The Bride of Porphyrion

DIOCLEA.

Pass on, pass on, and seek thy lair, lone man,
If neighbouring lair thou hast. Night falls; and God
For whom thou once didst snap all human ties
Requires thy evening prayer.

PORPHYRION.

Oh, if I stop
Upon my path and bandy words with woman--
I who for years have shunned man, woman, child,
But woman most--I would not have thee think
In error that thy old familiar voice,
Which seems to come from out the past, has called
Emotion back to life, or that I care
To take advantage of the freak of chance
Which brings us face to face and makes us stand
Each like a spectre in the other’s eyes.
But I suspect thee of a rash design
Abhorrent to the Christian; and I ask,
Woman, once more, what brings thee here at dusk--
Here by the deep lone Nile, when rise the mists
Heavy with death, when prowl devouring beasts,
And when God’s lonely dweller in the waste
Alone has nought to fear?

DIOCLEA.

What brings me here?
The Nile flower is closing with the day;
The Nile bird hastens to her bulrush nest;
All Nature that is not of night and evil
Is seeking rest; and why should not I too,
If I am weary, find repose at dusk
Where rolls the deep dark stream?

PORPHYRION.

Because the Lord,
Through my unworthy voice, has bid thee quit
This perilous brink, and bear such heavy load
As He, whom none shall judge, may choose to heap
Upon thy head.

DIOCLEA.

Resume thy path, lone man--
Resume thy path in peace. Oh, thou art rash
To linger out this meeting of dead souls!
Art thou not that Porphyrion who escaped
Into the waste to shun the sight of woman,
However pure and spotless she might be?
Then leave me to myself; go seek thy lair,
And leave me to the darkness and the night;
Else will I tell thee in one monstrous word
What she now is who once was Dioclea,
And make thy desert-nurtured chastity
Shrink back in fear as from a gust from hell!

PORPHYRION.

Oh, I have wrestled with the Fiend too long
And placed my heel too oft upon his neck
To fear contamination from thy breath!
I care not what thou wast, nor what thou art,
Now that my soul is safe and that long years
Of ruthless castigation of the flesh
Have put me out of reach of woman’s snare;
But, as a Christian servant of the Lord,
I may not let thee do the thing thou wouldst,
And which God hates. Thy soul is on the brink
Of the abyss; and God now bids me stretch
My hand to save it.

DIOCLEA.

Oh, not thine, not thine!
The wanton hand that broke the precious vessel
Shall not attempt to mend it.

PORPHYRION.

What I did
Upon that day, I did at God’s command.

DIOCLEA.

Upon my bridal morn my father’s house
Was full of song; my heart was full of sun;
Yea, and of earnest love and brave intent:
Less snowy was the linen I had woven
With my own hands for thee; less fresh the wreaths
The bridesmaids still were twining; and less pure
The gold of bridal gifts which guest-friends brought,
Than was the heart that waited to be thine.

PORPHYRION.

Upon thy bridal morn my heart was filled
With doubt and fear. My hounded spirit groped
Like one who fears pursuers in the dark
And knows no issue. Yea, within my breast,
Like captive eagles in a cage too narrow,
The love of God, the love of thee, did fight.
I cursed the perilous lustre of thy eyes;
I cursed thy smile and laugh; and cursed myself
That loathed them not. The sounds of mirth and song
That filled the house fell grating on my ear;
The nuptial cakes smacked bitter in my mouth,
Ay, worse than gall; the dewy bridal wreaths
Stank in my nostrils, while an inner voice
Kept thundering in my soul: “Away, away!
The howling waste awaits thee. Not for thee
Are care and kiss of woman; not for thee
Are hearth and home, and kith and kin and friend;
But scourge and shirt of hair!”

DIOCLEA.

And like a thief,
After the priest had blessed us and before
The feast was over, thou didst skulk away,
And all at once convert the sound of song
Into the hum of pity and derision.
I sat alone upon my empty bed,
Wrapped in the double gloom of night and woe.
The pillars of my faith in human good
Had given way; the roof had fallen in
Upon my life. Oh how I cursed the night
For dragging out its black and silent creep!
And when dawn came, oh how I cursed the dawn
For its intrusive stare! And yet that night
Was but the first of many equal nights;
That dawn was but the first of many dawns
In ushering in a loathed and lonely day.
I held aloof from every happier woman,
Suspiciously and silently to brood;
Grudging to one her husband’s look of love,
And to the next the infant at her breast;
Grudging to all their house, their home, their hearth,
Their dignity, their duties, and their cares:
And shunning, I was shunned, and, as it were,
Marked out for future shame.

PORPHYRION.

If like a thief
I stole away unseen, oh it was not
To spend that night in any rival’s arms!
Rock, hard and wind-swept, was my marriage bed;
The wilderness my bride; the starry sky
My roof; the distant, interrupted howl
Of beasts of prey my nuptial lullaby.
Before me lay the waste, strewn here and there
With ribs of men and camels, or the wreck
Of perished cities; yea, and thirst and pain
In vaguely measured sum. But in my soul
The voice of thunder cried: “Push on, push on
Into the waste, Porphyrion! thou art still
Too near to human haunts, too far from God!”
And I pushed on; and in an empty tomb
In a deserted city of the dead
I made my lair, alone with stones and God;
Living off locusts and such scanty herbs
As grew in clefts of rock and empty wells.
Oh what a silence, what a loneliness!
The temple columns and the huge carved stones
Cast long black shadows on the sun-baked sand
In endless rows; and through the livelong day
No moving shadow crossed them save my own,
As, like a leper whom his sores have doomed
To lead the lonely life, I prowled for food.
Oh, it was hard! For knowing that the Fiend
Would come ere long to scare and tempt me back
To human haunts, I sought with prayer, and scourge,
And thirst, and hunger, and restricted sleep
To arm myself against him and his strength;
And come he did. He prowled at first at night,
Shaped as a roaring lion, round and round
My lonely cell; but his re-echoing roar
Deterred me not, nor stopped a single prayer.
And then he came with soft insidious step
During my sleep, and strove to tempt the flesh
In woman’s guise--yea, in thy very shape--
And sought to lure me to caress and kiss,
Taking thy face, thy eyes, thy very voice
In all their beauty and their blandishment;
But I defied him, and he howling fled,
And changed his plan. He made the solid ground
Lurch ever and anon beneath my feet;
He made me shiver in the blazing sun
With mortal cold; and sometimes, in the dusk
He made the huge stone heads of sphinxes nod
And gibber as I passed them. Oh, for years
I wrestled with him in the awful waste;
But I o’ercame his strength.

DIOCLEA.

And dost thou think
That I, in that worse waste, which was not strewn
Like thine with stones, but with the wreck of hopes
And wreck of love, was not sought out by fiends
As well as thou? Ay, ay, they came, the fiends;
They whispered in my ear that I was young,
And that my youth was passing unenjoyed;
They whispered in my ear that I was fair--
Fairer than any other far or near,
And that the beauty that a fool had spurned
Would wane before its time. They said: “Look up!
Thou mournest Love whom thou believest dead,
And Love, hard by, is waiting for one word,
One motion of encouragement, one glance.
Give but the signal, and the lonely one
Whom maid and matron scorn, and who now holds
Suspiciously aloof from life and joy,
Will be a very Empress new-enthroned,
And waste her life no more.” But oh, I clung
To the dull honour of my broken life;
I struggled with the Tempter long and hard;
I said unto myself that after all
Thou mightst at last return to me; and strove
With all my strength to keep me pure for thee.
But years went by and still thou didst not come,
And round and round my heart the Tempter prowled,
Nearer and ever nearer with new arts,
New wiles, new snares, new whispers, day by day,
And proved at last the stronger of the two.
I fled my father’s house for ever more;
I loved; was loved; I saw luxurious cities
Where pleasure triumphed--Alexandria,
Antioch and Athens, ay, and even Rome--
Courted where’er I went; until the day
When he proved false, and when once more I sat
Upon my lonely bed and prayed for dawn.
And yet I loved again; yea, twice and thrice.
Down, down the winding stair of love I went,
Until the slippery and precipitous steps
Became so dark and noisome all at once
That I threw up my arms and shrieked in fear;
But all my strength was gone, and heaven’s faint light
Too far above my head. Oh, since we two
Last saw each other’s eyes, not thou alone
Hast felt the scourge alight upon thy back,
Not thou alone hast known the howling waste;
For I have felt that nine times knotted scourge
Which makes the soul and not the body writhe.
Descending on me fiercely; and have found
In men’s embrace a loneliness more dread,
A desert more terrific and more bare
Than any which thy bruised unsandalled foot
Has ever trodden yet.

PORPHYRION.

The worse for thee.
I freed thee from the weight of human ties;
I pointed out the path that leads to heaven
Across life’s wreck; and if, instead of God,
Thou chosest Satan, what is that to me?
Thou mightst have built a mansion for thy soul
Upon the ruins of an earthly home;
Thou mightst like me have wrestled with the Fiend,
And felt the pride of bruising with thy heel
The Tempter’s head; thou mightst like me have felt
The fierce voluptuous pleasure of the scourge;
Nay, even, like myself thou mightst, with time,
Have sought to snatch from Heaven’s hand the crown,
The glorious crown of martyrdom: for if
Upon this day thou meetest me so near
The haunts of men, it is because I wait
For some fresh outburst of the Pagan’s wrath
Against our sect, to court the lingering death.
But lo, we waste our words; for I have warned
And summoned thee to leave the perilous brink
Of this dark circling water; and if thou
Still cleavest to thy heathenish design
Of self-destruction, not upon my soul
Shall fall the wrath of Heaven for the deed.
Once more I bid thee, woman, leave the brink;
For see, the night has come; and, as thou say’st,
God needs my evening prayer.

DIOCLEA.

Ay, ay, the night
Has wrapped us round: I scarce can see the flowers
That glimmered on the current; though I hear
The sweet faint rustling of the stream-bent reeds.
Pass on thy way, lone man--pass on in peace;
There is no link between us, and no love.
Go, find thy rest, as I at last find mine;
And leave me here, beside the deep lone Nile,
Where woe will sink, and haply leave no trace.