CAMILLO: 
I urged him still; 15
Pleading, as I could guess, the devilish wrong
Which prompted your unnatural parent’s death. 
And he replied:  ’Paolo Santa Croce
Murdered his mother yester evening,
And he is fled.  Parricide grows so rife 20
That soon, for some just cause no doubt, the young
Will strangle us all, dozing in our chairs. 
Authority, and power, and hoary hair
Are grown crimes capital.  You are my nephew,
You come to ask their pardon; stay a moment; 25
Here is their sentence; never see me more
Till, to the letter, it be all fulfilled.’

BERNARDO: 
O God, not so!  I did believe indeed
That all you said was but sad preparation
For happy news.  Oh, there are words and looks 30
To bend the sternest purpose!  Once I knew them,
Now I forget them at my dearest need. 
What think you if I seek him out, and bathe
His feet and robe with hot and bitter tears? 
Importune him with prayers, vexing his brain 35
With my perpetual cries, until in rage
He strike me with his pastoral cross, and trample
Upon my prostrate head, so that my blood
May stain the senseless dust on which he treads,
And remorse waken mercy?  I will do it! 40
Oh, wait till I return!

[RUSHES OUT.]

CAMILLO: 
Alas, poor boy! 
A wreck-devoted seaman thus might pray
To the deaf sea.

[ENTER LUCRETIA, BEATRICE, AND GIACOMO, GUARDED.]

BEATRICE: 
I hardly dare to fear
That thou bring’st other news than a just pardon.

CAMILLO: 
May God in heaven be less inexorable 45
To the Pope’s prayers than he has been to mine. 
Here is the sentence and the warrant.

BEATRICE [WILDLY]: 
O
My God!  Can it be possible I have
To die so suddenly?  So young to go
Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground! 50
To be nailed down into a narrow place;
To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more
Blithe voice of living thing; muse not again
Upon familiar thoughts, sad, yet thus lost—­
How fearful! to be nothing!  Or to be... 55
What?  Oh, where am I?  Let me not go mad! 
Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts!  If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;
The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world! 
If all things then should be...my father’s spirit, 60
His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me;
The atmosphere and breath of my dead life! 
If sometimes, as a shape more like himself,
Even the form which tortured me on earth,
Masked in gray hairs and wrinkles, he should come