In the scenes which follow among the Gypsy guard, both that with Juan and the lonely night immediately preceding the march, the terrible reaction has already begun to set in. The “quivering” poise of Don Silva’s nature makes it impossible he should rest quiet in this utterness of moral and spiritual fall. Already we hear and see the “murdered virtues” begin
“To walk as ghosts
Within the shuddering soul and shriek remorse.”
The past returns on him with tyrannous power,—early associations, the taking up of his knightly vows with all its grand religious and heroic accompaniments, the delegated and accepted trust which he has by forsaking betrayed—
“The life that made
His full-formed self, as the impregnant sap
Of years successive frames the full-branched tree”—
all come back with stern reproach and denunciation of the apostate who, in hope of the outward realisation of a human love, has cast off and forsworn them all. Fiercely he fronts and strives to silence the accusing throng. Still the same plea—
“My sin was made for me
By men’s perverseness:”
still the same impulses of mad, despairing self-assertion—
“I have a right to choose my good or ill,
A right to damn myself!”—
still the same vain imagination that union is any longer possible between Fedalma’s high self-abnegating truth and his self-seeking abnegation of all truth, coupled with the arrogant assumption that he, morally so weak and fallen, can sustain her steadfast and heroic strength—“I with my love will be her providence.”
When with the fearful Gypsy chant and curse