Book IV

By kindly tending was the mourner won.
How loth soever, back to common life ;
Who after reckless roaming in far lands
Bent last his course towards his native shore
Imperatively summoned thitherward.
And still he loved to minister to want,
Warm friend to grief, and still a mellow smile
He wore for innocent joy and loving bliss ;
But his bright curls were thin upon his brow ;
Wan, pale, and aged untimely he appeared.
While fixed sadness like a yewtree cast
Perpetual gloom on his deserted heart
As o'er some ruined cloister which the living
Tread no more but avoid ; 'tis consecrate
Unto the dead who rest beneath its flags.
Alas ! for him restless philosophy
Had peered and fingered till the walls of creeds,
So venerable and solid as they seemed
In the twilight, fell crumbling here and there.
Or tore to shreds and gaping made a way
For dismal wind and rain that are no dream.
But he was of a soul amphibious,
Two elements essential unto it.
One for imagination and for thought,
The other, sustenance of life and love.
He lived and loved, he lost himself in her,
A second self far dearer lovelier
Than his own self; she from his vitals torn.
Earthward he sank all mangled to the core.
Forget he could not, would not if he could ;
And things which could not love pronounced him weak.
And things without a mind pronounced hint fool,
Sneered at his dark and vain philosophy ;
While ruddy animals of vigorous frame
Strutted and gabbled of strong character ;
While pious folk averred he made an idol
Of her he lost, and God was jealous of her.
Jealous of Clement's mighty love for her,
Counting it so much pilfered from himself.
Was God then but a greater Marchioness ?
Clement should lavish not his love on her.
But while she shivered in the outer cold,
He with mouth rigid, lifting treacherous eyes,
Should say " 'Tis corban ! " spilling it in the snow.
We may be impotent in love, but ah I
Shall we blaspheme the All-Father for our fault ?
The Love Eternal feeding our weak love.
Yearning to flush it through a myriadfold
Until it leaps and broadens to embrace
In its divine blaze all the universe —
The Love Eternal jealous of our love !

Yet he became no hermit, only he.
Though unforeseen he had inherited
The title of his forefathers and estates.
Could herd not with the brainless moneyed tribe
Who swarmed about him crawling at his feet 1
Old stately dames, portly or vulture-necked,
Grew unaware obsequious and bland ;
He trode upon them as they seemed to crave,
But straightway drove them forth without their dole.
While they with meekness very Christian
Endured his "little eccentricities."

Could he have taken, as he was wont of yore,
What we name heaven for grand reality,
Not for mere painted splendours in the dome.
He might have held communion with her still,
Scarce interrupted by the change of death ;
Failing but as the recognition fails
A moment of a friend we left in pain
And sorrow, whom we find again elate
And radiant with health and happiness :
" Indeed I did not know you " we exclaim,
But straight we know him and rejoice together.
Communion with her would only fail
Through death as recognition fails when we
Are travelling and come to some fair spot
In twilight, vague aware of dusky scenes,
Water and mountain ; in the sunrise fails
When we awake and fling the window wide
Beholding mountains crowned and girt with light,
Torrents and lakes their trains of flashing gold.
He would have shivered gazing down the chasm
Where she seemed lost, but would have heard anon
Her call from yon sunslope, and shading eyes.
Dazzled a moment, have beheld her climb
Godward for aye buoyant and luminous !
But Reason banned the quest forlorn of Hope,
And coldly sternly whispered " She is dead.""
For so alas! ran Clement's way ward thought-
" Though nought may perish in the universe,
Yet Nature is the Proteus in a flux !
For us we live in children, or in friends,
In every moment's subtle influence.
But is not influence expended power
Feeding the world upon the garnered store
We name a person ? for the tissues wear,
The organs fail, slow dwindles out the store.
Not the most selfish man can live for self,
But lovers take the life-law to their hearts.
They give themselves — God takes them at their word :
Who shall complain ? His universe will grow
A little by their grand self-sacrifice,
And they fulfil their own ideal so."
So Clement deemed she lived indeed, bui lived
In him, in all the noble and good in him ;
Her life, as boastless of its nectar rare
And yet as lavish of it as the flowers.
Living in him transmuted, flowed again.
Like nectar grown to honey in the bee,
Rich stored in cells of individual art
To feed mankind ; yea and her very death
Wailed in the weird magic of his strain.
Tinged all his song with its own plaining minor,
.Sinking to human spirits' very root ;
Circuiting wider, meshing souls who dwell
In dark seas of experience and deep —
" Yet can the individual person cease?
Would that she lived yet, howsoever far
From me!" wept Clement often — "'tis a dream.
Beautiful, natural, noble, yet a dream I
For why may not the individual cease ?
The newborn babe was none a year ago —
Itself but person now in embryo."
Yet it had been herself that Clement loved,
The lovely childlike maiden and no other ;
No principle ; a simple country girl ;
And still he yearned for love to fill his heart.
But should he banish his once chosen child
Because she nestled in his bosom no more ?
They were to love for ever ; was a year
Or two so long to keep her memory green,
To keep her memory green with secret tears,
Then would come death, dear death, with breath grown sweet
And warm from kissing on so dear a mouth.
Must he wipe out the Eden of his life
So clean from reverence and memory ?
For him he could not.

A mysterious
Chamber there was in gallery remote
Of the ancestral castle where he dwelt.
None entered there but, in the dead of night,
Himself — 'twas whispered that her picture hung
There and before it ever burnt a lamp.
There were the precious little remains of her.
Dresses and trinkets, books and some dried flowers
They pulled and pressed together in the South.
And some affirmed that he who worshipped not
In any temple worshipped nightly there.
For was not she the noblest symbol God
Vouchsafed to Clement's own especial life.
Next unto Christ, supreme and given to all ?
At times he felt she must be living still ;
Did not her spirit flash upon his own
At intervals ? she seemed so very nigh —
Yet that might be a vision of the brain !

While others spilling malice from their fangs.
Because to herd with them amused him not.
And he was proud to all pretentious folk,
Hinted him not abstemious from delights
Of sense, as men might deem for all his love
Buried in that one little grave with her.
Yet since his intimates (but one or two).
For all his genial sympathy, no more
Set foot in certain precincts of his life
And strange lone tortuous spirit than within
That gallery of his ancestral castle,
Ancient and vast and tombed in snowclad pines,
This was but vague suspicion to the last.
Yet he was not the man that he had been.
Though stern he seemed and silent commonly,
When mortal anguish and despondency
Sombred him more than wont — he shut himself
For days alone, nor any ventured nigh.
But from his incoherent muttering,
Some deed or deeds of darkness men affirmed
Must weigh upon him ; visions haunted him.
Hallucinations often troubled him ;
And every night the menials avowed
He talked with some one in the lonely room,
Though never any made him a reply.
Yet once a servant bolder than the rest
Lingering nigh the chamber caught some words
Like these " If thou hadst lived, life of my
Hfe,
Blown drifted as I am by passion fierce.
By veering speculation, all my days,
The evil bitter taint within my blood
Of gloom and madness might have reached to thee,
And these hands, even these, have torn thy breast !
Ah ! if the chill damp of the outer world
With its dull soulless death of every day
Had eaten corroding with its rust away
The mirror-sheen, the substance of our hearts I
Have I not seen old people dumb and cold —
Who once were lovers — with but breath enough
Left now to drivelling jeer at what they were,
Beautiful living men and women ; now
Dead-alive bodies ghastlier than the dead !
With all the immortal life in the young world
Pulsing and throbbing, surging them about,
Nigh deaf and blind, yet lifting palsied hands
Quavering "O great tide, come no farther in !"
Yet could I ever make thee happy, love?
I was too weird, too grave and self-absorbed,
My sunny child, for thee — 'twas well to go —
For might I not have dazed thy very soul
With my bewildering counsels, a blind guide,
Leading ihee blindly, leaning on me, child ?
I brought a dark chill on thy sunny life,
Who would have shed my heart's blood out for thee !
Fed on thy life I live, but thine went out
From feeding mine — this all-accursed life —
Ah ! let me quench it and lie down to rest ! . . .
Beatrice ! your lips move ! O speak to me ! ''

And as with horror paralysed he stood
He fancied that a softer voice replied ;
Then all was silence — but the listener
Shivering stole again to whence he came.

But Clement made a yearly pilgrimage
To yon dear shrine, his Compostella fair.
That lowly villa, musing on her grave
In sunshine and by moonlight wandering
About the orange-groves and mountain-paths,
Or sitting in the old room as of yore.
'Twas there he made the song concerning her
That had for title " Lost," and thus it ran.

But when for si.x ) ears he had dragged the chain
Of life without her, revolution flashed
Among a noble people who uprose
To free themselves from tyranny or die.
He joining with enthusiasm fought
As one who set scant value upon life.
After the battle on the gory clay
They found him through the heart shot lying dead —
A portrait on him of a lovely woman
Wet from his heart's blood, with a tress of hair
Let into crystal on the side reverse ;
A shred of writing naming him by name
They found beside, with earnest-breathing prayer
That if 'twere possible he might be borne
To Monaco and buried where he named.

Twin crosses in white marble mark the spot,
Small, graven, side by side, and two low mounds ;
While lullabies eternal from the sea
Float dreamy o'er the eternal slumberers.
Oft an old man brings wreaths of immortels
For the two crosses tottering and weak.
Some spiral grasses whisper, marking soft
Their shadows on the marble and in flower
Nestling into the graving of the names.
But those two hearts, the turbulent and the meek.
Worn out and weary slumber full of peace,
And in their deaths they are divided not.