Her. Look at me!
Cha. I look, and know
My eyes till now were cankered, look and see
The whole fair lie you are.
Her. Nay, Chartrien!
Cha. The book is open. There the brow yet shines
As God o'erlilied it,—an altar urn
Stuffed with profane decay. Those are the eyes
Like springs within a wood where no road leads
With murking pilgrim dust, yet Innocence
There paused looks up no more. That is the hand
That as a comrade angel's took my friend's,—
Reached out as though it parted Heaven's veil
To draw his grief within, then clapped him down
To Hell.
Her. The place for traitors. Let him go.
This moment is for us. 'Tis true your eyes
Were cankered, and I thought by surgeon means
To give them health, but deeper than the eyes
This trouble's seat. Deep as your changèd soul,
That forfeits its divinity to link
With an infection. Here you stood and heard
Those poured-out profanations with no move
Or sound of protest. That was left for me.
Cha. What truth may pierce such ignorance, fatuous, thick!
That man,—Megario,—with whom you've struck
Alliant palm, twisted a lawless law
To his deformed desire, and took the lands—
The priceless valley lands of Cana Ru—
From gentle dwellers there, whose titles bore
The rooted claim of dear ancestral graves
Nine generations deep,—and when they stood
The guardians of their doors, faced them with guns,
Dragged them to his bribed courts, weighed them with fines,
And sent them to his burning maguey fields
To slave and rot.
Her. No—don't——
Cha. The lands were sold
To Hudibrand——
Her. It can not be!
Cha. Not be?
That cry is stale as ignorance, as old
As wrong. I've heard it till my ears refuse
To register its emptiness. LeVal,
It was, rose first against Megario,—
Stood up and urged men to be Man,—and this,
That makes archangels in the ranks of Heaven,
Was treason upon earth. He lived—escaped—
But not his wife. Anointed woman, such
As centuries with conjoined virtues breed
Once and no more! She was condemned, enslaved,
And toiling in the steaming fields, fell down,
Was flogged, and died.