“Oh, dire disgrace! Our beauty and our hope
So with the last of trampers to elope!
Fled with a gypsy! And who shall discover
The secret hole of this kidnapping lover,
Where he the shameless one concealèd hath?”
And, as they spake, they knit their brows in wrath.
Now came the cupbearer with ass and pannier,
And from the threshold, in his wonted manner,
“Good-morrow,” Jane. “I’m come,” he said, “to seek
The labourer’s lunch.” And Ramoun could but wreak
His anguish on him. “Go, you cursèd churl!
I’m as a cork-tree barked, without my girl!”
“Yet hark ye, cupbearer, upon your track
Across the fields like lightning go you back,
And bid the ploughmen and the mowers all
Quit ploughs and scythes, the harvesters let fall
Their sickles, and their shepherds too,” said he,
“Forsake their flocks, and instant come to me!”
Then, fleeter than a goat, the faithful man
O’er stony fallow and red clover ran,
Threaded holm-oaks on long declivities,
Leaped o’er the roads along the base of these,
And now already scents the sweet perfume
Of new-mown hay, and the blue-tufted bloom
Of tall lucerne descries; and presently
The measured sweep of the long scythes hears he,
And lusty mowers bending in a row
Beholds, and grass by the keen steel laid low
In verdant swaths,—ever a pleasant sight,—
And children, and young maidens, with delight
Raking the hay and in cocks piling it;
While crickets, that before the mowers flit,
Hark to their singing. Also, farther on,
An ash-wood cart, by two white oxen drawn,
Where a deft cartman, piles the well-cured grass
By armfuls high and higher, till the mass
Rises about his loins, and so conceals
The rails, the cart-beam, and the very wheels;
And, when the cart moves on, with the hay trailing,
It seems like some unwieldy vessel sailing.
But now the cartman rises, and descries
The runner, and “Hold, men! there’s trouble!” cries;
And all his aids, who in great forkfuls carry
To him the hay, do for a moment tarry,
And wipe their streaming brows; and mowers rest
The scythe-back carefully upon the breast,
And whet the edge, as they the plain explore
That Phœbus wings his burning arrows o’er.
Began the rustic messenger straightway,
“Hear men, what our good master bade me say:
“‘Cupbearer,’ was his word, ‘upon your track
Across the fields like lightning go you back,
And bid the ploughmen and the mowers all
Quit ploughs and scythes, the harvesters let fall
“‘Their sickles, and the shepherds hastily
Forsake their flocks, and hither come to me!’”
Then, fleeter than a goat, the faithful man
O’er the rich, madder-growing hillocks ran,—
Althen’s bequest,—and saw on every hand
The gold of perfect ripeness tinge the land,