Chapter III

White, and estranged as a man who has looked on a spectre, he
mutely
Sank to the place at my side, nor while we returned to the city
Uttered a word of explaining, or comment, or comfort, but only,
With his good-night, incoherently craved my forgiveness and
patience,
Parted, and left me to spend the night in hysterical vigils,
Tending to Annie's supreme dismay, and postponing our journey
One day longer at least; for I went to bed in the morning,
Firmly rejecting the pity of friends, and the pleasures of travel,
Fixed in a dreadful purpose never to get any better.

Later, however, I rallied, when Fred, with a maddening prologue
Touching the cause of my sickness, including his fever at Jaffa,
Told me that some one was waiting; and could he see me a moment?
See me? Certainly not. Or,--yes. But why did he want to?
So, in the dishabille of a morning-gown and an arm-chair,
Languid, with eloquent wanness of eye and of cheek, I received
him--
Willing to touch and reproach, and half-melted myself by my pathos,
Which, with a reprobate joy, I wholly forgot the next instant,
When, with electric words, few, swift, and vivid, he brought me,
Through a brief tempest of tears, to this heaven of sunshine and
sweetness.

Yes, he had looked on a ghost--the phantom of love that was
perished!--
When, last night, he beheld the scene of which I have told you.
For to the woman he saw there, his troth had been solemnly plighted
Ere he went to the war. His return from the dead found her absent
In the belief of his death; and hither to Europe he followed,--
Followed to seek her, and keep, if she would, the promise between
them,
Or, were a haunting doubt confirmed, to break it and free her.
Then, at Naples we met, and the love that, before he was conscious,
Turned his life toward mine, laid torturing stress to the purpose
Whither it drove him forever, and whence forever it swerved him.
How could he tell me his love, with this terrible burden upon him?
How could he linger near me, and still withhold the avowal?
And what ruin were that, if the other were doubted unjustly,
And should prove fatally true! With shame, he confessed he had
faltered,
Clinging to guilty delays, and to hopes that were bitter with
treason,
Up to the eve of our parting. And then the last anguish was spared
him.
_Her_ love for him was dead. But the heart that leaped in his bosom
With a great, dumb throb of joy and wonder and doubting,
Still must yield to the spell of his silencing will till that
phantom
Proved an actual ghost by common-place tests of the daylight,
Such as speech with the lady's father.

And now, could I pardon--
Nay, did I think I could love him? I sobbingly answered, I thought
so.
And we are all of us going to Lago di Como to-morrow,
With an ulterior view at the first convenient Legation.

Patientest darling, good-by! Poor Fred, whose sense of what's
proper
Never was touched till now, is shocked at my glad self-betrayals,
And I am pointed out as an awful example to Annie,
Figuring all she must never be. But, oh, if _he_ loves me!--

POSTSCRIPT.

Since, he has shown me a letter in which he absolves and forgives
her
(Philip, of course, not Fred; and the _other_, of course, and not
Annie).
Don't you think him generous, noble, unselfish, heroic?

L'ENVOY.--_Clara's Comment_.

Well, I'm glad, I am sure, if Fanny supposes she's happy.
I've no doubt her lover is good and noble--as men go.
But, as regards his release of a woman who'd wholly forgot him,
And whom he loved no longer, for one whom he loves, and who loves
him,
_I_ don't exactly see where the _heroism_ commences.

THE SONG THE ORIOLE SINGS.

There is a bird that comes and sings
In the Professor's garden-trees;
Upon the English oak he swings,
And tilts and tosses in the breeze.

I know his name, I know his note,
That so with rapture takes my soul;
Like flame the gold beneath his throat,
His glossy cope is black as coal.

O oriole, it is the song
You sang me from the cottonwood,
Too young to feel that I was young,
Too glad to guess if life were good.

And while I hark, before my door,
Adown the dusty Concord Road,
The blue Miami flows once more
As by the cottonwood it flowed.

And on the bank that rises steep,
And pours a thousand tiny rills,
From death and absence laugh and leap
My school-mates to their flutter-mills.

The blackbirds jangle in the tops
Of hoary-antlered sycamores;
The timorous killdee starts and stops
Among the drift-wood on the shores.

Below, the bridge--a noonday fear
Of dust and shadow shot with sun--
Stretches its gloom from pier to pier,
Far unto alien coasts unknown.

And on those alien coasts, above,
Where silver ripples break the stream's
Long blue, from some roof-sheltering grove
A hidden parrot scolds and screams.

Ah, nothing, nothing! Commonest things:
A touch, a glimpse, a sound, a breath--
It is a song the oriole sings--
And all the rest belongs to death.

But oriole, my oriole,
Were some bright seraph sent from bliss
With songs of heaven to win my soul
From simple memories such as this,

What could he tell to tempt my ear
From you? What high thing could there be,
So tenderly and sweetly dear
As my lost boyhood is to me?

PORDENONE.