And now the voice was still: and lo,
With eyes that stared on naught but night,
He looked and saw—what none shall know!
The form of one, who long from sight
Had lain, here murdered long ago?...
And men who found him,—thither led
By the she-fox,—within that place
Saw in his stony eyes, ’tis said,
The thing he met there face to face,
The thing that left him staring dead.
IDENTITIES
I sat alone in the arrased room
Of Sin, wrapped pale in her winding shroud;
The night was stricken with glare and gloom,
And the wailing wind was loud.
I heard the gallop of one who rode
Like a rushing leaf on the wind that lisps;
The night with the speed of her steed was sowed
With streaming will-o’-the-wisps.
And I said to myself, “’Tis a long-lost Shame,
Who rides to my house through the night and rain!
She will blaze in the blackness a face of flame
When she opens the door again!”
I thought of the blame on her lips and brow;
And stared at the door she must enter in—
To sear my soul with her eyes and bow
My heart by the corpse of Sin.
As hushed as the mansion of death was night,
When, dark as a sob of the storm, she came—
But her face, like beautiful Sin’s, was white,
And her face and Sin’s—the same!
HALLOWE’EN
It was down in the woodland on last Hallowe’en,
Where silence and darkness had built them a lair,
That I felt the dim presence of her, the unseen,
And heard her still step on the hush-haunted air.