VI.
But at last came a day when she failed to come, when the reed bent rottenly down,
And he sat in a cruel impatience, his face deformed by a frown,
And he listened in vain for the crystalline tinkle of feet through the crepitant grass,
The delicate laugh of dismay at a drift or haply a tiny crevasse,—
He waited half sick of a hope deferred, till his marrow was turned to ice,
And the orange and garnet chilled out of the sky, and the lad had come for him thrice,
And then he arose and doggedly trudged to his poor pain-tenanted room,
That crawled as with slimiest horrors through out the reticulate gloom,
And he shrank from shutting himself alone into that living tomb.
And he had no lilies at all that night, no languorous lullings of spice,
No hope of remote reparation, no visions to lure and entice,
Naught but the old, old Tantalus-mood, that had gathered new malice and gall
From disuse, as a robe gathers mildew and moth, hanging forgot on the wall,
And a pain rapacious surged over his soul like a flood or a pestilent wind,
Or octopus-like sucked into his heart, shark-toothed and poisonous-finned,
And he summoned the strength of his nature in its outraged trust to arise
And help him to hate himself and this woman, to utterly loathe and despise
Her who had made him a pastime, bridging the winter across
With a masque, a foolery petty and vain, amusing herself with his loss,—
God! it had been but an insult throughout, her ’havior so sisterly free,—
She scarce had esteemed him a man at all,—why, then, forsooth! should she be
Distantly coy with a clod, reserved as a maid is alway
With a man? She had seen at a glance that no least possibility lay
Of love ’twixt herself and a creature ignoble, all of whose manlihood
The chief enchanter had Merlin-wise sunk in a pathless wood,
And so she had pitied him for a season, but now she had wearied and sped
To a southern clime where the grapes were gold and the pomegranates lusciously red.
But the Avon Swan sang silvery clear, “All office infirmity still
Neglects,” and his heart waxed weak and wailed, “Perhaps she is fevered and ill,—
Perhaps she is dying—O God, protect Thy purest, Thy peerless Saville!”
Yet the foul faint doubt he had trampled at first sprang weedlike over again,—
She was but a woman and therefore false,—she smiled on a hundred men,—
And he thought how she clung to his arm in the snow and he wished he had killed her then!
