Yes, let’s be gone! for once and all be gone!
Mephistopheles.
Here is a casket, of a goodly weight;
Its former lord, I ween, bewails its fate.
Come, put it in the press. I swear
She’ll lose her senses when she sees it there.
The trinkets that I stowed within it
Were bait meant for a nobler prey:
But child is child, and play is play!
Faust.
I know not—shall I?
Mephistopheles.
Can you doubt a minute?
Would you then keep the dainty pelf,
Like an old miser, to yourself?
If so, I would advise you, sir,
To spare your squire the bitter toil,
And with some choicer sport the hour beguile
Than looking lustfully at her.
I scratch my head and rub my hands that you—
[He puts the casket into the cupboard, and locks the door again.]
Come, let’s away!—
With this sweet piece of womanhood may do,
As will may sway;
And you stand there,
And gape and stare,
As if you looked into a lecture-room,
And there with awe
The twin grey spectres bodily saw,
Physics and Metaphysics! Come!
[Exeunt.
Enter Margaret, with a lamp.
Margaret.
It is so sultry here, so hot! [She opens the window.]
And yet so warm without ’tis not.
I feel—I know not how—oppressed;
Would to God that my mother came!
A shivering cold runs o’er my frame—
I’m but a silly timid girl at best!
[While taking off her clothes, she sings.]
There was a king in Thule,
True-hearted to his grave:
To him his dying lady
A golden goblet gave.
He prized it more than rubies;
At every drinking-bout
His eyes they swam in glory,
When he would drain it out.
On his death-bed he counted
His cities one by one;
