Bea. Sister, cannot a woman kill herself? is it not lawful to die when we should not live?
Cri. O sister, ’tis a question not for us; we must do what God will.
Bea. What God will? Alas, can torment be His glory, or our grief His pleasure! Does not the nurse’s nipple, juiced over with wormwood, bid the child it should not suck? And does not Heaven, when it hath made our breath bitter unto us, say we should not live?
O my best sister, 10
To suffer wounds when one may ’scape this rod
Is against nature, that is against God!
Cri. Good sister,
Do not make me weep; sure Freevill was not false.
I’ll gage my life that strumpet, out of craft
And some close second end, hath maliced[98] him.
Bea. O sister! if he were not false, whom have I lost?
If he were, what grief to such unkindness!
From head to foot I am all misery;
Only in this, some justice I have found— 20
My grief is like my love, beyond all bound.
Nur. My servant, Master Caqueteur, desires to visit you.
Cri. For grief’s sake keep him out; his discourse is like the long word Honorificabilitudinitatibus,[99] a great deal of sound and no sense: his company is like a parenthesis to a discourse,—you may admit it, or leave it out, it makes no matter.
Enter Freevill in his disguise.
Free. By your leave, sweet creatures.