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17
THE STARER.
I call to mind a little silent sceneI one day witnessed in a quiet street.
The war had barely hurried to its close;
The dead were buried, and the wounded men
Were slowly now emerging from their beds,
And feebly crawling in the April sun—
Pale, broken shadows of their former selves.
An open carriage stood before a door,
And on a chair had just been lifted in
A young lieutenant of the French Hussars,
Crippled for life by fragments of a shell.
As his attendant left him for a while,
To seek for something left within the house,
A woman of the lower classes, plain,
Shabbily dressed and elderly, took up
Her stand close to the carriage door, and stared.
She stared in so intent and strange a way,
No human creature could have stood it long.
The wounded youth in turn looked hard at her,
And on his brow a gathering frown appeared,
That plainly said, “Now, woman, pass thy way,
For thou hast stared enough at me.” When lo!
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And like a cloud the frown from off it passed;
A something in the woman's eye had gleamed,
A murmured word had dropped upon his ear,
That showed she stared in pity at his woe,
And not in mere offensive idleness.
The wounded youth stretched out a feeble arm,
And gently pressed the woman's hand in his;
And then the carriage bore him swift away.
A stare is ever an unseemly thing;
But still I think that such a stare as this,
If humbly pleaded at the gate of heaven,
By some excluded Peri of to-day,
Would gain admittance for that erring soul.
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