did you not suspect it?”
Here Giovanni looked so darkly upon her that Beatrice paused and trembled. But her faith in his love was so great that she had no doubt for an instant.
“There was an awful doom,” she continued, “the effect of my father’s fatal love of science, which estranged me from all society of my kind.[34] Until Heaven sent you, dearest Giovanni, oh, how lonely was your poor Beatrice!”
“Was it a hard doom?” asked Giovanni, fixing his eyes upon her.
“Only lately have I known how hard it was,” answered she, tenderly. “Oh, yes; but my heart was quiet.”
Giovanni’s rage broke through like a lightning out of a dark cloud.
“The cursed one!” cried he with anger. “You have cut me also from all the warmth of life and dragged me into your region of horror!”
“Giovanni!” exclaimed Beatrice, turning her large bright eyes upon his face.
“Yes, poisonous thing!” repeated Giovanni, beside himself with passion. “You have done it! You have filled my veins with poison! You have made me as hateful, as ugly and deadly as yourself – a world’s monster! Now, if our breath is as fatal to ourselves as to all others, let us join our lips in one kiss of hatred, and so die!”
“What has happened to me?” murmured Beatrice. “Holy Virgin,[35] pity me, a poor heart-broken child!”
“Do you pray?” cried Giovanni, still with the same rage. “Your prayers, as they come from your lips, fill the atmosphere with death. Yes, yes; let us pray! Let us go to church! They that come after us will be killed!”
“Giovanni,” said Beatrice, “why do you join yourself with me in those terrible words? I, it is true, am horrible, as you say. But you, – you can go out of the garden and forget there ever was on earth such a monster as poor Beatrice?”
“Do you pretend ignorance?[36]” asked Giovanni. “Look! I have received this power from the daughter of Rappaccini.”
There were some insects flying through the air, and round Giovanni’s head, and were evidently attracted towards him by the same fragrance as that of the shrubs. He breathed at them, and smiled bitterly at Beatrice as some of the insects fell dead upon the ground.
“I see it! I see it!” shrieked Beatrice. “It is my father’s fatal science! No, no, Giovanni; it was not I! Never! never! I dreamed only to love you and be with you a little time, and to let you go away, leaving your image in my heart; for, Giovanni, believe it, though my body is filled with poison, my soul belongs to God, and wants love as its daily food. Kill me! Oh, what is death after such words as yours? But it was not I. I would never have done it.”
They stood, cut off from all the human race. If they were cruel to one another, who would be kind to them? Besides, thought Giovanni, there was still a hope of his returning within the limits of ordinary nature, and leading Beatrice by the hand? O, weak, and selfish, and unworthy man, that could dream of an earthly happiness, after such deep love had been shattered as was Beatrice’s love by Giovanni’s cruel words! No, no; there could be no such hope. She must pass heavily, with that broken heart, across the borders of Time – she must forget her grief in the light of immortality.
But Giovanni did not know it.
“Dear Beatrice,” said he, approaching her, while she shrank away as always at his approach, but now with a different impulse, “dearest Beatrice, our fate is not yet so desperate. Look! there is a medicine, made up of ingredients opposite to those by which your awful father has brought this trouble upon you and me. Let us take it together and be saved!”
“Give it me!” said Beatrice. She added, “I will drink it; wait for the result.”
She put Baglioni’s antidote to her lips; and, at the same moment, the figure of Rappaccini emerged from the portal and came slowly towards the marble fountain. As he came near, the pale man of science seemed to gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful young man and girl, as might an artist who had spent his life in painting a picture and finally was satisfied with his success. He paused; he held his hands over them; and those were the same hands that had thrown poison into their veins. Giovanni trembled. Beatrice pressed her hand upon her heart.
“My daughter,” said Rappaccini, “you are no longer lonely in the world. Pluck one of those flowers from your sister shrub and let your bridegroom wear it. It will not harm him now. My science and the sympathy between you and him have so changed his system that he now is different from common men, as you are from ordinary women. Pass on through the world, most dear to one another and dreadful to all others!”
“My father,” said Beatrice, weakly, – and still as she spoke she kept her hand upon her heart, “why did you bring this doom upon your child?”
“Doom!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “What do you mean, foolish girl? Do you call doom the power that no enemy has – doom, to be as terrible as you are beautiful? Would you prefer to be a weak woman?”
“I would prefer to be loved, not feared,” murmured Beatrice, sinking down upon the ground. “But now it does not matter. I am going, father, where the evil which you put in me will pass away like a dream – like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers, which will no longer poison my breath among the flowers of Eden. Farewell, Giovanni! Your words of hatred are like lead within my heart; but they, too, will fall away as I go up. Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in your nature than in mine?”
To Beatrice, for whom poison had been life, the powerful antidote was death; and thus the poor victim of man’s zeal for science died there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni.
An Imaginative Woman
After Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
When William Marchmill had finished looking for lodgings at the well-known watering-place of Solentsea in Upper Wessex,[37] he returned to the hotel to find his wife. She, with the children, had walked along the shore, and Marchmill followed them there.
“How far you’ve gone!” Marchmill said, when he came up to his wife, who was reading as she walked, the three children were considerably further ahead with the nurse.
Mrs. Marchmill started out of the thoughts into which the book had thrown her. “Yes,” she said, “you’ve been such a long time. I was tired of staying in the hotel.”
“Well, I have had trouble to find rooms. Will you come and see if what I’ve chosen on will do?[38] There is not much room, I am afraid; but I couldn’t find anything better. The town is rather full.”
The couple left the children and nurse to continue their walk, and went back together.
Well-balanced in age, matched in personal appearance, and having the same domestic requirements, this couple differed in temper, though even here they did not often clash. They did not have common tastes. Marchmill considered his wife’s likes and interests silly; she considered his sordid and material. The husband was a manufacturer of weapons in a city in the north, and his soul was in that business always; the lady was sensitive and romantic. Ella, shrank from detailed knowledge of her husband’s business whenever she thought that everything he manufactured was for the destruction of life. She could only recover her balance by thinking that some, at least, of his weapons were sooner or later used for killing animals almost as cruel to others in their species as human beings were to theirs.
She had never considered this occupation of his as any objection to having him for a husband. Indeed, the necessity of getting married at all cost, which all good mothers teach, kept her from thinking of it at all till she had married William and had passed the honeymoon. Then, like a person who has stumbled upon something in the dark, she wondered what she had got; mentally walked round it, estimated it; whether it was rare or common; contained gold, silver, or lead; was everything to her or nothing.
She