BEATRICE:
What have I done?
Am I not innocent? Is it my crime _70
That one with white hair, and imperious brow,
Who tortured me from my forgotten years,
As parents only dare, should call himself
My father, yet should be!—Oh, what am I?
What name, what place, what memory shall be mine? _75
What retrospects, outliving even despair?
LUCRETIA:
He is a violent tyrant, surely, child:
We know that death alone can make us free;
His death or ours. But what can he have done
Of deadlier outrage or worse injury? _80
Thou art unlike thyself; thine eyes shoot forth
A wandering and strange spirit. Speak to me,
Unlock those pallid hands whose fingers twine
With one another.
BEATRICE:
’Tis the restless life
Tortured within them. If I try to speak, _85
I shall go mad. Ay, something must be done;
What, yet I know not…something which shall make
The thing that I have suffered but a shadow
In the dread lightning which avenges it;
Brief, rapid, irreversible, destroying _90
The consequence of what it cannot cure.
Some such thing is to be endured or done:
When I know what, I shall be still and calm,
And never anything will move me more.
But now!—O blood, which art my father’s blood, _95
Circling through these contaminated veins,
If thou, poured forth on the polluted earth,
Could wash away the crime, and punishment
By which I suffer…no, that cannot be!
Many might doubt there were a God above _100
Who sees and permits evil, and so die:
That faith no agony shall obscure in me.
LUCRETIA:
It must indeed have been some bitter wrong;
Yet what, I dare not guess. Oh, my lost child,
Hide not in proud impenetrable grief _105
Thy sufferings from my fear.
BEATRICE:
I hide them not.
What are the words which you would have me speak?
I, who can feign no image in my mind
Of that which has transformed me: I, whose thought
Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up _110
In its own formless horror: of all words,
That minister to mortal intercourse,
Which wouldst thou hear? For there is none to tell
My misery: if another ever knew
Aught like to it, she died as I will die, _115
And left it, as I must, without a name.
Death, Death! Our law and our religion call thee
A punishment and a reward…Oh, which
Have I deserved?
LUCRETIA:
The peace of innocence;
Till in your season you be called to heaven. _120
Whate’er you may have suffered, you have done
No evil. Death must be the punishment
Of crime, or the reward of trampling down
The thorns which God has strewed upon the path
Which leads to immortality.
BEATRICE:
Ay, death… _125
The punishment of crime. I pray thee, God,
Let me not be bewildered while I judge.
If I must live day after day, and keep
These limbs, the unworthy temple of Thy spirit,
As a foul den from which what Thou abhorrest _130
May mock Thee, unavenged…it shall not be!
Self-murder…no, that might be no escape,
For Thy decree yawns like a Hell between
Our will and it:—O! In this mortal world
There is no vindication and no law _135
Which can adjudge and execute the doom
Of that through which I suffer.
[ENTER ORSINO.]
[SHE APPROACHES HIM SOLEMNLY.]
Welcome, Friend!
I have to tell you that, since last we met,
I have endured a wrong so great and strange,
That neither life nor death can give me rest. _140
Ask me not what it is, for there are deeds
Which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue.
NOTE: _140 nor edition 1821; or editions 1819, 1839 (1st).
ORSINO:
And what is he who has thus injured you?
BEATRICE:
The man they call my father: a dread name.