Not who becomes the instrument of ill,

But who can flatter the dark spirit, that makes
Its empire and its prey of other hearts,

Till it become his slave-as I will do.

ACT III.

(Exit.)

SCENE 1.

An apartment in the Cenci Palace. LUCRETIA; to her enter BEATRICE.

Beatr. (She enters staggering, and speaks wildly.)

Reach me that handkerchief!-My brain is hurt;

My eyes are full of blood; just wipe them for me→→

I see but indistinctly:

Lucr. My sweet child,

You have no wound; 'tis only a cold dew

That starts from your dear brow-Alas! alas!
What has befallen?

Beatr.

How comes this hair undone?

Its wandering strings must be what blind me so,
And yet I tied it fast.-Oh, horrible!

The pavement sinks under my feet! The walls
Spin round! I see a woman weeping there,
And standing calm and motionless, whilst I
Slide giddily as the world reels-My God!
The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood!
The sunshine on the floor is black! The air

Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe
In charnel pits!-Pah! I am choked! There creeps
A clinging, black, contaminating, mist

About me--'tis substantial, heavy, thick;

I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues
My fingers and my limbs to one another,
And eats into my sinews, and dissolves
My flesh to a pollution, poisoning
The subtle, pure, and inmost spirit of life!
My God! I never knew what the mad felt
Before; for I am mad beyond all doubt!
No, I am dead! These putrifying limbs
Shut round and sepulchre the panting soul,

(More wildly.)

Which would burst forth into the wandering air! (a pause.) What hideous thought was that I had e'en now?

'Tis gone; and yet its burthen remains here

O'er these dull eyes-upon this weary heart!

world! O life! O day! O misery!

Lucr. What ails thee, my poor child?-She answers not? Her spirit apprehends the sense of pain, But not its cause; suffering has dried away The source from which it sprung.

Beatr. (franticly.) Like parricideMisery has killed its father: yet, its father,

Never like mine-O God! what thing am I?

Lucr. My dearest child, what has your father done?

Beatr. (doubtfully.)

Who art thou, questioner? I have no father.
She is the mad-bouse nurse who tends on me.
It is a piteous office.

(To Lucretia, in a slow subdued voice.)
Do you know

I thought I was that wretched Beatrice

Men speak of, whom her father sometimes hales
From hall to hall by the entangled hair;

At others, pens up naked in damp cells
Where scaly reptiles crawl, and starves her there,
Till she will eat strange flesh. This woeful story

(aside.)

So did I overact in my sick dreams,
That I imagined-no, it cannot be!

Horrible things have been in this wild world,
Prodigious mixtures, and confusions strange
Of good and ill; and worse have been conceived
Than ever there was found a heart to do.
But never fancy imaged such a deed.

As

(pauses, suddenly recollecting herself.)

Who art thou? Swear to me, ere I die

With fearful expectation, that indeed
Thou art not what thou seemest-Mother!

My sweet child, know you

Beatr. Yet speak it not:

For then if this be truth, that other too

Must be a truth, a firm enduring truth,

Linked with each lasting circumstance of life,
Never to change, never to pass away.
Why so it is. This is the Cenci Palace;

Thou art Lucretia; I am Beatrice.

I have talked some wild words, but will no more.
Mother, come near me: from this point of time,
I am-

(her voice dies away faintly.)

Lucr. Alas! what has befallen thee, child? What has thy father done?

Beatr. What have I done?

Am I not innocent? Is it my crime

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?
What retrospects, outliving even despair?

Lucr. 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?

Thou art unlike thyself; thine eyes shoot forth
A wandering and strange spirit. Speak to me,
Unlock those palid hands whose fingers twine
With one another.

Beatr. 'Tis the restless life

Tortured within them. If I try to speak

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
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 any thing will move me more.
But now!-O blood, which art my father's blood,
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 canot be!
Many might doubt there were a God above
Who sees and permits evil, and so die:
That faith no agony shall obscure in me.

Lucr. It must indeed have been some bitter wrong;

Yet what, I dare not guess. O my lost child,

Hide not in proud impenetrable grief

Thy sufferings from my fear.

Beatr. 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
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,

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?

Lucr. The peace of innocence,

Till in your season you be called to heaven.
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.

Beatr. Ay, death

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
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. Oh! in this mortal world
There is no vindication and no law

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,