JUDGE: 
Well, be her purity on your head, my Lord, 70
If you forbid the rack.  His Holiness
Enjoined us to pursue this monstrous crime
By the severest forms of law; nay even
To stretch a point against the criminals. 
The prisoners stand accused of parricide 75
Upon such evidence as justifies
Torture.

BEATRICE: 
What evidence?  This man’s?

JUDGE: 
Even so.

BEATRICE [TO MARZIO]: 
Come near.  And who art thou thus chosen forth
Out of the multitude of living men
To kill the innocent?

MARZIO: 
I am Marzio, 80
Thy father’s vassal.

BEATRICE: 
Fix thine eyes on mine;
Answer to what I ask.
[TURNING TO THE JUDGES.]
I prithee mark
His countenance:  unlike bold calumny
Which sometimes dares not speak the thing it looks,
He dares not look the thing he speaks, but bends 85
His gaze on the blind earth.
[TO MARZIO.]
What! wilt thou say
That I did murder my own father?

MARZIO: 
Oh! 
Spare me!  My brain swims round...I cannot speak... 
It was that horrid torture forced the truth. 
Take me away!  Let her not look on me! 90
I am a guilty miserable wretch;
I have said all I know; now, let me die!

BEATRICE: 
My Lords, if by my nature I had been
So stern, as to have planned the crime alleged,
Which your suspicions dictate to this slave, 95
And the rack makes him utter, do you think
I should have left this two-edged instrument
Of my misdeed; this man, this bloody knife
With my own name engraven on the heft,
Lying unsheathed amid a world of foes, 100
For my own death?  That with such horrible need
For deepest silence, I should have neglected
So trivial a precaution, as the making
His tomb the keeper of a secret written
On a thief’s memory?  What is his poor life? 105
What are a thousand lives?  A parricide
Had trampled them like dust; and, see, he lives!
[TURNING TO MARZIO.]
And thou...

MARZIO: 
Oh, spare me!  Speak to me no more! 
That stern yet piteous look, those solemn tones,
Wound worse than torture.
[TO THE JUDGES.]
I have told it all; 110
For pity’s sake lead me away to death.

CAMILLO: 
Guards, lead him nearer the Lady Beatrice;
He shrinks from her regard like autumn’s leaf
From the keen breath of the serenest north.