Keep the promise you have made. I doubt it not. Now ask yourself my feeling When for the second time (for once already I’d pardoned him) he put me under sword And I must say to me:--“Your shadow’s liker Your proper self than that wry twisted image He bears of you far in his inmost depths.” ’Twas that I would not bear, and could I so? I made to grasp my dagger, and prevented From rash-essayed self-murder, I then swore-- “It is your will in death to be my headsman? You shall become my headsman, but in life. The woman you have gazed on you shall slaughter And not till death shall see me as I am;” You came unto my feast; well then, a mask Was dancing there. TITUS. Ha! MAR. ’Twas a mask that stood To-day before the Judges; for a mask The axe is whetted, but it strikes myself. TITUS. I stand dumbfounded, Queen, and yet I charge you With no injustice when perforce I say That you had duped my very self, had filled me With horror and recoil before your feast As now with shudders and admiring wonder. If thus with me, how could this show for him Have failed to dim your Being in a darkness, For him, whose heart all passion-fluctuous As little as a turbid-troubled stream Could image things reflected as they are. Therefore I give his hurt my answering feel And find that your revenge is overstern. MAR. But that revenge I take at my own cost; And proof it was not for the sake of life That death like any altar-beast incensed me I give you, for I cast that life away. TITUS. Give me my word again! MAR. And if you broke it You’d alter not a tittle; for to die, There man commands his fellow, but to live, In that the mightiest forces not the weakest. And I’m aweary! Yea, I envy now The stone, and if the end of life is this That man should learn to hate it and to death, Eternal death, give preference, it is Achieved in me. And may they quarry granite, Uncrumbling rock, to hollow out my coffin, May it be sunken in abysmal ocean That so my dust escape the elements Oblivioned for all eternity. TITUS. And yet we all live in the world of show. MAR. I see that now and therefore I go out. TITUS. I have myself against you testified. MAR. To gain that end I had you at the feast. TITUS. Should I say to him what to me you’ve said-- MAR.