Chapter IV: Part 4

And so passed Marian’s life from year to year.
Her parents took her with them when they tramped,
Dodged lanes and heaths, frequented towns and fairs,
And once went farther and saw Manchester,
And once the sea, that blue end of the world,
That fair scroll-finis of a wicked book,—
And twice a prison,—back at intervals,
Returning to the hills. Hills draw like heaven,
And stronger sometimes, holding out their hands
To pull you from the vile flats up to them;
And though, perhaps, these strollers still strolled back,
As sheep do, simply that they knew the way,
They certainly felt bettered unawares
Emerging from the social smut of towns
To wipe their feet clean on the mountain-turf.
In which long wanderings, Marian lived and learned,
Endured and learned. The people on the roads
Would stop and ask her how her eyes outgrew
Her cheeks, and if she meant to lodge the birds
In all that hair; and then they lifted her,
The miller in his cart, a mile or twain,
The butcher’s boy on horseback. Often, too,
The pedlar stopped, and tapped her on the head
With absolute forefinger, brown and ringed,
And asked if peradventure she could read;
And when she answered ‘ay,’ would toss her down
Some stray odd volume from his heavy pack,
A Thomson’s Seasons, mulcted of the Spring,
Or half a play of Shakspeare’s, torn across:
(She had to guess the bottom of a page
By just the top sometimes,—as difficult,
As, sitting on the moon, to guess the earth!)
Or else a sheaf of leaves (for that small Ruth’s
Small gleanings) torn out from the heart of books,
From Churchyard Elegies and Edens Lost,
From Burns, and Bunyan, Selkirk, and Tom Jones.
’Twas somewhat hard to keep the things distinct,
And oft the jangling influence jarred the child
Like looking at a sunset full of grace
Through a pothouse window while the drunken oaths
Went on behind her; but she weeded out
Her book-leaves, threw away the leaves that hurt,
(First tore them small, that none should find a word)
And made a nosegay of the sweet and good
To fold within her breast, and pore upon
At broken moments of the noontide glare,
When leave was given her to untie her cloak
And rest upon the dusty roadside bank
From the highway’s dust. Or oft, the journey done,
Some city friend would lead her by the hand
To hear a lecture at an institute:
And thus she had grown, this Marian Erle of ours,
To no book-learning,—she was ignorant
Of authors,—not in earshot of the things
Out-spoken o’er the heads of common men,
By men who are uncommon,—but within
The cadenced hum of such, and capable
Of catching from the fringes of the wind
Some fragmentary phrases, here and there,
Of that fine music,—which, being carried in
To her soul, had reproduced itself afresh
In finer motions of the lips and lids.

She said, in speaking of it, ‘If a flower
Were thrown you out of heaven at intervals,
You’d soon attain to a trick of looking up,—
And so with her.’ She counted me her years,
Till _I_ felt old; and then she counted me
Her sorrowful pleasures, till I felt ashamed.
She told me she was almost glad and calm
On such and such a season; sate and sewed,
With no one to break up her crystal thoughts;
While rhymes from lovely poems span around
Their ringing circles of ecstatic tune,
Beneath the moistened finger of the Hour.
Her parents called her a strange, sickly child,
Not good for much, and given to sulk and stare,
And smile into the hedges and the clouds,
And tremble if one shook her from her fit
By any blow, or word even. Out-door jobs
Went ill with her; and household quiet work,
She was not born to. Had they kept the north,
They might have had their pennyworth out of her,
Like other parents, in the factories;
(Your children work for you, not you for them,
Or else they better had been choked with air
The first breath drawn;) but, in this tramping life,
Was nothing to be done with such a child,
But tramp and tramp. And yet she knitted hose
Not ill, and was not dull at needlework;
And all the country people gave her pence
For darning stockings past their natural age,
And patching petticoats from old to new,
And other light work done for thrifty wives.

One day, said Marian,—the sun shone that day—
Her mother had been badly beat, and felt
The bruises sore about her wretched soul,
(That must have been): she came in suddenly,
And snatching, in a sort of breathless rage,
Her daughter’s headgear comb, let down the hair
Upon her, like a sudden waterfall,
And drew her drenched and passive, by the arm,
Outside the hut they lived in. When the child
Could clear her blinded face from all that stream
Of tresses ... there, a man stood, with beast’s eyes,
That seemed as they would swallow her alive,
Complete in body and spirit, hair and all,—
With burning stertorous breath that hurt her cheek,
He breathed so near. The mother held her tight,
Saying hard between her teeth—‘Why wench, why wench,
The squire speaks to you now—the squire’s too good;
He means to set you up, and comfort us.
Be mannerly at least.’ The child turned round,
And looked up piteous in the mother’s face,
(Be sure that mother’s death-bed will not want
Another devil to damn, than such a look) ...
‘Oh, mother!’ then, with desperate glance to heaven,
‘God, free me from my mother,’ she shrieked out,
‘These mothers are too dreadful.’ And, with force
As passionate as fear, she tore her hands
Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,
And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,
Away from both—away, if possible,
As far as God,—away! They yelled at her,
As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell,
She felt her name hiss after her from the hills,
Like shot from guns. On, on. And now she had cast
The voices off with the uplands. On. Mad fear
Was running in her feet and killing the ground;
The white roads curled as if she burnt them up,
The green fields melted, wayside trees fell back
To make room for her. Then, her head grew vexed,
Trees, fields, turned on her, and ran after her;
She heard the quick pants of the hills behind,
Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet,
Could run no more, yet, somehow, went as fast,—
The horizon, red ’twixt steeples in the east,
So sucked her forward, forward, while her heart
Kept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so big
It seemed to fill her body; then it burst,
And overflowed the world and swamped the light,
‘And now I am dead and safe,’ thought Marian Erle—
She had dropped, she had fainted.
When the sense returned,
The night had passed—not life’s night. She was ’ware
Of heavy tumbling motions, creaking wheels,
The driver shouting to the lazy team
That swung their rankling bells against her brain;
While, through the waggon’s coverture and chinks,
The cruel yellow morning pecked at her
Alive or dead, upon the straw inside,—
At which her soul ached back into the dark
And prayed, ‘no more of that.’ A waggoner
Had found her in a ditch beneath the moon,
As white as moonshine, save for the oozing blood.
At first he thought her dead; but when he had wiped
The mouth and heard it sigh, he raised her up,
And laid her in his waggon in the straw,
And so conveyed her to the distant town
To which his business called himself, and left
That heap of misery at the hospital.

She stirred;—the place seemed new and strange as death.
The white strait bed, with others strait and white,
Like graves dug side by side, at measured lengths,
And quiet people walking in and out
With wonderful low voices and soft steps,
And apparitional equal care for each,
Astonished her with order, silence, law:
And when a gentle hand held out a cup,
She took it, as you do at sacrament,
Half awed, half melted,—not being used, indeed,
To so much love as makes the form of love
And courtesy of manners. Delicate drinks
And rare white bread, to which some dying eyes
Were turned in observation. O my God,
How sick we must be, ere we make men just!
I think it frets the saints in heaven to see
How many desolate creatures on the earth
Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship
And social comfort, in a hospital,
As Marian did. She lay there, stunned, half tranced,
And wished, at intervals of growing sense,
She might be sicker yet, if sickness made
The world so marvellous kind, the air so hushed,
And all her wake-time quiet as a sleep;
For now she understood, (as such things were)
How sickness ended very oft in heaven,
Among the unspoken raptures. Yet more sick,
And surelier happy. Then she dropped her lids,
And, folding up her hands as flowers at night,
Would lose no moment of the blessed time.

She lay and seethed in fever many weeks,
But youth was strong and overcame the test;
Revolted soul and flesh were reconciled
And fetched back to the necessary day
And daylight duties. She could creep about
The long bare rooms, and stare out drearily
From any narrow window on the street,
Till some one, who had nursed her as a friend,
Said coldly to her, as an enemy,
‘She had leave to go next week, being well enough,’
While only her heart ached. ‘Go next week,’ thought she,
‘Next week! how would it be with her next week,
Let out into that terrible street alone
Among the pushing people, ... to go ... where?’

One day, the last before the dreaded last,
Among the convalescents, like herself
Prepared to go next morning, she sate dumb,
And heard half absently the women talk,
How one was famished for her baby’s cheeks—
‘The little wretch would know her! a year old,
And lively, like his father!’ one was keen
To get to work, and fill some clamorous mouths;
And one was tender for her dear goodman
Who had missed her sorely,—and one, querulous ...
‘Would pay those scandalous neighbours who had dared
To talk about her as already dead,’—
And one was proud ... ‘and if her sweetheart Luke
Had left her for a ruddier face than hers,
(The gossip would be seen through at a glance)
Sweet riddance of such sweethearts—let him hang!
’Twere good to have been as sick for such an end.’

And while they talked, and Marian felt the worse
For having missed the worst of all their wrongs,
A visitor was ushered through the wards
And paused among the talkers. ‘When he looked,
It was as if he spoke, and when he spoke
He sang perhaps,’ said Marian; ‘could she tell?
She only knew’ (so much she had chronicled,
As seraphs might, the making of the sun)
‘That he who came and spake, was Romney Leigh,
And then, and there, she saw and heard him first.’
And when it was her turn to have the face
Upon her,—all those buzzing pallid lips
Being satisfied with comfort—when he changed
To Marian, saying ‘And _you_? you’re going, where?’—
She, moveless as a worm beneath a stone
Which some one’s stumbling foot has spurned aside,
Writhed suddenly, astonished with the light,
And breaking into sobs cried, ‘Where I go?
None asked me till this moment. Can I say
Where _I_ go? when it has not seemed worth while
To God himself, who thinks of every one,
To think of me, and fix where I shall go?’

‘So young,’ he gently asked her, ‘you have lost
Your father and your mother?’
‘Both,’ she said,
‘Both lost! my father was burnt up with gin
Or ever I sucked milk, and so is lost.
My mother sold me to a man last month,
And so my mother’s lost, ’tis manifest.
And I, who fled from her for miles and miles,
As if I had caught sight of the fires of hell
Through some wild gap, (she was my mother, sir)
It seems I shall be lost too, presently,
And so we end, all three of us.’
‘Poor child!’
He said,—with such a pity in his voice,
It soothed her more than her own tears,—‘poor child!
’Tis simple that betrayal by mother’s love
Should bring despair of God’s too. Yet be taught;
He’s better to us than many mothers are,
And children cannot wander beyond reach
Of the sweep of his white raiment. Touch and hold!
And if you weep still, weep where John was laid
While Jesus loved him.’
‘She could say the words,’
She told me, ‘exactly as he uttered them
A year back, ... since, in any doubt or dark,
They came out like the stars, and shone on her
With just their comfort. Common words, perhaps;
The ministers in church might say the same;
But _he_, he made the church with what he spoke,—
The difference was the miracle,’ said she.

Then catching up her smile to ravishment,
She added quickly, ‘I repeat his words,
But not his tones: can any one repeat
The music of an organ, out of church?
And when he said ‘poor child,’ I shut my eyes
To feel how tenderly his voice broke through,
As the ointment-box broke on the Holy feet
To let out the rich medicative nard.’

She told me how he had raised and rescued her
With reverent pity, as, in touching grief,
He touched the wounds of Christ,—and made her feel
More self-respecting. Hope, he called, belief
In God,—work, worship ... therefore let us pray!
And thus, to snatch her soul from atheism,
And keep it stainless from her mother’s face,
He sent her to a famous sempstress-house
Far off in London, there to work and hope.

With that, they parted. She kept sight of Heaven,
But not of Romney. He had good to do
To others: through the days and through the nights,
She sewed and sewed and sewed. She drooped sometimes,
And wondered, while, along the tawny light,
She struck the new thread into her needle’s eye,
How people, without mothers on the hills,
Could choose the town to live in!—then she drew
The stitch, and mused how Romney’s face would look,
And if ’twere likely he’d remember hers,
When they two had their meeting after death.

FOURTH BOOK.

THEY met still sooner. ’Twas a year from thence
When Lucy Gresham, the sick sempstress girl,
Who sewed by Marian’s chair so still and quick,
And leant her head upon the back to cough
More freely when, the mistress turning round,
The others took occasion to laugh out,—
Gave up at last. Among the workers, spoke
A bold girl with black eyebrows and red lips,—
‘You know the news? Who’s dying, do you think?
Our Lucy Gresham. I expected it
As little as Nell Hart’s wedding. Blush not, Nell,
Thy curls be red enough without thy cheeks;
And, some day, there’ll be found a man to dote
On red curls.—Lucy Gresham swooned last night,
Dropped sudden in the street while going home;
And now the baker says, who took her up
And laid her by her grandmother in bed,
He’ll give her a week to die in. Pass the silk.
Let’s hope he gave her a loaf too, within reach,
For otherwise they’ll starve before they die,
That funny pair of bedfellows! Miss Bell,
I’ll thank you for the scissors. The old crone
Is paralytic—that’s the reason why
Our Lucy’s thread went faster than her breath,
Which went too quick, we all know. Marian Erle!
Why, Marian Erle, you’re not the fool to cry?
Your tears spoil Lady Waldemar’s new dress,
You piece of pity!’
Marian rose up straight,
And, breaking through the talk and through the work,
Went outward, in the face of their surprise,
To Lucy’s home, to nurse her back to life
Or down to death. She knew, by such an act,
All place and grace were forfeit in the house,
Whose mistress would supply the missing hand
With necessary, not inhuman haste,
And take no blame. But pity, too, had dues:
She could not leave a solitary soul
To founder in the dark, while she sate still
And lavished stitches on a lady’s hem
As if no other work were paramount.
‘Why, God,’ thought Marian, ‘has a missing hand
This moment; Lucy wants a drink, perhaps.
Let others miss me! never miss me, God!’

So Marian sate by Lucy’s bed, content
With duty, and was strong, for recompense,
To hold the lamp of human love arm-high
To catch the death-strained eyes and comfort them,
Until the angels, on the luminous side
Of death, had got theirs ready. And she said,
When Lucy thanked her sometimes, called her kind,
It touched her strangely. ‘Marian Erle, called kind!
What, Marian, beaten and sold, who could not die!
’Tis verily good fortune to be kind.
Ah, you,’ she said, ‘who are born to such a grace,
Be sorry for the unlicensed class, the poor,
Reduced to think the best good fortune means
That others, simply, should be kind to them.’

From sleep to sleep while Lucy slid away
So gently, like the light upon a hill,
Of which none names the moment that it goes,
Though all see when ’tis gone,—a man came in
And stood beside the bed. The old idiot wretch
Screamed feebly, like a baby overlain,
‘Sir, sir, you won’t mistake me for the corpse?
Don’t look at _me_, sir! never bury _me_!
Although I lie here, I’m alive as you,
Except my legs and arms,—I eat and drink,
And understand,—(that you’re the gentleman
Who fits the funerals up, Heaven speed you, sir,)
And certainly I should be livelier still
If Lucy here ... sir, Lucy is the corpse ...
Had worked more properly to buy me wine:
But Lucy, sir, was always slow at work,
I shan’t lose much by Lucy. Marian Erle,
Speak up and show the gentleman the corpse.’

And then a voice said, ‘Marian Erle.’ She rose;
It was the hour for angels—there, stood hers!
She scarcely marvelled to see Romney Leigh.
As light November snows to empty nests,
As grass to graves, as moss to mildewed stones,
As July suns to ruins, through the rents,
As ministering spirits to mourners, through a loss,
As Heaven itself to men, through pangs of death,
He came uncalled wherever grief had come.
‘And so,’ said Marian Erle, ‘we met anew,’
And added softly, ‘so, we shall not part.’

He was not angry that she had left the house
Wherein he placed her. Well—she had feared it might
Have vexed him. Also, when he found her set
On keeping, though the dead was out of sight,
That half-dead, half-live body left behind
With cankerous heart and flesh,—which took your best
And cursed you for the little good it did,
(Could any leave the bedrid wretch alone,
So joyless, she was thankless even to God,
Much less to you?) he did not say ’twas well,
Yet Marian thought he did not take it ill,—
Since day by day he came, and, every day,
She felt within his utterance and his eyes
A closer, tenderer presence of the soul,
Until at last he said, ‘We shall not part.’

On that same day, was Marian’s work complete:
She had smoothed the empty bed, and swept the floor
Of coffin sawdust, set the chairs anew
The dead had ended gossip in, and stood
In that poor room so cold and orderly,
The door-key in her hand, prepared to go
As _they_ had, howbeit not their way. He spoke.

‘Dear Marian, of one clay God made us all,
And though men push and poke and paddle in’t
(As children play at fashioning dirt-pies)
And call their fancies by the name of facts,
Assuming difference, lordship, privilege,
When all’s plain dirt,—they come back to it at last;
The first grave-digger proves it with a spade,
And pats all even. Need we wait for this,
You, Marian, and I, Romney?’
She, at that,
Looked blindly in his face, as when one looks
Through driving autumn-rains to find the sky.
He went on speaking.
‘Marian, I being born
What men call noble, and you, issued from
The noble people,—though the tyrannous sword
Which pierced Christ’s heart, has cleft the world in twain
’Twixt class and class, opposing rich to poor,—
Shall _we_ keep parted? Not so. Let us lean
And strain together rather, each to each,
Compress the red lips of this gaping wound,
As far as two souls can,—ay, lean and league,
I, from my superabundance,—from your want,
You,—joining in a protest ’gainst the wrong
On both sides!’—
All the rest, he held her hand
In speaking, which confused the sense of much;
Her heart, against his words, beat out so thick,
They might as well be written on the dust
Where some poor bird, escaping from hawk’s beak,
Has dropped, and beats its shuddering wings,—the lines
Are rubbed so,—yet ’twas something like to this,
—‘That they two, standing at the two extremes
Of social classes, had received one seal,
Been dedicate and drawn beyond themselves
To mercy and ministration,—he, indeed,
Through what he knew, and she, through what she felt,
He, by man’s conscience, she, by woman’s heart,
Relinquishing their several ’vantage posts
Of wealthy ease and honourable toil,
To work with God at love. And, since God willed
That, putting out his hand to touch this ark,
He found a woman’s hand there, he’d accept
The sign too, hold the tender fingers fast,
And say, ‘My fellow-worker, be my wife!’’

She told the tale with simple, rustic turns,—
Strong leaps of meaning in her sudden eyes
That took the gaps of any imperfect phrase
Of the unschooled speaker: I have rather writ
The thing I understood so, than the thing
I heard so. And I cannot render right
Her quick gesticulation, wild yet soft,
Self-startled from the habitual mood she used,
Half sad, half languid,—like dumb creatures (now
A rustling bird, and now a wandering deer,
Or squirrel against the oak-gloom flashing up
His sidelong burnished head, in just her way
Of savage spontaneity,) that stir
Abruptly the green silence of the woods,
And make it stranger, holier, more profound;
As Nature’s general heart confessed itself
Of life, and then fell backward on repose.

I kissed the lips that ended.—‘So indeed
He loves you, Marian?’
‘Loves me!’ She looked up
With a child’s wonder when you ask him first
Who made the sun—a puzzled blush, that grew,
Then broke off in a rapid radiant smile
Of sure solution. ‘Loves me! he loves all,—
And me, of course. He had not asked me else
To work with him for ever, and be his wife.’

Her words reproved me. This perhaps was love—
To have its hands too full of gifts to give,
For putting out a hand to take a gift;
To love so much, the perfect round of love
Includes, in strict conclusion, the being loved;
As Eden-dew went up and fell again,
Enough for watering Eden. Obviously
She had not thought about his love at all:
The cataracts of her soul had poured themselves,
And risen self-crowned in rainbow: would she ask
Who crowned her?—it sufficed that she was crowned.
With women of my class, ’tis otherwise:
We haggle for the small change of our gold,
And so much love, accord, for so much love,
Rialto-prices. Are we therefore wrong?
If marriage be a contract, look to it then,
Contracting parties should be equal, just;
But if, a simple fealty on one side,
A mere religion,—right to give, is all,
And certain brides of Europe duly ask
To mount the pile, as Indian widows do,
The spices of their tender youth heaped up,
The jewels of their gracious virtues worn,
More gems, more glory,—to consume entire
For a living husband! as the man’s alive,
Not dead,—the woman’s duty, by so much,
Advanced in England, beyond Hindostan.

I sate there, musing, till she touched my hand
With hers, as softly as a strange white bird
She feared to startle in touching. ‘You are kind.
But are you, peradventure, vexed at heart
Because your cousin takes me for a wife?
I know I am not worthy—nay, in truth,
I’m glad on’t, since, for that, he chooses me.
He likes the poor things of the world the best;
I would not therefore, if I could, be rich.
It pleasures him to stoop for buttercups;
I would not be a rose upon the wall
A queen might stop at, near the palace-door,
To say to a courtier, ‘Pluck that rose for me,
‘It’s prettier than the rest,’ O Romney Leigh!
I’d rather far be trodden by his foot,
Than lie in a great queen’s bosom.’
Out of breath
She paused.
‘Sweet Marian, do you disavow
The roses with that face?’
She dropt her head,
As if the wind had caught that flower of her,
And bent it in the garden,—then looked up
With grave assurance. ‘Well, you think me bold!
But so we all are, when we’re praying God.
And if I’m bold—yet, lady, credit me,
That, since I know myself for what I am,
Much fitter for his handmaid than his wife,
I’ll prove the handmaid and the wife at once,
Serve tenderly, and love obediently,
And be a worthier mate, perhaps, than some
Who are wooed in silk among their learned books;
While _I_ shall set myself to read his eyes,
Till such grow plainer to me than the French
To wisest ladies. Do you think I’ll miss
A letter, in the spelling of his mind?
No more than they do, when they sit and write
Their flying words with flickering wild-fowl tails,
Nor ever pause to ask how many _t_s,
Should that be _y_ or _i_—they know’t so well:
I’ve seen them writing, when I brought a dress
And waited,—floating out their soft white hands
On shining paper. But they’re hard sometimes,
For all those hands!—we’ve used out many nights,
And worn the yellow daylight into shreds
Which flapped and shivered down our aching eyes
Till night appeared more tolerable, just
That pretty ladies might look beautiful,
Who said at last ... ‘You’re lazy in that house!
‘You’re slow in sending home the work,—I count
I’ve waited near an hour for’t.’ Pardon me,—
I do not blame them, madam, nor misprize;
They are fair and gracious; ay, but not like you,
Since none but you has Mister Leigh’s own blood
Both noble and gentle,—and, without it ... well,
They are fair, I said; so fair, it scarce seems strange
That, flashing out in any looking-glass
The wonder of their glorious brows and breasts,
They are charmed so, they forget to look behind
And mark how pale we’ve grown, we pitiful
Remainders of the world. And so, perhaps,
If Mister Leigh had chosen a wife from these,
She might ... although he’s better than her best,
And dearly she would know it ... steal a thought
Which should be all his, an eye-glance from his face,
To plunge into the mirror opposite,
In search of her own beauty’s pearl: while _I_....
Ah, dearest lady, serge will outweigh silk
For winter-wear, when bodies feel a-cold,
And I’ll be a true wife to your cousin Leigh.’

Before I answered, he was there himself.
I think he had been standing in the room,
And listened probably to half her talk,
Arrested, turned to stone,—as white as stone.
Will tender sayings make men look so white?
He loves her then profoundly.
‘You are here,
Aurora? Here I meet you!’—We clasped hands.

‘Even so, dear Romney. Lady Waldemar
Has sent me in haste to find a cousin of mine
Who shall be.’

‘Lady Waldemar is good.’

‘Here’s one, at least, who is good,’ I sighed, and touched
Poor Marian’s happy head, as, doglike, she
Most passionately patient, waited on,
A-tremble for her turn of greeting words;
‘I’ve sate a full hour with your Marian Erle,
And learnt the thing by heart,—and, from my heart,
Am therefore competent to give you thanks
For such a cousin.’
‘You accept at last
A gift from me, Aurora, without scorn?
At last I please you?’—How his voice was changed!

‘You cannot please a woman against her will,
And once you vexed me. Shall we speak of that?
We’ll say, then, you were noble in it all,
And I not ignorant—let it pass. And now,
You please me, Romney, when you please yourself;
So, please you, be fanatical in love,
And I’m well pleased. Ah, cousin! at the old hall,
Among the gallery portraits of our Leighs,
We shall not find a sweeter signory
Than this pure forehead’s.’
Not a word he said.
How arrogant men are!—Even philanthropists,
Who try to take a wife up in the way
They put down a subscription-cheque,—if once
She turns and says, ‘I will not tax you so,
Most charitable sir,’—feel ill at ease,
As though she had wronged them somehow. I suppose
We women should remember what we are,
And not throw back an obolus inscribed
With Cæsar’s image, lightly. I resumed.

‘It strikes me, some of those sublime Vandykes
Were not too proud, to make good saints in heaven;
And, if so, then they’re not too proud to-day
To bow down (now the ruffs are off their necks)
And own this good, true, noble Marian, ... yours,
And mine, I’ll say!—For poets (bear the word)
Half-poets even, are still whole democrats,—
Oh, not that we’re disloyal to the high,
But loyal to the low, and cognisant
Of the less scrutable majesties. For me,
I comprehend your choice—I justify
Your right in choosing.’
‘No, no, no,’ he sighed,
With a sort of melancholy impatient scorn,
As some grown man, who never had a child,
Puts by some child who plays at being a man;
—‘You did not, do not, cannot comprehend
My choice, my ends, my motives, nor myself:
No matter now—we’ll let it pass, you say.
I thank you for your generous cousinship
Which helps this present; I accept for her
Your favourable thoughts. We’re fallen on days,
We two, who are not poets, when to wed
Requires less mutual love than common love,
For two together to bear out at once
Upon the loveless many. Work in pairs,
In galley-couplings or in marriage-rings,
The difference lies in the honour, not the work,—
And such we’re bound to, I and she. But love,
(You poets are benighted in this age;
The hour’s too late for catching even moths,
You’ve gnats instead,) love!—love’s fool-paradise
Is out of date, like Adam’s. Set a swan
To swim the Trenton, rather than true love
To float its fabulous plumage safely down
The cataracts of this loud transition-time,—
Whose roar, for ever, henceforth, in my ears,
Must keep me deaf to music.’
There, I turned
And kissed poor Marian, out of discontent.
The man had baffled, chafed me, till I flung
For refuge to the woman,—as, sometimes,
Impatient of some crowded room’s close smell,
You throw a window open, and lean out
To breathe a long breath in the dewy night,
And cool your angry forehead. She, at least,
Was not built up, as walls are, brick by brick;
Each fancy squared, each feeling ranged by line,
The very heat of burning youth applied
To indurate forms and systems! excellent bricks,
A well-built wall,—which stops you on the road,
And, into which, you cannot see an inch
Although you beat your head against it—pshaw!

‘Adieu,’ I said, ‘for this time, cousins both;
And, cousin Romney, pardon me the word,
Be happy!—oh, in some esoteric sense
Of course!—I mean no harm in wishing well.
Adieu, my Marian:—may she come to me,
Dear Romney, and be married from my house?
It is not part of your philosophy
To keep your bird upon the blackthorn?’
‘Ay,’
He answered, ‘but it is:—I take my wife
Directly from the people,—and she comes,
As Austria’s daughter to imperial France,
Betwixt her eagles, blinking not her race,
From Margaret’s Court at garret-height, to meet
And wed me at St. James’s, nor put off
Her gown of serge for that. The things we do,
We do: we’ll wear no mask, as if we blushed.’

‘Dear Romney, you’re the poet,’ I replied,—
But felt my smile too mournful for my word,
And turned and went. Ay, masks, I thought,—beware
Of tragic masks, we tie before the glass,
Uplifted on the cothurn half a yard
Above the natural stature! we would play
Heroic parts to ourselves,—and end, perhaps,
As impotently as Athenian wives
Who shrieked in fits at the Eumenides.

His foot pursued me down the stair. ‘At least,
You’ll suffer me to walk with you beyond
These hideous streets, these graves, where men alive,
Packed close with earthworms, burr unconsciously
About the plague that slew them; let me go.
The very women pelt their souls in mud
At any woman who walks here alone.
How came you here alone?—you are ignorant.’

We had a strange and melancholy walk:
The night came drizzling downward in dark rain;
And, as we walked, the colour of the time,
The act, the presence, my hand upon his arm,
His voice in my ear, and mine to my own sense,
Appeared unnatural. We talked modern books,
And daily papers; Spanish marriage-schemes,
And English climate—was’t so cold last year?
And will the wind change by to-morrow morn?
Can Guizot stand? is London full? is trade
Competitive? has Dickens turned his hinge
A-pinch upon the fingers of the great?
And are potatoes to grow mythical
Like moly? will the apple die out too?
Which way is the wind to-night? south-east? due east?
We talked on fast, while every common word
Seemed tangled with the thunder at one end,
And ready to pull down upon our heads
A terror out of sight. And yet to pause
Were surelier mortal: we tore greedily up
All silence, all the innocent breathing-points,
As if, like pale conspirators in haste,
We tore up papers where our signatures
Imperilled us to an ugly shame or death.

I cannot tell you why it was. ’Tis plain
We had not loved nor hated: wherefore dread
To spill gunpowder on ground safe from fire?
Perhaps we had lived too closely, to diverge
So absolutely: leave two clocks, they say,
Wound up to different hours, upon one shelf,
And slowly, through the interior wheels of each,
The blind mechanic motion sets itself
A-throb, to feel out for the mutual time.
It was not so with us, indeed. While he
Struck midnight, I kept striking six at dawn,
While he marked judgment, I, redemption-day;
And such exception to a general law,
Imperious upon inert matter even,
Might make us, each to either, insecure,
A beckoning mystery, or a troubling fear.

I mind me, when we parted at the door,
How strange his good-night sounded,—like good-night
Beside a deathbed, where the morrow’s sun
Is sure to come too late for more good-days:—
And all that night I thought.... ‘Good-night,’ said he.

And so, a month passed. Let me set it down
At once,—I have been wrong, I have been wrong.
We are wrong always, when we think too much
Of what we think or are; albeit our thoughts
Be verily bitter as self-sacrifice,
We’re no less selfish. If we sleep on rocks
Or roses, sleeping past the hour of noon
We’re lazy. This I write against myself.
I had done a duty in the visit paid
To Marian, and was ready otherwise
To give the witness of my presence and name
Whenever she should marry.—Which, I thought,
Sufficed. I even had cast into the scale
An overweight of justice toward the match;
The Lady Waldemar had missed her tool,
Had broken it in the lock as being too straight
For a crooked purpose, while poor Marian Erle
Missed nothing in my accents or my acts:
I had not been ungenerous on the whole,
Nor yet untender; so, enough. I felt
Tired, overworked: this marriage somewhat jarred;
Or, if it did not, all the bridal noise ...
The pricking of the map of life with pins,
In schemes of ... ‘Here we’ll go,’ and ‘There we’ll stay,’
And ‘Everywhere we’ll prosper in our love,’
Was scarce my business. Let them order it;
Who else should care? I threw myself aside,
As one who had done her work and shuts her eyes
To rest the better.
I, who should have known,
Forereckoned mischief! Where we disavow
Being keeper to our brother, we’re his Cain.

I might have held that poor child to my heart
A little longer! ’twould have hurt me much
To have hastened by its beats the marriage-day,
And kept her safe meantime from tampering hands,
Or, peradventure, traps? What drew me back
From telling Romney plainly, the designs
Of Lady Waldemar, as spoken out
To me ... me? had I any right, ay, right,
With womanly compassion and reserve
To break the fall of woman’s impudence?—
To stand by calmly, knowing what I knew,
And hear him call her _good_?
Distrust that word.
‘There is none good save God,’ said Jesus Christ.
If He once, in the first creation-week,
Called creatures good,—for ever, afterward,
The Devil only has done it, and his heirs,
The knaves who win so, and the fools who lose;
The word’s grown dangerous. In the middle age,
I think they called malignant fays and imps
Good people. A good neighbour, even in this,
Is fatal sometimes,—cuts your morning up
To mince-meat of the very smallest talk,
Then helps to sugar her bohea at night
With your reputation. I have known good wives,
As chaste, or nearly so, as Potiphar’s;
And good, good mothers, who would use a child
To better an intrigue; good friends, beside,
(Very good) who hung succinctly round your neck
And sucked your breath, as cats are fabled to do
By sleeping infants. And we all have known
Good critics, who have stamped out poet’s hopes;
Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state;
Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause;
Good kings, who disembowelled for a tax;
Good popes, who brought all good to jeopardy;
Good Christians, who sate still in easy chairs,
And damned the general world for standing up.—
Now, may the good God pardon all good men!

How bitterly I speak,—how certainly
The innocent white milk in us is turned,
By much persistent shining of the sun!—
Shake up the sweetest in us long enough
With men, it drops to foolish curd, too sour
To feed the most untender of Christ’s lambs.

I should have thought ... a woman of the world
Like her I’m meaning,—centre to herself,
Who has wheeled on her own pivot half a life
In isolated self-love and self-will,
As a windmill seen at distance radiating
Its delicate white vans against the sky,
So soft and soundless, simply beautiful,—
Seen nearer ... what a roar and tear it makes,
How it grinds and bruises!... if she loves at last,
Her love’s a re-adjustment of self-love,
No more; a need felt of another’s use
To her one advantage,—as the mill wants grain,
The fire wants fuel, the very wolf wants prey;
And none of these is more unscrupulous
Than such a charming woman when she loves.
She’ll not be thwarted by an obstacle
So trifling as ... her soul is, ... much less yours!—
Is God a consideration?—she loves _you_,
Not God; she will not flinch for Him indeed:
She did not for the Marchioness of Perth,
When wanting tickets for the birthnight-ball.
She loves you, sir, with passion, to lunacy;
She loves you like her diamonds ... almost.
Well,
A month passed so, and then the notice came;
On such a day the marriage at the church.
I was not backward.
Half St. Giles in frieze
Was bidden to meet St. James in cloth of gold,
And, after contract at the altar, pass
To eat a marriage-feast on Hampstead Heath.
Of course the people came in uncompelled,
Lame, blind, and worse—sick, sorrowful, and worse,
The humours of the peccant social wound
All pressed out, poured out upon Pimlico,
Exasperating the unaccustomed air
With hideous interfusion: you’d suppose
A finished generation, dead of plague,
Swept outward from their graves into the sun,
The moil of death upon them. What a sight!
A holiday of miserable men
Is sadder than a burial-day of kings.

They clogged the streets, they oozed into the church
In a dark slow stream, like blood. To see that sight,
The noble ladies stood up in their pews,
Some pale for fear, a few as red for hate,
Some simply curious, some just insolent,
And some in wondering scorn,—‘What next? what next?’
These crushed their delicate rose-lips from the smile
That misbecame them in a holy place,
With broidered hems of perfumed handkerchiefs;
Those passed the salts with confidence of eyes
And simultaneous shiver of moiré silk;
While all the aisles, alive and black with heads,
Crawled slowly toward the altar from the street,
As bruised snakes crawl and hiss out of a hole
With shuddering involutions, swaying slow
From right to left, and then from left to right,
In pants and pauses. What an ugly crest
Of faces, rose upon you everywhere,
From that crammed mass! you did not usually
See faces like them in the open day:
They hide in cellars, not to make you mad
As Romney Leigh is.—Faces!—O my God,
We call those, faces? men’s and women’s ... ay,
And children’s;—babies, hanging like a rag
Forgotten on their mother’s neck,—poor mouths,
Wiped clean of mother’s milk by mother’s blow,
Before they are taught her cursing. Faces!... phew,
We’ll call them vices festering to despairs,
Or sorrows petrifying to vices: not
A finger-touch of God left whole on them;
All ruined, lost—the countenance worn out
As the garments, the will dissolute as the acts,
The passions loose and draggling in the dirt
To trip the foot up at the first free step!—
Those, faces! ’twas as if you had stirred up hell
To heave its lowest dreg-fiends uppermost
In fiery swirls of slime,—such strangled fronts,
Such obdurate jaws were thrown up constantly,
To twit you with your race, corrupt your blood,
And grind to devilish colours all your dreams
Henceforth, ... though, haply, you should drop asleep
By clink of silver waters, in a muse
On Raffael’s mild Madonna of the Bird.

I’ve waked and slept through many nights and days
Since then,—but still that day will catch my breath
Like a nightmare. There are fatal days, indeed,
In which the fibrous years have taken root
So deeply, that they quiver to their tops
Whene’er you stir the dust of such a day.

My cousin met me with his eyes and hand,
And then, with just a word, ... that ‘Marian Erle
Was coming with her bridesmaids presently,’
Made haste to place me by the altar-stair,
Where he and other noble gentlemen
And high-born ladies, waited for the bride.

We waited. It was early: there was time
For greeting, and the morning’s compliment;
And gradually a ripple of women’s talk
Arose and fell, and tossed about a spray
Of English _s_s, soft as a silent hush,
And, notwithstanding, quite as audible
As louder phrases thrown out by the men.
—‘Yes, really, if we’ve need to wait in church,
We’ve need to talk there.’—‘She? ’Tis Lady Ayr,
In blue—not purple! that’s the dowager.’
—‘She looks as young.’—‘She flirts as young, you mean!
Why if you had seen her upon Thursday night,
You’d call Miss Norris modest.’—‘_You_ again!
I waltzed with you three hours back. Up at six,
Up still at ten: scarce time to change one’s shoes.
I feel as white and sulky as a ghost,
So pray don’t speak to me, Lord Belcher.’—‘No,
I’ll look at you instead, and it’s enough
While you have that face.’ ‘In church, my lord! fie, fie!’
—‘Adair, you stayed for the Division?’—‘Lost
By one.’ ‘The devil it is! I’m sorry for’t.
And if I had not promised Mistress Grove’ ...
—‘You might have kept your word to Liverpool.’
‘Constituents must remember, after all,
We’re mortal.’—‘We remind them of it.’—‘Hark,
The bride comes! Here she comes, in a stream of milk!’
—‘There? Dear, you are asleep still; don’t you know
The five Miss Granvilles? always dressed in white
To show they’re ready to be married.’—‘Lower!
The aunt is at your elbow.’—‘Lady Maud,
Did Lady Waldemar tell you she had seen
This girl of Leigh’s?’ ‘No,—wait! ’twas Mrs. Brookes,
Who told me Lady Waldemar told her—
No, ’twasn’t Mrs. Brookes.’—‘She’s pretty?’—‘Who?
Mrs. Brookes? Lady Waldemar?’—‘How hot!
Pray is’t the law to-day we’re not to breathe?
You’re treading on my shawl—I thank you, sir.’
—‘They say the bride’s a mere child, who can’t read,
But knows the things she shouldn’t, with wide-awake
Great eyes. I’d go through fire to look at her.’
—‘You do, I think.’—‘And Lady Waldemar
(You see her; sitting close to Romney Leigh;
How beautiful she looks, a little flushed!)
Has taken up the girl, and organised
Leigh’s folly. Should I have come here, you suppose,
Except she’d asked me?’—‘She’d have served him more
By marrying him herself.’
‘Ah—there she comes,
The bride, at last!’
‘Indeed, no. Past eleven.
She puts off her patched petticoat to-day
And puts on May-fair manners, so begins
By setting us to wait.’—‘Yes, yes, this Leigh
Was always odd; it’s in the blood, I think;
His father’s uncle’s cousin’s second son
Was, was ... you understand me—and for him,
He’s stark!—has turned quite lunatic upon
This modern question of the poor—the poor:
An excellent subject when you’re moderate;
You’ve seen Prince Albert’s model lodging-house?
Does honour to his Royal Highness. Good!
But would he stop his carriage in Cheapside
To shake a common fellow by the fist
Whose name was ... Shakspeare? no. We draw a line,
And if we stand not by our order, we
In England, we fall headlong. Here’s a sight,—
A hideous sight, a most indecent sight!
My wife would come, sir, or I had kept her back.
By heaven, sir, when poor Damiens’ trunk and limbs
Were torn by horses, women of the court
Stood by and stared, exactly as to-day
On this dismembering of society,
With pretty troubled faces.’
‘Now, at last.
She comes now.’
‘Where? who sees? you push me, sir,
Beyond the point of what is mannerly.
You’re standing, madam, on my second flounce—
I do beseech you.’
‘No—it’s not the bride.
Half-past eleven. How late. The bridegroom, mark,
Gets anxious and goes out.’
‘And as I said ...
These Leighs! our best blood running in the rut!
It’s something awful. We had pardoned him
A simple misalliance, got up aside
For a pair of sky-blue eyes; our House of Lords
Has winked at such things, and we’ve all been young.
But here’s an inter-marriage reasoned out,
A contract (carried boldly to the light,
To challenge observation, pioneer
Good acts by a great example) ’twixt the extremes
Of martyrised society,—on the left,
The well-born,—on the right, the merest mob,
To treat as equals!—’tis anarchical!
It means more than it says—’tis damnable!
Why, sir, we can’t have even our coffee good,
Unless we strain it.’
‘Here, Miss Leigh!’
‘Lord Howe,
You’re Romney’s friend. What’s all this waiting for?’

‘I cannot tell. The bride has lost her head
(And way, perhaps!) to prove her sympathy
With the bridegroom.’
‘What,—you also, disapprove!’

‘Oh, _I_ approve of nothing in the world,’
He answered; ‘not of you, still less of me,
Nor even of Romney—though he’s worth us both.
We’re all gone wrong. The tune in us is lost:
And whistling in back alleys to the moon,
Will never catch it.’
Let me draw Lord Howe;
A born aristocrat, bred radical,
And educated socialist, who still
Goes floating, on traditions of his kind,
Across the theoretic flood from France,—
Though, like a drenched Noah on a rotten deck,
Scarce safer for his place there. He, at least,
Will never land on Ararat, he knows,
To recommence the world on the old plan:
Indeed, he thinks, said world had better end;
He sympathises rather with the fish
Outside, than with the drowned paired beasts within
Who cannot couple again or multiply:
And that’s the sort of Noah he is, Lord Howe.
He never could be anything complete,
Except a loyal, upright gentleman,
A liberal landlord, graceful diner-out,
And entertainer more than hospitable,
Whom authors dine with and forget the port.
Whatever he believes, and it is much,
But no-wise certain ... now here and now there, ...
He still has sympathies beyond his creed,
Diverting him from action. In the House,
No party counts upon him, and all praise
All like his books too, (he has written books)
Which, good to lie beside a bishop’s chair,
So oft outreach themselves with jets of fire
At which the foremost of the progressists
May warm audacious hands in passing by.
—Of stature over-tall, lounging for ease;
Light hair, that seems to carry a wind in it,
And eyes that, when they look on you, will lean
Their whole weight half in indolence, and half
In wishing you unmitigated good,
Until you know not if to flinch from him
Or thank him.—’Tis Lord Howe.
‘We’re all gone wrong,’
Said he, ‘and Romney, that dear friend of ours,
Is no-wise right. There’s one true thing on earth;
That’s love! He takes it up, and dresses it,
And acts a play with it, as Hamlet did,
To show what cruel uncles we have been,
And how we should be uneasy in our minds,
While he, Prince Hamlet, weds a pretty maid
(Who keeps us too long waiting, we’ll confess)
By symbol, to instruct us formally
To fill the ditches up ’twixt class and class,
And live together in phalansteries.
What then?—he’s mad, our Hamlet! clap his play,
And bind him.’
‘Ah Lord Howe, this spectacle
Pulls stronger at us than the Dane’s. See there!
The crammed aisles heave and strain and steam with life—
Dear Heaven, what life!’
‘Why, yes,—a poet sees;
Which makes him different from a common man.
_I_, too, see somewhat, though I cannot sing;
I should have been a poet, only that
My mother took fright at the ugly world,
And bore me tongue-tied. If you’ll grant me now
That Romney gives us a fine actor-piece
To make us merry on his marriage-morn,
The fable’s worse than Hamlet’s, I’ll concede.
The terrible people, old and poor and blind,
Their eyes eat out with plague and poverty
From seeing beautiful and cheerful sights,
We’ll liken to a brutalised King Lear,
Led out,—by no means to clear scores with wrongs—
His wrongs are so far back, ... he has forgot;
All’s past like youth; but just to witness here
A simple contract,—he, upon his side,
And Regan with her sister Goneril
And all the dappled courtiers and court-fools,
On their side. Not that any of these would say
They’re sorry, neither. What is done, is done,
And violence is now turned privilege,
As cream turns cheese, if buried long enough.
What could such lovely ladies have to do
With the old man there, in those ill-odorous rags,
Except to keep the wind-side of him? Lear
Is flat and quiet, as a decent grave;
He does not curse his daughters in the least.
_Be_ these his daughters? Lear is thinking of
His porridge chiefly ... is it getting cold
At Hampstead? will the ale be served in pots?
Poor Lear, poor daughters! Bravo, Romney’s play!’

A murmur and a movement drew around;
A naked whisper touched us. Something wrong!
What’s wrong? The black crowd, as an overstrained
Cord, quivered in vibrations, and I saw ...
Was that _his_ face I saw?... his ... Romney Leigh’s ...
Which tossed a sudden horror like a sponge
Into all eyes,—while himself stood white upon
The topmost altar-stair, and tried to speak,
And failed, and lifted higher above his head
A letter, ... as a man who drowns and gasps.

‘My brothers, bear with me! I am very weak.
I meant but only good. Perhaps I meant
Too proudly,—and God snatched the circumstance
And changed it therefore. There’s no marriage—none.
She leaves me,—she departs,—she disappears,—
I lose her. Yet I never forced her ‘ay,’
To have her ‘no’ so cast into my teeth,
In manner of an accusation, thus.
My friends, you are all dismissed. Go, eat and drink
According to the programme,—and farewell!’