She scrambled to her feet and for a moment leant her cheek against the rough stone of the wall, then she went on round the town and in at the great gate.
That evening she sat in Beata's garden, finishing her poem to Richard. Elate as she was, she still had no hint of what her discovery meant, or of how the garden would bring the final revelation to her, but even then she felt the soothing influence that held it and her as she wrote out her poem. It went to him without a title, but for herself she headed it:
To the Forbidden Lover
That time I gave you half-a-moon of days
In the dear Southern land of many moods
She lured us up among her hill-ringed ways
Far from the ordered gardens, far from where,
Sacring the sky, the Christs hang on their roods.
We saw the sea-grey slopes of olive-trees
Blown foamy-pale, from the cloud-ridden air
Fell the swift shadows on those leafy seas.
To lakes of hardened lava we would come,
Scarred, as by whirlpools, with cold crater-rings
Or packed in furrows, like mammoth slugs grown numb
At some disaster of creation's dawn—
A burnt-out lunar landscape of dead things.
And there some kindlier whim of path would show
Rocks that might echo to a piping Faun,
Or hide a huntress nymph with spear and bow.
Pan-haunted is that valley where we lay
(Lay, till lulled senses slid into a dream)
Watching sun-wrought reflections of ripples play
And break in shining scales through that green pool,
Deepest of seven strung on a ribbon of stream
That seven times wings the air in curving flight.
And from the gleaming arc blew spray to cool
Lids that were rosy films against the light.
A hut with fluted roof we found one morn,
A fairy-story hut; an empty shrine
Haply once dear to comrades less forlorn,
For on the walls were names of lover-folk.
And there we ate our bread and drank our wine,
A Sacrament of Fellowship; only dregs
We poured to envious gods, and laughing broke
Thrush-like, against a stone, our brown-shelled eggs.
Dearest that castle set in sun and winds
Remote as though upon Olympus hung,
Yet with a human tang that drew our minds
To gentle restful things; an open door,
Warm hearths, silk-curtained beds, and shutters flung
Wing-wide to let us watch the stars pulsating.
Now through closed slats their light must bar the floor
And on the hearth the ash be grey with waiting.
And when for daily troubles you make dole
(Now that the miles have set you far away)
Then to our little castle come in soul.
There, where the two girl-children thought us wed,
There, surely, I need never say you nay;
But, where the hollow curves between the breast
And rounded shoulder, draw your weary head,
And, when the day's lid droops, there give you rest.
The weakness of you I can hold to me,
For since at the world's door the babes unborn
Must vainly beat for us; oh, I will be
A Virgin-Mother to the child in you. . . .
And comradeship is good when sweetly sworn,
Being no less tender for its commonplace
And for its lack of fetters no less true—
Take what you may, my dear, and with good grace.