Romeo’s resolution was taken. Juliet was dead. Well, he would die too. Now for the means. Then Romeo remembered that near the very spot where he was standing dwelt an old apothecary—a meagre wretch, wasted with misery and famine, whose sordid little shop contained a few musty odds and ends of rubbish, thinly scattered to make up a show. Noting this penury when he had first seen him, Romeo had said to himself: “Now, if a man needed a poison whose sale would be instant death in Mantua, here lives a caitiff wretch who would sell it him.” That thought had only been the forerunner of his present need, and now he found that, won over by the handsome bribe offered, the starving apothecary could indeed supply him with a fatal drug of deadly power.
The hour of awakening had not yet come, and Juliet still slept peacefully in her strange abode of death.
To the churchyard at night came the gallant County Paris, to lay flowers at the tomb of the young bride who had been so untimely snatched away. His little page kept watch at a distance, while Paris laid the flowers with loving words at the door of the tomb.
“Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew,— O woe! thy canopy is dust and stones;— Which with sweet water nightly I will dew, Or, wanting that, with tears distilled by moans; The obsequies that I for thee will keep Nightly shall be to strew thy grave and weep.”
Warned by a whistle from the page, Paris retired into the shadow, as other footsteps were heard approaching. Romeo, accompanied by Balthasar, bearing a torch and some tools for opening the vault, now came near, and Paris could hear the instructions Romeo gave his servant.
“Give me the mattock and the wrenching iron. Hold, take this letter. Early in the morning see you deliver it to my lord and father. Give me the light. I charge you on your life, whatever you hear or see, stand quite aloof, and do not interrupt me in what I am doing. The reason I descend into this abode of death is partly to behold my lady’s face, but chiefly to take from her dead finger a precious ring. Therefore, hence, begone! But if you jealously return to pry into what I further intend to do, by heaven, I will tear you joint from joint!”
“I will begone, sir, and not trouble you,” replied Balthasar; but, all the same, he intended to hide himself somewhere near, for he feared the looks of Romeo, and doubted his intention.
When the serving-man had retired, Romeo took up the tools, and began to wrench open the door of the tomb. But now Paris came forward to interfere.
“This is that banished, haughty Montague,” he said to himself, “who murdered my love’s cousin, out of grief for whom it is supposed she died. Now he has come here to do some villainous shame to the dead bodies. I will seize him. Stop thy unhallowed toil, vile Montague! Can vengeance be pursued further than death? Villain, I seize thee! Obey, and go with me, for thou must die.”