And now her heart strove, longing, to divine
The several thoughts of her they had devised
In separate years that passed by with no sign;
Yea, to have known their pain she would have prized:
For now when toward them her heart was wrought
Quite weak, and from no tenderness forbore,
They seemed all strong against her, with hard thought
And faces turning from her evermore.
And with the vision of them so deceived
Came piteous memories of the waning face
Of the Old man who sat all shamed and grieved
Lonely beside the hearth’s familiar place.
Before her soon in very semblance gleamed
The Spartan homestead there unaltered, plain,
With all the household things; yea, till she dreamed
All were yet to begin that way again,
And Menelaus the next golden morn
Were still to come for her with wedlock blest,
As though not all deserted and forlorn
He strayed—the lone man without love or rest.
But most she yearned between her fear and love,
To see him now—divining what was due
To wrath and sorrowing to change and move
His features from the fashion that she knew:
For now the first time after all those years
The face seemed anyhow her way to seek;
—But turned upon her now with all its tears
And vengeance of reproach at length to wreak;
—And seemed to hold her through her love come back,
Unforeseen, and how come, she could not tell;
So that the wrath of it, the grief could rack
Her heart,—yet her heart craved therewith to dwell.
He was her husband—it should ever seem;
And that home, surely it was still her home;
And years since some long voyage or a dream;
And now no more the heart was fain to roam:
Nay, but was true to where it felt begin
Love and the rosy ecstasies so brief;
And that was surely love and the rest sin,
That all delight and all the other grief.