University of Virginia Library

JAMES AND MARY.

Beside a furzy common patched with sand,
An ancient mansion stood, a piebald heap
Of blackened oak and plaster: in the days
Of queenly Bess a hall, a farmstead now.
Here Martha Bruce for many years abode,
A widowed mother with a single child,
Mary a comely blossom of eighteen.
Now Martha, ere she fell in widowhood,
Had in her cares of wisedom fretful grown:
A grievance-searching nature hers, most keen
To guage and probe the petty rubs and thorns
Of household custom: dwelling on her cares,
She bred them for herself from carelessness
And want of system; then on these complained
In needless-fretful whining, till she made
The mote annoyance bulge a beam of wrong,
And half believed herself an injured drudge,
The very model of a wife ill-used.
And thus she found her trouble for herself
By faults of nature part, of nurture more:
Forsooth she had been delicately bred,
A yeoman's daughter upon gentry's verge,
Taught that to move in homely usefulness,
To touch a pan or darn a stocking end,
Were loss of caste: the lady must not toil;
And the more helpless the more lady she.
And thus the girl grew, till she came to wed,
Environed with a draff gentility:
And when she wedded with a poorer man
She started on the test of married days
With slender stock of foresight; soon to fail,
And sour herself and make a curse of home,
Alternative in shrewing and in tears.
And, after years, her goodman chanced to die;
She, left with narrow store and one weak child,
Held barely on the farm as best she might
Unthrifty, cankered with penurious days,
While still she gave her want the fiercer sting
With jarring discontents, and evil thoughts
Against her richer neighbours in the land.
And she would prate to Mary as she grew,
Filling the child with vainness and conceit,
How ne'er another lass in all the shire
Could touch her Mary's beauty by a league.
And she could tell, nay, well enough she knew,
Mary's sweet face should drive the neighbour lads
Half mad in time: but she was not for these.
Nay, but she hoped her child would bring her ease,
And come to marry in a wealthy house,
And comfort her old mother's latter days
In sunshine and the honour of her name.
But to the fair face, dreaming on the world
Of future wonder and the things to be,
The rolling years came slowly, till the time
Had shaped her woman and had overborne
Her girlhood. Then the mother looked at her
And thought, ‘My wish sights haven in this child.
My still endeavour all these eighteen years
Has fruited richly. I shall see good days
And lay my bones in honourable rest.’
But westward of the heath by some hours' ride,
James Bolton lived, half farmer and half squire,
Florid, fair-built, some twenty-four years old:
Who rode his hunters: kept his park of deer,
A small one: owned some land and rented more.
He, from the hunt thrown out one winter eve,
Pushed meditative homewards with loosed rein;
And chanced on Mary leaning near a well
To lift her pitcher: in whose gentle eyes
He read a power that seemed to clothe in light
The gray lane with its bare and soughing twigs
Of leafless hazel: and his horse drew up
Guessing the rider's mind. But James's blood
Came at a leap in crimson to his face,
Deep as the red leaves showering from the eaves
Of cottage trailers: somewhat less she blushed;
As the warm west answers the eastern glow
At sunrise matching with a fainter rose.
And so they dwelt confusedly: but he
Grasping suggestion, with a quickened brain,
From the mid flutter of his heart, devised
To feign a thirsty pretext for delay,
So perhaps to speak a word or change a glance.
And she, how could she else? with some faint smile
Willingly gave the bright wave of the well
Caught from its source and trickling now no more
In prison walls, and reached it, near as fair
As she, whose story in the Church is read,
The mother of the favoured Israel.
But, after that James Bolton sought her heart,
On Mary loathing towards that other grew:
Where hardly she had borne him from the first
Outright she hated now, and gave to James
A deeper tenderness: so time went on.
Then Martha told her daughter, and the girl
Looked scared, but answered nothing for the night;
Nor would the mother press her further then.
So Mary slipt in silence to her rest;
But ere she slept she wrote to James, and told
How things went ill against their love at home:
And how her mother hurried on the match
She hated, and she knew not what to do.
On James his trouble thickened as he read,
For need of action came in unripe hour,
Ere he had settled purpose with himself.
He feared his mother likewise; who abode
And kept his house with him, and watched her son
With jealous and maternal tyranny.
She, daughter of a county family,
Had ruled her goodman straitly till his death,
Quelling his free-will with superior birth
And right assumed of territorial pride:
And, since this sway bore weaker on the son,
She ever strove, by straining it the more,
To brace her tottering frail prerogative.
Thus, to sustain her ground, she came to feel
Past reason querulous on imagined slight
And faintest contradiction: and James knew
That all her heart, as all her pride, was set
To match him with a slip of some great squire,
Whose race had held their acres, sire to son,
Since rose with rose contended, in a chain
Of proud, obscure, and dull gentility.
Now James had wrote to Mary he would come
The morrow; so he turned the question round
Thro' all that day and half a restless night
In sleep, that came, more hateful than unrest,
To feign distorted shadows of his thought.
And so with light he rose, and unrefreshed
Rode out across the meadows, crushing down
His care with motion in the whistling airs
Of morning: and he rested not his steed
Until he found her by the lisping well
Pallid as he was pale, and in her eyes
He read the crisis of his life was come.
Then she, ‘Alas, my own and not my own!
I tremble in the presence of this hour,
Which parts or binds us all our doom of days
Till we are cold in earth, and summer-time
Is one with winter on the pulseless heart.
We plant weak vows eternal, else unroot
The slender threads which held us in a soil
Of rich delusion. Thine, O love, to choose:
On thee self-doubtful leaning I withhold
My wavering judgment: yet in one resolve
Most resolute am I, that if mistrust
Or fleck of unsure purpose touch thy wish
To cast in hand with mine this earthly time—
I will begone and see thy face no more,
And bear it patiently, as bear I can:
And better thus, than in my autumn days
To hang a clog about the neck I love
When this poor cheek has worn its freshness by.’
And so they kissed and parted. But James rode
Homewards with loosened rein: no ease at heart:
Vext that he had not acted fair and well.
So, pricking on the faster to beat down
The chafing thought, he took across the fields,
To slice an angle from the road, and cleared
The fences in his line: but at the third
The horse, who rose not, crushing thro' the stakes
Rolled on his rider, whom some ploughmen came
And found, to bear him homewards sense-bereft.
But James was long in fever from his fall,
And him his mother tended. But mischance
Brought in his coat the letter to her hand,
Last writ of Mary, when they brought him in
Helpless and stunned. She read it, and long days
The mother watched him, scheming to unweave
The love this letter taught. Some comfort this,
His illness, bad in most, was good in this
That she might plot unthwarted: and she held,
All means were holy and a mother's right
To stave her son from this perpetual shame
Of mating low: for all her thought was blind
And warped with narrow county pride; and chief
She feared her spinster sisters in their hall
Lined with the canvas faces of past squires,—
Great squires, each in his narrow walk supreme,
Lords of the hind and acres at their gate,
They drank, bred, hunted their allotted time,
Then gave the parish-church one hatchment more.
But James, who mended slowly, chanced to read
The County Herald, lighting on the news:
And for a space the ceiling and the walls
Swam round him, sick and stunned. He giddily rose,
And strove to dress and dash aside his pain;
But on him came his weakness and prevailed,
As clearer flashed conviction of his full
And utter desolation. Could he mend
An hour of her irrevocable doom
Now were his strength at fullest? Lost as dead
Was Mary now: could strong despair unknit
Life-woven vows, the goodman from his wife?
And, if he moved, of bad should worse ensue
To Mary full as wretched as himself,
If he knew right, in this thrice-loathed result
Of motherly compulsion. Fool and blind
To waver two months since: then blindly ride
A break-neck course in spleen: thus men lost all.
He wished his neck had broken: this had spared
All self-reproach, much bitterness of time
Hereafter, and the sting of wasted chance.
He must not even see her, but sit still,
In forced inaction dribbling out his days
With trivial occupation as they came.
So wore his life away; till at the last
In apathy or weakness, or in both,
He wedded as his mother bade him wed,
And never knew her guilty till his grave.