His face in the dusk showed stern and set,
Old and haggard and worn with pain;
"Dear, I may never see you again—
Mine but the meed regret!
How can I ask you to share my shame,
How can I give you my blemished name,
Yet how shall the heart forget?
Naught in my life save a dream have I,
A dream—a vision, too fair to be,
A rose that blooms 'mid the rue for me—
Naught but a dream ... Good-bye."
And then, ere he lifted his bridle rein
To ride away down the dark'ning land,
He bent and touched with his lips the hand
I had laid on the chestnut's mane.
XVII.
Something ... my senses will scarce recall ...
The horror they came in the night to tell ...
The mare had galloped riderless home,
Blown and bleeding and flecked with foam,
And they found him there by the sunken wall,
Hurt to the death by the desperate fall.
How it had chanced, he could only tell,
Ere the merciful numbness stole his brain;
How the chestnut rose to the leap and fell....
Then his senses closed on the shocks of pain.
He spoke, they told me, but once again—
To whisper my name with his struggling breath—
(Thank God, he suffered so brief a while)
Then peacefully sank on the breast of Death,
Dead, with his lips asmile.
* * * * *
How can I wish him alive again,
Lying so peacefully, placidly still,
With that carven smile on his marble face.
How can I pray that his heart should thrill
To waking and waking's pain?
Lying so peacefully, placidly still.
With the old, sweet smile on his quiet face,
Dead to the sting of a heart's disgrace....
How should I wish him a lesser grace,
How should I strive with a wiser Will?
Yet how can the heart that is reft divine
Death's mystical, measureless charity?
The cry of the stricken king is mine:
"Would I had died for thee!"
Severance
Not severed by long leagues of lonely land,
Nor sundered by wide wastes of sounding sea;
But ever side by side and hand in hand,
And yet—apart are we.