Ah, God! Such wishes weigh on me unkindly,
... Nay, not unkindly! But your eyes are swept
So wide across the breadths of Italy,
You call up years for me as if you were
A necromancer, not my very son
Whose proud, hot Spanish blood, whose fire and courage
Have given my flesh its youth again so often.
Your mother’s land is changing you, beloved—
All schemes, all plots ... and where now is the smile
That flashed along your lips and made me sing
Ave Maria plena gratia—where?
[Cesare moves impatiently.
CESARE.
I am grown anxious, as my foemen’s watch
When one of my huge pieces takes its station
For ruin’s work.... This pestilential heat!...
Well, Roble, what an orange you have snatched,
Round as your eyes!
[To Alexander.] Lucrece!—Oh, have you seen her
Look at you from the child?
[With a bitter laugh.] I shall begin
To talk of years ago, like an old man.
Farewell!
They need me at the Mola.
[With a smile.] Then to night
The dance! To-morrow the al fresco feast! [Exit.
ALEXANDER.
I’m envious of Lucrezia, and weary,
More weary than with August—all my passion
Hard on my heart at last! My Cesare,
—Beautiful and cold as steel, his mind
Shining and shallow as the moon—for certain,
If he had been Medea, he had simmered
My ageing body in the cauldron’s flood,
Like Æson’s, for his purpose.... Solitary!
Age, age! And when the young are still,
The young who should be noisy, it is vacant.
I shall see Lucrezia in the spring: and yet
I know I shall not see her.
There, I am glad
The children have been captured by their nurse.
Buona notte, little ones! [The Children are taken away.
Ah, but I would
I were as other fathers, and could make him
My heritor, and aid him by my death.
It is so good the old should die;
It is very good to die, but I must live;
I must subserve, must give my hand
In signature to any of his dreams,
Taking, in caritate,
A lovely eye-glance from him.... And Lucrece
Gone too, her husband’s prisoner! Where my Pearl
And my great royal Diamond have been set
Here in my bosom—hollows!
And this twilight
Is filling them....
[With a sudden, terrified cry.] Lucrezia, Cesare!
Lucrece!
SCENE III
The Pope’s bedchamber in the Borgia Apartments.
Monsignore Burchard at the bed’s head watching: two card-players at a little table by the bedside. The Lord Alexander VI. is sitting up in bed, his glazed eyes fixed on the game. A crowd of Physicians, Surgeons, Apothecaries. The Cardinals consulting anxiously with the Pope’s Chief Physician, the Lord Bishop of Venosa.