CAMILLO:
Alas, poor boy!
A wreck-devoted seaman thus might pray
To the deaf sea.
[ENTER LUCRETIA, BEATRICE, AND GIACOMO, GUARDED.]
BEATRICE:
I hardly dare to fear
That thou bring’st other news than a just pardon.
CAMILLO:
May God in heaven be less inexorable _45
To the Pope’s prayers than he has been to mine.
Here is the sentence and the warrant.
BEATRICE [WILDLY]:
O
My God! Can it be possible I have
To die so suddenly? So young to go
Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground! _50
To be nailed down into a narrow place;
To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more
Blithe voice of living thing; muse not again
Upon familiar thoughts, sad, yet thus lost—
How fearful! to be nothing! Or to be… _55
What? Oh, where am I? Let me not go mad!
Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;
The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!
If all things then should be…my father’s spirit, _60
His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me;
The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!
If sometimes, as a shape more like himself,
Even the form which tortured me on earth,
Masked in gray hairs and wrinkles, he should come _65
And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix
His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down!
For was he not alone omnipotent
On Earth, and ever present? Even though dead,
Does not his spirit live in all that breathe, _70
And work for me and mine still the same ruin,
Scorn, pain, despair? Who ever yet returned
To teach the laws of Death’s untrodden realm?
Unjust perhaps as those which drive us now,
Oh, whither, whither?
LUCRETIA:
Trust in God’s sweet love, _75
The tender promises of Christ: ere night,
Think, we shall be in Paradise.
BEATRICE:
’Tis past!
Whatever comes, my heart shall sink no more.
And yet, I know not why, your words strike chill:
How tedious, false, and cold seem all things. I _80
Have met with much injustice in this world;
No difference has been made by God or man,
Or any power moulding my wretched lot,
’Twixt good or evil, as regarded me.
I am cut off from the only world I know, _85
From light, and life, and love, in youth’s sweet prime.
You do well telling me to trust in God;
I hope I do trust in him. In whom else
Can any trust? And yet my heart is cold.
[DURING THE LATTER SPEECHES GIACOMO HAS RETIRED CONVERSING WITH CAMILLO, WHO NOW GOES OUT; GIACOMO ADVANCES.]
GIACOMO:
Know you not, Mother…Sister, know you not? _90
Bernardo even now is gone to implore
The Pope to grant our pardon.
LUCRETIA:
Child, perhaps
It will be granted. We may all then live
To make these woes a tale for distant years:
Oh, what a thought! It gushes to my heart _95
Like the warm blood.