Scene 3
Herod. Mariamne. Soemus.
Herod.
Is my kinsman Joseph here?
Soemus.
He’s tarrying with Sameas.
Herod.
Lead him hence!
I gave a letter to him. Have the letter
Forthwith delivered. You afford him escort
And see that all be loyally fulfilled
Whatever this letter orders.
Soemus.
’Twill be done.
[Exit.
Herod.
Whate’er you may suspect or think or know,
You have misprised me.
Mar.
On a brother’s murder
The seal you’ve planted of necessity
To which the neck must bow though sharp the shudder,
But you’ll ne’er have the plausible success
To stamp this seal upon my murder too;
That murder must remain the thing it is,
An outrage that at most may be repeated
But never, never can be overgone.
Herod.
I would not have the courage for an answer
Unless, whatever the deed I may have ventured,
I had not been assured of the event;
But then I was assured and was so only
Because I set my all upon the hazard.
I did what on the field of fight the soldier
Is wont to do when all his last’s at stake.
He flings the standard which has led him onward,
On which his fortunes and his honour hang,
Determined in the mellay of the foemen
But not because he thinks to give’t for spoil.
He brings the wreath, which now no more by courage
Only by hope forlorn was to be reached,
The victory-wreath, albeit tattered, with him.
You called me craven. If the man is so
Who fears a seated demon in himself,
Then I at times am craven, but alone
When I must reach my goal on crooked by-paths,
When I must duck my head and make a show
As though I were no more the man I am.
Then anguish takes me that I might too soon
Erect my bearing, and to tame my pride,
Which, lightly strung, might spur me on thereto,
I knit into me what is more than Self
And which with me must stand or suffer fall.
Know you what waited on me as I went?
No dual fight, and less by far a court;
A tyrant whimsy-willed to whom I must
Forswear myself, and yet I surely had
Forsworn no tittle if—I thought of you
And gnashed my teeth not once—and whatsoe’er
He may have bid the Man and King within me,
Haling me on from gorge to gorge, yet holding
My teasing quittance back in sinister silence
—I took it all as patient as a slave.
Mar.
You speak in vain. In me humanity
Is shamed by you. My pain each soul must share.
Who’s human is like me, nor has he need
To be my kin, or woman as I am.
When you with murder secret-still had robbed
My brother, only they could share my weeping
Who might have brothers; and the rest might all
With eyes still dry of tears, step from me sidewards
Refusing me their pity. But a life
Has every man, and none allows his life
Be taken from him but by God alone
Who was the Giver of it. Such an outrage
Is damned by mankind’s universal race,
Is damned by Fate who suffered it begin,
’Tis true, but not succeed; is damned by you.
And if the Human in me is through you
So deeply hurt, what must the woman feel?
How stand I now to you and you to me?