“O WHENCE do you come,
Figure in the night-fog that chills me numb?”
“I come to you across from my house up there,
And I don’t mind the brine-mist clinging to me
That blows from the quay,
For I heard him in my chamber, and thought you unaware.”
“But what did you hear,
That brought you blindly knocking in this middle-watch so drear?”
“My sailor son’s voice as ’twere calling at your door,
And I don’t mind my bare feet clammy on the stones,
And the blight to my bones,
For he only knows of _this_ house I lived in before.”
“Nobody’s nigh,
Woman like a skeleton, with socket-sunk eye.”
“Ah—nobody’s nigh! And my life is drearisome,
And this is the old home we loved in many a day
Before he went away;
And the salt fog mops me. And nobody’s come!”
From “To Please his Wife.”
OUTSIDE THE CASEMENT
(A REMINISCENCE OF THE WAR)
WE sat in the room
And praised her whom
We saw in the portico-shade outside:
She could not hear
What was said of her,
But smiled, for its purport we did not hide.
Then in was brought
That message, fraught
With evil fortune for her out there,
Whom we loved that day
More than any could say,
And would fain have fenced from a waft of care.
And the question pressed
Like lead on each breast,
Should we cloak the tidings, or call her and tell?
It was too intense
A choice for our sense,
As we pondered and watched her we loved so well.
Yea, spirit failed us
At what assailed us;
How long, while seeing what soon must come,
Should we counterfeit
No knowledge of it,
And stay the stroke that would blanch and numb?
And thus, before
For evermore
Joy left her, we practised to beguile
Her innocence when
She now and again
Looked in, and smiled us another smile.
THE PASSER-BY
(L. H. RECALLS HER ROMANCE)
He used to pass, well-trimmed and brushed,
My window every day,
And when I smiled on him he blushed,
That youth, quite as a girl might; aye,
In the shyest way.
Thus often did he pass hereby,
That youth of bounding gait,
Until the one who blushed was I,
And he became, as here I sate,
My joy, my fate.
And now he passes by no more,
That youth I loved too true!
I grieve should he, as here of yore,
Pass elsewhere, seated in his view,
Some maiden new!
If such should be, alas for her!
He’ll make her feel him dear,
Become her daily comforter,
Then tire him of her beauteous gear,
And disappear!
“I WAS THE MIDMOST”
I WAS the midmost of my world
When first I frisked me free,
For though within its circuit gleamed
But a small company,
And I was immature, they seemed
To bend their looks on me.
She was the midmost of my world
When I went further forth,
And hence it was that, whether I turned
To south, east, west, or north,
Beams of an all-day Polestar burned
From that new axe of earth.
Where now is midmost in my world?
I trace it not at all:
No midmost shows it here, or there,
When wistful voices call
“We are fain! We are fain!” from everywhere
On Earth’s bewildering ball!
A SOUND IN THE NIGHT
(WOODSFORD CASTLE: 17–)
“WHAT do I catch upon the night-wind, husband?—
What is it sounds in this house so eerily?
It seems to be a woman’s voice: each little while I hear it,
And it much troubles me!”
“’Tis but the eaves dripping down upon the plinth-slopes:
Letting fancies worry thee!—sure ’tis a foolish thing,
When we were on’y coupled half-an-hour before the noontide,
And now it’s but evening.”
“Yet seems it still a woman’s voice outside the castle, husband,
And ’tis cold to-night, and rain beats, and this is a lonely place.
Didst thou fathom much of womankind in travel or adventure
Ere ever thou sawest my face?”
“It may be a tree, bride, that rubs his arms acrosswise,
If it is not the eaves-drip upon the lower slopes,
Or the river at the bend, where it whirls about the hatches
Like a creature that sighs and mopes.”
“Yet it still seems to me like the crying of a woman,
And it saddens me much that so piteous a sound
On this my bridal night when I would get agone from sorrow
Should so ghost-like wander round!”
“To satisfy thee, Love, I will strike the flint-and-steel, then,
And set the rush-candle up, and undo the door,
And take the new horn-lantern that we bought upon our journey,
And throw the light over the moor.”
He struck a light, and breeched and booted in the further chamber,
And lit the new horn-lantern and went from her sight,
And vanished down the turret; and she heard him pass the postern,
And go out into the night.
She listened as she lay, till she heard his step returning,
And his voice as he unclothed him: “’Twas nothing, as I said,
But the nor’-west wind a-blowing from the moor ath’art the river,
And the tree that taps the gurgoyle-head.”
“Nay, husband, you perplex me; for if the noise I heard here,
Awaking me from sleep so, were but as you avow,
The rain-fall, and the wind, and the tree-bough, and the river,
Why is it silent now?
“And why is thy hand and thy clasping arm so shaking,
And thy sleeve and tags of hair so muddy and so wet,
And why feel I thy heart a-thumping every time thou kissest me,
And thy breath as if hard to get?”
He lay there in silence for a while, still quickly breathing,
Then started up and walked about the room resentfully:
“O woman, witch, whom I, in sooth, against my will have wedded,
Why castedst thou thy spells on me?
“There was one I loved once: the cry you heard was her cry:
She came to me to-night, and her plight was passing sore,
As no woman . . . Yea, and it was e’en the cry you heard, wife,
But she will cry no more!
“And now I can’t abide thee: this place, it hath a curse on’t,
This farmstead once a castle: I’ll get me straight away!”
He dressed this time in darkness, unspeaking, as she listened,
And went ere the dawn turned day.
They found a woman’s body at a spot called Rocky Shallow,
Where the Froom stream curves amid the moorland, washed aground,
And they searched about for him, the yeoman, who had darkly known her,
But he could not be found.
And the bride left for good-and-all the farmstead once a castle,
And in a county far away lives, mourns, and sleeps alone,
And thinks in windy weather that she hears a woman crying,
And sometimes an infant’s moan.