How is it with you, Sir Walter? Look up, sir, the villains are gone. He hears me not, and this deep disgrace of treachery in his son hath touched him even to the death. O most distuned and distempered world, where sons talk their aged fathers into their graves! Garrulous and diseased world, and still empty, rotten and hollow _talking_ world, where good men decay, states turn round in an endless mutability, and still for the worse; nothing is at a stay, nothing abides but vanity, chaotic vanity.--Brother, adieu!
There lies the parent stock which gave us life, Which I will see consign'd with tears to earth. Leave thou the solemn funeral rites to me, Grief and a true remorse abide with thee.
_Marg_. (_alone_.) It was an error merely, and no crime, An unsuspecting openness in youth, That from his lips the fatal secret drew, Which should have slept like one of nature's mysteries, Unveil'd by any man. Well, he is dead! And what should Margaret do in the forest? O ill-starr'd John! O Woodvil, man enfeoff'd to despair! Take thy farewell of peace. O never look again to see good days, Or close thy lids in comfortable nights, Or ever think a happy thought again, If what I have heard be true.-- Forsaken of the world must Woodvil live, If he did tell these men. No tongue must speak to him, no tongue of man Salute him, when he wakes up in a morning; Or bid "good-night" to John. Who seeks to live In amity with thee, must for thy sake Abide the world's reproach. What then? Shall Margaret join the clamors of the world Against her friend? O undiscerning world, That cannot from misfortune separate guilt, No, not in thought! O never, never, John. Prepared to share the fortunes of her friend _For better or for worse_, thy Margaret comes, To pour into thy wounds a healing love, And wake the memory of an ancient friendship. And pardon me, thou spirit of Sir Walter, Who, in compassion to the wretched living, Have but few tears to waste upon the dead.
SANDFORD. MARGARET. (_As from a Journey_.)
_Sand_. The violence of the sudden mischance hath so wrought in him, who by nature is allied to nothing _less_ than a self-debasing humor of dejection, that I have never seen anything more changed and spirit-broken. He hath, with a peremptory resolution, dismissed the partners of his riots and late hours, denied his house and person to their most earnest solicitings, and will be seen by none. He keeps ever alone, and his grief (which is solitary) does not so much seem to possess and govern in him, as it is by Him, with a wilfulness of most manifest affection, entertained and cherished.