“Yea, you are stunned! your face is white,
That I should come confronting you,
As comes a lorn ghost of the night
From out the past, and to pursue.
“You thought me dead? You shake your head,
You start back horrified to know
That she is loved, that she is wed,
That you have sinned in loving so.
“Yet what seems strange, that lady there,
Housed in the holy house of prayer,
Seems just the same for all her tears,—
For all my absent twenty years.
“Yea, twenty years to-night, to-night,
Just twenty years this day, this hour,
Since first I plucked that perfect flower,
And not one witness of the rite.
“Nay, do not doubt,—I tell you true!
Her prayers, her tears, her constancy
Are all for me, are all for me,—
And not one single thought for you!
“I knew, I knew she would be here
This night of nights to pray for me!
And how could I for twenty year
Know this same night so certainly?
“Ah me! some thoughts that we would drown
Stick closer than a brother to
The conscience, and pursue, pursue
Like baying hound to hunt us down.
“And then, that date is history;
For on that night this shore was shelled,
And many a noble mansion felled,
With many a noble family.
“I wore the blue; I watched the flight
Of shells like stars tossed through the air
To blow your hearth-stones—anywhere,
That wild, illuminated night.
“Nay, rage befits you not so well:
Why, you were but a babe at best,
Your cradle some sharp bursted shell
That tore, maybe, your mother’s breast!