“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.”

The couple left the children and nurse to continue their walk, and went back together.

Well-balanced in age, matched in personal appearance, and having the same domestic requirements, this couple differed in temper, though even here they did not often clash. They did not have common tastes. Marchmill considered his wife’s likes and interests silly; she considered his sordid and material. The husband was a manufacturer of weapons in a city in the north, and his soul was in that business always; the lady was sensitive and romantic. Ella, shrank from detailed knowledge of her husband’s business whenever she thought that everything he manufactured was for the destruction of life. She could only recover her balance by thinking that some, at least, of his weapons were sooner or later used for killing animals almost as cruel to others in their species as human beings were to theirs.

She had never considered this occupation of his as any objection to having him for a husband. Indeed, the necessity of getting married at all cost, which all good mothers teach, kept her from thinking of it at all till she had married William and had passed the honeymoon. Then, like a person who has stumbled upon something in the dark, she wondered what she had got; mentally walked round it, estimated it; whether it was rare or common; contained gold, silver, or lead; was everything to her or nothing.