Then down the long street having slowly stolen, His heart foreshadowing all calamity, His eyes upon the stones, he reach'd the home680 Where Annie lived and loved him, and his babes In those far-off seven happy years were born; But finding neither light nor murmur there (A bill of sale gleam'd thro' the drizzle) crept Still downward thinking, "dead, or dead to me!"685
Down to the pool and narrow wharf he went, Seeking a tavern which of old he knew, A front of timber-crost antiquity, So propt, worm-eaten, ruinously old, He thought it must have gone; but he was gone690 Who kept it; and his widow, Miriam Lane, With daily-dwindling profits held the house; A haunt of brawling seamen once, but now Stiller, with yet a bed for wandering men. There Enoch rested silent many days.695
But Miriam Lane was good and garrulous, Nor let him be, but often breaking in, Told him, with other annals of the port, Not knowing—Enoch was so brown, so bow'd, So broken—all the story of his house.700 His baby's death, her growing poverty, How Philip put her little ones to school, And kept them in it, his long wooing her, Her slow consent, and marriage, and the birth Of Philip's child: and o'er his countenance705 No shadow past, nor motion: any one, Regarding, well had deem'd he felt the tale Less than the teller; only when she closed, "Enoch, poor man, was cast away and lost," He, shaking his gray head pathetically,710 Repeated muttering, "cast away and lost;" Again in deeper inward whispers, "lost!"
But Enoch yearned to see her face again; "If I might look on her sweet face again And know that she is happy." So the thought715 Haunted and harass'd him, and drove him forth, At evening when the dull November day Was growing duller twilight, to the hill. There he sat down gazing on all below; There did a thousand memories roll upon him,720 Unspeakable for sadness. By and by The ruddy square of comfortable light, Far-blazing from the rear of Philip's house, Allured him, as the beacon-blaze allures The bird of passage, till he madly strikes725 Against it, and beats out his weary life.
For Philip's dwelling fronted on the street, The latest[222] house to landward; but behind, With one small gate that open'd on the waste, Flourish'd a little garden square and wall'd:730 And in it throve an ancient evergreen, A yewtree, and all round it ran a walk Of shingle,[223] and a walk divided it: But Enoch shunn'd the middle walk and stole Up by the wall, behind the yew; and thence735 That which he better might have shunn'd, if griefs Like his have worse or better, Enoch saw.
For cups and silver on the burnish'd board Sparkled and shone; so genial was the hearth: And on the right hand of the hearth he saw740 Philip, the slighted suitor of old times, Stout, rosy, with his babe across his knees; And o'er her second father stoopt a girl, A later but a loftier Annie Lee, Fair-hair'd and tall, and from her lifted hand,745 Dangled a length of ribbon and a ring To tempt the babe, who rear'd his creasy[224] arms, Caught at, and ever miss'd it, and they laugh'd: And on the left hand of the hearth he saw The mother glancing often toward her babe,750 But turning now and then to speak with him, Her son, who stood beside her tall and strong, And saying that which pleased him, for he smiled.
Now when the dead man come to life beheld His wife his wife no more, and saw the babe755 Hers, yet not his, upon the father's knee, And all the warmth, the peace, the happiness, And his own children tall and beautiful, And him, that other, reigning in his place, Lord of his rights and of his children's love,—760 Then he, tho' Miriam Lane had told him all, Because things seen are mightier than things heard, Stagger'd and shook, holding the branch, and fear'd To send abroad a shrill and terrible cry, Which in one moment, like the blast of doom,765 Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth.
He therefore turning softly like a thief, Lest the harsh shingle should grate underfoot, And feeling all along the garden wall, Lest he should swoon and tumble and be found,770 Crept to the gate, and open'd it, and closed, As lightly as a sick man's chamber-door, Behind him, and came out upon the waste.
And there he would have knelt, but that his knees Were feeble, so that falling prone he dug775 His fingers into the wet earth, and pray'd.
"Too hard to bear! why did they take me thence? O God Almighty, blessed Saviour, Thou That didst uphold me on my lonely isle, Uphold me, Father, in my loneliness780 A little longer! aid me, give me strength Not to tell her, never to let her know. Help me not to break in upon her peace. My children too! must I not speak to these? They know me not. I should betray myself.785 Never: no father's kiss for me—the girl So like her mother, and the boy, my son."