Лучшие любовные истории / The Best Love Stories - стр. 11

But Giovanni did not know it.

“Dear Beatrice,” said he, approaching her, while she shrank away as always at his approach, but now with a different impulse, “dearest Beatrice, our fate is not yet so desperate. Look! there is a medicine, made up of ingredients opposite to those by which your awful father has brought this trouble upon you and me. Let us take it together and be saved!”

“Give it me!” said Beatrice. She added, “I will drink it; wait for the result.”

She put Baglioni’s antidote to her lips; and, at the same moment, the figure of Rappaccini emerged from the portal and came slowly towards the marble fountain. As he came near, the pale man of science seemed to gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful young man and girl, as might an artist who had spent his life in painting a picture and finally was satisfied with his success. He paused; he held his hands over them; and those were the same hands that had thrown poison into their veins. Giovanni trembled. Beatrice pressed her hand upon her heart.

“My daughter,” said Rappaccini, “you are no longer lonely in the world. Pluck one of those flowers from your sister shrub and let your bridegroom wear it. It will not harm him now. My science and the sympathy between you and him have so changed his system that he now is different from common men, as you are from ordinary women. Pass on through the world, most dear to one another and dreadful to all others!”

“My father,” said Beatrice, weakly, – and still as she spoke she kept her hand upon her heart, “why did you bring this doom upon your child?”

“Doom!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “What do you mean, foolish girl? Do you call doom the power that no enemy has – doom, to be as terrible as you are beautiful? Would you prefer to be a weak woman?”

“I would prefer to be loved, not feared,” murmured Beatrice, sinking down upon the ground. “But now it does not matter. I am going, father, where the evil which you put in me will pass away like a dream – like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers, which will no longer poison my breath among the flowers of Eden. Farewell, Giovanni! Your words of hatred are like lead within my heart; but they, too, will fall away as I go up. Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in your nature than in mine?”

To Beatrice, for whom poison had been life, the powerful antidote was death; and thus the poor victim of man’s zeal for science died there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni.

When William Marchmill had finished looking for lodgings at the well-known watering-place of Solentsea in Upper Wessex,[37] he returned to the hotel to find his wife. She, with the children, had walked along the shore, and Marchmill followed them there.

“How far you’ve gone!” Marchmill said, when he came up to his wife, who was reading as she walked, the three children were considerably further ahead with the nurse.

Mrs. Marchmill started out of the thoughts into which the book had thrown her. “Yes,” she said, “you’ve been such a long time. I was tired of staying in the hotel.”

“Well, I have had trouble to find rooms. Will you come and see if what I’ve chosen on will do?[38] There is not much room, I am afraid; but I couldn’t find anything better. The town is rather full.”