Pietro. My lords, the heavy action we intend
Is death and shame, two of the ugliest shapes
That can confound a soul; think, think of it: 90
I strike, but yet, like him that ’gainst stone walls
Directs, his shafts rebound in his own face;
My lady’s shame is mine, O God, ’tis mine!
Therefore I do conjure all secrecy:
Let it be as very little as may be,
Pray ye, as may be.
Make frightless entrance, salute her with soft eyes,
Stain naught with blood; only Ferneze dies,
But not before her brows. O gentlemen,
God knows I love her! Nothing else, but this:— 100
I am not well: if grief, that sucks veins dry,
Rivels[435] the skin, casts ashes in men’s faces,
Be-dulls the eye, unstrengthens all the blood,
Chance to remove me to another world,
As sure I once must die, let him succeed:
I have no child; all that my youth begot
Hath been your loves, which shall inherit me:
Which as it ever shall, I do conjure it,
Mendoza may succeed: he’s nobly[436] born;
With me of much desert.
Celso. [aside] Much![437] 110
Pietro. Your silence answers, “Ay:”
I thank you. Come on now. O, that I might die
Before her shame’s display’d! would I were forc’d
To burn my father’s tomb, unheal[438] his bones,
And dash them in the dirt, rather than this!
This both the living and the dead offends:
Sharp surgery where naught but death amends.
[Exeunt.
[412] “Cast o’ ladies”—couple of ladies.
[413] A very venomous little serpent. “A man or beast wounded with this serpent,” says Topsel in his Hist. of Serpents (ed. 1658, p. 699), “is afflicted with intolerable thirst, insomuch as it is easier for him to break his belly than to quench his thirst with drinking; always gaping like a bull, casteth himself down into the water and maketh no spare of the cold liquor, but continually sucketh it in till either the belly break or the poison drive out the life by overcoming the vital spirits.”
[414] Omitted in ed. 2.—“A maquerela, in plain English a bawd,” says Overbury in his Characters, “is an old charcoal that hath been burnt herself, and therefore is able to kindle a whole green coppice.”
[415] Ed. 2. “dooth.”