Juan. Your danger!—Pardon the interruption, my friend, but you speak here without much reflection!—Your danger put in the balance against hers, is as a handful of down weighed against a bar of gold. You hazard only your life—
Diego. What the devil, and is not that enough?
Juan. She, on the contrary, hazards her fame, her repose, her father’s blessing, the love of her family, her prospect of salvation—and, to sum up all—she must encounter the most horrible of all deaths, supposing that this intercourse should give existence to a being who would prove the betrayer of your loves.
Alonzo. Oh talk not of it!—No, no, Velasquez, thank heaven I am not so deeply involved in guilt!
Juan. Heaven be thanked indeed, if you are yet clear from it?—but while you continue in your present course, what security can you have, that you will always remain so. And should a consequence so fatal ensue, think only on the boundless misery that it must bring both on Cora and yourself. That she must die would be little; the horrible idea is, the manner of her death. Shut up alive in a subterraneous vault, the opening of which will be closed upon her for ever, with only a single loaf of bread and a small lamp, she must sit gasping for air, and soon endure the severest torments of hunger.—Oh the very thought makes me shudder!—I have encountered death undauntedly under a variety of forms; but I could not bear to meet him under this.
Alonzo. (Falling on his neck.) I will never see Cora again!
Juan. Worthily resolved!—let us then instantly depart!—(Endeavours to draw him away.)
Alonzo. Only permit me to take leave of her!
Juan. Write her a letter, which we will throw over the wall—You hesitate!—Oh you are undecided!—Ha! already I see the hapless Cora enclosed in her horrible dungeon, crushed by the two-fold agony of bodily and mental torments, lying on the ground and gnawing her own flesh—uttering the most dreadful execrations against her God, and amid the wildest ravings of phrenzy breathing out that soul, the purity of which was poisoned by thee. Then when she shall stand before him who hereafter will judge alike the Peruvian and the Spaniard, and shall accuse thee as the origin of all her woes, the occasion of her becoming the murderer of her child——