‘A soul that’s lost as mine is lost,
Little brother!’
(O Mother, Mary Mother,
Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)”
The same thought of reciprocal sin, if we may so express it,—of the mutual responsibility of soul to soul,—that subtle action of the law of vicarious suffering by which every soul that falls short of its own highest and best inevitably drags down some other soul with it,—and the converse thought of individual redemption through mutual love: these afford the motive of “Rose Mary.”
“Shame for shame, yea, and sin for sin:
Yet peace at length may our poor souls win
If love for love be found therein.”
The story turns upon the magic properties attributed to the Beryl-stone, into which the pure in heart might look and read the future, and be forewarned against all danger or calamity. Rose Mary’s mother bids her read the mysterious crystal on the eve of her lover’s journey to a distant shrine, whither he rides to seek shrift for his soul before the wedding-day. The mother fears some ambush of foes by the way, and trusts the Beryl to reveal where the danger lies. Unknown to her, however, Rose Mary and her lover have joined in sin; and their sin dispossesses the good spirits from the stone, and yields their place to evil spirits, so that the spell works by contraries, and the oracle speaks falsely; the lover is betrayed and killed on the road at night. But, unknown to Rose Mary, her lover has been faithless, even to her own love. The sin is threefold,—his with her, hers with him, and his with another; and Rose Mary learns that only by an heroic forgiveness and self-sacrifice which shall cost her very life can she atone for her own and his greater sin, win pardon for both, and cast out the evil tenants from the Beryl stone. The ballad moves throughout at Rossetti’s highest poetic level; its majestic rhythm sweeps from verse to verse in a torrent of swift, strong, lyric narrative, almost too cohesive for quotation, save in such descriptive stanzas as these:
“Even as she spoke, they two were ’ware