Gwin. Wretch! would you say—
Gray. Nothing—nothing—where we have facts what need of words? the artless timid Lucy, she who moves about the town with closed lips and downcast eyes—who flutters and blushes at a stranger’s look—can steal into a wood—oh! shame—shame.
Gwin. Shame! villain! but no, to infamy so black as this, the best return is the silent loathing of contempt.
Gray. What! would you go with him, Lucy?
Lucy. Grayling, never again, in town or field, under my uncle’s roof, or beneath the open sky, that you have so lately made a witness to your infamy, dare to pronounce my name; there is a poison festering in your lips, and all that passes through is tainting—your words fall like a blight upon the best and purest—to be named by you, is to be scandalised—once whilst I turned from, I pitied you—you are now become the lowest, the most abject of created things—the libeller, the hateful heartless libeller of an innocent woman. Farewell, if you can never more be happy, at least strive to be good.
[Exit with Gwinett. L.
Gray. Lucy, Lucy, upon my knees—I meant not what I said—’twas passion—madness—eh, what—now she takes him by the arm—they’re gone—I feel as I had drank a draught of poison—never sound her name again? yes, and I deserve it—I am a wretch!—a ruffian,—to breathe a blight over so fair a flower. I feel as if all the world,—the sky, the fields, the bright sun were passing from me, and I stood fettered in a dark and loathsome den—my heart is numbed, and my brain palsied.
Reef. A plague take these woods, I see no good in ’em—there’s no looking out a head the length of a bow sprit; I know he run down here.
1 Sail. That’s what I said at first, and if you had taken my advice we should have come here without staying beating about the bushes like a parcel of harriers.