No More Learning

MARMADUKE No, not by stroke of arm. But learn the process:
Proof after proof was pressed upon me; guilt
Made evident, as seemed, by blacker guilt,
Whose impious folds enwrapped even thee; and truth
And innocence, embodied in his looks,
His words and tones and gestures, did but serve
With me to aggravate his crimes, and heaped
Ruin upon the cause for which they pleaded.
Then pity crossed the path of my resolve:
Confounded, I looked up to Heaven, and cast,
Idonea! thy blind Father, on the Ordeal
Of the bleak Waste--left him--and so he died! --

[IDONEA sinks senseless; Beggar, ELEANOR, etc. , crowd round, and bear
her off. ]

Why may we speak these things, and do no more;
Why should a thrust of the arm have such a power,
And words that tell these things be heard in vain?
_She_ is not dead. Why! --if I loved this Woman,
I would take care she never woke again;
But she WILL wake, and she will weep for me,
And say, no blame was mine--and so, poor fool,
Will waste her curses on another name.


[He walks about distractedly. ]

[Enter OSWALD. ]


OSWALD (to himself)
Strong to o'erturn, strong also to build up.
[To MARMADUKE. ]
The starts and sallies of our last encounter
Were natural enough; but that, I trust,
Is all gone by.
You have cast off the chains
That fettered your nobility of mind--
Delivered heart and head!
Let us to Palestine;
This is a paltry field for enterprise.

MARMADUKE Ay, what shall we encounter next? This issue--
'Twas nothing more than darkness deepening darkness,
And weakness crowned with the impotence of death! --
Your pupil is, you see, an apt proficient.
(ironically)
Start not! --Here is another face hard by;
Come, let us take a peep at both together,
And, with a voice at which the dead will quake,
Resound the praise of your morality--
Of this too much.
[Drawing OSWALD towards the Cottage--stops short at the door. ]
Men are there, millions, Oswald,
Who with bare hands would have plucked out thy heart
And flung it to the dogs: but I am raised
Above, or sunk below, all further sense
Of provocation. Leave me, with the weight
Of that old Man's forgiveness on thy heart,
Pressing as heavily as it doth on mine.
Coward I have been; know, there lies not now
Within the compass of a mortal thought,
A deed that I would shrink from;--but to endure,
That is my destiny. May it be thine:
Thy office, thy ambition, be henceforth
To feed remorse, to welcome every sting
Of penitential anguish, yea with tears.
When seas and continents shall lie between us--
The wider space the better--we may find
In such a course fit links of sympathy,
An incommunicable rivalship
Maintained, for peaceful ends beyond our view.
[Confused voices--several of the Band enter--rush upon OSWALD and
seize him. ]


ONE OF THEM I would have dogged him to the jaws of hell--


OSWALD Ha! is it so!