Classic Poem

... A simple chance
Did all. I could not sleep last night, and, tired
Of turning on my pillow and harder thoughts,
Went out at early morning, when the air
Is delicate with some last starry touch,
To wander through the Market-place of Flowers
(The prettiest haunt in Paris), and make sure
At worst that there were roses in the world.
So wandering, musing, with the artist's eye,
That keeps the shade-side of the thing it loves,
Half-absent, whole-observing, while the crowd
Of young vivacious and black-braided heads
Dipped, quick as finches in a blossomed tree,
Among the nosegays, cheapening this and that
In such a cheerful twitter of rapid speech, —
My heart leapt in me, startled by a voice
That slowly, faintly, with long breaths that marked
The interval between the wish and word,
Inquired in stranger's French, " Would that be much,
That branch of flowering mountain-gorse?" — " So much?
Too much for me, then!" turning the face round
So close upon me that I felt the sigh
It turned with.
" Marian, Marian!" — face to face —
" Marian! I find you. Shall I let you go?"
I held her two slight wrists with both my hands;
" Ah Marian, Marian, can I let you go?"
— She fluttered from me like a cyclamen,
As white, which taken in a sudden wind
Beats on against the palisade. — " Let pass,"
She said at last. " I will not," I replied;
" I lost my sister Marian many days,
And sought her ever in my walks and prayers,
And, now I find her ... do we throw away
The bread we worked and prayed for, — crumble it
And drop it, . . to do even so by thee
Whom still I've hungered after more than bread,
My sister Marian? — can I hurt thee, dear?
Then why distrust me? Never tremble so.
Come with me rather where we'll talk and live
And none shall vex us. I've a home for you
And me and no one else" ...
She shook her head.
" A home for you and me and no one else
Ill-suits one of us: I prefer to such,
A roof of grass on which a flower might spring,
Less costly to me than the cheapest here;
And yet I could not, at this hour, afford
A like home even. That you offer yours,
I thank you. You are good as heaven itself —
As good as one I knew before . . Farewell."

I loosed her hands, — " In his name, no farewell!"
(She stood as if I held her.) " For his sake,
For his sake, Romney's! by the good he meant,
Ay, always! by the love he pressed for once, —
And by the grief, reproach, abandonment,
He took in change" . .
" He Romney! who grieved him?
Who had the heart for't? what reproach touched him?
Be merciful, — speak quickly."
" Therefore come,"
I answered with authority. — " I think
We dare to speak such things and name such names
In the open squares of Paris!"
Not a word
She said, but in a gentle humbled way
(As one who had forgot herself in grief)
Turned round and followed closely where I went,
As if I led her by a narrow plank
Across devouring waters, step by step;
And so in silence we walked on a mile.

And then she stopped: her face was white as wax.
" We go much farther?"
" You are ill," I asked,
" Or tired?"
She looked the whiter for her smile.
" There's one at home," she said, " has need of me
By this time, — and I must not let him wait."

" Not even," I asked, " to hear of Romney Leigh?"

" Not even," she said, " to hear of Mister Leigh."

" In that case," I resumed, " I go with you,
And we can talk the same thing there as here.
None waits for me: I have my day to spend."

Her lips moved in a spasm without a sound, —
But then she spoke. " It shall be as you please;
And better so — 'tis shorter seen than told:
And though you will not find me worth your pains,
That , even, may be worth some pains to know
For one as good as you are."
Then she led
The way, and I, as by a narrow plank
Across devouring waters, followed her,
Stepping by her footsteps, breathing by her breath,
And holding her with eyes that would not slip;
And so, without a word, we walked a mile,
And so, another mile, without a word.
Until the peopled streets being all dismissed,
House-rows and groups all scattered like a flock,
The market-gardens thickened, and the long
White walls beyond, like spiders' outside threads,
Stretched, feeling blindly toward the country-fields
Through half-built habitations and half-dug
Foundations, — intervals of trenchant chalk
That bit betwixt the grassy uneven turfs
Where goats (vine-tendrils trailing from their mouths)
Stood perched on edges of the cellarage
Which should be, staring as about to leap
To find their coming Bacchus. All the place
Seemed less a cultivation than a waste.
Men work here, only, — scarce begin to live:
All's sad, the country struggling with the town,
Like an untamed hawk upon a strong man's fist,
That beats its wings and tries to get away,
And cannot choose be satisfied so soon
To hop through court-yards with his right foot tied,
The vintage plains and pastoral hills in sight.

We stopped beside a house too high and slim
To stand there by itself, but waiting till
Five others, two on this side, three on that,
Should grow up from the sullen second floor
They pause at now, to build it to a row.
The upper windows partly were unglazed
Meantime, — a meagre, unripe house: a line
Of rigid poplars elbowed it behind,
And, just in front, beyond the lime and bricks
That wronged the grass between it and the road,
A great acacia with its slender trunk
And overpoise of multitudinous leaves
(In which a hundred fields might spill their dew
And intense verdure, yet find room enough)
Stood reconciling all the place with green.

I followed up the stair upon her step.
She hurried upward, shot across a face,
A woman's, on the landing, — " How now, now!
Is no one to have holidays but you?
You said an hour, and stay three hours, I think,
And Julie waiting for your betters here?
Why if he had waked he might have waked, for me."
— Just murmuring an excusing word she passed
And shut the rest out with the chamber-door,
Myself shut in beside her.
'Twas a room
Scarce larger than a grave, and near as bare;
Two stools, a pallet-bed; I saw the room:
A mouse could find no sort of shelter in't,
Much less a greater secret; curtainless, —
The window fixed you with its torturing eye,
Defying you to take a step apart
If peradventure you would hide a thing.
I saw the whole room, I and Marian there
Alone.
Alone? She threw her bonnet off,
Then, sighing as 'twere sighing the last time,
Approached the bed, and drew a shawl away:
You could not peel a fruit you fear to bruise
More calmly and more carefully than so, —
Nor would you find within, a rosier flushed
Pomegranate —
There he lay upon his back,
The yearling creature, warm and moist with life
To the bottom of his dimples, — to the ends
Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face;
For since he had been covered over-much
To keep him from the light-glare, both his cheeks
Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose
The shepherd's heart-blood ebbed away into
The faster for his love. And love was here
As instant; in the pretty baby-mouth,
Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked,
The little naked feet, drawn up the way
Of nested birdlings; everything so soft
And tender, — to the tiny holdfast hands,
Which, closing on a finger into sleep,
Had kept the mould of't.
While we stood there dumb,
For oh, that it should take such innocence
To prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb, —
The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,
And, staring out at us with all their blue,
As half perplexed between the angelhood
He had been away to visit in his sleep,
And our most mortal presence, gradually
He saw his mother's face, accepting it
In change for heaven itself with such a smile
As might have well been learnt there, — never moved,
But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy,
So happy (half with her and half with heaven)
He could not have the trouble to be stirred,
But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said?
As red and still indeed as any rose,
That blows in all the silence of its leaves,
Content in blowing to fulfil its life.

She leaned above him (drinking him as wine)
In that extremity of love, 'twill pass
For agony or rapture, seeing that love
Includes the whole of nature, rounding it
To love . . no more, — since more can never be
Than just love. Self-forgot, cast out of self,
And drowning in the transport of the sight,
Her whole pale passionate face, mouth, forehead, eyes,
One gaze, she stood: then, slowly as he smiled
She smiled too, slowly, smiling unaware,
And drawing from his countenance to hers
A fainter red, as if she watched a flame
And stood in it a-glow. " How beautiful,"
Said she.
I answered, trying to be cold.
(Must sin have compensations, was my thought,
As if it were a holy thing like grief?
And is a woman to be fooled aside
From putting vice down, with that woman's toy
A baby?) — " Ay! the child is well enough,"
I answered. " If his mother's palms are clean
They need be glad of course in clasping such;
But if not, I would rather lay my hand,
Were I she, on God's brazen altar-bars
Red-hot with burning sacrificial lambs,
Than touch the sacred curls of such a child."

She plunged her fingers in his clustering locks,
As one who would not be afraid of fire;
And then with indrawn steady utterance said,
" My lamb, my lamb! although, through such as thou,
The most unclean got courage and approach
To God, once, — now they cannot, even with men,
Find grace enough for pity and gentle words."

" My Marian," I made answer, grave and sad,
" The priest who stole a lamb to offer him,
Was still a thief. And if a woman steals
(Through God's own barrier-hedges of true love,
Which fence out licence in securing love)
A child like this, that smiles so in her face,
She is no mother but a kidnapper,
And he's a dismal orphan, not a son,
Whom all her kisses cannot feed so full
He will not miss hereafter a pure home
To live in, a pure heart to lean against,
A pure good mother's name and memory
To hope by, when the world grows thick and bad
And he feels out for virtue."
" Oh," she smiled
With bitter patience, " the child takes his chance;
Not much worse off in being fatherless
Than I was, fathered. He will say, belike,
His mother was the saddest creature born;
He'll say his mother lived so contrary
To joy, that even the kindest, seeing her,
Grew sometimes almost cruel: he'll not say
She flew contrarious in the face of God
With bat-wings of her vices. Stole my child, —
My flower of earth, my only flower on earth,
My sweet, my beauty!" . . Up she snatched the child,
And, breaking on him in a storm of tears,
Drew out her long sobs from their shivering roots,
Until he took it for a game, and stretched
His feet and flapped his eager arms like wings
And crowed and gurgled through his infant laugh:
" Mine, mine," she said. " I have as sure a right
As any glad proud mother in the world,
Who sets her darling down to cut his teeth
Upon her church-ring. If she talks of law,
I talk of law! I claim my mother-dues
By law, — the law which now is paramount, —
The common law, by which the poor and weak
Are trodden underfoot by vicious men,
And loathed for ever after by the good.
Let pass! I did not filch, — I found the child."
" You found him, Marian?"
" Ay, I found him where
I found my curse, — in the gutter, with my shame!
What have you, any of you, to say to that,
Who all are happy, and sit safe and high,
And never spoke before to arraign my right
To grief itself? What, what, . . being beaten down
By hoofs of maddened oxen into a ditch,
Half-dead, whole mangled, when a girl at last
Breathes, sees . . and finds there, bedded in her flesh
Because of the extremity of the shock,
Some coin of price! . . and when a good man comes
(That's God! the best men are not quite as good)
And says, " I dropped the coin there: take it you,
And keep it, — it shall pay you for the loss," —
You all put up your finger — " See the thief!
" Observe what precious thing she has come to filch.
" How bad those girls are!" Oh, my flower, my pet,
I dare forget I have you in my arms
And fly off to be angry with the world,
And fright you, hurt you with my tempers, till
You double up your lip? Why, that indeed
Is bad: a naughty mother!"
" You mistake,"
I interrupted; " if I loved you not,
I should not, Marian, certainly be here."