Jezebel.
Jehu? Not you?
Yet do you know that men are cursing you
For wanting Naboth’s land; and feasting Naboth
To-day, in public, for refusing you?
And that our crowns and even our lives are threatened?
Ahab.
No, Queen, I do not know and cannot care.
What is the raging of the fools to me
Who ponder day and night upon a question,
A question that goes down into the bone
And burns like fire, till I cannot sleep
Or eat or work, for it is always here.
No, do not look like that, I am not mad,
Not yet; I am not mad. But always night and day
This question is about me and within me,
Haunting and harsh: the question, “Am I wrong?
Are these, my people who oppose my will,
Right, after all, righter than I, the King?
Righter throughout my twenty years of kingship?”
Jezebel.
How can these preys to every passionate flaw
Be righter than an upright mind and conscience?
Ahab.
I cannot tell, and yet I think they are.
Jezebel.
You know they are not.