MALATESTA.  No, no; your last bout levelled him.  He reeled
Into Ravenna, from the battle-field,
Like a stripped drunkard, and there headlong fell—­
A mass of squalid misery, a thing
To draw the jeering urchins.  I have this
From faithful spies.  There’s not a hope remains
To break the shock of his great overthrow. 
I pity Guido.

LANCIOTTO.  ’Sdeath! go comfort him! 
I pity those who fought, and bled, and died,
Before the armies of this Ghibelin. 
I pity those who halted home with wounds
Dealt by his hand.  I pity widowed eyes
That he set running; maiden hearts that turn,
Sick with despair, from ranks thinned down by him;
Mothers that shriek, as the last stragglers fling
Their feverish bodies by the fountain-side,
Dumb with mere thirst, and faintly point to him,
Answering the dame’s quick questions.  I have seen
Unburied bones, and skulls—­that seemed to ask,
From their blank eye-holes, vengeance at my hand—­
Shine in the moonlight on old battle-fields;
And even these—­the happy dead, my lord—­
I pity more than Guido of Ravenna!

  MALATESTA.  What would you have?

LANCIOTTO.  I’d see Ravenna burn,
Flame into heaven, and scorch the flying clouds;
I’d choke her streets with ruined palaces;
I’d hear her women scream with fear and grief,
As I have heard the maids of Rimini. 
All this I’d sprinkle with old Guido’s blood,
And bless the baptism.

  MALATESTA.  You are cruel.

LANCIOTTO.  Not I;
But these things ache within my fretting brain. 
The sight I first beheld was from the arms
Of my wild nurse, her husband hacked to death
By the fierce edges of these Ghibelins. 
One cut across the neck—­I see it now,
Ay, and have mimicked it a thousand times,
Just as I saw it, on our enemies.—­
Why, that cut seemed as if it meant to bleed
On till the judgment.  My distracted nurse
Stooped down, and paddled in the running gore
With her poor fingers; then a prophetess,
Pale with the inspiration of the god,
She towered aloft, and with her dripping hand
Three times she signed me with the holy cross. 
Tis all as plain as noon-day.  Thus she spake,—­
“May this spot stand till Guido’s dearest blood
Be mingled with thy own!” The soldiers say,
In the close battle, when my wrath is up,
The dead man’s blood flames on my vengeful brow
Like a red planet; and when war is o’er,
It shrinks into my brain, defiling all
My better nature with its slaughterous lusts. 
Howe’er it be, it shaped my earliest thought,
And it will shape my last.

MALATESTA.  You moody churl! 
You dismal knot of superstitious dreams! 
Do you not blush to empty such a head
Before a sober man?  Why, son, the world
Has not given o’er its laughing humour yet,
That you should try it with such vagaries.—­Poh! 
I’ll get a wife to teach you common sense.