III.
From the Hospital’s arched window,
Open to the summer air,
You can see the monks in couples
All returning home at sunset
Through the old cathedral square.
On the steps of the cathedral,
In the weak declining sun
Sit the beggars and the cripples;
While faint gusts of organ-rolling
Tell that vespers have begun.
Slowly creeps the tide of shadow
Up the steps of sculptured front,
Driving back the yellow sunshine
On each pinnacle and buttress
Which the twilight soon makes blunt.
Slowly evening grasps the city,
And the square grows still and lone;
No one passes save, it may be,
Up the steps and through the portal,
Some stray monk or tottering crone.
In this room, which seems the study
Of the Hospital’s chief leech,
There is no one; but the twilight
Makes all objects seem mysterious,
Like a conscious watcher each.
Here the snakes whose venom healeth
Stand in jars in hideous file;
While the skulls that crown the book-shelves
Seem to grin; and from the ceiling
Hangs the huge stuffed crocodile.
Here be kept the drugs and cordials
Which the Jew from Syria brings,
And perchance drugs yet more precious,
Melted topaz, pounded ruby
Such as save the lives of kings.
All is silent in the study;
But the door-hinge creaks anon,
And a woman enters softly
Seeking something that seems hidden—
One unnaturally wan.
What she seeks is not in phials
Nor in jars, but in a book;
And she mutters as she searches
Through the book-shelves with a kind of
Brooding hurry in her look;
And she finds the book, and takes it
To the window for more light;
And she reads a passage slowly
With constrained and hissing breathing
And dark brow contracted tight.
“Most of them,” it says, “are corpses
That have lain beneath the moon,
And that quit their graves at midnight,
Prowling round to prey on sleepers;
But the daybreak scares them soon.
“But the worst, called soulless bodies,
Plague the world but now and then;
They have died in some great sickness;
But reviving in the moonbeams
Rise once more and mix with men.
“And they act and feel like others,
Never guessing they be dead,
Common food of men they love not;
But at night, impelled by hunger,
In their sleep they quit their bed;
“And they fasten on some sleeper,
Feeding on his living blood;
Who, when life has left his body,
Must in turn arise, and, prowling,
Seek the like accursed food.”
And the book slips from her fingers
And she casts her down to pray;
But convulsions seize and twist her,
And delirious ramblings mingle
With the prayers she tries to say.
In her mouth there is a saltness,
On her lips there is a stain;
In her soul there is a horror;
In her vitals there is something
More like raging thirst than pain;
And she cries, “O God, I knew it:
Have I not, at dead of night,
Waking up, looked round and found me
On the ledge of roofs and windows
In my shift, and shrunk with fright?
“Have I not, O God of mercy,
Passed by shambles in the street,
And stopped short in monstrous craving
For the crimson blood that trickled
In the gutter at my feet?
“Did I not, at last Communion,
Cough the Holy Wafer out?
Blood I suck, but Christ’s blood chokes me.
O my God, my God, vouchsafe me
Some strong light in this great doubt!”
And she sinketh crushed and prostrate
In the twilight on the floor,
While the darkness grows around her,
And her quick and laboured breathing
Grows convulsive more and more.