Page 183 - Cyberculture and New Media

174 Cyborg Goddesses: The Mainframe Revisited
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“My daughter,” said Rappaccini, “thou art no longer lonely
in the world. Pluck one of those precious gems from thy
sister shrub and bid thy bridegroom wear it in his bosom. It
will not harm him now. My science and the sympathy
between thee and him have so wrought within his system
that he now stands apart from common men, as thou dost,
daughter of my pride and triumph, from ordinary women.
Pass on, then, through the world, most dear to one another,
and dreadful to all besides!”
“My father,” said Beatrice, feebly,—and still as she spoke
she kept her hand upon her heart,—”wherefore didst thou
inflict this miserable doom upon thy child?”
“Miserable!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “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. Just at that moment Professor Pietro Baglioni
looked forth from the window, and called loudly, in a tone
of triumph mixed with horror, to the thunder stricken man
of science,—
“Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your
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experiment!”