University of Virginia Library

Scene V

(Enter DEVIL)
[AMORET shrieks, covers her face with her hand and runs to the door. DEVIL brings her back and forces her into a chair
DEVIL
Madam! What's this? What? Railing? Fie! for shame!
(Nay, sit you still and hear me.) Think you then
To play Xantippe with impunity,
Who gave her philosophical old spouse
So choice and delicate a water bath
To whet his appetite one frosty morning
Before his breakfast? Do you hearken to me?

AMORET
Ye saints defend me—I shall die with terror.

DEVIL.
How, now, my dainty one, my delicate ward,
My pretty piece of frail mortality,
Where think you is the rendezvous of Saints,
Where their celestial club-room, that you make
A fretwork argent of your snowy fingers,
And cast your jetty pupils up on high
Until the blank, unanimated white
Usurps the field of vision?
A most unphilosophical conclusion!
Point thy hands downward, turn thine eyes to the floor!
There is a Heaven beneath this Earth as fair
As that which roofs it here.
Dost think that Heaven is local, and not rather
The omnipresence of the glorified
And liberated Spirit—the expansion
Of man's depress'd and fetter'd faculties
Into omniscience?

AMORET
O ye Powers have mercy!

DEVIL
Have mercy, quoth'a! when had thy tongue mercy
Upon thy betters, mistress? Curb it straightly,
'Tis the most dangerous member of the Body—
Unto the wise a blessing and a benefit,
A healing balm of mild Persuasion,
A sewer up of rents, sweet Pity's oracle,
A curber of dissension's contumely—
But in the mouth of the improvident
Worse than an Adder's fang.
It prompts the brain to hatch, the hand to execute,
The heart to shake off conscience and the back
To throw away the burden of restraint,
The saucy foot to spurn Authority.
Faith and troth, Madam, if my fates had bid me
To tread the thorny path of life with thee,
If the indissoluble, firm-knit chain
Of fixed alliance in its sacred bond
Had joined the fortune of thy stars with mine,
Would I become a target of your taunts?
The mark and butt of your unruly tongue?
Would I be baffled, like the idle wave
Fuming and fretting on a changeless rock,
Without the power to make impression
On the obdurate nature of the stone?
Would I be hurried like the dust of the earth
With every gale of passion to and fro,
Or be the plaything of your haughtiness
To gibe and sneer at?

AMORET
Hence! Avaunt, foul fiend!
Bear hence the terrors of thy crooked horns
And the long windings of thy sinuous tail!
Oh! that I could speak Latin, whose magic sounds
And Elfin syllables might drive thee far
To thy remotest Hell.

DEVIL
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Now by my Devilship 'tis wondrous plain,
Plain as the polish of a marble floor,
Plain as the surface of a bowling green,
Plain as the nose upon a Negro's face,
That husbands are the veriest dolts in nature.
Ye henpeck'd mates, who, like insensate drones,
Doze out your sleepy melancholy days,
Who twist and twine beneath th'oppression
Of woman's will, did ever Nature leave
To man on earth a want unsatisfied?
Has she not planted in each towering hedge
That fronts the King's highway, in each green wood
That crowns the balmy summit of the hill
A sovereign remedy to curb the power
Of overbearing insolence and pride?
Ye are all wrapt in apathy, else where
Would ARGUMENTUM BACULINUM be?
'Tis a most delicate physic, suited to
All ages from the schoolboy to the wife.
It quickens business, makes the lazy blood,
Which heretofore was stagnant, circulate,
'Tis the primeval origin of virtue,
Moulding the mind to good, it checks the freaks
Of growing vice i' th'heart; corrects the hardness
Of our ferocious natures like the iron
Which when most beaten is most ductile; thus
Men's natures are all malleable: should'st thou use them
Mildly, they turn again and trample thee;
But should'st thou hold and rein them straitly in,
And curb the mettled nature of their spirits,
When first they leave life's starting-post, they fear thee,
And fearing honour, honouring obey thee,
Obeying, love thee. Honour, love and fear
All meet in a bamboo. Oh! Heaven and Earth!
Why wilt thou crouch and bow and lick the dust
Whereon thy consort treads? Beat back the stream
And to the violence of the ridgéd waves
Oppose the massy stonework of thy power,
Though for awhile it roar and bound above
The opposition of thy barrier—
Yet raise thy dam up higher—higher still—
Till the submissive stream with silent course
Seek its far fount. She'll never rave again,
Unless in negligence or flexibility
Of yielding nature thou should'st leave some avenue
To her insinuating and sapping force,
(Which will not leave one stone unturn'd, until
She doth recover her dominion)
Some faithless fissure or uncemented hole,
Whence her ebullient spirit may leap forth,
At first in an attenuated stream,
Unto new contest, and enlarging straightly
May hurry thy frail mound down its rough bed,
And leave thee with one finger in thine eye
To wail the pliability which led thee
To trust thus far.

AMORET
I know not whence thou comest,
Nor who thou art, nor what thy message here,
Nor how I may exorcise thee, or drive
Thy troubled spirit to its biding-place.
If there be ought of pity in thy soul,
I do beseech thee leave me to my thoughts
And solitude.

DEVIL
Thoughts! Thoughts! what thoughts are thine
But evil and dishonour?

AMORET
Nay, I'll kneel
And pray thee to depart.

DEVIL
Out on thee, woman!
Devils are faithful to their trust.

AMORET
Alas!
Am I entrusted then to thee?

DEVIL
Dost weep?
Is that a tear which stains thy cheek? Nay—now
It quivers at the tip-end of thy nose
Which makes it somewhat dubious from which feature
It first had issue.

AMORET
I conjure thee—

DEVIL
Tears!
The rain of sentiment, the dews of feeling,
The beads of sensibility!
They are the coinage of a single wish.
I know that ye can summon them at will.
They are a woman's weapons, sword and shield,
Wherewith she braves remonstrance and breaks hearts—
Those faithful sluices never are drawn dry.
Even the withering heat of passion
But leads them forth in greater plenitude.
What! more! I know ye can command them, woman,
Even to the precise number, ten or twenty,
As suits occasion—
More yet? Methinks the cavity o' thy skull
Is brine i' th'room o' brains. More yet? at this rate
You'd float a ship o' the line.
This is the cogent stream wherewith ye turn
The mill-wheel of men's love (whose motion
Guides all the inner workings o' the heart)
And grind what grist ye please.

AMORET
I pray thee—

DEVIL
Get thee to bed—yet stay—but one word more—
Let there be no somnambulations,
No colloquy of soft-tongued whisperings
Like the low hum of the delighted bee
I' th'calyx of a lily—no kerchief-waving!
No footfalls i' th'still night! Lie quietly,
Without the movement of one naughty muscle,
Still as a kernel in its stone, and lifeless
As the dull yoke within its parent shell,
Ere yet the punctum saliens vivify it.
I know ye are perverse, and ever wish,
Maugre my wholesome admonitions,
To run obliquely like the bishop at chess,
But I'll cry “check” to ye, I warrant ye
I'll prove a “stalemate” to ye.

AMORET
(half aside)
In all conscience
My mate is stale enough.

DEVIL
Do'st mutter? how?
Would you outface the devil, Insolence?
Or tweak me like St. Dunstan by the nose,
Who scarified my smeller for a twelvemonth?
Who would cast seeds i' th'ocean? who would graft
Good counsel's fruits upon a stock so sterile?
Oh! Amoret! there is no honour in thee;
Thou art the painted vision of a dream,
Whose colours fade to nothing, a fair rainbow
Mocking the tantalized sight, an airy bubble,
O'er whose bright surface fly the hues of light,
As if to hide the nothingness within.
Few will bear sounding—cast the plummet in
And it will draw up mud, vile, worthless mud.
Gaze on the mirror of the silver lake
In its clear picture deftly pencilling
The soft inversion of the tremulous woods,
But probe it not to th'bottom—weeds, rank weeds,
Darkness and swarming reptiles harbour there.
Now go and ponder on my words. Begone.
[Exit AMORET
I am in troth a moralising devil,
Quite out o' my element; my element, fire.
Then come my spirit, with thy torch light up
The strongest flame of thine ability,
Use all thine efforts—work thy passage, as
The restless rushing of a fiery flood
Within the hollow and sonorous earth.
Now to my charge—I must be violent, fierce,
And put that ugly disposition on
Which is my portion by inheritance
From my great grandsire Lucifer—Good lack!
I'll make the scurvy-pated villains skip
As they were mad, e'en though they thronged about me,
As thick as Beelzebub on Beelzebub,
Alias as thick as horseflies on horse-dung.
'Twill be a troublesome office. Nay, by Phlegethon,
I'd rather be the chilly watch, whose voice
Sounds midnight through the length o' the hazy streets
In some great city, by the misty light
O' th'fumigated moon, than guard a woman.
When will the reign of feminine intrigues
Of female politics and folly cease?
It will be much about that time, methinks,
When this dark field of earth shall be sow'd thick
With the gay stars of Heav'n and the keen ploughshare
Shall trench deep furrows in the inverted sky;
When his triple mitred Holiness shall become
An arrant Protestant, and all their Eminences
Shall be unboiled into th'humility
Of black canonicals; when a second Becket
Shall thunder excommunication
From out his lordly see of Canterbury;
When Summer shall be Winter, and Spring Autumn;
When cold shall rarify and heat condense;
When Almacks shall become the rendezvous
Of burly citizens and citizens' wives,
And Lady J—y wearied shall throw down
The reins of Fashion and—think better things;
When high soul'd man shall walk upon his head,
When Colonel B—y shall shake hands with Decency
And read or write a sermon.
So! So! methinks in good truth I have hemm'd in
My proposition with a sweeping circle
Of insurmountable improbabilities.
Yon taper sinks i' th'socket; Time wears quickly,
Yet treads in shoes of felt. What is't o'clock?
[Going to the timepiece
Half after midnight! These mute moralizers,
Pointing to the unheeded lapse of hours,
Become a tacit eloquent reproach
Unto the dissipation of this Earth.
There is a clock in Pandemonium,
Hard by the burning throne of my Great Grandsire,
The slow vibrations of whose pendulum,
With click-clack alternation to and fro,
Sound “EVER, NEVER!” thro' the courts of Hell,
Piercing the wrung ears of the damn'd that writhe
Upon their beds of flame, and, whensoe'er
There may be short cessation of their wailings,
Through all the boundless depth of fires is heard
The shrill and solemn warning “EVER, NEVER.”
Then bitterly, I trow, they turn and toss
And shriek and shout, to drown the thrilling note—
[Looking again at the timepiece
Half after midnight! Wherefore stand I here?
Methinks my tongue runs twenty knots an hour:
I must unto mine office.

[Exit abruptly