University of Virginia Library

ACT III.

SCENE I.

Ten years are supposed to elapse between the first and second part of this Drama.
A room in the Palace. Enter Conrad and Adelheid as King and Queen.
CONRAD
Is Uriel, Count of Gemmingen, to die?

ADELHEID
Ay so, my lord: I gave you yester-eve
A ream of reasons for his instant grave;
And his revolted vassals die as well
Around the master python of the nest.

CONRAD
This doomed pretender to our rightful throne
Has sent me into gloomy retrospects.
I too—aspired. Well, that's a decade since:
Time kicks along his foot-ball called the world

ADELHEID
I saw these filmy musings pass your eyes,
And caught your mood infected. I too went
Stumbling and scaling through our craggy past
A great way back.

CONRAD
The crisp-foot winters go,
And the stars turn in ether. They have danced
Ten times, it seems, the bunches into must,
Since you and I have taken seat to rule
This fluctuant and many-tided realm.

ADELHEID
You know I love to sit within that oriel
Which looks toward Arnheim out across the square
And burnished downs, hard in their folds of grey.
Well, there I went this morn,—for you had gone,
To see the cage of falcons just arrived
From Raymond, our king neighbour to the south—
And leaning there, I said unto my soul,
I will sit down and be alone to muse,
And look behind along this road of years;
Which, since my father died and you are king,
We twain have traversed, rough malignant ways,
Where—though we went with faces well composed
Before a watchful people, though we wore
Spiked gold as garland, and the sea-shell's dye
To make our clothes as heaven between its stars,
We felt not less the bedded flints and shales
Torture our foot-sole like a path of knives.
I saw our road had been o'er one great moor,
Ploughed into tracts, which intercrossing ran
To every point of heaven: vast heathery sweeps,
And here and there a bench near one small pool
With nothing but a bulrush and a frog.
Then came a shelf of tawny dunes which sent
The way-sand to our knees. Then a bare plain
Of hard cold clay, and in a fenceless garden
A black and broken wind-mill, which we made
An inn of brief repose. Thence, passing on,
We picked our paces through a desperate place,
Green-scummed, or else with bald and pasty mire
Cracked into net-work seam of hardened marl.
There the heath faded to a mongrel marsh,
And then the marsh at odds with a red stream
Fought for the land between them; then rose up
Again bare sand, upon whose limits lay
The margin hills in many a ruined heap,
Morsels of weathered steep and wasted cliff
Tumbled and hoary. O, the land was bad
And blind and sodden. Finger, ear, and eye
Recall it loathsome and condemn its vileness.
Bad, bad; I'm weary of jogging by foul roads
To the market-hall of Death!

CONRAD
Is my queen tired
With but ten years of queendom?

ADELHEID
That I be;
And of all earth-fruit, save my husband's love
And infant's smile, most sick. I live for these
And, losing these, I perish: they inspire
Coherence in my elements of life:
Withdraw them and I drop asunder, dust
And shadow, husk and ashes; in your love
I breathe, and therefore you must answer back
With burning adorations, and eternal
Enormous antiphons, which, if I die,
May echo on. For, even in the grave,
I think, that I should hear you through my sleep,
Leading the hateful rival to my home;
Ah, I should hear your kisses, though the earth
Lay many fathoms deep against my ear.

CONRAD
I love you in the frank and silver day-light,
I love you in the sullen churlish grave;
In the bubble, which enrings this little moment;
In the vast iron wheel, which girdles round
A thousand centuries. But, good my queen,
These are phantasmal sorrows, quite unborn,
Who may not gather life to break the womb
Of many-childed Future. Will you spend
Your strength in fighting air, not husband it
To bruise this arched solidity of treason,
Coated in hardened mail of steely scales,
Who must slay us or instantly be slain?
Will you, with such a portent in our doors
To be encountered, go out to the waste
And beat the bats down?

ADELHEID
Ay, we swarm with treason.
Shall we be never ridded of this old
And tortuous Hydra? Will she always dart
Her flat and flickering unexpected mouth
Of out some new rift in our palace floor?
And must we sleep and walk and eat our bread,
Knowing that in this chink, or in the curtain,
Or in that wall she nestles. Can we set
Our lip against no yellow goblet's rim
Without a curdling fear, we may gulp down
One of her snakelet infants coiled within
Among the ebbing wine-lees? Shall we never
Brain the blue mother's leprous crest, and fling her
Dead out on garden offal?

CONRAD
Treason is
The rust upon the armour of a king;
We scour it bright but still the specks recur,
Till the good suit wears through. 'Tis a disease
I'th' metal of a leader. 'Tis a stain
On an imperial breast-plate. Men unroyal
Are spared this plague, as lower beasts elude
Fever and palsy and the ghastly train
That shake the higher man.

ADELHEID
I'd gladly sell
A fathom of my queen disquietude
For an inch of clownish peace.

CONRAD
We live in storm,
We breathe storm in at nostrils, on our feet
Comes the sea-storm and on our head the sky one.
This elemental discord is our home,
It pushed us up into our seat and there
It holds us in—Still air would ruin us.
The ruler is disvalued in the calm.
I rode in here on danger's ragged vans,
When the grey-browed confusion of the sky
Scorched the dim purple morning. I took seat,
In the sword-clash and the spear-clash—You remember—
I feel your hands a-tremble—ay, you do—
One certain hideous night, curtained in blood,—
When I reluctantly did first put on
This diadem and this most weary robe
Of irksome glory, hating each of them
And seeking neither. But the palace raved
At sight of that red death-bed; and men stood
Leaderless, wild with panic, at a word
Ready to rend each other. This I saw;
And, lest some dozen captains, keen as dogs,
Tugging at diverse corners of this realm,
Had pulled it piece-meal; and then slunk aside
Each with his paltry cantle, mouthing it,
And snarling on the rest—I, in this fear
Of a split kingdom and divided counsels,
Not loving Raban's deed nor yet its fruit,—
So far assented for the general good;
When I beheld a throne and none to fill it,
An army, mad with fear, and none to lead them,
A bed of sleep turned into reeking shambles,
A hundred lifted arms and glaring eyes
Signing me up into that vacant chair,—
Wild, wrestling hands pushing the crown at me,
A Babel of hoarse throats shrieking me king—
Why! Then I yielded. One grim shag-face growled,
Who presently did homage on my hand,
That he himself had hewn it off at wrist,
And sawn his sword across where now his lips came,
Had I not yielded. See how mutable
And wolfish be these soldiers, full of malice
And peril, if you rub their wishes wrong.
To save my life I yielded, to acquire
A throne I to these butchers said ‘Amen.’
Was there no more to win by nodding ‘ay,’
To lose by thundering ‘never’? One dear head
Lay in that turmoil nestled at my heart,
To whom the grim deeds of that outer world
Were blank as to a girl put in her grave.
Wearing this circlet, I should wear her love
As appanage more glorious than its gems.
Losing this crown, should I endure to see
Some brutish Captain leap into my place
And gather up my kisses? Welcome hell
Rather; and he was dead—not of my hand—
Could my refusal breathe him warm again,
Or pluck him up from Charon? By God, no.
Therefore Love said be king, and king was I:
And I accepted royal oil to feed
The lamp of Hymen, and these purple robes,—
Since in no marriage garment but this one
Could I become your bridegroom. Love said plain,
‘Ye twain shall make no nest save in a throne.’
Who blames me then to have seized such glorious ledge,
And built our eyrie there? In some deep rift
Of stormy rock, twixt pine and snow, where-round
The thunder speaks like a familiar friend;
The lightning is our nestling's golden toy,
And the winds rock him sleepy, pinnacled
In peril, which is cradle to the great;
Let the mean village sparrow hatch her young
Safe in some farmer's thatch. Our eaglet hears
The avalanche, the tempest, and the wolves—
And if that night recurs—

ADELHEID
Lord of my soul,
Peace of that night; let it and all its deeds
Rest: so it was; and silence now is best.
Some day we shall hold out our hands to God,
And He will answer whether they be clean
Or spotted as this Raban's, whom we loathed,
Who is gone down whither he pushed my father
By a most righteous doom, redhanded eft.
And, as the axe sheared his throat scurrilous,
Do thou with these, this countship and his pack,
Who, as foul beasts in pen, await the hatchet.

CONRAD
How if I spare him? 'tis a shallow knave.

ADELHEID
Why, he will put a poniard in our babe,
When we are grass and dust.

CONRAD
I think, you fear
Too far about this Uriel, Count of Gemmingen;
He is a sturdy rebel, if you will,
And a most manifest conspirator.
Yet all day long he sits with nose in mug,
Soaking his wits, and vapours at the king,
A gasconading rascal full of brag;
How should I fear this barrel of a man,
This keg of countship?—I am tired of signing
Men into darkness. Let him go scot-free.
All will suppose we sit on granite rocks,
If with a careless hand we brush this fly
To buzz again over his honey bowl,
To sip or smother in the viscid nectar—
Either, for all we heed or all we care.
As for these rabble cart-boys in his train,
Let them be flogged and go.

ADELHEID
I say he dies,
Certainly dies, twice over if he might.
This knave was born with danger in his blood,
Though his head be a puff-ball full of dust,
The lineage of this traitor countervails
His lightness with the vulgar. In his cups
He chatters ancestry with tavern grooms,
And proves the king a clown to Gill and Jack;
How, an he chose, and some day too he would,—
His friends should live to see it, by the rood—
He'd be, where in his right he should have been,
Ten years come next November. Did they know,
His great, great, great grandfather ruled them all,
A monarch, ay, a monarch to his toes?
But, as for this paid cut-throat called a king,—
His pedigree the gutter, and his crest
A dung-hill cock, who crows against the sun
With motto, ‘As thou risest, I shall rise.’—
A rank usurper—Did they like their wine?—
How gat he up? Why this way—being young
And handsome, as the wenches reckon looks,
This swordsman by his graceful attitudes
Catches a suitorless princess's eye,
And wins her to his will, and—

CONRAD
Finish there:
His doom is sealed. I thank thee, Adelheid.
So let thy purpose steel my weaker heart.
Give me the pen. Thou art the stem of rule,
And I the light and evanescent leaves.

ADELHEID
O Conrad, I am tired of dealing death.
Branded with age too early, iron care
Has wrinkled up my face, and made my eyes
Large, strangely-lighted. ‘Hush!’ the people say,
‘Pale as a phantom comes this queen of ours.
She looks as fierce and faded as a ghost.
Regard her not: regarding vexes her.
She carries in those grey abysmal eyes
The gloom of many sudden sepulchres.
Her hand is like an eagle's wasted claw.
God! will she never pass? O Christ, she turns
Her eyes upon my baby, and the child
Moans in its sleep. I think, her wistful gaze
Would draw the very breath out at its lips,
And yet I dare not veil it, lest she see
And freeze its blood from going with her will.
O Mary, make this vampire move away!’
So these poor fools misdeem and quake at me:
Who wrap my pity in a tiger's fell,
Being unwarlike and compassionate,
But goaded and beset and hounded on
By one supreme great instinct to preserve
My husband and my offspring: motherhood
And wifehood quenching fear; and, since our reign
Came in no calm, began—as it begun—
Some things must not be thought about at all—
I saw thy road was thorny; yet I said,
Whither thou leadest at thy side I come.
Have I not made thee husband, conscience, god,
The pontiff of my soul? Thy needing it
Tinges an act with virtue. In thy name
All service is most righteous. Justice is
My Lord's advantage merely. To thy will
The keys of all my wishes are surrendered—
I hold her nothing in the roll of wives,
Who will do less. Help-mate she ne'er will be,
But some weak creature with a languid blood,
Who cannot hear her heart-beat in these words.
Have I said well? Have I done all for thee?
Then for my service give me one more grave.

CONRAD
I mark him from the living with my pen.
[He signs a warrant, summons in an attendant, and despatches it.]
So this man being done with, clear your brow,
And smile a little. We, who rule, deserve
To sit with happy faces now and then,
As John and Joan in the cottage, shelling peas
And plaiting rushes. You were rosy once
As sweetheart in the song, but there's a winter
Come to your face; as those, who cheat fat sleep,
Are thinned in his revenges. All your vigils
Would tire Prometheus strapped on naked stone.
And, even when you sleep, I think your heart
Fearfully wakens—like a pilgrim bird
Who leans the outer feather of its wing
Upon the sea and dozes as it goes
Above the heaving peril. But you are changed
With a great changing. Ah, poor altered flower,
Scathed in the crushing of this weary wind,
Your soft aerial petals harsh and dry;
Can Care uncolour splendour in so brief
A tale of turning moons? Can some years slided,
Unbloom the radiant aspect of my bride
Into this haggard mother of my child?

ADELHEID
I have outworn the polish on my face,
Outgrown the bridal plaything that I was
Into thy wife. Which means, not less nor more,
That prodigal of beauty's tender skin,
Reckless of wrinkles prematurely earned,
Bare-headed in the snow wind I will sit
And listen to thy turmoil. If my lord
Goes at a cry of war upon the hill,
I'll out as well and wrestle in his wake,
Beaten on hand and brows with stinging hail,
Disdaining shelter. Is thy path o'er peril?
I'll tread on adders too. Dost walk in blood?
My feet shall redden to their ankle-bones.
Are men at watch to slay thee? Watch they may,
They'll need to wake till either eyelid flag
With leaden rims of slumber, ere I doze
Upon my counter-ambush sentinel.
For Love is vigilant, when Hatred snores
From utter weariness a bulk of dreams.
Are thy foes cruel? I will pass them here,
And in the service of mild Love devise
Such bitter curious death-ways, that the fools
Shall falter back astounded and cry ‘Hold!
Thou art the better mechanist of torment.’
But these things age one. She, who'd save her beauty,
Must keep it closed within a crystal cupboard,
Out of the air-stroke. Had I been a craven,
I should have worn my roses longer, King!

CONRAD
When you are angry, you are beautiful
As on the first day. Turn your face a little,
Just from the full. You seem Medea now
Fuliginous and grandly moved. They say,
That we, the world-kings perched so very high
Between the frozen zones of drifting honour,
Get seldom loving wives. That fruitage grows
More in the garden of a delving loon.
Well, this wise moralist, the common ‘they,’
Trips now and then. Our story proves it liar,
And so Medea's did.

ADELHEID
And who was she?

CONRAD
The pathos of a dim and ruined face,
Which from the poet's pages, in strange sweetness,
Looks down a thousand years, and makes the world
Wan with supreme regret and answering tears.
A fair great queen of very long ago,
Against whose virgin lattice the grey fringe
Of the black Euxine withered on her walls,
Or crusted in its salt her casement flowers,
Or, inland hurled with volumes of rough wind,
Made the grass glaucous on the barren dunes.
There in the day-beam she grew beautiful,
And moonlight gave her softness, till she heard
A silence in the garden of her youth,
A crisping in the branches of her dreams,
And a strange footstep—But this happened, dearest,
Far, far away, out of our world almost,
And ages back; and, where she lived, her nation
Is gone and conquered out; and they again
Who vanquished hers like rain are sponged away;
And a great cantle of her tale itself
Is utterly forgot. But all she left,
All for a husband's sake; and slew her kin,
And with his people she forgat her own;
And, save his love, all wishes left her soul;
Till she grew wasted with excess of worship,
And from the censers of her own idolatry
The incense cloud rolled back and scorched her heart.
For to such fierceness and strange jealous ways
Her love was waxen, that it irked the man
And drave him into falseness; and the tale
Flared into tragedies of blood and fire;
But, I forget whether through him or her,
When the last curtain of the fable fell,
Its stage was littered with sufficient death.

ADELHEID
Why do you beat her sorrows, deluge-old,
Into my ears? Why point her wrong at me?
Why should I hearken to this woman's pain?
Is she then re-incarnate from her dust
In Adelheid, slave of a husband's whims?—
My kin I slew not, though I saw them slain!

CONRAD
In no degree. Her story to my brain
Swam idly in; as through an open casement
A dry leaf flutters wind-borne miles away
From the black bough, that in the winter-clad
Coppice forgets the budding of its child.
Resemblance finds no stepping-stone between you.
This fable queen was jealous: mine is calm.
And, if I wronged her—just for argument
We'll give Chimæra clothing-scale and wings,
And let her hawk at gnats that ne'er will fly—
My queen would inly pine, weep stillest tears;
She would not wave her wrong out, like a flag,
For the raw world to see. But she would wear it
As a continual sack-cloth next her heart,
And, when that pulse of love broke, it should make
The cerements of her pure and patient dust.
So would she fade to heaven without a word,
Saving her secret, loving through it all;
And only God should read it in her eyes,
Reaching her ghost its crown of martyrdom—
That were a wife indeed!

ADELHEID
These hideous words
Rend me their listener. Are our dreams so good,—
Who sleep in porphyry chambers with the weight
Of many maledictions on our rest,
Earth's emperors—that, when we waken wide,
We should take mist to mould like potter's clay
Into such hellish visions? No, my Conrad,
This demon May-be never will beget
A fiendling Has-been in his likeness here.
Trust in such utter mutuality
Is grown between us, child of dangerous days,
Nursed at the teats of our calamities,
Rocked in the common cradle of the crime,
That gave us leave to bear him; sent, when born,
To try his reeling baby feet along
The reddened floor of our consorted reign.
This Trust of ours a hardy nurseling, grown
Upon the knees of parents perilous,
The scion of a Spartan motherhood,
Is waxed and thewed, with no uncertain power,
Into the perfect flourish of a god.
Is not our Trust so holy and so large,
That to imagine its divulsion seems
Like laughing at a grave, like poison poured
Into the golden cup of sacrament,
Like saying, God is dead and flesh is God?
Nay, we are one, in spite of fire and rain
Or earthquake. I am welded and built in
Between my kingly rock; as the white seam
Of marble in the granite crag abides
For ever in her mountain, part of him
Though diverse. Will they quarrel and remove
Their interlacing arms? Will they cry out
To the hill-torrent, that she speedily come
With cold wet touch and white persistent teeth,
And gnaw them in divorce asunder? Nay!
The twain shall cleave together till Heaven's signs
Are sick with rifts of age; and the doom seraph
Sails, like an eagle, pealing the great death
Among the overwatched and wasted stars.

CONRAD
I tell thee, wife, we dare not spring apart;
A furnace roars up at us on one hand,
An ocean at our other side wails plunging.
The foam-flakes and the cinders intercross
Flung on our narrow ridge: we stand alone.
Behind us is a terror of strange water,
A smooth lagune laid inland of wild seas,
Languidly heaving, in whose silvery threads
The heads, the fins, the mounded ebon backs
Of sea-brutes palpitate, pass, disappear,
Till the deep seems one swarm of serpent shoals—
That is our past, wherein such evil memories
Paddle and come to surface, it is wise
To lock our thoughts from skimming those scummed waves,
And turn our backs upon the sighing of them;
So, forwards creep by that sea-ruined mole—
Dreadful to tread but worse to pause upon—
Which we have paven with grey ashes, wrecks
Of things that once were men, until our word
Came on them and undid God's artifice,
Poor broken worms—we crunch them, shudder, pass
Into the blackness—onwards!

ADELHEID
Courage! dearest,
See, husband, see, our mirk is riven at last;
Our path is sweeter by one morning star,
These wayside bones are goldened with its ray;
No groundward gazing more: bathe, bathe our eyes
In the white splendour and light innocent
Of that young orb. O, fresh incarnate ghost,
O, tender spirit hardly meshed in Time,
O, ether-roaming and aerial feet
Just tangled in the gossamer of days;
Love's budded evolution, O my child,
My infant beam, my rose bedewed with heaven:
My little apple, blown a windfall down
Out of the starry orchards, gathered up
And tenderly brought here by some pale angel—
Just sweetly fanning out light pen-feathers
To arise again and float serenely back,
With dreamy evanescent hints of smile,
Their sister, to the stars—O dimpled babe,
Pure day-spring in these desecrated halls,
Empty so long of childish laughter, since
I played a little maid with my dead brother;
And then he went, and I played on alone
More pensively; until one fiery morn
I found myself a woman, at one leap
An orphan, and a wife. One night did all,
A hideous consecration, ring and shroud—
Of all which things I would oblivion buy
In your delight, O cradle-treasured curls;
O dimly-printed lips, and finger-buds
Weaker than rain, make me forget what farewell
I had with childhood. See, the iron mother
Bending above your innocence, the Queen
Unduly old, broken and blurred and stained
With taint of hurried graves;—Smile at me, babe:
Babble and reach at me with crumpled hands.
O'er thee at least this rumoured tigress bends,
And makes soft murmur like the mother ewe.
Shall not thy baby laughter cleanse the breath
Of these polluted chambers, and flush in
Virginal air, as sweet as sweeping over
The brine-exhaling deep can make it come?
We fester here, as in a catacomb
Shelved round with acrid bones and pungent dust.
Laugh out, babe son; we need thy laughter here.
The palace corners rankle phantom-full.
The grooved pilasters twist their flourished heads
Into a puckered feature, Raban-like.
The curtains droop into unearthly folds,
Like trappings of some feathered funeral car;
And drape out veiled contours and faded bulks,
Which, if we touched them, might begin to crawl
And move into grey kobolds, moth-like crabs
With cobweb faces creeping out of graves.
Ah, misery! Come quick, my morning ray,
Abolish, purify these atmospheres,
And sweeten out those heavy canopies,
Steeped in the reek of centuries of sighs.
For innocence is great and shall re-chain
These emanations, at whose vivid eyes
Fire comes in expressed tears. In their despair
Thou hadst no lot or finger. Thou art pure,
My Prince, my King, who shalt be. God shall build
Thy baby sinews man-ward like a tower;
And give thee such regality of aspect,
As they, who bear themselves in thrones, should bear.
Great he shall grow and mightily prevail,
And conquer with a clean and wholesome heart,
Pure soul, hands spotless. He shall never know
The need of doing wrong and speaking guile,
Because his seat is sure and certified
By our anterior guilt, by all this blood
Which cries at us, by all our leprous deeds.
Therefore, the passing of his time shall be
Sweet as a lute-string, and his spoken name
Will taste as sweetly in his people's mouths,
As in the April woods the violets are
To one, who enters suddenly from the downs
And beats into the odour with his face,
For the dell burns up fragrance—Reign in peace,
No spot need soil thy mantle lily-clean.
But we are filthied over, breast and palm;
We reek of fire and crust with furnace spume.
We hurtle with ill shapes in Tophet vales
To set thee on thy purple Olivet.
I barely think one live man on this world
Has ate his daily bread as we have ours,
So shorn of peace, so sistered with despair;
So nourished on disasters. Hath one man
Gone, in our way, to bed with agonies
And wakened with a scorpion on his sheet?
I do not think, rest ever can be ours
After the stir of all these tossing years;
Peace will not steep our eyelids till we die.
Toil, that is overtoiled, sleeps never much;
So let it be. The reaper seldom eats
Bread of the sheaves he gathered. Still the grain
Is cut and in its house, and he is glad;
And goes away into another land.
So in hereafter, when our childish heir
Feasts on that well-filled ear, security,
Reaped by our sickle vengeance, we shall turn
Rejoicing in our grave. Our mighty love
Shall say, ‘We saddened to give thee good days,
Our darling, it is well: we sleep in joy.’

CONRAD
Thy words are sadder than a weary wind,
That moans across rank grave-yards done with, closed,
Where even Death sees now no more new guests,
And seems the sadder for it. There abide
Unwholesome sprawling sheaves of great thin grass,
And unswept leaves with mildew on their ribs,
And putrid docks and sodden hemlock stems,
And such an army of black or orange slugs,
That if a sheep tried grazing in this close
He'd bite less herb than insect—Why, thy words
Pipe as in hideous whistle through the chinks
Of dead men's broken roof-flags. Ah, my queen,
It recks not to remember how we clomb
Up at this kingship. Shut thy mind and sleep.
We wanted and we won it. That's enough;
And we do mean to grip it, while we see,
With tight unflaccid fingers. But I tell thee,
Action's the bell to scare away these ghosts.
Act, and the weary body will claim sleep,
And drag the anxious soul to bed with him
To share his slumber. But you woman-folk
Cannot heal sorrow's shaft with horn and hound;
Well, that's your loss. I cheat my care this way;
Wade after bitterns in the mountain marsh,
Or track the shadows of huge antlered stags;
Get lost at night and shelter where I can,
Sup on a loaf of rye and goat's-milk cheese,
And quite forget I am a king at all.
I do divest that weary fellow Conrad,
Who seems an Atlas, orbed upon his neck
With such a globe of sorrow as my realm.
Who staggers up, crushed throat, chest strained, hands dug
Deep in his flanks, beneath this giant ball
Protuberant with mountainous arrears
Of all the knotty cares which tease a king.
Ay, so he stands, that toiled and moiling loon,
My other self, one Conrad crowned with pain,
Whom then I quite sough off and shed aside;
And, like a galling robe of ceremony,
Ease my free shoulders from and breathe at large.
I half believe, I have left this plodding knave,
Behind in the great town, more clerk than king,
Wearing his eyes on crabbed parchment dim;
Making the giant looms of justice spin,
Making the lazy brooms of office sweep,
Making the weary mills of empire turn—
I half protest, there can be no such man,
My worse and careworn double, left at home,
To whom all viand delicately served
In golden trenchers on a stately board
Seems cankered with disrelish. Who is this,
Who finds the black crust of the peasant sweet?
Conrad the hunter. Sound that hunter sleeps;
But poor King Conrad, like a shop in storm,
Rolls in his sea of heavy purple folds,
And never seems to find the haven Rest.

ADELHEID
Then up, to horse, my husband, and away
To-night, at once, to-morrow. If slain stags
Gladden the soul to gaze outside her windows,
Not inwards at the darkness of her pen—
O then, my king, depopulate your forests
And leave no hart alive. Crown all your doors
With antlered trophies. I can govern here,
If our rough people know one bugle-blast
Recalls you, panoplied at my right hand,
To rake the reddening cinders from the mouth
Of this rebellious furnace of a town.
So ride away in peace, and gaily tread
The scaffold face of this bloat Uriel down
Among the shrivelled wood-leaves. Yet ride not
With spur so rash, such loosely-gathered reins,
As when your charger slipped one Pentecost,
And bruised your brow and gashed his ebon side.
Only a wife, my monarch, had you then
To cheat the grave about. But now this child
Added must make us patient of our lives.
And, till our babe can cudgel menace back,
O bear, my king, your life like a glass cup,
Which any heedless footing may destroy.
Think, in what scale our weakling would be weighed,
If, stiffened on your shield, they carried you
Out of your last of battles. Live, dear, live,
Have greed of life, be vigilant of danger.
My mother instinct turns me from the tomb:
My weary queendom says, the grave is well—
But now, enough! So, you will hunt to-morrow?
Where will you drive your dogs?

CONRAD
An alp there is,
An earth of foxes, foster-nurse of wolves,
The mountain garden of the forest bear,
Perched on the outward corner of my realm,
So far away, so needled thick in pines,
That eye sees nothing but brown flaky shafts,
And hunters seldom penetrate thereon.
Laid in a dog's-ear cantle of my land,
It leads no whither. But my huntsmen say,
Strange ruins crown those desolated crags,
And in one basalt cave the ribbing bones
Of an enormous python fester foul.
I will ride sheer inside that wilderness
And see what quarry I can strike. 'Tis sweet
To cast a line into an unknown sea.

ADELHEID
Go, and my love shall guard thee as a shield;
But bring me home some strange new mountain flower,
Or plumaged bird unseen in these low lands.
Return not giftless, else I shall conclude,
That thou hast hunted down all thought of me
As forefront of thy cares.

SCENE II.

A ruinous baronial hall in a retired castle, half-way up an alp, with dense forests around it. The walls are hung with old banners, weapons, and armour. There is a spacious fireplace at one end, surmounted by a carved, coloured chimney-piece.
Violet and the Baroness von Minden.
BARONESS
Child, have you seen the ducklings fastened in,
And all the chickens roosted for the night?
There's a plank going in our hen-house door,
And more's the pity. Somewhen, an' God please,
It shall be patched. Remember, how the foxes
Gnawed at it all last winter, yet it baulked them,
Though, as they bit, their wicked mouths, I'll swear,
Ran water at the cackle of our hens,
Safe, yet so near their noses. Well, well, well,
Who can outwit these hill-thieves very long?
Some night—I know it—in what you call your dreams,
You'll leave the door agape. Up swims the moon,
Lights the red gentry in, and, ere day springs,
My office will be this, to wring my hands,
And stare at empty coops. Nay, girl, go to—
I've dreamt it more than once!

VIOLET
Saints mend thy rest!
That was a grievous dreaming—all came home,
Chickens and ducks, damsels and grandmothers,
These cooped securely, those well castled in:
Robber or fox will take no bite at either
For this one night, content thee!

BARONESS
Malcontent
I be, who hear such ominous rash jesting.
To boast of safety beckons woe to come,
And with misfortune wings to-morrow's heels.

VIOLET
Fast bind, I say, fast find! Let omens rest.
Young hearts ignore foreboding superstitions.
To-night my heart is lighter than a bee's
And full of honey. God is good and smiles:
And not a leaf rosette in all our mead,
But promises a silver-rosy daisy
Soon to arrive—in the new spring, ay, spring!
The word will set me dancing by itself,
Kiss in the ring my daisies then will play!

BARONESS
I heed them not, they serve no kitchen use,
Or medicinal purpose. Now your burdock
Is good, your comfrey good. But we have wandered:
I ask you, are the poultry safe? You tell me,
The daisies wax. Lean profit in that news.

VIOLET
The hens are in their dungeon all secure,
The ducks in fortress good of lath and wire.
I turned the key and guard it, castellain,
On the whole brood of velvety sixteen,
The twice eight yellowish daughters of the pond.
And, long ere this, their white-rimmed eye-beads black
Are veiled in sleep. Round are their pretty eyes,
Rounder than mine, which are more looped and long;
Unlashed their lids. Pity, no more broke shell;
An addled egg the less had made my age.

BARONESS
That's childish talk. You had better take your wheel
Than make such silly computations out.
Come, close the shutters, bring the candlesticks.
The night draws in with auguries of storm
And rainy promise. When I see the crag
Of the great worm without my glasses plainly,
Then say I to our foresters, ‘Bide in
Unless you be fleeced as a wether is
At eve of shearing.’ He who treads abroad
To-night will bring his back and shoulders home,
Soaking and smoking like a cottage thatch.

VIOLET
Alas, for homeless wanderers in those woods.

BARONESS
All honest folk are housed: you pity thieves:
Such only lie afield on rainy nights.

VIOLET
Poor thieves, I pity them.

BARONESS
You are a baby;—
But thieves bring up our watch-dog: is he fed?

VIOLET
Suppered and sound asleep!

BARONESS
Up here in the clouds,
In this old keep with moss-encrusted face
And rain-eroded turrets, peeling grey,—
'Tis policy to treat our watch-dog well.
And yet I know not: he might wake the better,
If that we left him hungrier than we do.
For, sated now, he slumbers overmuch:
Yet in another view he is stronger fed,
And feeble empty. Compromise is best;
Therefore, let him be moderately mealed,
So will he guard us well.

VIOLET
He never caught
A robber yet, nor will he ever slay one.

BARONESS
Now Heaven forefend! Who wishes bandits caught?
Not I for one. He better knows his cue,
And has, or may have scared a many hence.
The saint he knows.

VIOLET
He is too old for fear.
The very chickens mock him round his trough,
And filch his bones away. The saints know this,
Or they know little!

BARONESS
How you catch me up:
You doubt the saints? What next, you heathen girl?
So far they have saved us well, you know it, you!
But not a nimbus more will shepherd us,
If you must fleer and sneer at hierarchies.
Who else have guarded these dismantled doors
In the great wood? Who else have turned aside
The fiend that walks in darkness? (A faint knocking is heard at the outer door.)


VIOLET
(laughing)
There he is!

BARONESS
Who, grand-daughter?

VIOLET
Why, Satan; plain it echoed,
His tapping finger.

BARONESS
Do not mock me, child,
For all my skin is shrivelled as in fear,
And underneath my coif the stubborn hair
Seems to uplift in wiry strands. What heard you?

VIOLET
I heard the blown leaf pattered in the wood;
I heard along the sea-ward fell a roar,
As of great larches hurtling in the gale:
And then the watch-dog gave a sort of moan,
Hardly a moan; but, if a hound could sigh,
I think ours did.

BARONESS
You are glad of Hubert now;
They named him from the saint of Foresters.
It was a pleasant fancy of your father's.
That hound is not much younger than yourself;
I know you just could toddle when he came.

VIOLET
Ah, my poor Hubert, kennelled in the cold
To watch for thieves: you do your best to guard us,
And that poor best is old and feeble-tongued;
But once you were as brave as the bare sword,
And so I will not laugh against your eld,
Which is my youth, my youth!

BARONESS
He's purely bred:
We had him from the kennels of the king,
A tawny mastiff of the royal strain;
Thy sweet sire begged the whelp,—God rest his soul—
A good dog, why of need a right good hound,
Kings are too wise to harbour useless curs.

VIOLET
Then kings are wise. All of them, grandmother?

BARONESS
Wise of necessity: I think no treason.
The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no king—
Who is not also foolish, as I be.’
That's flat rebellion, brother sin to witchcraft.

VIOLET
Then, being wise, must kings be also good,
And, if good, very good or rather so?

BARONESS
You tease me like a brisk recurrent midge!
The king is wise and good. No one is bad
But very foolish people.

VIOLET
Grandmother,
I think I should so like to see a king.

BARONESS
Why, bless the girl, you'll want to see the moon
Walk, like a lady in a satin gown,
Up yonder staircase next. You want and want,
And seem to me to live in one great dreaming.
You move about wide-eyed yet half-asleep;
And, as for freaks and whims, your garnet beads
Are less in number than your airy wishes,
The last of which is merely for a king:
A king indeed! Are you a baby still:
Do you suppose a king would notice you?
Or waste a second of his royal glances
On such a little wood-girl, mean and grey?
He has great ladies, very fair and tall,
Who wrap themselves in crimson, and who share
The love-glance in his eye.

VIOLET
Besides the queen?

BARONESS
Hem! I have heard so—

VIOLET
Then the king does wrong.
No king of mine would do so.

BARONESS
King of thine!
Hast spoken with one dreaming?

VIOLET
Ah, no, no.
That would spoil all. He must not even speak.
My dream king never does, nor moves his eyes,
More than his brother in the picture-book;
Who sits upon his steed, full-crowned, and glares
In a grand kind of dumbness and disdain,—
For so my lord of vision must ride by,
Slow-musing, like a god who builds a world;
And from his shoulder in the beam behind
Shall float a grass-green mantle, like a wave
Washed in with rainbow. But his doublet vest
Must be an apple-rose, and clothe him round
In sheeny closeness, as a serpent's skin.
And his great war-horse shall be overlaid
With tags and twists of shine, and proudly tread.
He shall be dappled over, russet-red,
And, like the mountain-strawberry in hue,
Shall be his sinuous flanks; and such a mane
I'll give him, that shall rustle, as a sail
Dishevelled, when the wind goes thwart the field,
And turns it back on his rider, like grey foam.
My king must be a little stern i'th' face,
Yet with the mildness of a weird repose
That under-beautifies the sterner man.
He'll look as one prevailing and to prevail,
Yet with the heed of many coming fields
To keep him sad and lovely. His sweet high glance,
Whose fury no man living may abide,
Shall change to dove-like dream its eagle fire,
As, musing on his battles, in a turn
Of the bare April wood, the sudden form
Of the daffodil, borne on his vision, bends
His thought behind him back to that sweet queen,
He loves so well at home; and then his eyes
Burn, as wells catching first the morning sun.

BARONESS
And so, being dreamed about, this king of air
Is done with, and we waken.

VIOLET
Grandmother,
This was not quite a dream. I saw a knight
Just ere the owlet gloom, when windy rain
Came up the vale and crows went high in heaven
Whirling and waving, prophesying storm,
And the great burdock leaves began to flag;
So with the other wood-birds I came home,
And passed of need, then black in low flared sun,
The ruined chapel of our ancestors.
I love to muse within its chancel, bare
To ether now, a waste of grass and graves:
In all our hills there is no holier place,
No stiller; and this eve I entered in
To strew some crocus o'er my father's tomb,
And brush its letters. For a second I saw
Nothing—so blindingly the level rays
Beat through an ivy-rift of creviced wall,
And gave black leaves and myriad-threaded fire
Full at my face—Another instant went,
And, as it seemed, the sunset opened out
Its fanning rays; and, in their core, behold,
A knight, a phantom; still as death he stood
On graves and never saw me, for his eyes
Were seaward, measuring the expanse of woods.
I thought he might have slipped out of a tomb,
For there is no live man so goodly as he
Here, where the men are goat-herds, none sustain
So graciously their raiment, and none seem
To make their presence master of the ground
That bears them up. Assuredly, said I,
This is a shadow of the ancient dead
Signed with the beauty of the realms of sleep—
O, terrible, to meet his turning eyes—
And at a bound I fled. But, half way home,
I thought, I will return, he surely breathes,
Creep will I, touch his mantle with my hand,
And, if it melt between my fingers, whisper—
‘Depart in peace, thou beautiful dead man,
Forgive and do not hurt me!’ Some few steps
I did retrace, but the poor heart in me
Died out and sighed, ‘I dare not!’

BARONESS
On my soul,
Here be a tale indeed! You think of creeping
To touch and try the substance of a ghost.
Why, it had blasted to its root your arm;
Or struck you blind, or scorched off half that hair,
We hear so much about, with sulphur-breath.
You did not dare! By Paul, you dared enough,
And wisely gathered up your skirts and ran.
This was a ghost for certain—or a thief—
Nay, ghost, not thief, for robbers haunt not graves,
And so we tell this blossom by its soil.

VIOLET
Where do ghosts grow?

BARONESS
They breed in charnel flags,
And hatch in musty shrouds.

VIOLET
Who lays their eggs?

BARONESS
The old bronze serpent, king of worms and flies,
Who sits inside the bloodred heart o'th' earth,
As a leech in the liver of a sheep,
As a grey maggot nestled in a nut,
Or an old frog whom miners find in rock.
These spirits are his spawn, a motley brood
Of many names and natures: brown as bees,
Or shag-haired as black lurchers, or transpicuous
As amber—one and all accursed of God,
Crickets, who sing beside hell's furnace mouth—
Ah, silly girl, why make me speak of them?
A wild bad night to hold discourse on fiends:
For, when the world shakes up its cloud and wind,
They in such brewage swarm.

VIOLET
Ah, the wild rain,
Hear how it crashes through the woods, and heaves
Urns of great waters with a wasteful hand
To deluge all the gloom. Beneath its lash
The white plain of the immeasurable night
Tingles and smokes and rattles like a board.
The storm-sheet seems one scream of broken woods.

BARONESS
Come from the window: I ne'er saw the clouds
Ride out the moon and race her bright again
At such rash speed.

VIOLET
There gleams the chapel-gate;
Are the graves ever weary of their dead?
They might be on such a night. A grand rough night
For some old phantom horseman to ascend,
And mingle himself with elemental hail,
And stride the bellowing rack.

BARONESS
Peace, prattler, peace—
A terror twinges through my brow and palms—
Hear you that strange and grinding echo? Once,
Twice, and again!

VIOLET
It is the torn-off boughs,
Which the wind blows like feathers down the night,
And some against our gateway.

BARONESS
Are these boughs?
God! And the walls are heaving under them,
And with a crash our door falls inwards! Child,
This is the end and death!

[Conrad bursts in his way through the oak door, which drops into the hall with a loud crash. He is dressed as a hunter.
VIOLET
(hurriedly)
See, mother, see;
The ghost, the ghost of the chapel!

[Conrad advances slowly, both ladies fall on their knees.
BARONESS
(sobbing)
Spare our lives,
Sir Robber; we are weak and women merely:
Alone in the great storm with one old dog,
Who cannot hear thee, he is deaf and sleepy,
And we have no one else to guard us here.
Two lonely women in a forest lodge,
A place quite poor and ruinously old:
We have no coin and very little gear,
A trinket—one or two; a silver mug,
An ear-ring, and a salver—nothing else.
All these are freely thine: search, and possess,
And go thy way rejoicing. I am sorry,
Ours is such paltry plunder!

VIOLET
(slowly taking out her ear-rings)
So we part,
Poor little ear-rings, which my mother wore,
When first my father saw her: both are dead:
Sir Robber, you are welcome.

BARONESS
(volubly)
There is more:
Certainly more. This were a stinted all.
There's more to come, heavy and solid, sir,
Ay and indeed. O, I can hunt out more;
But you will spare our lives?

CONRAD
(smiling)
Most freely; give me
A moment, lady, of silence—

BARONESS
Nay, but swear!
Swear instantly upon Saint Mercury,
Or any other saint who loved your guild—
An oath, an oath I need—

CONRAD
Most worthy lady,
If I continued to delude your fears,
I were indeed that caitiff at his worst
In whose most craven shoes and dastard deed
I stand misread: no robber, but a knight
In a strange maze of tangled mountain-road
Belated, at your gate I wound my horn.
I called, none stirred: I knocked, no answering step.
Wild crashed the woods: and, in the pelting roar,
My voice came as the buzz of some drenched fly
Beating a window-pane with feeble wing.
Last, in despair, for cruel ran the rain,
I tried conclusions with your good oak door
And basely broke him. For his timber heart
Had provendered the worm ere I was child,
And all the staples of his sides were gone;
And half his nails were rust and could not bite—
So in I drave and crave to be forgiven.

VIOLET
Right merrily we pardon so reprieved:
I be an ear-ring richer!

BARONESS
Nay, come in,
Come in and dry thee, man, and sit thee down.
I had talked so long of robbers with this child,
And the night rocks my aged brain so hard,
That I ran mad on felons.

VIOLET
Will the knight
Come to the blaze?

CONRAD
(aside)
This child is beautiful
As a song heard in moonlight. Can such flowers
Grow under mouldy turrets?

BARONESS
Where be I?—
Nay, but sit down—You have made me breathless, sir,
And set my fingers trembling: my old heart
Doth rarely race along: now think of this!
I held you for a robber. Violet, quick,
Take the knight's cloak and wring the raindrops out—
You will be from the city, I expect.

CONRAD
(as Violet takes the cloak)
My child, fair thanks.

VIOLET
Sir, I am turned seventeen.

CONRAD
Then let my thanks, misrendered to the child,
Kneel at the lady's feet. Ah, little one,
Wait till you reach my milestone in the hedge,
And you will be less out of love with childhood.
Why hurry in your hood of innocent red
To that grey wolf, old age?

VIOLET
Sir, I am told
To sit and spin here very quietly,
To sit and sew here very peacefully,
And thus I do; till, once or twice a year,
A hint comes through our door of a great world,
With real men and women moving in it:
Who have at least a substance in their sorrow.
But when I grieve, I grieve here like a ghost
At shadowy chances of another planet,
Wherein I lived: ere, dying, I revived
From death-birth on this continent of sadness.

BARONESS
Regard her not: she chatters like a jay,
And shifts her topic as he shifts his tree;
Says a few notes on this, half hops, half flies
Into the next behind it; and so on
Through the whole coppice wanderingly shrill.
That's Violet: you'll excuse her, good sir knight—
A child, an evident child. She will discourse you
Quaintly enough, if you've a mind to hear.
I let her chirp away and spoil her so.
She lives under the leaves in solitude,
And talks to move her tongue, as a child dances
For motion merely. In this nest of crows
A maiden's lips might grow almost together,
Or gather moss of silence on their rims
For want of use. But, sir, your city dames
Encounter rosy days, turn in the sun
And mellow on the orchard-wall of change.
They hear of kings and queens, and what these wear,
And how the world rolls and the kingdoms grow.
Think, Violet, think, this gentleman comes here
From the great city, stranger than your dreams—
Has seen the palace and may be a courtier—
You serve the King, sir knight?

CONRAD
I serve him well.
None better in the realm. Farewell rebellion,
Were I his only subject.

BARONESS
(aside to Violet)
Heard you that?
This is a plain and loyal-honest man,
We well may trust him. What he makes in the woods,
And why he takes this thunder-broken night
Of all the good dry days to wander in,
Time and his talk may teach us. But he's honest,
Upon my wedding ring. There is a shadow
Of some one in his face whom I have seen.
And now his cloak is gone, his clothes are good
And richly guarded: robber? No such thing!
You heard how sweet the King's name on his tongue
Turned as a plum of sugar; now your thief,
Your caitiff thief, give him a king to chew,
Will spit and sputter; as a baby wries
Its mouthlet at the falsely-bitter breast
On weaning day: or, worse, will choke and heave
And nearly burst with naming the great name,
As some foul imp out of the sulphur land,
Who has sucked in holy water unawares.
But this our stranger cries, ‘The King for me,
I love the King.’ Each of us heard him plain.
This man is honest—hungry too I fear;
And I must search our empty larder shelves
To conjure up some supper for his dearth.
O conjuration hard! Had he but come
Last Candlemas, when our old sow was slain;
Then had our store been level to his need.
But now, child, now, how shall this supper be?
We keep no jointed sheep for garrisons;
Who could have dreamed this soldier must arrive?
There may be found a radish or an egg—
The Lord he knows—there may be. Hence I sail
To gather up and patch into a meal
The orts of famine. Sighs ne'er fed a cow
Or promises of pasture grass a sheep:
So I will up and forage in our pans.
But you must with this hunger of a knight
Remain; entreat him fair, yet heed him well
Out of the corner of a watchful eye:
One never knows: this supper! There's the rub!

[The Baroness goes out.
CONRAD
She goes with gathered brow and anxious mien:
My coming clearly vexes. I intrude
Upon the gentle concord of your lives.
As a wrong note, quite out of time and tune,
I enter, snap the song and leave you discords—
Divulge, O maiden, frankly: is it so?
That trouble soon is mended. I discern,
Methinks, a lighter accent in the rain:
I can depart. Would I had never come
To mar my welcome with a gloomy face
And clownish ingress!

VIOLET
Nay, you shall not go.
I would not send my dog into the woods.
On half so bad a night I would not turn
An adder out of doors to wade among
The sheets of drenching grass. No, stay you must!

CONRAD
Why did our hostess press her forehead, sigh
A fathom deep; and, piteously upraising
Her heavenward palms, so part?

VIOLET
This gestured grief
Is wider than the woe which gave it action.
The choir of nuns, whose gates you overthrew
As very Samson, is a fasting order;
Seven days a week we shed no blood to dine;
Our larder proves that this especial night
Is meagrely remembered in our calendar:
So our good abbess parted, wringing hands,
Because a guest, tossed in by rainy Jove
Upon our abstinence—a guest withal
New from the lavish tables of the great—
Must learn to live, as crickets do, on fire:
For we have logs, and logs, to dry a man,
But wood he cannot eat. Sir, you must dine
On stores as slender as the shrew-mouse saves
When days draw in. Sir, you will banquet here
Much as the squirrel fares, on mast of beech,
And musty acorns, and deaf hazel-nuts.
Sir, you will go most leanly supped to bed;
This indexes my grandam's face with woe—
Say not I told you, when she comes again!

CONRAD
That trouble will not bruise a may-fly's wing,
Or beat a bee's mouth from one rose's breast;
So, let us smile again; dispreading palms
Out at the comfortable heat, we bask
Secure of that rough fortune overhead.

VIOLET
Were faggots gold we should be rich indeed;
But, to recount our possible supplies,
Bread there must be and milk there often is,
And these combined are bread and milk; and then
We cross into the region of ‘may be,’
And there, I think, our tower of famine stands.

CONRAD
I shall not famish—pass that out of mind—
And so my little hostess is eighteen:
And, since her eyes are deeper than the sea,
And since the under-red of her attire
Breaks in blue shadows as the twilight wave,—
They could not call her any other name
Than Violet, and so she Violet is:
With what addition, pansy of the woods?

VIOLET
Von Minden.

CONRAD
Ah! (A pause.)
One Albrecht of that name
Fell—let me see—at Arnheim in the breach—
Ten years ago he died: I mind him well:
A tall, bush-bearded fellow with soft eyes,
And forward-hanging tufts of tawny hair.

VIOLET
(eagerly)
O tell me; then you knew him, tell me all!

CONRAD
I knew him none: yet did I note the man
Enough to tax his comrades for his name—
I think he died at Arnheim.

VIOLET
Nay, I know it,
Assuredly he did; in Arnheim's field
He made his ending as a soldier should.
On their crossed spears they bore him from the fight,
And laid him yonder at the oriel side
In the full tremor of the sunbeam, pale
And yet so noble. Then we decked his bier,
And on a velvet pillow set his face,
Fringed round with myrtle branches full of fruit;
Whose orange globes mixed with his amber hair.
And we put rosemary and cypress on,
And southernwood, and those small fluffy blooms,
Hop-headed, which we name flower of the dead.

CONRAD
This was thy father?

ADELHEID
Ay, my father, slain,
Gone to the greedy grave beyond the reach
Of all my orphan kisses: gone, quite gone!
I would not be a soldier for the world,
And yet I think I never could be wooed
Save by a soldier; I should loathe a knave,
Who heard the clarion pealing battlewards,
And pulled the blanket to his ears and slept!

CONRAD
These were thy halls, Von Minden; this thy child!
Well, it comes strangely round.

VIOLET
Most weird of all,
Your foot was on his grave at sunset, sir.

CONRAD
You saw me in the chapel?

VIOLET
That I did,
And stole away.

CONRAD
(aside, as he paces up and down the hall)
Von Minden buried there!
My land, it seems, is crowded with the slain,
Whom I have led to Lethe. May I not plant
A foot down without stamping in the face
One of the victims of that chariot's wheels
Which bore me on to glory? (Aloud.)
Gentle girl,
Forgive me, that your eyes are sorrow-dim
And almost rainy. Let my careless word
Effuse no further dew-drop. Weep the shamed,
Weep not the honoured dead. For some die well,
And some descend to shameful sepulchres:
Bewail the last alone. Number not him,
Who was your father, in the branded band
Of the disgraceful dead. Ah no, he went
An honourable soldier into rest,
Unstained and full of glory. The grey sleep
Of the happy dead laughs at our turmoil here!
Why, you are moved?—

VIOLET
To one mere drop of rain,
With a fair sunbeam winning through its mist,
To hear his comrade laud the absent host.
I live outside the rumour of the world,
So far beyond its noises and its way,
I never heard my father's praise before.
And you, the consort of his peril, speak
With worthier lips than others. At his side
The same death-edge, that mowed him, grazed your cheek,
And, passing, sheared him full across the stem.
Ah, you have right to praise him: you were there?
I know you fought at Arnheim. Who so mean
To bide indoors that day? Traitors and fools!
You were at Arnheim, sir?

CONRAD
By sworded Mars,
Was Marathon without Miltiades?
Did Fontarabia never feel the edge
Of doom-dark Roland in its lurid glens
Stained with the veins of kings of tournament?—
Peace! (Aside.)
I had half-forgotten, that I play
The hunter in a wood-lodge. Let my speech
Be one in grain with this my masking garb;
Shall I unfrock my kingship to this girl
With blaring out my battles? (Aloud.)
Ay, my child,
I simply was at Arnheim.

VIOLET
That I knew;
And I revere the humblest vineyard knave,
Who trod the vintage out on those red plains!
And saw you Conrad, our head sickleman,
Put edge among those living clusters, smite
With weaponed palm?

CONRAD
I saw that reaper's hand,
His face I could not see.

VIOLET
O, pity of that!
I should have asked you, how he looked: what brow,
Pallid or flushed? Was his eye rolled in anger,
Or steadfast in disdain? You cannot tell me?

CONRAD
I was the most unlikely combatant
During that onset to behold our king.
I know his favour but at second-hand— (Aside.)

They say, King Otho of the Romans took
A mirror into battle.

VIOLET
I would give
My necklace—nearly—for one peep at Conrad:
But I may wish, and wear into a voice
Wishing! What is he like?

CONRAD
Like other clay,
Unless you set him on his crown; a proof
That metal makes the king.

VIOLET
Nay, you deride me:
But I would see this captain of my father,
If only in gratitude.

CONRAD
Mis-grateful child,
Von Minden gat lean kindness of this king,
And dusty favour readily returned;
His present was a shovel and some mould:
Conrad has given to many such a gift:
To death he led him: thither kings lead men.

VIOLET
I love the King: he shall not be maligned.

CONRAD
If he could see that fairy flushing face,
The King would kiss his pretty championess,
And love her back again.

VIOLET
I shall have done
The last of all my blushes in my shroud,
Ere I shall gain great Conrad's commendation.

CONRAD
In the world-play there's an odd scene-shifter,
Some call him Destiny, and others Chance:
He pushes antic transmutations on;
A wood becomes a palace, and a temple
Becomes a stye.

VIOLET
And what is this to me?
Who sit i'th' street, and only see the awning
Of this great acting-booth.

CONRAD
Strange passions tread
Those stainèd boards. Bless thy exclusion, child;
The sawdust of the scaffold, and the torture
Which leaves a man mazed in an iron cell,
And tears his reason from him into rags
And leaves him mindless, as a waxen image,
To drivel and rock his chain: all, all such shows
Are here enacted; and, by Heaven, they are
Most naturally given.

VIOLET
Ah, terrible!
Tell me no more. I will stay here forever;
I wish to see no king. The green-wood way
Is the best, the lonely best. I will lie down
And die among my daisies; one or two
Field buds will fill their cups with sorrow near me;
And I shall be wrinkled and shrivelled up,
And quite, quite grey with seams upon my face,
And curious knotted hands, when this same King
May ride by once at last, and say, ‘What's here,
This lagging leaf of blear humanity,
Can women be so old?’

CONRAD
When I return,
I'll saddle Conrad's horse and hale him here
To cheat this piteous picture.

VIOLET
You shall get
Two kisses—if you bring him—Let the jest
Endure—I say—two kisses—

CONRAD
They are won.

VIOLET
How shall I know him?

CONRAD
(throwing back his doublet)
By this medal, child,
Which, in the twisted gold of my knight's collar,
Swings as a central badge: it will unclasp,
And you shall have it—nay, you shall—'tis yours.
Wear it in resting and in rising up
At your fair breast. Who knows, but as a charm,
Or amulet by eldish wizard blessed,
It may draw Conrad hither. There's his profile:
You'll know him now?

VIOLET
Right certainly I must.
(A pause, then with surprise
Why, this resembles thee!

CONRAD
So many say.

VIOLET
But you are older.

CONRAD
You are right again:
Certainly older than this likeness is.

VIOLET
May not his knights, who serve around our king,
By imitation of his princely air,
Conform their feature after his great mould,
By watching sun or thunder on his brow
Evolving in alternate majesty?
For, down the scale, assimilation holds,
In instances of yearlong servitudes,
Where old grey menials liken old grey masters.

CONRAD
'Tis well explained: a very fair solution!
I soon shall twin my master, as a trout
Takes colour from the gravel and the weed
He over-sails.

VIOLET
This king looks rather cruel.

CONRAD
He has been called so often.

VIOLET
Is he so?

CONRAD
One choice have kings—to slaughter or be slain.
He takes the wiser: is that cruel, child?

VIOLET
Are there such plots and pitfalls in his way?

CONRAD
I've seen a man ride in a darkened field
Where rabbits burrow. At each second pace
Down went his mare in spite of tightened rein,
And, once or twice, her pastern almost snapt.
An hour among those perforated lands
Only abridged a furlong of his way—
That's Conrad in his kingdom!

VIOLET
Out, alas,
And yet it seemed so grand and over-blest
To be a great wise king and wear red gold,
And wed a queen, as excellent as summer,
And spangled with magnificence. Though stars
Apparel her, she must lie many nights
Wakeful in beating fear. I see the great
'Twixt fear and fear wear out a stormy day.
I feel she fears for him and he fears back:
Lest, being slain, he leave her desolate
And heiress of a wide unmargined sorrow.
I pour my pity, through vast intervals
And from a long great way, on each of them,
On her the most! Retired humility
Is sorry for exaltedness in sorrow.
Poor careworn soul miscrowned with iron thorns,
Poor wakeful face misfeatured with long fear:
I hear she is no longer beautiful:
But she was lovely years and years ago;
Ah, yes, I know she was. Tell me the measure
Of her once fairness.

CONRAD
Child, she was right fair—
(He continues abruptly)
And in her fairness let that queen remain.
Leave her at least her sorrow to herself;
Our idle talk concerns her nothing—

VIOLET
Pardon,—
I have offended you?

CONRAD
Nay, nay, my girl;
You cannot reason how the tide erodes
A shore you have not seen. You mean no harm,
But talk beyond your vision.

[Conrad rises and moodily paces the hall.
VIOLET
(aside, timidly)
He reproves me—
My grandmother is long and her delay
Augurs not plenty. He will get no supper,
And so wax crosser still.

CONRAD
(halting before the coloured and embossed chimney-piece)
What have we here;
Fables in wood? Figures in allegory
Crowning the hearth? 'Tis quaint this sculptured text,
For him who warms to read. Lend me the key
Of all this coloured triumph, hares and hounds:
Lucrece and Cleopatra: each i'th' act
Of letting the red passionate life away,
She with a point, she with a brace of vipers:
'Tis pitiful to see them stare and do it.

VIOLET
Old is the carving, and its meaning died
And perished with the dusty-fingered clay,
Which cut its cunning riddles out in oak,
And left posterity to answer them,
Here on the screen above the spacious hearth,
Fronting the feasters—for they feasted once
In merry olden days, where you, sir, sit
And starve in this shrunk present beggar-faced—
And every banquet saw the figured wall,
But found no Daniel to declare its drift.
And, if these letters meant divided glory,
Glory at eve to go and ne'er refound,—
Well they prefigured this worn castle's fate,
Our empty hall, our family all dead,
And this last girl, who racks her shallow brains
With guessing the inscrutable.

CONRAD
But give me
Your guesses.

VIOLET
They are woven out of smoke
And built against a sunbeam, strange as childhood,
Fantastic as the colours on a gourd;—
Yet hear them, if you will. But, pray, remember
That solitude will coin the very air
For company; and think—ere you deride—
That, lonely as some spider of the dew,
I made the rays of every flimsy dream
Converge into one centre whence I spun,
An egotist Arachne, right and left,
My threaded universe; alone in morning,
I spread my laddered gossamer and caught
This point of leaf, this rock-jut, this sedge feather;
And, having bridged my space-gulf to the three,
So that my dream might cross and come again
With ease, as dew-drops down the trembling threads—
I cried, I am the leaf, the rock, the sedge,
The universe is compact of us four
And we are one. Beyond us Chaos sits,
And the abyss, brinked with unsounded shores,
Succeeds. My contact bounds the scheme of things,
The world extends to my rope end: no more—
You smile?

CONRAD
I smile not: give me more; explain
This mystic carving, apex of the screen,
Roofing the storied interludes beneath,
Dogs, dog-sized hares, and moribund great queens;—
Declare this emblem. Here's a naked child
Recumbent with an hour-glass in its hand,
And the sand-cups are winged as Hermes' heels:
While a great human-faced profile of sun
Rays in athwart the infant on its bed.

VIOLET
Then thus—The child begins it. Her I made
Clearly myself—I had none else to make her—
An orphan in a wilderness of briers
Naked and bare of any human love:
Her fleet-winged hours are plumed with restless flight,
Because they find no pinnacle of hope
Or incident of joy, whereon to poize
And bring down weary feet to clasp against
In ease and satisfied repose. That part
Of the image clearly runs, the sequel thickens.
For this child's arms and face and feet are moulded,
So as to seem equivocally posed
Between a slumber and a waking fit,
Not soundly sleeping, neither broadly awake;
And so the artist drew her eyelids wide,
Yet wrought such slumber through and through her limbs,
And gave them attitude: as when a nymph
Lies down effused with ebbing passion, ere
Eyes go together, chained upon her couch
With fiery lethargies and lazy sweetness,
Seen in the flaccid arm-bend; as she sways
Without a will to strengthen her drooped sides,
And break beyond the precincts of her swoon,
And taste the rough world's edge against her feet,
Chill as the steely east-wind—So, until—
Until—

CONRAD
I listen. Do not break the lute
In the middle of the music.

VIOLET
Ah, but the end
Is very foolish, though the rest indeed
Was a long way from wisdom. Will you promise
Not to laugh much?

CONRAD
Sweet, I would rather weep,
So pitiful it is to see a child
That always plays alone.

VIOLET
My fear is past
To hear this spoken: I can tell you now:
Well, I believe this child will dream and doze,
And hold the feathered hour-glass through it all,
Until—I broke there—whisper me—the sun,
Who is the king of shadows, suddenwise
Looks in upon her sleepy day and drives
Her shadows dead before his tingling beams—
Meaning—for I have worked this rigmarole
In circuit round again to our old jest—
That a king comes some day to love this child—
For, since mere phantoms bear her company,
It costs no more to build a king of air
Than shape a clown of vapour!

[Violet sinks back in her seat, and covers her eyes. Conrad rises and paces perturbedly up and down.
CONRAD
(aside)
God, my God!
Are we then flies upon the wheel of Fate,
Whirled on in blindness where the driver lists?
We cannot say, ‘Where goëst thou?’ Her face
Is muffled; and one lean and wrinkled arm
Protrudes, yearns forward, shaking out the reins;
And from the grey recesses of her cowl,
Drawn close, there croons a gibbering undersong
Savage and hideous; as she wags her head
To the metre of the madding hoofs, and sings
To urge her vivid coursers foam-besprent,
And give their wide and gasping nostrils air,
And hearten their glazed eye-balls. On—on—on—
There is a thread of blood set up in heaven
Over a hive-like row of burning kilns,
And a mad wind-mill, with one broken prong,
Ploughs round in night and hisses, gaunt and sere;
On these, it seems, that we are straining straight;
And, as we batter through, the hedges crunch,
And flint-beds churn out fire-sparks in our wake;—
On we go. Where? My God, how should I ken?
The driver, ay, the driver, ask her plan!

VIOLET
(timidly)
Sir, you are pale, and tremble and speak low;
Have I offended in my tale?

CONRAD
Forbear me—
I have an ague-fit: 'twill quickly pass.
'Tis an old ache that lives among my bones.
I caught him camping out. In rain he wakens
And chatters at my teeth. Naught—naught, I tell thee!

VIOLET
Let me run out and fetch my grandmother:
She knows all herbs, their secret surgery,
And how in many a trampled weed resides
Drugs to becalm the blood-beat of a man,
And give wild fever eyelids. She will find
A leechdom for this ague.
[Exit Violet.

CONRAD
Curse of blood!
We spill you and we push you fathoms down,
And tread the clods against you and the turf,
Saying, it is forgotten, let us turn
To easeful sleep: no eye the buried sees:
And in the morning on our very doors
The deed is daubed in red, for all who pass
To gape upon and read. I blindly said,
The branch of this impenetrable wood
Shall cheat the curse, which, as a blood-dog, quests
Each footprint of my onwards. Hare-like, here
I squeeze inside a form of tussock grass
And fancy I am lost, as is a needle
Dropped in a river. Am I not secure,
As if the foam were rolled above my head,
Under this sea of leafage ridged in storm?
Here I can close my evil as in a cup
And sit beneath the lid in safety, hearing
No baying retribution on my track:
Which roams my vacant palace like a hound
Snuffing the corners for his absent lord.
I have slipped him: that is well: I'll take my ease,
And seem a kindly man with kindly folk:
Talk an hour, chink our glass, laugh on the news,
Meaning no harm, shake hands, and pass away,
Braced with an interval of innocence,
Blessed by the eld in going,—when, lo, here
In the great waste of wintry woodland, here
In the tree-desert, miles and miles inside it
Belated, masked, disguised—at my right hand
Pat, through a rift i'th' flooring, up it springs
My old Curse; feels me safe, and, nodding gleeful,
Whispers, ‘My spirit's brother, I am here,
Bone of thy bone and sinew of thy flesh,
Sun of thy gloom and shadow of thy joy:
Our elements inseparably fused
Bind us together; parcel am I and part
In the rills of thy blood, in the bundles of thy brain,
In the craft of thy hands, in the lusting of thine eyes,—
One, till the end shall lead us down together
In one grey shroud. Fool, thou shalt leave behind
Thy entrails sooner than thy Curse. I follow,
And where thou goest I bind thee to this doom—
To bring contagion over innocence,
Harm over all, and on thyself despair.’
For, as monks say, God passes everywhere,
In the sea-deeps, in the star-deeps, in the void:
Yet still, behind the footprints of its power,
His omnipresent form projects a shade,
Which shadow has a name more used than God's.
So God proceeds no inch beyond the fiend,
And his fiend goes no further inch than God,
And either sails to the last abysmal star,
And either furls his wing upon one shoal
Bounding immensity.

[Re-enter Violet.
VIOLET
(coming gently up behind Conrad)
I will stand by;
Wild are his eyes, I dare not speak to him,
And these strange craggy words and fulgurous murmurs
Wreck him like rocks, rive him like levin blasts—
I will mark him further—

CONRAD
(aside)
Peace, dark angel, peace:
Ghost of the dead grim Raban, rest in thy earth,
Rest; in my curse thy sullen feature lives,
And is as thou wert: yet not wholly thou,
But some strange welding from another sphere,
Darker and deeper, is wrought upon thy face;
And there's a wistful pity about the eyes
Thine never harboured in their living orbs.
I know thou gavest me my careful crown,
I know thou wast my friend as friends go here,
And in return I gave thee bitter earth
To chew between thy lips. Why must thou take
The innocent mist off some sweet meadow's face,
Or burnished vapour of fair fountain-heads,
To wrap thy sides corrupted? Darest reprove me,
Who in thy day of flesh did worse than I?
Tempt me no more. Thou seëst my will is free:
The lion may degrade into the wolf,
Into the serpent he can ne'er descend.
My guilt has ever gone most lion-like,
Not sneaking on its belly as did thine.
The strong, the fierce, the mighty were my game,
And the weak plaintive innocence of girls
Passed safely through the trammels of my toils.
I need a smack of thy maliciousness—
Which ruined lurcher-like for ruin merely—
To play this part with relish. Brace the will;
I am free! This girl is lovely as the tint
Which wakens in the yet uncoloured rosebud,
When its faint pursed-up petals loosen out
And catch the tinge of its expanded sisters,
Who see the morn and draw its burnish in.
She is too beautiful to be destroyed
By serpent sibilation, this poor Eve
In her wood paradise! Her dream-stuff life
Makes her thrice vulnerably innocent:
And my great office simply reverenced
Would flash upon her as a beam of hell,
Which she'd mistake for day; and open her arms
And bosom to the smile of God, heaven-rolled,
And kiss him, as a flower may kiss the sun-ray,
In virgin adoration. Base, most base
To stain her in the mire of such a passion,
As my pre-occupied consorted life
Hath only room to render. I have conquered:
I have pinned this fiend's head quivering to the ground.
My heel grinds in the wicked beating eyes:
I am resolute to go. Come, roaring night,
I fling myself into your great sweet waters;
Purge me with storm, cleanse me with hurricane,
Wash me in lustral waves—I win—I am gone!

[As Conrad is rushing out, Violet comes forward and interposes.
VIOLET
You rush upon your death: you shall not go.
Hear, how the woods snap like a bed of reeds
Wherein a tiger tramples. You cannot count
Three between flash and flash.

CONRAD
My child, my child,
You would detain destruction. Loose your hands,
Your pure and pitying hands, that pluck back Cain,
That strain back Belial, that would save dry-hided
Some cattle-minded faun, fit occupant
For the rough brakes and rain-dishevelled glens;—
O, listen,—on your beautiful pale life
That makes your listening eyes so wonderful,—
O, hear me, and obey me. Child of the flower,
If I remained I certainly should love you;
They know that up in heaven. And they know this,
That it were kinder office to reach hand
And smite you, as you are, the end and sum
Of paradisal sweetness ever impressed
On woman's limb, face, bosom,—smite you dead,
Rather than bring my desecrated love
To crawl upon the shrine, which is your heart,
Like a toad spotted. This wild swamp of night,
Strewn as with crags of torn and weeping cloud,
Brothers right well my soul: I'll out in him— (A pause.

Sweet, I am speckled so and patched with evil,
That, if an angel came to comfort me,
She would arise with gore-bedrabbled plumes
Re-entering heaven a portent and a shame,
Horrible from my contact—Weep, ay, weep,—
Weep and farewell: ah, pure white hand, good-bye.
It is because I love you that I go.

VIOLET
I cannot see you going through my tears:
Stay till they stint, then go!

CONRAD
Nay, I will sink
Sun-like behind their dim and rainy veil.

VIOLET
Go then, and God be with thee!

[As Conrad is going out, the Baroness re-enters abruptly with a tray. Conrad pauses irresolutely in the broken door-way.
BARONESS
Ready at last! Fall on: come, eat, man, eat!
I bring no feast yet famine I can slay.
What, cloak on shoulder, hat-brim over brows!
The man is daft: worse moans the night than ever.
Be these your courtly ways, to crave repast,
And, on its readying, vanish?

CONRAD
(aside)
Miracle,
Angel of these lone woods, why will you watch me
Parting with such persuasion of soft tears?
Why will you draw me back with the corded iron
Of such a helpless sorrow? I am human;
What can I do? (Aloud to Violet.)
O darling, shall I stay?

VIOLET
I never bade you go.

BARONESS
There—say no more.
The good knight bides, he has no choice but biding.
Why should a man get brained with cracking pines?
Soldiers are none so plenty for the war,
That they should more unreasonably die,
Than shrew-mice laid on autumn woodland paths.
I draw your chair. Begin!

CONRAD
So let it be.
Fate conquers by one moving instant's gulf.
By the division of a hair, an eye-wink:
She entered—and I stay! A moment later,
Free as the storm, the woods had taken me.
God help us all, say I!

[They sit down to supper.

SCENE III.

The ruined chapel in the forest. An altar overgrown with weeds. A stone effigy of a recumbent warrior. In the background a half-fallen oriel window with gothic tracery. During the scene a sunset effect becomes visible over woods and mountains, on the horizon, through an ivied archway.
Conrad and Violet
CONRAD
Back to the windows of my soul's desire,
Back to the cote and lattice of my dove!

VIOLET
Thou steppest out of sunset: art thou here?

CONRAD
O cushat, on the cypress of my days
Who broodest, ringed with rainbow, in a clearing
Between two storms, the coming and the past,
Am I returned too soon?

VIOLET
My loneliness
Laughs, and my heart wakes up as at a bell:
Thou comest unto me as my soul's angel,
As dew to drought: I ne'er shall see ‘too soon’
Written across thy morion's frontlet bar.

CONRAD
When I departed golden words you lavished,
And their effect lived in one brief ‘I love you,’
Which crowned me ere I went. Came absence then,
Night's wearying gloom and morn's refreshing dew
Have had their turn to come, arriving each
With varied gift and fingers full of change.
And each have rearrayed the sprinkled flowers
About the gentle faces of the fields.
And each have rearranged the starry host
To sweep in newly-ordered onset round.
God knows, in all these mutabilities
My maiden may have caught a fickle tinge,
And turned her love away to roam the wild
An orphan and disowned!

VIOLET
Ask back yourself:
Let this mistrust recoil and bite your hand.
Love will abide till new love conquer him,
Passion endures till passion push her out.
New Love, new Passion, in this glen of briars,
Hath any held their skirts, or tracked their prints?
How should I vary? In whose wilderness
The wolves are more than men: the men intrude
Chance guests, the wolf is master of the house.
For here a stranger's face perplexes us,
Much as a meteor head of rippled fire
Effused across the olive edge of night
Between the lowest rack and heaving trees—
How should I change? The memory of your shadow
Has sat with me and moved and had its meat.
Upon me in my dreams your parting glance
Has burnt, and made the dawn ray, when it came,
A pale and paltry fire. How can a bird,
Who only knows one very short poor song,
Forget the two or three lean bars of it?
And all my narrow tunelet is of you.
But you are from the house of changeful weather;
Around whose base the gusty rollers come,
And colour, as the vaulted cloud assumes
New burnish from the changes of the sun—
You have more right to know about forgetting.

CONRAD
A slander on your phantom, who returns
Full-handed, as his soul is full of you.
Here once you saw him and ran fearful home.
Here you will see him twice and kiss him fearless,
Once for the old fear, twice for the new gift!

VIOLET
A necklace, pale as ice yet full of shining!
'Twill match my garnets well—pomegranate seeds
Above this row of dewdrops. I shall go
Right queenly now. Love, clasp it on at once.
If yonder brook less tremulously dimpled,
Straight would I run and view myself transformed.
Two necklaces, indeed! Now think of that!

CONRAD
Ah, but discard this paltry tinsel trash,
These reddened beads fit for a peasant's throat:
They misbecome your brightness, misadorn
The clear imperial marble of your breast.
Fling them aside! Joan dancing at a wake,
Or Gretchen in a fair-booth cracking nuts,
And munching buns beside her ploughman jo,
Might find them well enough. But you, my fairy,
Whose throat is moulded as a sun-rise wave,
And tender-outlined as a sun-down cloud,—
Shall hoop it round with such a beaming cord,
That not the regal mother of the gods
Shall bear such wavering dew-drops at Heaven's feast
Between her shoulder ringlets—Clasp them on:
Now seem you a piece of sunlight!

VIOLET
These round crystals
Are clear and give no colour save in glancing,
But move them and they bicker full of beams:
And not one banded sparkle round the string
Repeats the ray-blush of his brother's splendour,
But hoards his shaft of glory to himself,
And rings all changes on the chorded rainbow
Each in his crystal lake. 'Tis magical:
Can they be glass, and, if not glass, what are they?

CONRAD
Wear them, and ask no more. They are a gift
Worthy of my great love: let that suffice you.
As from thy treasury of precious lips
With golden kisses I am overpaid.
But there are many ladies, ay, and proud ones,
Who, for a bauble like the one you wear,
Would buss black Urien right across his mouth,
Nor mind the reek of sulphur.

VIOLET
Fairy glances
Of coloured fire! And will they twinkle always,
Or merely while its newness gilds the toy?
The gloss of my last fairing faded soon:
A month it shone, and blackened in a year.
Must this most gorgeous tremble of tinted stars
Melt, like a rocket's crimson burning tears
Spilt out o'er purple space and found no more?

CONRAD
These rays will last a thousand years, and laugh
As merrily as ever.

VIOLET
Wonderful!
You mean it? Then I fear this trinket cost
More than a golden ducat.

CONRAD
More than one,
And more, I should not wonder, than a thousand
Tacked to its golden heels.

VIOLET
Nay, do not mock me:
'Tis a fair gift, and thus I pay thank's toll,
Once and again. The morning we are wedded
I'll wear a pure white gown, at bosom these,
Lent-lilies twisted crown-wise on my curls,
And in my girdle staring pansy-tufts.
God give me beauty for that morn at least,
For it were pity if, of all my days,
I should be found mis-featured on this one,
And shame my lord with foulness as his bride—
Suppose I hoard thy necklace up till then,
Closed in a crafty cupboard.

CONRAD
Wear it rather
At once, in this good wreath of blooming present;
For the strange years turn strangely, and God knows,
Who shall be wife, and who shall husband her.
It is a child's device to hoard aside
The sweetest morsel on the trencher's edge,
And taste it last of all. 'Tis childhood's heart
Alone believes Time trusty and secure.
Our wiser years have proved him false and haggard,
Thrusting the promised good from many doors,
And ringing joy-bells backwards!—Do you love me?

VIOLET
God knows my life is but a darkened moon,
Lit only on that side which turns itself
After thy presence!

CONRAD
As a child you love me:
But wenches' love is light and soon foredone,
Fills with the moon, then ebbs with her away,
In a white tidal fancy. This is maidenish
Liking: but woman's love is thewed, and bears
Such clinging clutch of pertinacious arms,
That not the rudest brand of burning harm
Will e'er unrivet them.

VIOLET
Whence should this come?
There is no one to harm me but yourself.
Can Love divide his kingdom, kiss at noon
And ere the dew-fall slay?

CONRAD
There are two loves:
One is a viper love with viper poison,
Which, as a toad does when you look at him,
Swells up in spite. One love is wholly lamb-like,
Fleeced in soft down, healing and giving comfort,
Kissing the tears of time.

VIOLET
Be mine the last.

CONRAD
And you the white lamb in a good green field,
Whom we may fondle, and tie round its ears
With cherry bows. Will it come in a string
To the city with its master?

VIOLET
It will shame thee
Before the great and lovely ladies there.

CONRAD
Nay, though a ring of frowning queens gloomed scorn,
I would uphold you flower of all their herd.
Child, I have done with queens—'tis a hard breed—
Great sweeping damsels of the court, farewell!
I heed no gracious ladies, saving one,
Who is perfected grace. The rest are scum,
Mere tinselled bulks of insincerity;
Yet some of their great eyes can look right through you,
And some of their deep sighs are soft and dangerous,
And, when you go, they make you understand
That they are wonderfully sad to lose you!—
There is more truth in your least finger end
Than in a palace-full of painted nymphs,
Whose threadbare artificialities
Would make Job in his potsherds yawning-angry.

VIOLET
Ah, these high dames will hate and gibe at me,
And spread their many rainbow-coloured wiles
To shame my simple whiteness. They will sneer,
Was ever knight so simple? she is nothing:
He takes his reckling of the meadow geese
For a most crystal heaven-expanded swan;
And her poor cackle for the royal notes,
Which, like some mighty poet of the cloud,
This lily of birds dies singing.

CONRAD
We can love
Without their kindness or assenting brows.
For fools disparage, ay, and fiends deride
The pearls of Heaven; while Satan's choicest gold
Is cankered brass to God.

VIOLET
O, sweetheart, bide
For ever in these woodlands of my childhood;
Best are they, after all. For these green twigs
Have never learnt ambition: the rose trail
Grows without envy of the eglantere:
All things are happy. Why should you return?
Your knighthood—O, forget to be a knight:
The wars are rough and full of useless blood.
The limits of the kingdoms never move,
Though their graves thicken like a molehill field;
While the poor weary kings sit wrapt in fear
Or buffet down each other—Stay—

CONRAD
I dare not;
But if I might unclasp these blistering greaves,
Unlatch this morion eating into my brow,
Uncoat this grinding mail of golden care;—
Could I peel off my greatness at your word,
And be some woodland fellow cutting twigs
And chopping bavins—so you partnered me,
And raked the ashes up in our dull home,
When the owl's star crept out and called the moon,
And loosed their sweating collars off the beeves;—
If up the valley, in our doorway, white,
Large-eyed and tender, arming on your heart
Our yearling child, I saw you watching, heard
The music of the mother bird, because
Its mate came homewards, sailing through the pines—
I swear by those red garden tears of Christ,
Which this dropped resin on the fir's side likens—
That I would dash aside, detestable,
These trappings of my life, that gall me down
With heavy splendour. I would pluck in twain
The indentures of that cursed regality,
Which rivets me with devil-twisted thongs
Apprentice to the prince of this world, whom
All princes posture after; I would fling
The bitter husks of my detested past
To burn in rubbish Tophets with the foul
Ordures and scums of the wicked city—Free!
Free at the last. Then at your feet, my child,
I would weep out my heart in ecstasies,
Yours and no other's,—while the kingdoms rot,
And the great world rolls hellwards as of old!

VIOLET
What passion is this, my lover? What strange words
Of greatness and repentance? Are you great?
I know you are to my humility,
A girl of the hedge, whom no one ever heeded
Till you did. Great? What river feeds your greatness?
What mountain-head your fame? what sea receives them?
A shudder ripples right across my heart:
Dearest and best, I trust you to the end:
Do anything, say anything, I trust you!
Why should I waver? If you ceased to love me,
My elements would crumble into dust:
As a dead form, torn from the shielding tomb,
Melts in the full fierce ruin of the light.
God made me at my birth: my second god
Found and remade me at his coming: none
Saw me, till he did, in my wood: he came,
And simply kissed me, and my light arose,
And the evening and the morning were the day!

CONRAD
O thou, whose love grows soft around my heart,
As silken grass invests the arid down,—
Demand no more, but merely love me. This
Orbit of love includes within its bend
A universe of still beatitudes.
Who recks, if—wafted on the reeling air,
Which sways behind the current of the gloom,
Out in the night there, out beyond our garden's
Dew-swarded limits—foul and filmy things
Cross and re-cross with bat-like ears and hands,
Spectrally screaming? Need we watch them? Nay:
Nor lean beyond our flowery island's brink
To catch the hideous sawing of their wings.
Turn rather inwards, where the excess of summer
Tangles our garden to so many bowers,
We know not round which thicket nectar-yielding
We best can play with love at hide and seek!

VIOLET
This flitter-mouse, which sails the darkened skirts
Beyond the roses of our paradise,
Is then some secret, which I may not fathom:
Well, shroud it up: so potently I trust,
That I would wed you here with bandaged eyes,
And penetrate the chasm and void hereafter,
My hand inside your hand, my eddying hair
Brushing your neighboured shoulder, as we go.
Veil what you will, unveil what pleases you,
I will not vex you with a single ‘why?’
Let this bird-beast of gloom soar round our bowers,
And scrape my nuptial lattice with its wing,—
Shall I desire to scan it closer? Nay—
And yet strange inspiration plucks at me—
I seem to hear God speaking in my heart,—
Why should our wedding wait another hour,
If there is danger in the air against it,
And God hath sent its incidents? Behold! (pointing)

Are not his feet fair on the crags of time,
Who, bearing in his ignorant good hands,
Love's final consecration, comes?

CONRAD
Ah, child,
You know not what you ask or what you say ...
How can I wed you in this waste of trees ...
Where is the book, the priest, the church, the ring?

VIOLET
I speak inspired: my mother's ring is here,
The chapel here, yonder a holy man,
Reading his missal, climbs the mountain road.
Hath not God spoken in his sending?

CONRAD
Ay:
He comes in strangely pat. But, whence commissioned,
I care not to demand.

VIOLET
But I know best:
For up in gracious heaven some rainbow spirit,
Belike my mother's angel, silver-eyed
And filmy-feathered, winnows to the throne,
And tells the story of our loves to Him,
The mighty cone of light, black at its core,
At whose feet sit the four archangels watching.
And the light says—‘So be it!’ And one goes
Winging away, like a twanged shaft, in heaven,
And touches earth ere one can say ‘He is gone!’
And, earthward lit, seeks out an old grey saint,
Who sits at even in a field, whose shoulder
He taps, whose ear he whispers. Up the saint
Arises, takes his staff, and, lo! is here—
Whom I will summon. (raising her voice.)
O good ghostly father,
Who scalest these rough hills, pilgrim of Christ,
As once thy master climbed up Calvary—
Pause on thy sacred errand, here turn in
Through this arch ruined once a holy place;
And, though the altar splits with wilding flowers,
God's children, these cannot unconsecrate
This precinct of divinity, these walls
Made holy with the echoes in dead years
Of million supplications. Who shall say,
That this is not the table of God's rites,
Although the oat-grass and the bryony vine
Supplant the elements? O, enter priest,
We need thy office.

PRIEST
Do not hold me long.
Northwards I toil, hot speed devours my heart;
But my most frail and unresponsive limbs
Fail me; as one who goes in shifting sand,
The devil hangs a lead weight on each leg
To hold me back from those poor dying souls,
Who yearn for shrift. Girl, girl, let me be gone!
Is this a time for love and meeting mouths?
Have ye not heard the blue plague is unleashed
Among the Saxon? and the uncarted dead
Lie spotted in the sunny market-places,
And clog the conduits of the lonely streets.
It seems a city of one vast repose,
With all men strangely sleeping on their backs
In the open, drunk with death; who twists their eyes
With the strange glazing of his cup supreme,
To which the drink drawn at our mother's teat
Was the first drop to lead us—In that town,
I tell thee, that the sextons all are dead
And the priests all are dying,—and I go!
Oh, for the wings of eagles: but I crawl,
And creep, and stumble. (To Violet)
Ah, fair rose-bud face,
So full of joy, the Lord is at the doors,
Dash down thy wreath: He smiteth: let Him in.
O fairy cheek, the plague-worm may crawl out
Upon it from the marriage-garland! come,
Since I must wed you, come; brief is my time.
Give me thy hand, O maiden: and thou, the groom,
Whose face is mantled so with ivy-shade,
Stand forth and give me thine.

CONRAD
(aside, coming forward reluctantly)
Well—Be it so!
I never sought this mocking rite: some fiend
Pushes it at me. Let the lie proceed.
She will be purer thinking she is wed,
And I not so much blacker. (Aloud)
Priest read on.

PRIEST
(about to join their hands)
Wilt have this maid to wife?

CONRAD
I surely will.

PRIEST
I join your hands (recognises Conrad)
. By Heaven, I sever them (flings their hands roughly apart)
.
O execrable tyrant, I discern
The cloven hoof of thy oppressions here!
Ah, my poor maiden, flee this satyr King,
Whom I will curse with thunder straight from Heaven;
And God will give my mouth sufficient peal,
And wing with levin brands my imprecation,
While I repay the mock this crowned dishonour
Would heap upon the sacrament of God—
Tyrant, seducer, perish in thy sin:
Let an eternal doom of worm and fire
Be meted to thy bosom. Death, sin's wages,
Death, death be thine! A death without death's comfort,
And, till it come, a life without life's joy:
I do award thee both. My tongue is God's.
Could'st thou not have thy lusts aloof from Him,
Must cheat Him to come down through holy hands
To smear a consecration o'er thy sin?
Therefore, I say, seethe in the sulphur brinks,
And turn upon a wheel in hell for this!
Be Herod's end, here and hereafter, thine:
Let the uncoiling worm, who gnaws the grave,
Feed sweetly on thy filthy fibrous heart
For making Holy Church the procuress,
King, of thy lust: Amen!

CONRAD
Well mouthed, by Mars:
Rome's rusty shotless cannon-throat peals well!
Boys hit with elder pop-guns quite as hard.
Rot, scolding priest! My sword tastes only men,
Not railing epicenes in petticoats,
Who patter prayers at profit by the ell.
Off! while you breathe—

[Priest raises his hands and exit sadly.
VIOLET
(dreamily)
Alas, he has gone mad!

CONRAD
Why, so he has my darling, and so have I; (drawing her towards him.)

Come, you will kiss me still. These birds build nests
Without a priest to teach them pack the straws.

VIOLET
But he said—King!

CONRAD
And I say, Queen of Flowers,
And love and bloomy kisses. In whose mouth
The ether of a wilderness of summers
Drugs nature with delirium; in its fire
The strong hills quiver like a paper sheet,
And the large clouds reel as a weanling's limbs—
Ah—can you love me still?

VIOLET
Alas, alas,
I weep to think how much. Can the white sea,
Trembling through all her furrows, sheeting out
The silver edges of her soft swift fear,
Help loving that strong golden tyrant storm,
That almost crushes her with ecstasy ....
But he said—King.

CONRAD
Sweet, if you love me much,
He has said well: if little, then suppose him
Merely a madman still.

VIOLET
Merciful God,
It breaks—It breaks! Heaven save and succour all—
You must be King then?

CONRAD
Ay, so poor a name;
But dowered beyond all other emperors
In thy rich love.

VIOLET
Help me—The world grows dark—
King—King—my King!

CONRAD
Catch up my mouth with kisses,
And leave the rest.

VIOLET
But let me speak—

CONRAD
Say nothing!
Let cold to-morrow tell its want in words,
For here the angels are and silence here:
As the great heaven's most inward nest of stillness
Unfolded, world o'er world, and sphere on sphere,
Full of great beating stars, and palpitating
Light points beyond them, on and always on—
Star roads, rose veils, and galleries of ether!

VIOLET
O, my King, spare me!—

CONRAD
Do you love me now,
Or hate me, Violet?

VIOLET
O King, O love,
My first love and my last love, though I die;
I weep, and weep, and weep to see my sin
In daring not to abhor you as I ought,
In daring yet to love you as I must;
Who loathe your trespass, plainly see you stained
With the red leavings of Sin's giant cup;
Dead I should drop and senseless, if I dared
Think out your baseness. O my spirit's master,
Lord of my soul, sweet-base, yet basely dear:
False and belovèd, false!—I blame you none.
Push me inside a cloister: let me rot:
My day is done—Go back to your great Queen—
I have kissed you and I love you: 'tis enough.
I am ready for my grave!