He did not note that RoBards made no comment. He was thinking of that circle in Dante’s Inferno where the damned lie imbedded in ice. But Chalender glanced down at the hearthstone and asked:
“Isn’t that the marble I brought over from Sing Sing when I was an engineer on the aqueduct? Why, I believe it is! There was a poem I started to write. I have always been a poet at heart, Davie, plucking the lyre with hands all thumbs, trying to make life rhyme and run to meter. But I had no gift of words.
“I spent half a night and fifteen miles trying to write a poem to go with that slab. It ran something like—like—ah, I have it!—
“Marble, marble, I could never mould you
To the beauteous image of my love,
So keep the blissful secret that I told you
Tell it only to—
“And there I stuck and couldn’t get on to save me.”
He bent his arm along the mantel and laid his forehead on it as he said with an unusual absence of flippancy:
“I loved her, Davie. You stole her from me when I was dying. You ran away with her to this place. When I called for her and they told me she had married you, my heart died. I got well. My body got well. But my soul was always sick. I laughed and pretended, flirted and reveled, but I never loved anybody else—only Patty—always only Patty.