Opas. See her, Count Julian: if thou lovest God,
See thy lost child.
Jul. I have avenged me, Opas,
More than enough: I only sought to hurl
The brands of war on one detested head,
And die upon his ruin. O my country!
O lost to honour, to thyself, to me,
Why on barbarian hands devolves thy cause,
Spoilers, blasphemers!
Opas. Is it thus, Don Julian,
When thy own offspring, that beloved child,
For whom alone these very acts were done
By them and thee, when thy Covilla stands
An outcast and a suppliant at thy gate,
Why that still stubborn agony of soul,
Those struggles with the bars thyself imposed?
Is she not thine? not dear to thee as ever?
Jul. Father of mercies! shew me none, whene’er
The wrongs she suffers cease to wring my heart,
Or I seek solace ever, but in death.
Opas. What wilt thou do then, too unhappy man?
Jul. What have I done already? All my peace
Has vanished; my fair fame in after-times
Will wear an alien and uncomely form,
Seen o’er the cities I have laid in dust,
Countrymen slaughtered, friends abjured!
Opas. And faith?
Jul. Alone now left me, filling up in part
The narrow and waste intervals of grief:
It promises that I shall see again
My own lost child.
Opas. Yes, at this very hour.
Jul. Till I have met the tyrant face to face,
And gained a conquest greater than the last;
Till he no longer rules one rood of Spain,
And not one Spaniard, not one enemy,
The least relenting, flags upon his flight;
Till we are equal in the eyes of men,
The humblest and most wretched of our kind,
No peace for me, no comfort, no—no child!