

Where scaly reptiles crawl, and starves her there,

Till she will eat strange flesh. This woful story

So did I overact in my sick dreams,

50That I imagined … no, it cannot be!

Horrible things have been in this wild world,

Prodigious mixtures, and confusions strange

Of good and ill; and worse have been conceived

Than ever there was found a heart to do.

55But never fancy imaged such a deed

As …      [Pauses, suddenly recollecting herself.

         Who art thou? Swear to me, ere I die

With fearful expectation, that indeed

Thou art not what thou seemest … Mother!

   Lucretia.         Oh!

My sweet child, know you …

   Beatrice.    Yet speak it not:

60For then if this be truth, that other too

Must be a truth, a firm enduring truth,

Linked with each lasting circumstance of life,

Never to change, never to pass away.

Why so it is. This is the Cenci Palace;

65Thou art Lucretia; I am Beatrice.

I have talked some wild words, but will no more.

Mother, come near me: from this point of time,

I am …      [Her voice dies away faintly.

   Lucretia. Alas! What has befallen thee, child?

What has thy father done?

   Beatrice.  What have I done?

70Am I not innocent? Is it my crime

That one with white hair, and imperious brow,

Who tortured me from my forgotten years,

As parents only dare, should call himself

My father, yet should be!—Oh, what am I?

75What name, what place, what memory shall be mine?

What retrospects, outliving even despair?

   Lucretia. He is a violent tyrant, surely, child:

We know that death alone can make us free;

His death or ours. But what can he have done

80Of deadlier outrage or worse injury?

Thou art unlike thyself; thine eyes shoot forth

A wandering and strange spirit. Speak to me,

Unlock those pallid hands whose fingers twine

With one another.

   Beatrice.   ’Tis the restless life

85Tortured within them. If I try to speak

I shall go mad. Aye, something must be done;

What, yet I know not … something which shall make

The thing that I have suffered but a shadow

In the dread lightning which avenges it;

90Brief, rapid, irreversible, destroying

The consequence of what it cannot cure.

Some such thing is to be endured or done:

When I know what, I shall be still and calm,

And never any thing will move me more.

95But now!—Oh blood, which art my father’s blood,

Circling thro’ these contaminated veins,

If thou, poured forth on the polluted earth,

Could wash away the crime, and punishment

By which I suffer … no, that cannot be!

100Many might doubt there were a God above

Who sees and permits evil, and so die:

That faith no agony shall obscure in me.

   Lucretia. It must indeed have been some bitter wrong;

Yet what, I dare not guess. Oh, my lost child,

105Hide not in proud impenetrable grief

Thy sufferings from my fear.

   Beatrice.   I hide them not.

What are the words which you would have me speak?

I, who can feign no image in my mind

Of that which has transformed me. I, whose thought

110Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up

In its own formless horror. Of all words,

That minister to mortal intercourse,

Which wouldst thou hear? For there is none to tell

My misery: if another ever knew

115Aught like to it, she died as I will die,

And left it, as I must, without a name.

Death! Death! Our law and our religion call thee

A punishment and a reward … Oh, which

Have I deserved?

   Lucretia.   The peace of innocence;

120Till in your season you be called to heaven.

Whate’er you may have suffered, you have done

No evil. Death must be the punishment

Of crime, or the reward of trampling down

The thorns which God has strewed upon the path

125Which leads to immortality.

   Beatrice.   Aye, death …

The punishment of crime. I pray thee, God,

Let me not be bewildered while I judge.

If I must live day after day, and keep

These limbs, the unworthy temple of thy spirit,

130As a foul den from which what thou abhorrest

May mock thee, unavenged … it shall not be!

Self-murder … no, that might be no escape,

For thy decree yawns like a Hell between

Our will and it:—O! In this mortal world

135There is no vindication and no law

Which can adjudge and execute the doom

Of that through which I suffer.

[Enter ORSINO.

(She approaches him solemnly.) Welcome, Friend!

I have to tell you that, since last we met,

I have endured a wrong so great and strange,

140That neither life or death can give me rest.

Ask me not what it is, for there are deeds

Which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue.

   Orsino. And what is he who has thus injured you?

   Beatrice. The man they call my father: a dread name.

145   Orsino. It cannot be …

   Beatrice.   What it can be, or not,

Forbear to think. It is, and it has been;

Advise me how it shall not be again.

I thought to die; but a religious awe

Restrains me, and the dread lest death itself

150Might be no refuge from the consciousness

Of what is yet unexpiated. Oh, speak!

   Orsino. Accuse him of the deed, and let the law

Avenge thee.

   Beatrice.