Then they took me up very softly, and bore me to the door from which I had fled forth. Lucia walked with me. In the dusk of the leaves, while the bearers were fumbling with the inner doors, which would swing in their faces, Lucia put her hot lips to my hand, which she had held kindly in hers all the way.
"Pardon me, Douglas," she said, and there was a break in her voice. I felt the ocean of tears rising about me, and feared that I could not find the words fittingly to answer. For the pain had made me weak.
"Nay," I said at last, just over my breath, "it was my folly. Forgive me, little Saint Lucy of the Eyes! It was—it was—what was it that it was?—I have forgotten—"
"An error in judgment!" said Saint Lucy of the Eyes, and forgave me, though I cannot remember more about it.
I suppose I could take the title if I chose, for these things are easily arranged in Italy; but Lucia and I think it will keep for the second Stephen Douglas.
IV
UNDER THE RED TERROR
What of the night, O Antwerp bells,
Over the city swinging,
Plaintive and sad, O kingly bells,
In the winter midnight ringing?
And the winds in the belfry moan
From the sand-dunes waste and lone,
And these are the words they say,
The turreted bells and they—
"Calamtout, Krabbendyk, Calloo,"
Say the noisy, turbulent crew;
"Jabbeké, Chaam, Waterloo;
Hoggerhaed, Sandvaet, Lilloo,
We are weary, a-weary of you!
We sigh for the hills of snow,
For the hills where the hunters go,
For the Matterhorn, Wetterhorn, Dom,
For the Dom! Dom! Dom!
For the summer sun and the rustling corn,
And the pleasant vales of the Rhineland valley."