University of Virginia Library

SCENE II.

Library, as before.
The Earl and Mordaunt discovered.
Mor.
Is love a crime?
Can we prevent its coming? or when come,
Can we command it from us?

Earl.
We may, at least,
Curb its expression, when disgrace and grief
Are like to follow it.

Mor.
Disgrace! Your daughter's noble, fair, and good;
I shall not feel disgraced in taking her.

Earl.
[Sitting.]
Sir! you are insolent.
Enter Lady Mabel and Lady Lydia.
Mabel, my child,
Have I not loved you truly, shown all kindness
That is a daughter's due?

Mab.
Indeed you have.

Earl.
Have you done well
In making stranger to a father's heart
The dearest wish of yours?—in plighting faith
For life, unknown to him who gave you life?

Mab.
This have I never done.

Mor.
Tell all, speak frankly;
Have you not, Lady Mabel, given me proof
Of favour in your sight will justify
The boon I have entreated of the Earl—
Permission to be ranked as one who seeks
For closer union with you than a friend's?
I know you gave no pledge; but looks and deeds,
And words whose precious sense was in their tones—
These bade me love! Was it not so? Answer, Mabel!

Mab.
Mabel! the Lady Mabel, when you speak.

Lyd.
She utterly denies what you infer.

Mab.
Yes, utterly.

Mor.
And Lady Lydia speaks thus;
She who confirmed my hopes!—I see, for sport.

Lyd.
We think you but presumptuous; let your honour
Guard you from veiling shame by sin; nor strive
From loose discourse, spoken in pleasantry,
To justify your conduct.

Mor.
And the letter?

Lyd.
The letter! He's distracted.

Mab.
Letter! [Apart to Lydia.]
Aunt?

Lyd.
Yes, love.

Mab.
[Aside.]
No, no; I will not wrong her; it is plain
His folly has deceived him.

Mor.
May I then ask,
If you have never loved me, why you deigned
To wear love's semblance; deigned, when I approached,
To feign joy's sudden smile; to urge my stay
With lips that, faltering, won me, and with eyes
That pleaded more by drooping; hour by hour
To sit half mute and bid me still speak on,
Then pay me with a glance in which there seemed
A heart's whole volume writ?

Mab.
[Sitting.]
This is too much.
Whate'er my kindness meant, it did not mean
To foster your presumption, though, perhaps,
Suspecting it, and lacking at the time
Better employment, I allowed it scope,
Did not repress it harshly, and amused,
Rather than angered, failed to put a bound
To its extravagance.

Mor.
All, then, has been a jest; the thing resolves
Itself into a harmless badinage!
You had no other toy, so took my heart
To while away an hour. The plaything broke;
But then it was amusement!

Lyd.
You were honoured
In thus assisting to beguile the hours
Of Lady Mabel's solitude.

Mor.
Honoured, say you?
Men's hearts have leaped within them at my words.
The lowly have adored me, and the proud—
Ay, sir, the proud—have courted me; you know it.

Lyd.
All this would sound much to your credit, sir,
Were other lips to speak it.

Mor.
Understand me.
You deem me proud. I am so; and yet humble:
[To Mabel.]
To you I would have been a slave; have moulded
Each wish to your desire; have laid my fame,
Though earth had ratified it, at your feet,
Nor deemed the offering worthy of your smile!
But when, admitting what I am, you scorn me
For what my father was, sport with me, trample
On the same hopes you fostered, then I claim
The patent which the Great Paternity
Of heaven assigns to nature—not descent—
And walk before you in the march of time!

Lyd.
The stale, fond trick—to boast of honours stored
In ether, where no human eye can pierce.
You may be prince of several stars—possess
All cloudland for your realm; but one poor knighthood,
Conferred by a real sword upon real shoulders,
Beats fifty thousand dukedoms in the air.
The old, convenient trick!

Earl.
Nay, courtesy!

Lyd.
You'll suffer us to go?

Earl.
Yes, leave me.

[Mabel rises; they are about to go.
Mor.
Stay!
Before we part, I have a word or two
For Lady Mabel's ear. [To Mabel.]
I know right well
The world has no tribunal to avenge
An injury like mine; you may allure
The human heart to love, warm it with smiles,
To aspirations of a dream-like bliss,
From which to wake is madness—and when spells
Of your enchantment have enslaved it quite,
So that you are its world, its light, its life,
And all beside is dark and void and dead—
I say, that very heart, brought to this pass,
You may spurn from your path, pass on and jest,
And the crowd will jest with you; you may glide,
With eye as radiant, and with brow as smooth,
And feet as light, through your charmed worshippers,
As though the angel's pen had failed to trace
The record of your crime; and every night,
Lulled by soft flatteries, you may calmly sleep
As do the innocent; but it is crime,
Deep crime, that you commit! Had you for sport
Trampled upon the earth a favourite rose,
Pride of the garden, or in wantonness
Cast in the sea a jewel not your own,
All men had held you guilty of offence!

Lyd.
[To Earl.]
Is it fit that longer you should brook this censure?

Mor.
And is it then no sin
To crush those flowers of life, our freshest hopes,
With all the incipient beauty in the bud,
Which know no second growth? to cast our faith
In human-kind, the only amulet
By which the soul walks fearless through the world,
Into those floods of bitter memory
Whose awful depths no diver dares explore?
To paralyse the expectant mind, while yet
On the world's threshold, and existence' self
To drain of all save its inert endurance?
To do this unprovoked—I put it to you,
Is not this sin? To the unsleeping eye
Of Him who sees all aims, and knows the wrongs
No laws save His redress, I make appeal
To judge between us!

Earl.
Sir, our conference
Is ended.

Mor.
It is ended.

[He goes out.
Mab.
He's deceived!
He hears me not! He knows me not! He's gone!

Earl.
Why, what is this, dear Mabel?

Mab.
Nothing, sir.
I am not used, you know, to witness strife.
It somewhat chafes my spirit.

Earl.
Hither, love.

[Mabel reels forward, and falls into her father's arms.
[An interval of Five Years is supposed to elapse between the Third and Fourth Acts.]