"What mean you, foolish girl?
Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvellous gifts,
against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy? Misery, to
be able to quell the mightiest with a breath? Misery, to be as
terrible as thou art beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the
condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil, and capable of none?"
"I would fain have been loved, not feared, murmured Beatrice,
sinking down upon the ground. "But now it matters not; I am going,
father, where the evil, which thou hast striven to mingle with my
being, will pass away like a dream- like the fragrance of these
poisonous flowers, which will no longer taint my breath among the
flowers of Eden. Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words of hatred are like lead
within my heart- but they, too, will fall away as I ascend. Oh, was
there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?"
To Beatrice- so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by
Rappaccini's skill- as poison had been life, so the powerful
antidote was death. And thus the poor victim of man's ingenuity and of
thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts
of perverted wisdom, perished there, at the feet of her father and
Giovanni.
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