“Hear me! I had been bred to hate
All priests, their mummeries and all.
Ah, it was fate,—ah, it was fate
That all things tempted me to fall!
“And then the rattling songs we sang
Those nights when rudely revelling,—
The songs that only soldiers sing,—
Until the very tent-poles rang!
“What is the rhyme that rhymers say
Of maidens born to be betrayed
By epaulettes and shining blade,
While soldiers love and ride away?
“And then my comrades spake her name
Half taunting, with a touch of shame;
Taught me to hold that lily-flower
As some light pastime of the hour.
“And then the ruin in the land,
The death, dismay, the lawlessness!
Men gathered gold on every hand,—
Heaped gold: and why should I do less?
“The cry for gold was in the air,
For Creole gold, for precious things;
The sword kept prodding here and there
Through bolts and sacred fastenings.
“‘Get gold! get gold!’ This was the cry.
And I loved gold. What else could I
Or you, or any earnest one
Born in this getting age have done?
“With this one lesson taught from youth,
And ever taught us, to get gold,—
To get and hold, and ever hold,—
What else could I have done, forsooth?
“She, seeing how I sought for gold,—
This girl, my wife, one late night told
Of treasures hidden close at hand,
In her dead father’s mellow land:
“Of gold she helped her brothers hide
Beneath a broad banana tree,
The day the two in battle died,—
The night she dying fled to me.