“O Saints,” groaned Ramoun, stumbling in the gloom
While shook his aged head, “be kind, and come!
Look on this little one! She is my treasure!
She is my plover! Pretty beyond measure,
And good and meet for life! Send my old bones
To dung the mallows, but save her!” he moans.
And all the while Mirèio lay in swoon,
Till a breeze, with declining afternoon,
Blew from the tamarisks. Then, hoping still
To call her back to life, they raised with skill,
The flower of Lotus Farm, and tenderly
Laid on the tiles that overlook the sea.
There, from the doorway leading on the tiles,—
The chapel’s eye,—one’s vision roams for miles,
Even to the pallid limit of the brine,
The blending and the separating line
Between the clouds and waters to explore,
And the great waves that roll for evermore.
Insensate and unceasing and untiring,
They follow one another on; expiring,
With sullen roar, amid the drifted sand:
While vast savannas, on the other hand,
Stretch till they meet a heaven without a stain,
Unfathomed blue over unmeasured plain.
Only a light-green tamarisk, here and there,
Quivering in the faintest breath of air,
Or a long belt of salicornes, appears,
With swans that dip them in the desert meres,
With oxen roaming the waste moor at large;
Or swimming Vacares from marge to marge.
At last the maiden murmured, but how weak
The voice! how vague the words! “On either cheek
I seem to feel a breeze,—one from the sea,
One from the land: and this refreshes me
Like morning airs; but that doth sore oppress
And burn me, and is full of bitterness.”
So ceased. The people of Li Santo turn
Blankly from plain to ocean: then discern
A lad who nears them, at so fleet a pace
The dust in clouds is raised; and, in the race
Outstripped, the tamarisks are growing small,
And far behind the runner seem to fall.
Vincen it was. Ah, poor unhappy youth!
When Master Ambroi spake that sorry truth,
“My son, the pretty little lotus-spray
Is not for you!” he turned, and fled away;
From Valabrègo like a bandit fled,
To see her once again. And when they said
In Crau, “She in Li Santo must be sought,”
Rhone, marshes, weary Crau, withheld him not;
Nor stayed he ever in his frantic search
Till, seeing that great throng inside the church,
He rose on tiptoe deadly pale, and crying,
“Where is she?” And they answered, “She is dying
“Above there in the chapel.” In despair
And all distraught, he hurried up the stair;
But, when his eye fell on the prostrate one,
Threw his hands wildly up. “What have I done,—
What have I done against my God and hers
To call down on me such a heavy curse