LANDGRAVE.
Look, foreign pilgrims! What an endless file!
Naked waist-upward. Blood is trickling down
Their lacerated flesh. What do they carry?
SCHNETZEN.
Their scourges—iron-pointed, leathern thongs,
Mark how they lash themselves—the strict Flagellants.
The Brothers of the Cross—hark to their cries!
VOICE FROM BELOW.
Atone, ye mighty! God is wroth! Expel
The enemies of heaven—raze their homes!
[Confused cries from below, which gradually die away in the
distance.]
Woe to God's enemies! Death to the Jews!
They poison all our wells—they bring the plague.
Kill them who killed our Lord! Their homes shall be
A wilderness—drown them in their own blood!
[The LANDGRAVE and SCHNETZEN withdraw from the window.]
SCHNETZEN.
Do not the people ask the same as I?
Is not the people's voice the voice of God?
LANDGRAVE.
I will consider.
SCHNETZEN.
Not too long, my liege.
The moment favors. Later 't were hard to show
Due cause to his Imperial Majesty,
For slaughtering the vassals of the Crown.
Two mighty friends are theirs. His holiness
Clement the Sixth and Kaiser Karl.
LANDGRAVE.
'T were rash
Contending with such odds.
SCHNETZEN.
Courage, my lord.
These battle singly against death and fate.
Your allies are the sense and heart o' the world.
Priests warring for their Christ, nobles for gold,
And peoples for the very breath of life
Spoiled by the poison-mixers. Kaiser Karl
Lifts his lone voice unheard, athwart the roar
Of such a flood; the papal bull is whirled
An unconsidered rag amidst the eddies.
LANDGRAVE.
What credence lend you to the general rumor
Of the river poison?
SCHNETZEN.
Such as mine eyes avouch.
I have seen, yea touched the leathern wallet found
On the body of one from whom the truth was wrenched
By salutary torture. He confessed,
Though but a famulus of the master-wizard,
The horrible old Moses of Mayence,
He had flung such pouches in the Rhine, the Elbe,
The Oder, Danube—in a hundred brooks,
Until the wholesome air reeked pestilence;
'T was an ell long, filled with a dry, fine dust
Of rusty black and red, deftly compounded
Of powdered flesh of basilisks, spiders, frogs,
And lizards, baked with sacramental dough
In Christian blood.