FIRST JUDGE: 
This sounds as bad as truth.  Guards, there,
Lead forth the prisoner!
[ENTER LUCRETIA, BEATRICE AND GIACOMO, GUARDED.]
Look upon this man; 20
When did you see him last?

BEATRICE: 
We never saw him.

MARZIO: 
You know me too well, Lady Beatrice.

BEATRICE: 
I know thee!  How? where? when?

MARZIO: 
You know ’twas I
Whom you did urge with menaces and bribes
To kill your father.  When the thing was done 25
You clothed me in a robe of woven gold
And bade me thrive:  how I have thriven, you see. 
You, my Lord Giacomo, Lady Lucretia,
You know that what I speak is true.
[BEATRICE ADVANCES TOWARDS HIM;
HE COVERS HIS FACE, AND SHRINKS BACK.]
Oh, dart
The terrible resentment of those eyes 30
On the dead earth!  Turn them away from me! 
They wound:  ’twas torture forced the truth.  My Lords,
Having said this let me be led to death.

BEATRICE: 
Poor wretch, I pity thee:  yet stay awhile.

CAMILLO: 
Guards, lead him not away.

BEATRICE: 
Cardinal Camillo, 35
You have a good repute for gentleness
And wisdom:  can it be that you sit here
To countenance a wicked farce like this? 
When some obscure and trembling slave is dragged
From sufferings which might shake the sternest heart 40
And bade to answer, not as he believes,
But as those may suspect or do desire
Whose questions thence suggest their own reply: 
And that in peril of such hideous torments
As merciful God spares even the damned.  Speak now 45
The thing you surely know, which is that you,
If your fine frame were stretched upon that wheel,
And you were told:  ’Confess that you did poison
Your little nephew; that fair blue-eyed child
Who was the lodestar of your life:’—­and though 50
All see, since his most swift and piteous death,
That day and night, and heaven and earth, and time,
And all the things hoped for or done therein
Are changed to you, through your exceeding grief,
Yet you would say, ‘I confess anything:’  55
And beg from your tormentors, like that slave,
The refuge of dishonourable death. 
I pray thee, Cardinal, that thou assert
My innocence.

CAMILLO [MUCH MOVED]: 
What shall we think, my Lords? 
Shame on these tears!  I thought the heart was frozen 60
Which is their fountain.  I would pledge my soul
That she is guiltless.

JUDGE: 
Yet she must be tortured.

CAMILLO: 
I would as soon have tortured mine own nephew
(If he now lived he would be just her age;
His hair, too, was her colour, and his eyes 65
Like hers in shape, but blue and not so deep)
As that most perfect image of God’s love
That ever came sorrowing upon the earth. 
She is as pure as speechless infancy!