University of Virginia Library

Scene I.

A Room in Eliduke's Castle at Yveloc.
Roland and Walter meeting.
Rol.
Well met, Sir Walter! If my memory serve,
I have not seen you since the busy day
We scotched those rascal Picards. By my faith,
The knaves showed fight too! Come you from the court?

Walt.
Yes, my good lord, from Nantes; where, I may tell you,
You fill men's mouths still with your gallant deeds
That singly turned the fortune of the day
And propped the tottering safety of the realm.

Rol.
I came but second to your Eliduke,
The crest of noble blades, my friend and brother.

Walt.
You are equal stars and peers of valorous action;
The courtiers' brains were sorely put to it
When you two, whose skilled conduct in the war
Had closed our dangers with a prosperous peace,
Put by preferment that was pushed upon you,
And scorning the gilt humours of the court
And burden of the King's precarious favour,
Chose rather here to rest upon your oars,
And let life's tide go by. Runs it smooth here?
Lord Eliduke still loves his wife, my lord?

Rol.
What is't you say?

Walt.
Nay, I am sad, my lord.
Do you love Castabel?

Rol.
Sir, when you name her,
Whose title I dare scarcely bless my lips with,
Use a more reverent form! I do not love her.
Common hearts love and dote on common things;
But she that is the finest work of Heaven
And gathered garland of all excellence,
Framed to show men that there are higher things
Than their dull-paced imaginations frame,—
She claims a clearer-spirited devotion
Than that which mingles in the medley love.
I serve her, then, with grief, and not with love,
Which interferes not in a husband's rights;
Not idle pinings and such boyish show,
But with a deep and silent melancholy,
Because my earthly hopes and happiness
Are all closed up in her, and here on earth
Can never shoot again.

Walt.
Do you not see,
Or, always seeing her, have overlooked,
How pale she grows, and what an anxious eye
From under her drawn brow looks sadly out?
Since last I saw her, the slow pen of care
Has written change upon her sunken cheek!
Alas! I know the cause.

Rol.
Tell me the cause!
I know her cheek is sunk; her brother's death
And Blancaflor's deep grief weigh thus with her.

Walt.
It is not that:—yet why should I lay bare
What she within herself wraps up so close,
Nor even breathes it, I dare well be sworn,
In the dark ear of secret-keeping night?
It is so terrible and sad a thing,
That to her central soul she tells it not,
Only she feels it draining all her comfort.

Rol.
What is this thing?

Walt.
Eliduke loves her not;
Loves her no more, but with a foreign passion
Feeds his changed heart.

Rol.
What a pure devil are you,
That with an unchanged cheek and solemn tongue
Can vent such an abominable lie!
What! do you come to me, and dare you think,
Because I with a chaste and clear devotion
Affect this lady, you can hope to make me
A credulous instrument to some vile end
Your base brain hammers at? Let me look on you!
You are not Walter! O man, get you gone!
Honesty's less than it was! I am not angry,
So much do I disdain your paltry tale!

Walt.
Do you think this?

Rol.
Fine counterfeit amazement!
Sir, this grows tiresome! Look! The ladies come!
Make your fool's faces elsewhere!

Walt.
Let time show;
I'll touch no more in't. Is not Eliduke sad?

Rol.
Yes, sir, he is. D'ye think by patching up
Your petty circumstance you still can move me?
Begone, or I shall chafe!

Walt.
Remember this.

[Exit.
Rol.
What a knavish ape is this, slandering his lord!
Sir Walter, too! The court hath spoiled a man.

Enter Castabel and Blancaflor.
Cast..
Oh, take comfort!

Blanc.
Forgive me, sister; I forget myself.

Cast..
Too long you feed your sorrow with these tears.

Blanc.
Indeed I know that to the lookers on
Sorrow seems often tedious. Pray forgive me;
I will go weep alone.

Cast..
Not that,—not that,—
Not because I am tired, dear Blancaflor,
But that you hurt yourself. Why, how should that be?
I own as deep an interest in this grief
As thou canst do,—cherish as grave a sorrow.

Blanc.
As I? Oh, no! or I should shame myself,
As yet I may do, not to learn of you
A placider deportment: you have children
Whose tiny tongues prattle away your grief,
A loving husband in whose clasping arms
You harbour your tossed heart. I!—

Cast..
O sweet sister!

[They embrace in silence.
Rol.
Oh, what an angel aspect sorrow wears,
Being housed in such bright souls! I were unworthy
To see these tears, but that a kindred grief
Stirs in mine own full heart. These, and the boy
Late snatched by death, sure are not earthly stock,
But heavenly seed, by the kind hand above
Flung to renew our breed, and with our blood
To mix the clear and crimson element
Rolls in their finer veins. She lifts her head.

Blanc.
Let's talk of him. They are poor comforters
That snatch away the memory of the dead,
Our sweet most healing salve. Do you remember,
When he was very little, how we sate
Under the unpleached hedges in the fields,
And with green briony and honeysuckle
Circled his laughing hair? Do you remember?

Cast.
Dear childish days, never to come again!

Blanc.
And now he's dead, and far over the sea
Lies buried by the shore, that should have lain
In some green plot i' th' woods, where I'd have planted
His favourite flowers, and watered them with tears.
The daisy, spring's rathe herald, columbine
Nodding her purple head, anemone
Star of the grass, crowsfoot and celandine,—
All April's children,—these should have coverletted
His ivory body, while his unfleshed soul,
Lingering for me upon the edge of heaven,
Should with a liquid smile look down the blue
To see me tend his grave.

Cast..
How gentle was he,
And in men's hearts anchored himself how deeply!
Sir Walter, when he told his death's sad story,
Changed the stern aspect of a war-soiled soldier
For a piteous child's, and shook the frequent tears
From his rough cheeks in showers. My husband too
Waters a planted sorrow in his breast;—
Oft in the midst of some kind word to me,
Or dear caress, shot with keen recollection,
Stops suddenly, and turning his blanched cheek
Gives silence to the air. Thus, long he stands—
Ah! with so sad a face!—Oh, my good lord,
[To Roland.
We two sad sisters are poor company,
And I do ill in my untutored grief
To cover up the courtesy due to you!

Rol.
Your sorrow's the best courtesy, telling me
I'm fit to share your grief; and so I am
In this, that I much loved him.

Blanc.
You say you loved him?

Rol.
Most dearly for himself! and more than that,
He was your sister's brother.

Blanc.
I mistook you,
Because you wept not for him, and my tears
Were bitterer to make up the lack of yours.

Rol.
I am schooled in grief, and sorrow shows not in me,
Being deeper buried. Yet this grief's not much,
The boy being dead, and, with the bloom upon him,
Plucked for the court of heaven. Death's a sharp knife,
Whose wound heals up; but there's a bruising sorrow
That rankles comfort. Death being duly mourned,
The past looks greener for the tears shed in it;
But there's a grief within whose heavy hand
The future is crushed up, and all our virtue
Turned into constancy.

Blanc.
How are such sorrows shown?

Rol.
Not shown at all.

Cast..
How solemnly you speak, as if you felt them!

Rol.
Because I do, and therefore marvel not
I have no tears for death, who seems a crown
In the black hair of shrouded Melancholy
Which I would gladly win, but that I must not
Stretch mine own hand for't.

Blanc.
Such grief's hard to bear,
And looks not through the chambers of the eye,
But lays a cold hand on the heart within!

Rol.
You speak it feelingly.

Blanc.
Alas, poor Harry!

Enter Page.
Page.
My lord asks for you, sir.

Rol.
I'll see him straight.

Cast..
You'll give my absence leave then, my good lord.
[To Blanc.]
Come, you shall go with me. I am almost
Joyful again to see your tears dried up.

[Exeunt Castabel and Blancaflor.
Rol.
Alas, they flow inwardly! some deeper sorrow,
I know not what, sits at the spring of her heart.
So young, and yet a gathered hopelessness
Marbles her cheek! What can it be but love—
Lost, unreturned love? No other sorrow
Can strike so deep. Come, lead me to your lord.

[Exit.