Volume I Part 24 (1/2)
”Perish the monster! I have not-never had father, or home, or--Speak not to me; speak not of him, or I shall lose what poor remains of reason his vile plots have left me. Peris.h.!.+-by all the powers of h.e.l.l, he shall perish, miserably!-miserably! And you, you, Paullus, must be the weapon that shall strike him!”
”Never the weapon in a daughter's hand to strike a father,” answered Paullus, ”no! though he were himself a parricide!”
”He is!-he is a parricide!-the parricide of Rome itself!-the murderer of our common mother!-the sacrilegious stabber of his holy country! Hear me, and tremble! It lacks now two days of the Consular election. If Catiline go not down ere that day cometh, then Rome goes down, on that day, and forever?”
”You are mad, girl, to say so.”
”You are mad, youth, if you discredit me. Do not I know? am not I the sharer? the tempter to the guilt myself? and am not I the mistress of its secrets? Was it not for this, that I gave myself to you? was it not unto this that I bound you by the oath, which now I restore to you? was it not by this, that I would have held you my minion and my paramour? And is it not to reveal this, that I now have come? I tell you, I discovered, how he would yesternight have slain you by the gladiator's sword; discovered how he now would slay you, by the perverted sword of Justice, as Medon's, as Volero's murderer; convicting you of his own crimes, as he hath many men before, by his suborned and perjured clients-his comrades on the Praetor's chair! I tell you, I discovered but just now, that me too he will cut off in the flower of my youth; in the heat of the pa.s.sions, he fomented; in the rankness of the soft sins, he taught me-cut me off-me, his own ruined and polluted child-by the same poisoned chalice, which made his house clear for my wretched mother's nuptials!”
”Can these things be,” cried Paullus, ”and the G.o.ds yet withhold their thunder?”
”Sometimes I think,” the girl answered wildly, ”that there are _no_ G.o.ds, Paullus. Do you believe in Mars and Venus?”
”In G.o.ds, whose wors.h.i.+p were adultery and murder?” said Arvina. ”Not I, indeed, poor Lucia.”
”If these be G.o.ds, there is no truth, no meaning in the name of virtue. If not these, what is G.o.d?”
”All things!” replied the young man solemnly. ”Whatever moves, whatever _is_, is G.o.d. The universe is but the body, that clothes his eternal spirit; the winds are his breath; the suns.h.i.+ne is his smile; the gentle dews are the tears of his compa.s.sion! Time is the creature of his hand, eternity his dwelling place, virtue his law, his oracles the soul of every living man!”
”Beautiful,” cried the girl. ”Beautiful, if it were but true!”
”It is true-as true, as the sun in heaven; as certain as his course through the changeless seasons.”
”How? how?” she asked eagerly. ”What makes it certain?”
”The certainty of death!” he answered.
”Ah! death, death! that is a mystery indeed. And after that-”
”Everlasting life!”
”Ha! do you believe that too? They tell me all that is a fable, a folly, and a falsehood!”
”Perchance it would be well for them it were so.”
”Yes!” she replied. ”Yes! But who taught you?”
”Plato! Immortal Plato!”
”Ha! I will read him; I will read Plato.”
”What! do you understand Greek too, Lucia?”
”How else should I have sung Anacreon, and learned the Lesbian arts of Sappho? But we have strayed wide of our subject, and time presses. Will you denounce, me, Catiline?”
”Not I! I will perish sooner.”
”You will do so, and all Rome with you.”
”Prove that to me, and--But it is impossible.”