Ant. Stay, stay, dear father, fright mine eyes no more.
And cleaves[276] his heart.—Come, pretty tender child,
It is not thee I hate, not thee I kill.
Thy father’s blood that flows within thy veins,
Is it I loathe; is that revenge must suck.
I love thy soul: and were thy heart lapp’d up
In any flesh but in Piero’s blood,
I would thus kiss it; but being his, thus, thus, 180
And thus I’ll punch it. Abandon fears:
Whilst thy wounds bleed, my brows shall gush out tears.
Jul. So you will love me, do even what you will.
Ant. Now barks the wolf against the full-cheek’d moon;
Now lions half-clam’d[277] entrails roar for food;
Now croaks the toad, and night-crows screech aloud,
Fluttering ’bout casements of departed souls;
Now gapes the graves, and through their yawns let loose
Imprison’d spirits to revisit earth;
And now, swart night, to swell thy hour out, 190
Behold I spurt warm blood in thy black eyes.
[He stabs Julio.—From under the stage a groan.
Howl not, thou putry[278] mould; groan not, ye graves;
Be dumb, all breath. Here stands Andrugio’s son,
Worthy his father. So: I feel no breath.
His jaws are fall’n, his dislodg’d soul is fled:
And now there’s nothing but Piero left:
He is all Piero, father all. This blood,
This breast, this heart, Piero all:
Whom thus I mangle. Sprite of Julio,
Forget this was thy trunk. I live thy friend: 200
May’st thou be twinèd with the soft’st embrace
Of clear eternity: but thy father’s blood
I thus make incense of to vengeance.
Ghost of my poison’d sire, suck this fume:
To sweet revenge perfume thy circling air
With smoke of blood. I sprinkle round his gore,
And dew thy hearse with these fresh-reeking drops.
Lo thus I heave my blood-dyed hands to heaven,
Even like insatiate hell still crying, More!
My heart hath thirsting dropsies after gore. 210
Sound peace and rest to church, night-ghosts, and graves:
Blood cries for blood, and murder murder craves.
[Exit.
[264] We should have expected “paizèd,” i.e., steady, unfaltering. (The reader will note that Marston constantly uses “vengeance” as a trisyllable.)
[265] Cf. p. 178. “The fist of strenuous vengeance is clutch’d”—a line which Ben Jonson ridicules in The Poetaster (v. i.)