Charles Di Tocca A Tragedy

Excerpt

ACT ONE

Scene.—The Island Leucadia. A ruined temple of Apollo near the town of Pharo. Broken columns and stones are strewn, or stand desolately about. It is night—the moon rising. Antonio, who has been waiting impatiently, seats himself on a stone. By a road near the ruins Fulvia enters, cloaked.

Antonio(turning): Helen——!
Fulvia:A comely name, my lord.
Antonio:Ah, you?
My father's unforgetting Fulvia?
Fulvia: At least not Helena, whoe'er she be.
Antonio: And did I call you so?
Fulvia:Unless it is
These stones have tongue and passion.
Antonio:Then the night
Recalling dreams of dim antiquity's
Heroic bloom worked on me.—But whence are
Your steps, so late, alone?
Fulvia:From the Cardinal,
Who has but come.
Antonio:What comfort there?
Fulvia:With doom
The moody bolt of Rome broods over us.
Antonio: My father will not bind his heresy?
Fulvia: You with him walked to-day. What said he?
Antonio:I?
With him to-day? Ah, true. What may be done?
Fulvia: He has been strange of late and silent, laughs,
Seeing the Cross, but softly and almost
As it were some sweet thing he loved.
Antonio(absently):As if
'Twere some sweet thing—he laughs—is strange—you say?
Fulvia: Stranger than is Antonio his son,
Who but for some expectancy is vacant.
(She makes to go.)
Antonio: Stay, Fulvia, though I am not in poise.
Last night I dreamed of you: in vain you hovered
To reach me from the coil of swift Charybdis.

(A low cry, Antonio starts.)

Fulvia: A woman's voice!
(Looking down the road.)
And hasting here!
Antonio:Alone?
Fulvia: No, with another!
Antonio:Go, then, Fulvia.
'Tis one would speak with me.
Fulvia:Ah? (She goes.)

Enter Helena frightedly with Paula.

Helena:Antonio!
Antonio: My Helena, what is it? You are wan
And tremble as a blossom quick with fear
Of shattering. What is it? Speak.
Helena: Not true!
O, 'tis not true!
Antonio:What have you chanced upon?
Helena: Say no to me, say no, and no again!
Antonio: Say no, and no?
Helena:Yes; I am reeling, wrung,
With one glance o'er the precipice of ill!
Say his incanted prophecies spring from
No power that's more than frenzied fantasy!
Antonio: Who prophesies? Who now upon this isle
More than visible and present day
Can gather to his eye? Tell me.
Helena:The monk—
Ah, chide me not!—mad Agabus, who can
Unsphere dark spirits from their evil airs
And show all things of love or death, seized me
As hither I stole to thee. With wild looks
And wilder lips he vented on my ear
Boding more wild than both. "Sappho!" he cried,
"Sappho! Sappho!" and probed my eyes as if
Destiny moved dark-visaged in their deeps.
Then tore his rags and moaned, "So young, to cease!"
Gazed then out into awful vacancy;
And whispered hotly, following his gaze,
"The Shadow! Shadow!"
Antonio:This is but a whim,
A sudden gloomy surge of superstition.
Put it from you, my Helena.
Helena:But he
Has often cleft the future with his ken,
Seen through it to some lurking misery
And mar of love: or the dim knell of death
Heard and revealed....