University of Virginia Library

PART II.

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!

ACT IV.

SCENE I.

Ten months are supposed to have elapsed. A street in the capital city.
A Courtier and a Count meeting.
COURTIER

Has heard the news?

COUNT

I have dimly and brokenly received some filtration
of tidings. The trumpet twang of rumour is thick
with startling yet uncertain echoes.

COURTIER

This Rumour is an ignorant jade; I have all upon
gospel certitude. I move within the golden orbits;
and can, therefore, speak like an almanack.

COUNT

Then let me anatomize in the noonday perspicacity
of thy intelligence the how, where, and when—
the depth, length, and amplitude of this most delectable
calumny. But, imprimis, doth this surely hold, that
there is a new tax upon thirst, both bottled and
barrelled, ere it passes the barrier?

COURTIER

Most assuredly. These tidings are frayed and
already thread-bare.

COUNT

And this toll treads into the heel of that recent
impost upon eggs and butter?

COURTIER

Excellency, why not? 'Tis merely another wrench
round of the national cheese-press. These things
must so soon become palpable to the pocket, that it is
superfluous to present them to the ear. Your human
atomy is most sensitive in his purse-strings. The ear
dulls, the hand numbs, the heart is clouded, but
your pocket is perpetually alert. Now let us be
logical, and take things in their natural order. Hereby,
we shall learn, that these young sucking taxes

are mere feeders and sustentations of the new archtax,
as recently by royal whim established; to wit, a
fair and frail national Hydra with many arms, and, for
the instant, unlimited credit. It is confidently predicted,
that she must, within certain moons, suck,
drain, exhaust, and desiccate State, Church, King,
Commons and revenues, into a kind of pulpy pabulum
necessary to the existence of this especial and peculiar
maiden-handed polypus.

COUNT

Grows it then to this? How gat he within sail-reach
of this wind-mill? This Conrad of ours was
ever rather bloody-minded than lecherous. Granting,
that these two attributes should usually be cousin-germans,
he at least excelled in the predominance of
the butcher.

COURTIER

There it precisely was. In recruiting himself
after the practice of one virtue, head-cropping; he
runs me his nose into the opposite virtue of wenching.
A certain bibulosity of a count, one tun-barrel on
leg-stalks, to wit, our late Gemmingen, and certain
his pot-companions, need the quietude ensued by
separation of their neck-joints. So said, so done;
Conrad has earned his holiday and goes a hunting

with a good conscience. He must needs try his
seventh forest, of lean repute for game. Here, he
gets separated from his train through the agency of
sudden-dropping darkness and most villainous weather.
Hence, more like a drowned rat than a most
Christian monarch, he stumbles into a certain tumble-down
wood-lodge; wherein abides the newest incarnation
of Dan Cupid his deceptitudes, in the shape
of a certain pink and white kitten, hardly beyond the
nursery, of most dangerous innocency and most beguiling
ignorance. The most Christian potentate likes
his quarters well, sees no necessity of moving, and
omits all tidings of his whereabouts. For three whole
days this kingdom resembles a master who has lost
his dog. In fact, Her Majesty metaphorically did
send round our news-monger and town-crier—to wit,
Rumour the aforesaid—with some such proclamation:
—‘Strayed out upon immensity—one of Jove's
own vice-regents. Can the lamps of space, or the
abysses of the profound, proclaim this monarch's
whereabouts to his tearful people and sorrowing
consort?’

COUNT

And that brought up another revolt? I seem now
to recall the circumstance; but it was a mere flea-bite
of an insurrection. They sacked, methinks, a silver-smith's
shop, and hung three bakers. The reason

was—the rider missing; though many of the outward
vulgar could not guess, why the body politic had
begun to rear. I mind me, that then my apricots
were barely ripe upon one cheek.

COURTIER

Sir, you are accurate; the very time. I warrant
you, that we of the fringe of royalty had a sufficient
handful in pacifying her distracted majesty. Where
was the King? In any place but the right one.
Would he come back? Most inevitably; as does
Phœbus from inter-solar darkness. Why send no messenger?
All hands were needed to bear his game
home. The people were up, what should she do?
Hang a liberal half-dozen. All which duly came to
pass; when, look you, at the tag end of the week in
sedately walks our missing Emperor; asks for his
letters, kisses his wife, and observes, he has been detained!
She, poor thing, glad to have him back at
any cost, dutifully presses no further, but tearfully
mentions the outbreak. Whereon, Conrad swears a
spacious oath and orders his horse round. At whose
appearance in the streets, the rioters, who had elected
him unanimously to heaven, disappear, head first,
into rat-holes and drain-pipes. Therefore, examples
being necessary, a few folk, quiet and worthy, whose
innocency lent no quicksilver to their heels, are

caught, suspended, and the affair drops. Time
elapses, sun and moon play their old game of leap-frog.
Days unroll nothing of consequence. Conrad
for a season acquiesces in domesticity, and fairly
buckles to national affairs. The wild girl of the
woods is, for the moment, shelved and cupboarded.
Conrad attends mass with the Queen on Sundays,
devises a new dress for his halberdiers, grants the
guild of pork-butchers a fresh charter, regulates with
the Archbishop the discipline of the minor clergy;
and is once more a monarch among ten millions.

COUNT

Yet, if I mistake not, just in the thick of damson-harvest
he once more gave slip to the proprieties.
My trees have this year suffered with a kind of evil
and grievous worm—but that regards not one who
abides in the fan-light of regality. I am apt to reckon
state events by garden incidents. Your urbanity will
smile at, but excuse my simple computation. It is
safer to manure cabbages than to cultivate the political
sciences. Therefore, I live somewhat retired, after
the manner of sundry classical worthies; hoping in
such seclusion to keep my eyes above my neck until
my two male brats be strong enough to fend without
me.

COURTIER

Your excellency is a worthy man. For myself,
lizard-like, I prefer glare to shade, even at the risk
of damsel Fortune noosing me with a ring of horse-hair.

COUNT

I am beholden for your good opinion. But where
were we? Ah, on Conrad's relapse into woodman's
ways. Now depose, I pray you, as my ears are of
the safest, by what signs or portents was this second
exodus of our most royal preceded?

COURTIER

Hark in your auricle—I had this direct from the
palace porter; but—go to—you will say, ‘Fables,’ and
indeed the whole matter transcends credibility.

COUNT

Proceed—Proceed—My ear waters with expectation.

COURTIER

Thus then—Get ready all your amazement. One
sundown a dusty peasant boy halts himself at the

grand entrance of our palace. ‘Get you gone,’ quoth
our porter, ‘your rags and scent offend me.’ But the
boy goes not. ‘Whom seek you?’ yawns Cerberus,
after the fluxion of an hour or so. ‘Your master,’
replies the imp, reseating himself with a resolute
patience on a dust-heap. ‘Imp, you lie, I have no
master but Cæsar.’ ‘Porter, you lie, for to Cæsar is
my message.’

COUNT

Stupendous!

COURTIER

Thereon, the porter claps me his hands upon his
ribs, and laughs aloud sans interruption for a space of
fifteen calendar minutes. ‘Is your message a long
one?’ gasped the porter, when laughter allowed him
utterance. ‘Say unto your king—Ghost,’ returned
the boy, and incontinently sat him down again. ‘This
youth is mad,’ said the porter, and to bed he went.
But in the morning our boy was there always. At
noon must the king ride forth with a retinue. No
sooner are gates unhinged than the brat leaps out
into the very midmost roadway at Conrad his horse's
nostril. The King is nearly over him, and jerks up
his charger smartly. ‘Ghost, O King!’ shrieks the
boy from under the horse-shoes, and again, ‘Ghost!’

then, shaking himself together, away for his life scours
this urchin. Forward comes the porter penitently,
for somewhat in Conrad's eye-corner abated his merriment.
‘This is a mad boy, your majesty: these
twelve hours gone, have I with difficulty restrained him
at bay from annoying your exaltitude.’ ‘Did you so?’
quoth Conrad, grimly, ‘As I hope for salvation, I
did,’ faltered the porter. ‘So,’ said the King, ‘strap
this beef-witted knave to an elm-plank, and give him
twenty lashes with the knottiest cow-hide whip in my
dominions.’ Then, turning to his train, ‘Gentlemen,
our ride for this morning must stand over.’ And with
a grunt he reels round his horse back into the palace.
That night again was our King off into space!

COUNT

These things are prodigious. That a king now
should come at the call of an errand-boy! Human
belief can barely embosom such a calamitous paradox.
Yet in these times one may expect strange events.
I found no less than fifty-seven beetles in the act of
kind on one cucumber bed yesterday after a violent
rain-drench; and, on Thursday fortnight, I by misadventure
tore up a mandrake instead of a horse-radish.
These things are surely ominous.

COURTIER

Your excellency is ever penetrant.

COUNT

I am to surmise, then, that this second vanishing
of our anointed put the pale queen into some suspicion
that her husband's venison went upon two feet.

COURTIER

Your mother-wit has surfaced well her Highness's
suspicions; it remains to my humility to turn, as
under a lamp, your lordship's eyes upon the special
tissue and texture of this mystery—

COUNT

I am fortunate in my instructor.

COURTIER

I kiss your Countship's hand—Can your acute
mind unreel some six years of rope off Time's wind-lass?
Can you recall a certain misbegotten churl,
whom devils now name Raban, but fortunately in an
earthly sense at the present year of grace dust and
cinders?

COUNT

Can I not? I see the eft at this moment in my
brain-pan, as lucidly as yonder water-spout. He was

a bunch mostly head like a cuttle-fish. None could
predict from what point in his anatomy limb-protrusion
might ensue. His malice equalled his deformity.
He was concerned (was he not?) in our late king's—

COURTIER
(hurriedly)

Sudden illness and precipitately unkind withdrawal.
Had not this aged monarch somewhat exceeded
the limit of humanity, our sorrowing land
would to this day have worn mufflers.

COUNT

Sir, I apprehend you! The wise mouth blabs not
in thoroughfares. But how comes this dead dog
Raban into this live royal—Hem! difficulty?

COURTIER

When about to be strangulated, he must needs
vent on his last breath a prophecy. This he despatches
with his duty to her Highness; videlicet—
that one, who broke friendly compact, would also
snap fetter conjugal. Meaning, that Conrad, who
would incontinently choke him, would incontinently
cheat her.

COUNT

These abortions of humanity are often lynx-sighted;

a feature which they share with idiots,
epileptics, albinos, embryos, homuncules, and other
hermaphrodites. As for Raban, he was haltered with
a general hand-clapping. No popular tear moistened
his rope. Yet, whisper goes, Conrad owed him a
golden chair and a second-hand scarlet wrapper. If
so, was not this extinction in a measure ungrateful?

COURTIER

Not a whit, sir, not a whit. In this dismissal was
Adelheid prime mover. Conrad had hint of something
stirring, wisely took a walk, eyelids down, and
hands clapped to his ear-holes. Besides, Conrad
lacked the patient audacity to snap, at fitting season,
the gin of silence upon his quondam accomplice.
Conrad's bravery is merely bull-like, and rushes.
Adelheid's courage is feline, and waits. Raban had
lived—the devil rend him—until now, had Conrad
been his only executioner. Let us also note, that
during Raban's survival, Adelheid's influence with
Conrad was merely second-best. This to a wife is
torture and ignominy. Then she owed this same
crab-monkey,—how shall we phrase it?—orphanhood.
Consider now by analogy their respective attitudes:
My children kept a cat and a bird. Such pets are
incompatible. It was merely an affair of time.
Puss watches and watches again. One day the

cage-door is left open. No more song and a flutter
of feathers!

COUNT

I now apprehend your digression to this Raban.
I see, that of this forth-coming Siren he was indirectly
prophetic. Good! Now as to the creature herself:
remains she in her woods? How is she parented?
Why these taxes? What does the Queen say?
Excuse my quaternion of queries, but curiosity
aroused strings questions like larks for the game
market.

COURTIER

Your excellency shall be satisfied. Your why
last spoken first pricks memory. ‘What will the
Queen say?’ Marry, she hath said on the testimony
of her most intimate—nothing; or the merest ghosts
and shadows of sentences. Yet hath she looked a
whole sky-full of thunder; and hath sown (they tell
me) quite enough seed of tears to reap a whole field
of armoured resolutions.

COUNT

Nay, I rather see the dragon teeth in our taxes
than in her tears.

COURTIER

An' please you, in the present conjuncture imposts
are inevitable. Royal mistresses sprout taxes as
rotten rails do fungus. Lo, I will now grasp two of
your questions in one sheaf. Taxes and residence.
Residence imprimis. Inasmuch as Conrad had raised
this Violetta von Minden to the honourable and well-precedented
estate of royal concubinage, and established
her therein, he must needs cast about in what
quarter to dispose of her. With the Queen in her present
mood it would imply peril inevitable, for him to
be jogging off wood-wards for whole nights together.
Leave a jealous woman to herself, and she will always
find tow and torches, resin and saltpetre, faggots, high
wind, and a huge mind for a bonfire. Therefore,
must Conrad bide at home, and sit in person upon
the bungs of his domestic tar-barrels. But, inasmuch
as two Lunas may not occupy the same sweep of
spangled midnight, to the actual palace cannot this
Violetta be—purveyed. Though there is precedent in
our annals for such an arrangement; yet no precedent
for a queen of such tinder and touch-paper surface as
our present governess. In this dilemma or dubiety,
Conrad, extravagant in the double right of king and
lover, is about to edify out of hand a palace in duplicate.
Had this scheme held, our very hides had gone
to satisfy the collectors of revenue. But that cloud

carried off its rain drily. Luckily, an old summer-palace,
just outside the north wall, is remembered.
Conrad gave the word Furbish; and to it they went
with a will, masons, hodmen, carpenters, joiners,
carvers, gilders, tapestry-mongers, and, not to weary
your excellency, the whole tribe of such as minister
to the lust of the eye and the pride of life. Presently,
when the setting is ready, the jewel is sent for and
framed. Our archbishop, with infinite tact, tenders
his respects in person on the day after Violetta's
arrival. She is said to have been greatly re-assured
by this ghostly recognition. Our primate is a wary
man and a dexterous, keen-nosed and weather-wise.
He continually ascends the roof of Holy Church to
scent the direction of the aerial currents. Some call him
a trimmer and her a Jezebel. But I weary you.
Suffice it to say, there she is; and there—for the
present—she is likely to continue.

COUNT

For the present—Hem! Poor little sparrow: the
hen-eagle will pick her bones clean—some day.

COURTIER

Indeed, sir, you be mistaken. This Adelheid's
day is done: her turn is served. Conrad never but
passably loved her. She was his ladder to splendour.

Now, he is in at the window, master of the front door,
and his old scaling-tackle may rot. Let Adelheid
mutter and mow; Conrad has set his nose as a mule,
and means to push on by his own roads and no other.
If this queen be worldly-wise, let her make as though
she saw not. Then, if the new star be not rancorous,
Adelheid may continue to enjoy apart a kind of desolated
grandeur; but let not her tongue wag in blasphemy
against the newly elect, or I will nowise
answer for her continuing to see daylight.

COUNT

And now, lastly, the favourite's origin? Von
Minden, if I caught rightly the smack of your lips.
It sounds, somehow, familiar and yet unfamiliar. My
memory cannot piece the thread of it. Let me see—
Let me see—Von Minden, Minden?

COURTIER

The original text of this fair transcript of Mother
Eve was one certain out-at-elbow Baron, poor as a
mole, lean as a greyhound. He intermarried with
some rag of a feminine cousin, and begat one child
to the national detriment. He goes to the wars, of
course, as a trade less dangerous than the inevitable
starvation of his own fireside; he serves under Conrad,
then Captain of the Forces, here and there, without

eminence and without ignominy, in the rank and ruck
of Mars his myrmidons; until in the tussle at Arnheim
someone pushes a spear through his tissues, and so
finis! His orphan lives intermediately on goat-milk
and fir-cones, unconscious of higher destinies; until—
a rap at the door in the forest, and enter Conrad!

COUNT

I do not seem to remember this soldier.

COURTIER

Your excellency will excuse me—but, at this distance
of time, with the man underground these ten
years, you might safely arrogate an acquaintanceship
without troubling memory at all in the matter.

COUNT

There is much in what you say. My remembrance
is ever treacherous. One greeted me in the street
yesternight, whom I could not name. Clearly, I may
have known this Von Minden; I will go and tender
my duty at once to the daughter of—my old comrade.

COURTIER

So will you prove your prudence. Yet, in our

private capacities, we shall retain a certain show of
honest indignation. At home, sir, the Queen's wrongs
are a healthy topic: wives must be impressed!

COUNT

Fare you well, fare you well!

[Exeunt severally.

SCENE II.

A parterre before the Palace. In the background a fountain and flower-beds. Various statues alternated with orange trees in avenues along the walks.
Conrad, Adelheid, Letalda, and several tire-women.
ADELHEID
Give me thy hand.

CONRAD
I give it.

ADELHEID
Bring thine eyes
Full upon mine.

CONRAD
I bring them: and what next?
Some foolish show is toward.

ADELHEID
Now King, now husband,
As thy soul means to envisage God, the judge,
When it has burst its bulging coffin bars,
And sailed a poor thin ghost to meet that eye,
Which will dissect all passion and all sin;
And, like a prism, in the seeming pure
Transpicuous beam of each weak human heart
Sort out its blue of malice, green of guile,
Its bloodshed red, its yellow jealousies,
So must thy soul lie naked in His eye.
By which anticipation I adjure thee,
As thou, poor moth, then hopest to flutter past
The reeking candles of the red profound
With unsinged wings—By love, by light, by honour,
By wine of blood and flesh of holy bread,—
By the last fibre of my breaking heart,—
Why dost thou shame me with this harlot girl?

CONRAD
I shame thee none. Are these things for the air?
Silence; go in. Closed doors become such speech.

ADELHEID
Thou shamest me, and in a bitter sort.

CONRAD
Then send these girls away, and have it out:
If we must reason over this, why well!
In God's name, say thy say and get it done.
But silence here is wiser than a word.

ADELHEID
I fear thee: let them bide. My shame is wrought
In such an open way, that all thy realm
Rings with it, as a chime of steeple bells.

CONRAD
I fear you none; yet would I condescend,
For quiet life and what your station craves,
To hint, there is a subject, queen and madam,
Which you and I had better, once for all,
Determine, that it shall be locked and closed,
Between us, when we meet, as meet we must,
Though seldom as you please. Try to forget
One theme, and all between us may be well.

ADELHEID
Remove that noisy fountain's weary drip,
And, when 'tis gone, thou shalt with ease forget it.
But while it splashes on at elbow here,
With opalescent hail and thudding wave-drift,
Its teasing echo keeps its thought alive.
Canst thou forget a tooth-ache till the fang
Be wrenched away? canst thou forget a hunger
Till meat be come? So, if this hireling wench
Were strangled, I would let this theme lie fallow,
Not earlier; and, till that desired event,
I'll seed and seed it yet with crop of vengeance!

CONRAD
Ha!

ADELHEID
That I will.

CONRAD
He wins, who plays the last.

ADELHEID
Dost threat me?

CONRAD
Take it, madam, as you please.
Now, get indoors; for you have been the bellman
Of what a modest woman scarce would speak
With bated breath within a cloistered grate.
'Tis very well: I shall remember this.
Kings treasure long a sense of shame endured:
As python saves his poison till the time
Comes for his fang to fix: then woe the prey!

ADELHEID
If you do kill me, I shall take it kindly—
(Turning to Letalda)
I must die soon. God knows that well. Letalda,
You'll seek me out a little homely grave,
No marble mausoleum in whose sides
Rest queenly ashes. I, discrowned in life,
Will make a humble bed with daisy thatched,
A grass-grown earth-place near some village turret,
In a bye-way of my realm, secludedly
Shrouded; which she, this light-love wanton snake,
May ne'er bring footfall near, or desecrate
With her triumphant laughter. Anywhere
Will do, so it be quiet and hidden well.
I want no name put over me: just say,
‘A mother and a wife.’ You will see it done,
Ay, you are leal, you will.

LETALDA
Ah, Queen, my tears
Rush in reply. They have wrenched all words away.

ADELHEID
My feet are weary with the hills of time:
I am going out of tear-reach and of love-reach.
I think this lord of mine, who ought to weep,
Will hardly cram his smiles behind his lips,
When they come saying, ‘She is dead.’ His eyes
Will glisten quietly. He will make shift
To sigh a shallow once; demurely teasing
Downwards the merry corners of his mouth;
And then give word with ostentatious gloom—
‘My folk, let her be decently interred;
And for a month must all my varlets wear
Black ribbon-tags at shoulder and at knee;
For truly, gentlemen, the case is piteous;
But at the last her life so sorely irked her,
We must not wish her back, and Providence
Is wise—Bring round my horse, this chance has dashed me
Somewhat; unless I gallop in the air
An hour or so, ere supper, I may play
But poorly with my trencher’—Conrad, Conrad,
I served you as a God: I served you more
Than ever loving woman in the world
Gave servitude to love, wearing away
The very fibre of her life in serving.
All this I did rewardless. Highest duty
Spurns all reward, and laughs at recompense.
Wages pollute its pure and lofty name.
You loved me in return a few years—well!
Well, for a man I mean. Their love is flimsy,
And shallow at its best. I had some beauty,
To hold you in the young and vernal years
After the love-torch and the orange-wreath.
But my great office with its scathing glare
Burnt age into my heart, and swiftly wrinkled
A brow, where slumber's eyelid seldom closed:
Then motherhood arrived, and brought in train
Sweet nursing sorrows. These sowed grey among
My roses. These bedim the lustrous eye,
These thin the plenteous ringlet. Thus I faded;
And gave your child the bloom and gloss of all
My youth. Right joyfully I gave it him.
And so you watched me alter as a leaf,
And scanned me with a cold and curious eye,
Growing less beautiful; as this my baby
Throve on my life; and so I lost, I lost you!
Now, therefore, let me die.

CONRAD
Dying and dying!
What dismal iteration sour is this
To peal out in a happy garden, scented
With rose incense? You jar against the golden
Music of yonder eddying nightingale.
Your robes mislike the summer in this spot.
Can this dishevelled railer be a queen?
No lady should forget, however wronged,
To be majestic in her injuries.
A queen through all her woes should queen it still.
The stress of your invective overturns
All modest self-reserve, all decencies
Which even dying women guard. Get home.
Rave, if you must, indoors among your girls.
Here you disgrace my kingdom and myself:
Upon your duty as a spouse, begone!

ADELHEID
Patient and meek, my women, let us be—
O but hear him, this perjury, my husband,
Who keeps his word so well, who saves so clean
The mirror of his nice untarnished honour,—
How he, the pattern and the flower of spouses,
Is good enough to read me full of flaws:
In what? My God! In wifely duty towards him!
He hath such utter right to censure here,
He might as well set climax to his blame,
And build perfection on his insult up,
By bringing here his harlot paragon
To preach me homilies on continence,
And teach me how to walk with modest feet:
By summoning this abject girl to scold
And finger out my fault. Can shame, the swine,
Roll in a redder ditch, bemire its sides
With smokier reek, than, when a lordly man,
Heroic once, degrades his lustrous name
To soil with such a love? O let her come!
And, if the mistress through the husband's lips
Admonishes the wife, finds her impure,
And this and that, and poisons all his mind—
Let us excuse her: we are worlds apart.
You might as well instruct the rushlight glow-worm
To lift its lamp and comprehend the moon;
Or teach some butterfly with bannered wing
What thoughts burn in the mother eagle's brain,
Whirling around the sun. This trifler know me,
This insect see the deeps between my waves?
Never, ah; God. Our paths are twain. I brush
The stormy stars: her wings are wet with dew
Gleaned on a cabbage face. My pinions mount
And moisten in the heart of thunder clouds.
How can she sound my grief or gauge my joy?
This stall-fed heifer, with her shining hide
And hard impervious heart, which quickens only
At sensual promptings or the lash of fear.
Poor painted rubbish, call her as you will,
Disguise her traffic in complacent phrase:
Give her the roll of sugared epithets
To revel through—one name she cannot clutch—
Wife! Round this name my dying fingers tighten;
O save it from her, God, when I am cold!

CONRAD
Save all your imprecations; they but weary
The summer airs, which serve them for a raft.
I heed you less than yonder scolding jay.
You want a slave, my Queen, and not a husband;
A broken and a contrite mock of manhood.
I think, you wish to lead me up and down
With eyes demure, tied to your apron string;
And, if a damsel pass, my glance must know
No wandering save upon my gracious lady.
By Vulcan, but I think the market-wives
Would crack their kirtled sides, on basket-seats
Laughing, to see a King so meanly led.

ADELHEID
My daily meat is insult. Sir, I think
Your very kennel hounds are better fed
And more considered than I be. Remember,
You did not pick me up to mate with you
Out of some faggot-chopper's hut; remember,
I am the daughter of this kingdom's kings:
The earth itself we stand upon is mine,
Mine yonder chain of mountains, mine that palace;
And even those poor hinds, who fathered you,
Were but my father's villain-slaves to hoe
His yard, and cart the rubbish of his kitchens:—
King, you may be, by my allowance King,
And by your own ingratitude my tyrant:
My master and my queller, how began you?
There was a common captain, whom my hand
Plucked from the gutter of his servitude
To bench on gold beside me.—You forget,
My father's servant, how I gave you all—
And to my cost I gave it—diadem,
This orb and sceptred state. Can you uplift
A brazen forehead and a tongue of insult
Beneath such crushing congregated crags
Of obligation, as this gift enormous
Involves upon your mean humility?

CONRAD
Wrench not the truth to sharp your malice sting.
Your every sentence staggers with a load
Of virulent perversion. So it was not,
And never could have been. Take back your tale
Amended: hear the right: and perish slander!
O'er his own ears your father drew his shroud:
His daughter should be wiser. That wild night,
That ruined him, crowned me. By merit crowned me.
Because our army conquered with my word,
But under others wavered or withdrew.
So sheer desert won me my golden place;
My crowning went before, not came behind
Our marriage. Did one soldier say, ‘Rule us,
Because you mean to wed this Adelheid,
Child of the stark and stricken tyrant there?’
By God in ether, nay: this much you gave me—
And hug yourself thereon—your bloodright tightened
The preadjusted circlet on my hair.
Nearness in blood is naught—be witness Uriel—
If yoked with feeble head—His royal vein
Found him and left him—toper. More than all,
You were unsexed from throning it alone:
The loaf your father left you, hard at rind,
Needed a sword to cleave it: this was I.
You had to share your diadem with some one:
The neighbour princelings seemed by Conrad's side—
As then you held him—worms. Your other captains
As wrens before your eagle. So you chose;
And wisely, though I say it, fell your choice.
You gave your whiteness to my arms, you gave me
Withal the rough possession of a realm,
Which a girl's fairy hand and minion fingers
Were weak as sand to strain or grapple down.

ADELHEID
Husband, I will not wrangle any more,
If I be first or last; if once my hand
Had crowns to give away: that is well over.
I am trod down beneath your wrong as grass,
And never shall I straighten up my stem
For any verdure more. What profit then
For one so bruised to boast what she has been?
All are unroyal in the grave. Ah, Conrad,
They say, that dying folk have oft strange whims,
And I am grown fantastic near my end;
Suppose—nay, you will laugh—I say, suppose,
You were to come some night, and made believe,
As in the old days, that you loved me still:
Came in and sat beside me, and pretended,
And talked a little kindly, nursed the child
A bit, and told me he was fair and rosy,
That in his dimples your old smile you caught.
O try, and humour my poor brainsick fancy
To such a pitch of fooling! I believe,
That I could almost bear my onward life,
For the child's sake, if you would drape your hatred
To come in lover's raiment twice or once.
O Conrad, grant my whim! You shake your locks,
And round the sullen corners of your mouth
A scornful sneer begins. I know, I know
This faded hair, these dismal leaden lips,
These haggard cheeks, this homely-featured face,
Make me the strangest suitor on this earth
To wait outside the palace courts of Love
In the chill withering rain-blast of rejection.
That I was ever wholly beautiful,
I do not think. Girlhood and gladness gave
A certain charm. Our life has been a bad one:
And yet the very prickles on Love's road,
Which stung our footfall, sweetened in their sting,
Because in welded unison we trod
A common pain together. Gentlier went
That rough ill-weathered day wherein you loved me,
Than this more halcyon time of my neglect;
My solitude sighs like a sea-face now,
Whereover brood infinite muffled miles
Of ocean vapour, through whose monotone
Not one gay ship comes sailing. That's my life!
But, when you loved me, like a strong white star
I went from even until dawning full
Of golden hope and clomb the heaven around,
One will between us. O we went so firmly.
I held your hand upon my hand, and fear
Became a laughter. Through the smoke of death,
The dragon land, the fiery deeps of blood,
I saw one face—my husband's—and went on,
As though I felt the daisies at my feet
In meadowy valleys under quiet woods.
It is my glory to have been your mate,
Not idle, but another living brain
Building your throne beside you: night and day,
In rumours of conspiracy, in hours
Of chidden armies, still at your right hand
Undaunted: when rebellion, bolt by bolt,
Played round our royal heads to tear us down,—
Did I quail then, did I seem pitiful?
Not so: men said, this queen is steel and fire;
But they were wrong, I was all love; naught else;
My husband was my law and lawgiver,
And righteous any deed that helped him best.
I bathed my hands in carnage and was glad;
For every stain of blood upon my robes
Had seated him securer on his throne,
Who was my sun in heaven, my oracle,
My breath, my soul, my justice. Hear me now,
When the long dark is ready for my feet;
Love, husband, master, King, almost my God,
In whose dear service my whole life, a slave,
Has bent herself adoring. I required
Only a little love as my reward;
On this my soul was nourished, only on this—
Now he despises, scorns, and spits at me:
Smiles on that other woman, whom he loves,
And clothes her in all glory, once my own;
Whereby, I weep all night, and only rise
To tears—tears—tears; and I discern no end
Save that cold common grave, where I descend.
Yet, ere I go forth on my darkened journey,
Though I be weak, rejected, without realm,
Though here my mandate barely moves a child,
While at your nod hosts buckle armour on,
And speck the night with torches: though I be
Here as an emmet to King Hercules,—
Yet my vexed soul, spreading her wings for flight,
Shall toss herself upon the void, crying out
The direst word, that ever dying wife
Sighed forth her soul in saying—

CONRAD
What wilt say?
I fear no breath of speech. I have played too long
With danger's solid shape to veil my brows
At noise or shadow merely. Say thy say
And get it done!

ADELHEID
I can pray God to curse thee!

CONRAD
Will that do much?

ADELHEID
It may, most impious man;
The curse of one poor broken woman's heart
Is terrible enough to overthrow
God's own elect archangel crowned with thunder:
And dire enough to make this dædal earth
Swim in God's eye a lurid blot of plague
Among the lucid orbs that roll below Him,
Sowing His deep with stars.—Art answered, fool,
What my curse dying does?

CONRAD
You sprinkle death
Largely along the furrows of a sea
Of hideous speech: whose wild and wordy surge,
With wave-head after wave-head following, stings
My mind, as some opposing continent,
Whereon its small erosions bite and bite.
You wring my ears with dinning, you will die:
And in the interim you tease and prick me
With your continual needles of reproof;
To front a forest-road of maddened gad-flies
Is better, by the mass!

ADELHEID
Dissembler, hear!
Hear and beware: you push me to the last
Inch on the trembling lip of patience: darkness
Is under me. I shall not fall alone.
I valueless may grapple in my lapse
Inestimable things and ruin them.
Ah, you may rue my dying for more reasons
Than the mock grief, which at my gainful loss.
Will ring out joy-bells in your summer palace.
I will drag down more grief: must I speak plainer?
As you do hope your babe shall come to man—
I charge you, hear me! On his life, on mine—
A futile adjuration this poor last:—
Yet, that you love the child, I well believe,
And that you loathe me, I believe the better:
But, though I languish in your hate, allow
This infant's love to occupy your heart
Without infection of the mother's scorn.
Cherish him well: forget he is my child.
Forget, that his abandoned mother bore him:
Let not her detestation sear his grace.
I am content with such oblivion: sooner
Your slaves shall teach him, that he never had
A mother fit for naming; I will bear
That he should scorn me lying in my grave,
When he is grown hereafter: let it pass.
But one affliction cannot I endure,
That your abhorrence of poor broken me,
As the infusion of some venomed weed,
Should tinge with poison his young cup of days.
I then adjure you, greatly love this child;
Whatever God does with me, you must love him—
Swear—promise this!

CONRAD
You now adjure me idly.
We need no clattering oaths on such a pledge.
Of course I love that little baby brow,
Which, as continuator of my honour,
Shall teach the hereafter how his father sate
Here diademed in glory, and hand on
Some vestige of his face to frown men down with,
When the original is dust and silence—
Love I the boy? By Christ on cross, I do!

ADELHEID
(in a low monotone)
Suppose, he died—

CONRAD
Peace, raven!

ADELHEID
I have said—
Suppose, he died! (A pause. After which her manner changes, and she speaks with vehemence.)
Conrad, by Mary's Son,
Who sees my bleeding breast—we three are standing,
Child, King, and Mother on a red gulf's edge:
Back, snatch yourself: back, just in time, snatch me!
Let not this harlot for an instant longer
Divide our loves! Give the word, I will darken
Her swift pernicious eyes, ere that sun goes.
You would not miss her after one week's mourning:
She is a mirage, merely an enchantment,
A song of music in your ears, a charm!
O glance aside, and give me for an hour
The signet off your middle finger. Conrad,
I swear, that you will thank me in a month,
For plucking my Tannhäuser from the clutch
Of his dream Venus, shameful. Turn your head,
Leave me alone an hour; and, I engage,
That, as the sea-face cruelly is smooth,
Where just the boat has sunk with all its crew,
That not one ripple of her slight existence
Shall vex you, where she glided gaudy-sailed.
(Slowly and impressively.)
You shall be King again. What are you now?
This carrion's lackey!

CONRAD
Fell assassin, nay!

ADELHEID
The epithet is just. I often earned it
In your upholding. You are generous
To make it now my label.

CONRAD
Slew you Raban
To prop my throne, forsooth, by sawing through
The sturdiest of its columns? Or to feed
Some woman's grudge? I wonder, which?

ADELHEID
(whispering)
I slew him
For neither cause, but—Hearken in your ear—
The story is a very curious one,
And, somewhat oddly, you require it now;
This Raban slew my father—slew my father!
Is that enough, or must I deeper probe
Down to the core in this good monarch's murder?
For they do say—and partly I believe it—
That some one egged this wry-necked butcher on,
And stood himself and shivered at the door.
Who might this be, I wonder?

CONRAD
(wincing)
Like a sparrow
You come at any crumb of gossip stale,
And hawk along my gutters for your news.
Who told you this?

ADELHEID
My own heart: none beside.
Love wears, my Lord, a mantle round his eyes,
And I have seen but dimly these ten years;
But now thy hatred hath unbound my brows,
And in the hideous backward of my days
The true relations of events stand out,
Their hard bright sequence out-lined full in dawn.
When morning lifts, the traveller looks back
And sees the features of his nightly road.

CONRAD
(more propitiatively)
I will consider—Something may be done—
And yet you ask too much by ells of prayer
And fathoms of request for royal honour
To grant, or entertain as possible
To be hereafter granted. Can I veer
From fondness to the fellness of your mood
In one swift afternoon's discussion? Nay.
Besides—the Countess has my plighted word.

ADELHEID
A plight unsoldering a foregone betrothal:
A promise to crack faith already sworn:
O rarely binding these!—If live she must—
I cannot see, why she should spoil more air
By breathing longer—But, if she must live,
Turn back this peasant thing to her rough woods
To crunch at acorns with her sister swine!

CONRAD
(losing all at once his self-control)
Hold there! I will not have her beautiful name
Torn on your lips.

ADELHEID
Why, this transcends belief,
And passes wonder. Then her very name
Is grown so purely chaste, so chastely noble,
That I, thy wife, must lack permission hence,
As held unworthy, to beatify
My lip with mention of this rustic hoiden,
Whose taper hell-ward lights thy netted feet.

CONRAD
Use better words or leave her from your speech.
You cannot rail the colour off her roses,
Or scold the coral from between her lips.
What sullen woman, since the moon was hung
To rule the tides of madness, ere endured
A penury of shrewing epithets
To lash against the beauty of her rival?

ADELHEID
My foot-stool, not my rival: you are wrong:
How can this minion claim equality?
Base-natured, born most base, a forest wench,
Just shown a sugared corner of the world,
Secluded in a baby-house of dreams:
This woodman's offset, peasant's paragon,
This doll-like puppet, of whose waking hours
A king, an idle king, must rock the cradle,
A hero sing this mammet fast asleep.
O shame, this rosy surface veils no heart.
The eyes are pretty, but no soul behind them
Informs their beams. Her brain is as a bird's.
Her life is ordered of a song, a kiss,
A laughter and a comfit. Still she hears,
That she is lovelier than the morning star:
That Helen's eyes were owlish to her own:
That the divine Astarte's neck would seem
A raven's near her more resplendent shoulder—
While she, vain simpleton, with greedy ear
Drinks in the fulsome rubbish, credits it:
Fool! For, beyond the knowledge she is fair,
The world with all its agonies and throes,
Seems like the painted landscape of a peepshow,
A scene she cannot read. Nor can she map
The prospect of my heart. How should she scan
My nature, catch an inkling of that soul,
Which burns out, like a pharos over wrecks,
Through these decrepitudes, which crush it in,
Behind these haggard faded lineaments?
Creature of sense, poor shallow-minded ape,
She only sees so far as ignorance
Allows her vision. Beast, I pity her!
Beast in her exaltation, still a beast,
Though all men bend adoring at her car;
When, like some empress, this mean forest girl
Rides royal through my city on men's necks;
While common mire is fitter for my feet,
A clarion clears her pathway through the town;
And hers to rule in is that summer home,
Wherein my girlhood faded as a foam-wreath,
And my dead parents came when chestnuts flowered;
Now palace of her orgies. I am shamed,
And very lonely in your great gaunt hall,
Where no one comes. All our court-butterflies
Are fluttered on to worship the new sunbeam.
I would not chide them back, poor fickle wings,
And yet I miss their colours and their forms;
When moping here alone with leaden gaze,
By the wide hearth, beneath the sombre line
Of portraits—all dead kings! You leave me these
Brows of the grave; you grudge me living eyes.
Broken, forlorn, bereaved, I anchor here
With my few girls. When first this rumour rose,
How some light lass had meshed you in her wires,
I told my heart that slander preyed on kings,
And, great in faith, discredited the tale;
And once I said, ‘My lord is often gone;
If I might learn his whither, it would balm
The watches of my solitary rest
With wing of slumber.’ Then I gat for answer
A frown, a few vague words; and yet my trust
Held mooring, though the gale began to rise.
Days dragged along: two pages in my ear
Spake, how you built a palace. Then I watched,
And found one boy apart and questioned him,
And my death-sentence in his answer read.
‘Had I not heard, a wonderful bright lady
Was coming to the summer palace soon?’
‘Tell me, good boy,’ I said, ‘when she is there;
For I would see her.’ In a week he came
And told me, with a smiling cherry face,
This adder had arrived. I bowed my head,
And all the certainty of desolation
Came flood-like o'er my soul. What should be done?
Where must I fly? Crying out of such deeps,
Whom must I seek? Why, God: how get at Him?
Through His deputed mouthpiece, our archbishop,
Who is as God's own angel, moving calm
Along a world of error; in his lips
The oracles of God shall bring me balm;
And at his voice this tempest in my heart
Shall fall, as did the Galilean waves
Before the Master's stilling. On the spur,
I sought our bishop's palace: he was gone.
Whither? An acolyte looked curiously,
And shuffled off: another would not tell.
Last came a simpering woman with a rose,
His niece or nothing, her garrulity
Divulged, our prelate was at present waiting
His turn to pay his court to your new devil,
For all her spacious anterooms o'erflowed
And hours one had to wait. I turned my heel,
Livid with indignation. Yet, next morning,
I forced myself to come again, I found him,
The old man, saint-like in his frosted hair
And clear calm eyes. He might have been in heaven
The day before, rather than where he went.
He heard me out, beneficently bland,
Cast up his orbs and trifled with his chair;
Then cleared his throat. I looked straight in his eyes,
And saw the serpent rising through the saint;
For hesitations and equivocations
Made him seem hideous. Writhing, I withdrew:
At his white mouth I gat no wholesome word.
Then my heart sank, and dismally within me
I held debate desponding, and exclaimed—
‘This insincerity with mitred brows,
Mirage of saintship, mock and mask of goodness,
This white face fleeced in grey hypocrisies,
Miscalled a bishop, rightlier Satan's goat,—
Whose truckling humour bends him to obey
The fickle frown and evanescent whims
Of one poor earth king, rather than subserve
His Master throned eternal in the cloud;
Of whose great service this false bishop wears
The saintly badge misprinted on his back,
A huge red cross; where Mammon's gibbet mark
Should ride and stripe him like a raddled ram’—
I said, ‘Since this most wordly, wavering prelate
Shuffles me off with temporising words,
And fatuous consolations vague as dreams;
Since he dismisses me, hurriedly blest,
And quotes me Scripture tags, which compromise
No soul at all, on general good conduct,
And meek submission to the marriage bond,
Ordained of God—and so forth: all this mouthed
By him, this saint, whose feet were even then
Foul with the mire that spreads your wanton's courts,
Stained with the litter of her palace—pigstye—
Why, then I plainly see my piteous plight,
And find that earthly help is dirt and straw.
No succour shall I gain this side the stars;
But how beyond? Ay, thence my aid is sure.
Up there are quiet saints, immersed in heaven,
Beyond the reach and taint of earth-born fear:
One of these saints will hear and do me good,
And bring me down hot vengeance on this drab.’

CONRAD
Call through the calendar: will one descend?
The saints are minded as my bishop is.
They know the world—were bishops in their day
A many of them—Popes and potentates—
They read the age: how monarchs are perplexed
With mulish wives: how kings and mates of kings
Will wrangle like a bucket's endless drip:
They know the weary drag of married lives,
And hear the eternal jealousies of fools.
Cry to them, call them! Will they answer? No!

ADELHEID
I thank thee: thou hast given my faltering prayer
Direction where to go. Its flight's ascension
Well hast thou tracked: I thank thee: it is well.
I will no longer supplicate these saints.
They are but dead men sitting in God's rays,
Tinged with a little lustre of God's eyes—
As the heads of a vast cornfield in the moonbeams
Now waving lustrous, now subsiding dark—
I will appeal to Him and none beside:
To One, with whom guilty and glorified
Are but as emanations of a breath
Peopling the void with worlds. My prayer shall climb
Directly to the Father, the dim shadow,
The essence and the spirit and the all.
I need no mediation to His ear,
No priest, though he be mighty: yet He made
This heart now breaking. He can understand,
How it will break—O presence hid in gloom—

LETALDA
Refrain, my queen, for awful words are these:
I almost veil my brows to hear them breathed.
It is a dreadful daring to beat out
New roads of prayer. Entreaty such as thine
Is ominous and ghastly. Silent lips
Aid more than supplication wrongly rendered.
Let Holy Church instruct thee how to pray:
She formulates in sentences well worn
All human needs, all possible desires,
Built up in words which Heaven has heard for ages.
Can we, the children of a dwindled day,
Cope with the mighty past; can we improve
The written inspiration of dead saints?

ADELHEID
Girl, I will pray as my heart prays in me.
My mighty sorrow speaks straight up at God,
So let the Church stand by and listen awed.
In such a moment God and my own soul
Are face to face. Right prayer is prayer sincere.
Him Churches interposed do mask and blur
From those who worship well.—Great Being, hear me!
Vast shadow, up and past this temporal veil,
These vapour emanations, star and cloud
And distance—past them all—O awful ghost,
How can I word petition to Thee unknown,
How supplicate the fathomless inane?
Can I adore, to whom Thy very name
Is an abysmal darkness, world-extended;
As a ripple on the eternal water-face,
Formlessly wafted, felt but not perceived?
I know Thee not, yet art Thou in my prayer
A living presence, with creative wing
Turning the turbid waters, trinitied
With Thy Son, Love, and Comfort for Thy dove.
As on the morning when the world cohered
And striped the void, dark strand and heaving sea.
O Thou, who dost all this, and yet concealest
The ardours of Thy forehead, and the out-shed
Reverberations of Thy trailing locks
In ether's inmost chambers. Thou—vast movement—
Thou, great of shadows, whom I dare not name,
Hear me in right of my great agony—
O Thou beyond the darkness and the cloud,
How can I make my call, how bring my prayer?
Can I appeal, strange even to Thy name?
When not one nation calls Thee by the same,
And all are wrong, nor know Thy name as sounded
In heaven's own language by the seraphim;
So all miscall Thee, and no man on earth
Means what his fellow means, when he says ‘God!’
Therefore I cry as some blind woman cries,
Out in the street on one whose step sounds kind,
To give her in her misery some alms.
Are not these very weak words that I speak
Wrung from my heart like blood, tear after tear?
Wilt Thou, O terrible, hear any one?
Are our tears pleasant, is our bleeding sweet
Before Thee? Are the striving and the void,
The throb, and this dark reaching out of hands,
Excellent music or unheeded noise?
Thou hast made Love, else hadst Thou nothing made;
Else had the unformed silence still endured,—
Is not Love rightly cruel as Thyself?
Love Thou hast made, and beautiful it is,
A dream of many lights and shaken waters,
Excellent, mortal, unenduring Love!

LETALDA
This is no prayer of the old days drawled over
To a drowsy priest in a chapel by the way.
This is no mumbling at a pigeon-hole
Of petty sins. But, strong as life desire,
And deep as human passion, her words tower,
And build a liturgy of agonies,
Fearful and formless. 'Tis an awful thing,
When a wife comes to praying as she prays:
And, be that wife a queen, her kingdom reels!

CONRAD
She knows not what she says. Her prayers are wind,
And wildly winnow on the idle air;
Vague, hideous, harsh, they bear no certain sound.
She sows down curses with a lavish hand,
As loosened oak leaves sink at winter's blast.
She recks not where her imprecations light,
Or on whose head her bans may flutter down!
O, she is madder than a wind in March,
And reasonless as some tumultuous sea.
Farewell, my queen, when next we meet, prepare
A smoother forehead and a milder mouth.
[Exit Conrad.

ADELHEID
Is he gone, Letalda?

LETALDA
Madam, he is gone—
With a sudden twirl of his great purple cloak,
With a sudden twist of eyebrows fulgurous;
And, as his back goes from us down the walk,
I see his inside hand, that fingers round
His sword-hilt, and he grinds the gravel going
With emphasis of heel.

ADELHEID
Ah, my Letalda,
He is gone! Is he gone? Is this the end?
I loved him very much. My bourn lies here.
I think my life has no more steps to go.
Nay, I will sink down senseless where I am,
Among the rose-wrecks and the leaves of autumn;
[She sinks down on the gravel pathway.
A poor weak woman, a limp heap of robes:
I cannot pray, dust thickens in my mouth:
I cannot curse; for my old love of him
Comes surging back, now he has gone. O girls,
What can I do? Where can I go? Sustain me!

[She faints.

SCENE III.

A magnificent room in the Summer Palace. Violet seated, attired in an amber gown with russet sleeves. At the end of the apartment a double fountain is playing, behind large coloured shells and gorgeous exotic flowers. At times Violet takes up an embroidered infant's frock, and works a few stitches on it with her needle. At her feet sits Conrad playing with her fan of peacock feathers.
Conrad and Violet.
CONRAD
These married fountains make a pretty bower
Of liquid arching rainbows, when the sun
Beats them in blazing through the painted glass.

VIOLET
A rainbow is like a kiss: why is it like one?
I am sure it is—yet why? The answer? Quick!

CONRAD
I'll have thy statue, as a water-nymph,
Made out of purest marble: I will plant thee
There in the fountain-drift and dripping flowers,
For men to marvel at. Over the hair
I will have gold-dust sown, and they shall tint
The marble to the colour of thy shoulders,
And make them rise out of a river ring
Of pouting and swan-shadowed water-buds
With golden mealy tongues: above it all
The rainbowed water-threads shall leap and shimmer.

VIOLET
You are become a boy in phantasies.
Can Love-stress thus degrade a man in years?
Girl as I was before, our mutual passion
Found me unwise and in unwisdom left me;
But the crowned warrior, you!

CONRAD
Warrior and crown!
O idle warfare, idle diadem,
Let these twin words perish, and pulse away
As an importunate echo from that wind,
Which rocks the silly furrows of the world,
And frets the foam, that on Fame's castled steep
Beats up in haze. Warrior! A corse in a ditch:
Crown! Why, a straw band for an idiot's forehead:
Glory! A penny peep-show at a fair:
Whereat some staring fools pay in their doit,
And peer and find it fine. O Violet,
Beyond thine arms this rubbish-heap of Time
Holds nothing worth a sigh!

VIOLET
My love, my glory,
King of that bright dream within which I breathe,
In such unreal moonlight-banded glory—
Amid these splendours, which thy bounteous hand
Heaps round my days—that, oftentimes, I fear
Lest I shall wake again among the pine-trees
In that weird hall; and see once more o'erhead
The crumbling banners and the rusted armour,
The empty morions full of spider ropes,
And spears of unremembered war; and find
The old dame nodding by the painted screen,
And the old watchdog baying at the woods;
And shiver having merely dreamt it all,—
How from the vapour of the storm-wind stepped
A knight into our castle, rested him,
And ate and went, and never came again.
And I, the foolish, in some after-sleep
Continued him into a king and lover,
Who merely came to dry his rainy curls
One dripping night; and under our poor roof
Told me that I was fair, for compliment,
Of kindness only, and went. Then must I fall
On sleep, and piece the sequel as I would—
Except, alas, in one thing: no, no, no;
Were this a dream and had I moulded it,
One thing I would alter—ah!

CONRAD
And one thing I
Would crush and will crush like an evil worm,
Which dares assail thy heel with shallow fang,
When all the other vermin of my realm
Keep their obedient distance, and obey.

VIOLET
I flung this hint out on a sun-mote's raft,
As something lighter than a grain of dust,
A bubble of talk, a ripple of the mind!
Let not this casual wrinkle on love's rose-leaf
Veer thy contentment to a vexing mood.
I spake my silly heart out as it came,
And not to anger thee with—anyone:
I think I am happy.

CONRAD
Sweet, you should be so:
For, Love be witness, I would shear my forests,
Drain out my lakes, and rip my hills in twain
To find you Happiness, this lurking thief,
That still eludes the great, who might command him.
I would wring out my whole realm, as a cloth,
To get you drops of joy. I'd have all seas
Searched, till the diver burst his labouring lungs,
To bring you neck-pearls large as robin's eggs,
While other queens string on their scanted breasts
A puny pea-sized row. I'd lose an army,
Sooner than your least kiss—

[Enter abruptly an Attendant.
ATTENDANT
Sire, the Archbishop
In hottest haste, freighted with weighty news,
Implores an instant audience!

CONRAD
Does he so?—
Who bade you tilt inside our privacy
Like a bull headlong?—Let this churchman wait,
And tell his beads or read his breviary,
Blow on his hands or rattle with his heels,—
Wait, an he list, or, does he choose, retire.
I am busy now—avoid!

ATTENDANT
He does entreat
A single second of thy royal time
On thy realm's safety swagging to its fall.

CONRAD
Must kings speak twice; have I not said, begone?

VIOLET
Nay, see him, Conrad.

[Enter another Attendant.
SECOND ATTENDANT
King, thy Chancellor
Comes sweating on the Bishop's heel to say,
There is bad news from Arnheim.

CONRAD
Tell this lord,
That time will cool the heating of his brows.
Let him amuse the Bishop—if he pleases—
As for his tidings, they are maggot-old:
I had them yester-eve. I will not see him.

VIOLET
O Conrad, see them both: these poor old men
Are weary; see them soon!

CONRAD
Pack, knaves, and say,
That I, perchance, may see them, if they wait,
And I, perchance, may not, as either mood
Holds me. Depart! (Exeunt Attendants.)
The raven and the jay
Flap hither, birds of bodement: the black lawyer,
And his bedizened priestship. I will wager,
His parti-coloured cope outcosts your mantle,
His ring episcopal this dainty ring
On daintier finger. Prettily, i' faith,
These blue veins mimic rivulets in your hand,
And lose themselves in meads of milky rose—
Arnheim! Bad news: I did expect no other—
I have seen this colour on the underlip
Of a sea-shell—Bad news! Well, walls must stand
Till cannon tilt them down. (Rises suddenly.)
God, let me go,
Saddle my charger; bring my spurs, and armour,
Sword—any sword will do—All may be mended
Yet, off, to horse!—O Heaven, I dare not leave her!

[He sinks back irresolutely on the couch beside Violet.
VIOLET
Nay, up at once, my hero, and begone.
I think, that I can bear your going now;
I am not near so languid as I was;
And, if I cry a little, why, for that
I shall do well enough. All girls must cry!
Away, and succour Arnheim: take no leave—
I cannot bear it—If you go, part swiftly
And say no more, yet hurry back on wings,
Ere I have missed you—But have no farewell,
For that's the worst of all!

CONRAD
My golden queen,
I swear by Love's most tender satin feather,
That I will never leave you on this side
Of your sweet childing sorrow.

VIOLET
Let me weep
A little—only one least droplet, gay
And bright, the tear of fair content and laughter.
Sweetheart, I gladden to my finger-tips
To feel you are not going. Let us be
Happy as children!

CONRAD
Ay: let Arnheim split
Her citadel, and toss her loosened stones,
Or tumble, one huge heap of rattling bricks,
Into the upturned faces of her foes—
Before I budge!

VIOLET
I have so many round me;
And yet without thee bitter solitude
Reigns in my splendid halls. I shall not be
So lonely, when—O love, I may not call thee
Husband, and yet we breathe together, move
Together, sigh and laugh in unison:
Are merry each, are sorry both at once,
In such a blended mutuality,
As shames the frigid name of spouse and groom.
O let the other woman, if she list,
Brag of her tinsel title. She retains
The husk of Love, mine is its sweeter kernel.
‘I am his wife!’ she cries: ay, and detested!
Queen of his love noways, thou art the queen
Of his abhorrence. Pride thyself thereon,
And leave my lord to me. O Conrad, husband,
For art thou not in essence thrice my husband?—

CONRAD
Ay, and that thrice made million: as indeed
I shall be, when the black-mouthed halting bell
Tolls her wild face inside the catacombs
Among the narrow shelves of dusty sleep—
Then shalt thou be in name as in desire—
Mine: (what a music the word brings with it!)
And death shall ease us of this whirling plague,
This headlong, noisy, stupid, boisterous fly,
Which brushes at our eyes and swings itself
Against the mirror of our dulcet days—
Winter will numb her wings!

VIOLET
Peace, Conrad, peace:
The picture of her burns into my soul:
I only saw her once and yet she haunts me,
This unqueened queen! She wore a faded mantle:
And limped along; her raiment might have been
Made on the very loom where cobwebs grow,
So poor it seemed and dusted. In her wake
Came a few moth-like women, eyed as owls,
Grey as their mistress, crawled and crept behind her,
As if they were a retinue of spiders.
Sheer in their faces the harsh steel-tongued east
Sawed piteously: as through their very bones
It seemed to glide, it tossed and tore them so.
Thus to hear minster mass they picked slow way
Along rain-deepened roads; and barely one
Heeded or did them reverence, as they went.
But in my track, as I came litter-borne,
A long and mighty concourse flowed behind;
And, round me and before me, such a sea
Of faces thickened, that my bearing guards
Went step by step; and they, who cleared the way,
Cried, ‘back,’ and bruised the people with their halberts,
Fearing a tumult, and to bring me through
Safe to my palace portals: yard by yard,
They had to cleave out passage, till I shrank
Flushed back into my nest of arctic furs,
And reddened over like a holly bush,
Half pleased, half frightened to be gazed at thus.
Then my proud scorn upon that careworn queen
Was rendered back with bitter interest,
And shame tenfold redoubled. For a crone
Pushed in her chin and peered. Her first breath blessed me,
Because I was so pretty; but her next
Came thick with piteous sobs: she turned away
And wrung her wrinkled hands out, sobbing aloud.
And, as they heard her weep, a shivering growl
Made the crowd-faces hideous and austere:
And one, he seemed a hybrid blackamoor,
Hissed out of blubbered lips these vitriol words—
‘Kneel, vermin people, to this mammet kneel!
This is the last doll of our emperor,
The fire-new plaything of the tyrannous hand.
Above the heads of men she rides on air,
Who should ride swiftly to the death of fire,
Were I the people of this queen of worms;
But ye are dogs and dumb, and, therefore, kneel
And pay your soldiers to bear round this jade!’
He ceased; and then a mighty bulk, who seemed
Coloured as earth, his face, hands, eyes, and clothes
Besmeared with tawny loam, antiphonally
Shrieked from the crowd across—‘Well said, black mastiff,
Thou canst yap yet. They tie our watch-dogs' noses
To keep them civil to this female thief.
This is the leech, who sucks our commonwealth
Dry with her lancet teeth. She lives in light.
Her beauty doth require as jewelled frame
The rosy rays of day. Her regal fool
Would chop the sun-sides into rushlight candles,
Rather than have her darkened, if he could!
I travail in the entrails of the ground
To dig out ores to deck her dainty bareness.
In her behest I burrow down in gloom
And scrape my way to hell. So, when the roof
Falls in and pins me flat, I shall be near
My journey's end. But she, this silken fitchet
Sniffs on the nosegay's musky face, reclines
Her ivory heels in swan's-down. Her sweet hide
Endures no glint of sun, no brush of breeze
To tan or roughen o'er its rosy marble.
She curtains out the beam with muslin veils.
But common faces saw I, splashed with mire,
Gaze on her shrouded litter reverently.
I looked, and, lo, the people bent, and nearly
Set in the mud their knees to worship something.
“The Host is coming certainly,” said I;
But, when the proud procession breasted me,
I found—O dismal anti-climax poor,
They carried one in triumph for her skin,
And rabbles howled their worship in her wake!
But I, whose dark days dig up her bright gems,
Will not caress the sandals of her guards.
If I must howl, then will I vent this prayer—
“My Satan, my good Satan with black nimbus,
Remember, thou art glorified to-day
In this the person of thy serving maid;
Lo, we adore thy fair ambassadress,
And, therefore, smile upon our happy land;
Reward us rarely, for we love thee well!”’
Then in the air he flung his cap and ended.
Whereat, a hundred keen derisive glances
Smote, like a sheaf of arrows, on my brow,
And sent me writhing back. ‘Soon, soon,’ I sighed,
‘This agony must finish: I shall clear
Their tumult in a moment, win to haven,
And get beyond curse-reach and slander-shot.
There gleam my palace gates.’ But worse remained;
For a fierce woman, with bedrabbled flowers
Stuck piteously awry in faded curls,
With hard high cheek-bones raddled to her lids,
Took up the cry—‘Ah, sister, hear and hail!
You move beneath the sun of sweltering pride,
I roll among the ditches, slimy-foul,
Of desolation and decrepitude.
Newts hover at my lips, and leeches float
Across my bosom; all my humid hair
Is greenly mixed with little duck-weed rafts.
You are the lily of a golden garden,
I am the nettle on some plague-pit grown.
Kings by your beauty take delicious hours:
The very lazar curses me for stinging
His barefoot heel. Of weeds I am the snake.
Yet, with this gulf between, we're sisters still,
As I shall prove; and so hear sisterly
A sister's word, our traffic being one.
Heed well the burnish of your mirrored face:
Heed well your lucid cheek and dainty lips;
Lest Adelheid break in with eager nails,
And crack the crystal surface of the glass,
Wherein her king sees Love's reflected eyes.’
And then a tawdry weather-beaten girl,
With eyes wine-swollen, caught her up and cried,
‘You prate mild measures: wench, the knife is best:
The good blue blade like butter in it glides,
And makes sweet silence round a rival's heart.
Give me such wronging as our worthy queen,
I should not merely scratch my reckoning out
Upon the walls of vengeance.’ Then a guard,
Who listened, smote her full across the mouth,
And felled her bleeding in the kennel prone,
And the mud mingled with her tinsel flowers,
And matted hair, and miserable head;
And, quailing, on I passed, and reached my home.

CONRAD
Scum of my streets, they sting their little hour,
And vent out envious poison on the great,
And rot like dogs to-morrow in the drains.
Heed them, thou rosy-royal pearl of kings!
Heed sooner the foul slug thy chariot wheel
Grinds into slimy earth. But these, thy railers,
An African, a delver, and a drab,—
My guards will know them. They shall catch the three,
And, like trapped carrion crows, on their own doors
Shall each be pinned; so shall civility
Increase among the herd. But these three jokers
Have grinned their last grin, japed their latest jeer:
Quick! Brush them from thy mind; they are quite done with;
Cancelled, mere earth, top-dressings for our fields,
Or powder for the grave. To such fools blatant
Time is a tavern merely, on whose screens
The chalky records of their thirsty days
Are settled at a sleeve-brush. With such loons
I can right swiftly reckon. As for her—
In the wide circles of whose discontent
These minnows dare to leap and show their fins,
Puddle leviathans!—By star and thunder,
She cannot be so readily repaid.
Let her alone, awhile: let her alone!
But, at no distant hour, I will devise
Such echoing scourge for her insurgent whims,
As other queens shall note, and, grown obedient,
Under their monarch's eye be mild, and quail!

VIOLET
O Conrad, is she crazed or does she feign?
They tell me, she runs wild on misery,
And must be soon secluded.

CONRAD
Sane enough
To play with poniards dangerously well:
Keen-eyed at need, and crafty with the best
To finger rift or find an eyelet hole,
Whereat to prize in opportunity
Wedge-like against us both. No mother fox,
Whose hungry cubs starve in the lean mid-winter,
More deftly gnaws in twain a hencoop wire,
Than she would file and fret opposing chains,
Which held her victim and her presence parted.
And, though one half her wits are stormed away
Ejaculating curses, she retains
A mighty silent sanity of mischief
Amid the gibbering incoherences
Of her hag-ridden life. Concede her crazy,
That doth not blunt her fangs but whet them more.
I dare not leave you in her wolfish way,
Next as she was in old authority
Through this unstable kingdom to ourselves.
And, though I've barred you in security,
And hooped you round with armoured satellites,
And halved my body's guard to guard your own—
Yet might she steal my signet, bribe my men,
And come, a tiger-cat, outside your wires,
And squeeze within electric reaching paws,
Weaponed with scythes: while her long-templed brow,
And massive jowl, impending near the cage,
Hardened the tigerish outline of a face,
Whose cold, implacably dilated eyes
From grey to green lengthened in fasting vengeance.
Would not to have her rubbing at your windows
Scare my bright fluttering dove from wall to wall?
And,—though her sickled hand sawed empty air,
And reached and reaped in nothing, till the beast,
Wailing and wauling out her strident hatred,
Grated the music of a baffled rage—
Yet to envisage her most fiendish eyes,—
Though gloating impotence and glaring malice
Were all the harm her liquorish whiskers gleaned,—
Might almost on the phantasy of terror
Bereave your brain of life, and blast the bud
Of our renewed affection, bringing pain
And peril on my darling ere her day.
Therefore, though Arnheim be as one who sighs
And, ere his death-sleep, makes his testament:
Though through her flimsy walls all cannon-rent
The life in her seems likely soon to fly:
Though, seeing my inaction, these sweet subjects
Howl ‘dastard’ at my doors, and brand me craven
For biding here, and tinker scurril ballads
On you and me—Yet, for all this I stir not.
Stand or fall Arnheim, here I peg my tent,
And budge no foot for any of their howls;
Though, in this night of sea-drift setting round us,
This fortress be sheet-anchor at whose chain
My tossing realm bites into steadfast ground,
And stems the tide and barely holds her own,
While wrecks and rudders of drowned neighbour kingdoms
Float by as feathers on the ocean face—
Even for this I move not but abide.
You are my kingdom, and this one, who calls me,
Is but a plain division of poor earth
Dotted with cities, meted into fields,
Sprinkled with farms, and varied into woods,
Or humped to mountain chains. Hath this realm brought me
A fragment of that immortality
Which to be near you brings? My kingdom's here.
What fear should tice abroad the father bird
Above the mossy circle of whose home
The grey impending shudder of the kite,
Like a dark cloud-suspended murderer,
Makes hideous all the happy blue of God?
God help you, child, if she could have me dead,
Or safely locked within those rotten walls
Of that beleaguered city, out of reach
And out of aidance—By the living Christ,
She would not stay to tell her beads twice over,
But smite and swiftly smite. Poor Raban's ghost
Sighs in his bed of shadows answering—Ay!
I merely turned my head one summer morn
And found my comrade slain, my signet gone
To be his hangman's warrant. This she did:
And this again, chance smiling, she will do.
Therefore must Arnheim keep her reeling feet
Without the fulcrum of my shoulder reared
To stay her staggering bulk; and, if she fall,
Why, let her crash!

VIOLET
My Conrad, in your ear—
You think not now, this river Happiness
Flows with too large a head upon my days?
My splendour burns me: it is terrible.

CONRAD
Not happy? Save this woman—whom God quell—
I say you shall be happy, if the veins
Of my broad kingdom, packed with jewelled ore,
Can sow your couch with lustre sapphirine
And blood-red rubies.

VIOLET
What is happiness?
To say, I seek, and change it to, I find.
To make my wishes instantly my havings.
To feed my sense with perfume, eyes with gems,
My touch with velvet foldings, ear with music,
Bird-song and water-song—like the fresh drip
Of that old river in my pine wood. Happy?
Ah, yes, to find reflected in your eyes
My pleasure in these pleasures, all of them
Wormwood without you. Oh, yes, I happy seem,
Happy enough. And yet (how shall I phrase it?)
At times, it grows a little wearisome
To have no wishes save accomplished ones!

CONRAD
You pretty grumbler! (Kisses her.)
You will hale the soul
Clean out of my poor mouth, if you put up
Such pouting lips at mine! A quaint complaint!
This little flower-white witch must rail on me,
Complaining that I leave her no complaint,
And grieving that she is not grieved at all.
She shall go back into the woods, and starve
To teach her better manners—Were you singing
When I came in?

VIOLET
An old and rusty song,
A song of faith forsworn—like swept up leaves
In bare woods, when the robin comes, and rime
Just fringes round the prickled holly leaf—
The lover is exposed and proven faithless:
The song says how, but I forget those verses;
And so the lady answers somewhat harshly,
And tyrannizes in the melody—
Thus singing, as I sing— (She commences.)


CONRAD
The sorrow of our talk has perished well
In this melodious ending, like a swan.
My nightingale, I am well heartened now
To see this chancellor.

VIOLET
That is my king!

SCENE IV.

A chamber in the Archbishop's Palace. The Archbishop is leaning out of a bay-window in a raised recess, which overlooks a court-yard, and commands a spacious prospect beyond it. Below him, in the body of the room, the Chancellor is writing at a table littered with documents.
CHANCELLOR
(looking up)
A clatter in the court-yard! Who rides in?

ARCHBISHOP
A sweltering post, booted with urgency
And spurred with fresh misfortune, errand-man
From Arnheim, I assume—

CHANCELLOR
(joining him at the window)
'Tis certain, Arnheim!
This fellow and his horse seem clad in vapour,
And halt as through a cloud. As he draws rein
How curiously the idlers gather in
Round his tired charger's head. The beast coughs sorely,
And hangs its jowl: the lame knees tremble fast.
How wearily the man flings himself off!
Now his spurs rattle as they reach the stones,
And startle off its knees the porter's child,
Who has crawled near, and draws a listless finger
Through one of the round foam-flakes on the flags.

[Enter an Attendant with a packet; this the Chancellor opens and peruses.
ARCHBISHOP
What do they say?

CHANCELLOR
The same old tale recurs—
Arms—Ammunition—Reinforcements—Go!
Lie there among the rest. (Flings the packet to the other papers on the table.)
Had I my way,
I'd answer thee to-morrow in such thunder,
As a great army marching onward churns—
But our Lord sleeps, ay, sleeps!

ARCHBISHOP
Another comes
Riding afar on yonder mountain side:
Small in the distance, greater momently.
These frequent messengers of Arnheim's danger
Come like ejaculations of despair
Breathed forth by yon imprisoned citadel.
Or rather you and I, my Lord, sit here,
As Job did on the day his fortunes cracked—
To watch the incoming harbingers of woe,
Post at the heels of post, on yonder road-line,
Slanted across the mount from cope to spur,
Coursing, as dew-beads down a spider's string.

CHANCELLOR
I yet could save this slumber of a king,
If he would rub the love-drug from his eyes,
And feel his feet. The ruin of our plight
Is, that this Lord is locked in lethargies.
Ours is no common wave-wreck of affairs:
We see the rocks but cannot rouse the pilot;
So deeply is he tranced with opiate charms,
So tight has Circe in her hell-toils snapt him;
That, like a bird whom some snake's gaze benumbs,
Full on his white witch he must chain his eyes,
And find the back-ground of the world beyond her
As tedious as a dunghill, or a yard
Full of spoilt straw and rotting in the rain.
His mind is charmed from woe: all evil tidings,
Though big with bulging danger presently
To crack, seem nothing in his lazy ear;
Seem lispings of calamities betid
An immaterial hundred years ago,
Away a thousand furlongs: O quite sad
In some old childish tattered story book:
Ay, sad enough, and is there more to come
Or does the tale end there? Then, faith, 'tis sad!
Is your recital done? We thank you: go!
You are dismissed; and, waving us away,
He turns him with a lip-curl to his doll;
As some huge school-boy smiles from idle heart
To find his lesson done and play-time near—
And the enchantress bows us slightly out
With a mock-serious air. Her cornered eyes
Watching the while his piteous-weary face
With barely undivulged amusement; then,
As inward-folding portals roll us out,
We hear inside a titter, first of wrens,
Expanding into shameless merriment;
As the pert jay's, who seems to jeer at God,
Alone in the holy woods, when nothing else
Dare break the dewy silence.

ARCHBISHOP
God, fair God,
Requite her these things in the shape of dust
Upon her rosy mouth, where kings come kissing,
As a sour shroud taste in her tender teeth;
And may her miracle of girlish flesh
Pasture the never-sated crawling worm
Soon, very soon. And let his writhing brothers—
Who in corruption hatch their myriad eggs,
And people the vast vale heads of the tomb—
Tug her to pieces; as an otter pack
Breaks the wet quarry, ere the creature die,
And strews the shore with bits and coils of him.

CHANCELLOR
A good stiff curse, you overseer of God,
And here's an echo to it in the smack
Of my palm on your hand-sole. This grip means—
‘Amen, Confound her!’ But, mean-hour, he pushes
Such absolute dominion to this girl,
That all our realm seems as a book's blank page,
Whereon she may inscribe in black and red
Her whims and wishes. Even you, my Lord,
State-pilot, keeper of our souls, grey-haired,
And aureoled with rays from Peter's chair,
Speak this thing fairly, wag no word her way,
Bow in the house of Rimmon with the rest—
For fear no brow be left you to incline,—
And wisely bow. Spite of our wintry heads,
We shall outlive this despot of eighteen,
For all her roses and her moonlight eyes.
Because there is no wretch so near his grave,
So wasted, dwindled, gone to lees and skin,
But he may trust to sit outside his earth,
And hold his bedward shovel in suspense,—
Until the hot broth of a monarch's fancy
Be cooled enough to spoil in gusty time.

ARCHBISHOP
God sees, I know, that she will swiftly pass
As dried hay down the oven, as one leaf
Upon the booming wind, as one poor gnat
Scolding and buzzing on the window-pane;
Then, as the swift air shuts behind a bird,
So will her scathing course across this land
Be wholly unremembered. In one night
She came, this locust, born at yester-even
And slain before the morrow's spring of day;
Our vines lay tender in their leaves: she nipped them,
And left mere branches of re-wintered bareness;
But yet the dry stock of this worm-eat realm
Has sap within its cells to push new buds:
While she, this grig, having devoured our best,
Fulfils her fate and rots, and the great world
Will drink new wine, when she is dross and dust.

CHANCELLOR
Ay, ay, my Lord, we sit as men in the snows,
Seeing full fires in the distance. Day shall break
Abundantly hereafter—that's most sure—
But the rub is to keep our hearts alive
Under this chill and deadly veil of air,
That cramps us till the sun lift. O my friend,
The present of this desolated land
Is as the writing of a skilless child,
Soiled at the edges, inked between its lines,
Torn cross-wise, blotted, dirty, and dog-eared.

ARCHBISHOP
And yet there's hope. I sat up in my tower
A watchman and alone—alone with God—
And I looked forth, and saw our brainless King
Drink with his harlot out of yellow cups,
Kissing her glove and softening her bright hair;
While, on his northern frontier, watching him,
The heights grew black with foemen; and each hour
This silly play endured, crept up behind
New men, new morions, new great clanging squares
Of forms in mail: these deepened on the first,
Who in the front ranks, craning from the cliffs,
Watched without breath; as these over their shoulders
Watched without breath, a wall of living eyes,
Importunately patient: till the cup
Of the adulteress shall have made him faint
Enough—this fool beside her in the crown—
For their swift avalanche to rush below,
And clasp the panting wretch in easy cords,
And hale him through their cities like a bear
To skip to a creaking flute.

CHANCELLOR
So shall it be.
So they sit watching his ineptitude,
Now, even now, where hoary mountains lift
Their frowning brows o'er Arnheim's river-bend.
Here lies the very keyhole of our realm;
The needle-eye through which a foe must crawl
To win inside our heaven.

ARCHBISHOP
Now, by the the rood,
What garrison has Arnheim?

CHANCELLOR
Men enough
To hold a place castled by nature's self
Into such sheer impregnability,
That, if the assailants lack the feet of flies,
And cannot go as agile woodlice climb
Up the rough face of some old orchard wall—
The polished basalt of its parapet
Will make assault to each up-crawler—death!
Or as a virgin with brave brown oak hair,
Bosomed in breastplate of bright living rocks,
Arnheim would mock their ineffectual spasms
To be up and at her throat, and shake them off
Her slippery sides; as the small summer worms
Roll down the wind-rocked birch's satin greaves,
And strew the precinct, barrened by her shade,
With litter of coiled broken throbbing things!—
That is the fortress—Heaven's own battlements,
Whereover the old dragon's beaten angels
Went into boiling chaos,—were no stronger,
And yet—

ARCHBISHOP
Speak out thy thought—I hear the stars
Rushing through glorious arcs of airless void,
The trembling worlds of ether floating by;
I hear a sea that shatters, and a noise,
As of the earth's foundations broken through:
As of iron, as of grinding rock, as the hiss
Of rivers seething into furnace mouths;—
As the tramp of a great multitude abroad
On a vast plain in darkness; at the verge
One thread of lurid sea, above it straightly
Another of blear cloud. I seem to see
The beaded outline of the myriad heads,
To catch the shuffle of their on-coming;
I seem almost to fear the swoop and scream
Of wild great birds, who, now and then, in the dark
Turn out their shining sides, instantly passing
Back into a giant column of black haze
Hung like a blight o'er those advancing heads—
These things I see being similitudes;
And all this kingdom's night is foul with dread,
And bad with desolate shapes. Speak! Thy worst fear
Has in my soul a brother, elder born
And huger in his limbs.

CHANCELLOR
Turn up thy lip—
I teem the rough wine of my tidings in.
The time is gone for wincing, and mincing words,
The hour is come to crush the grape of truth,
And turn her keen tart must inside our mouths,
Though it draw tears at the eyelids.—I have said,
Arnheim is strong; meaning, the inanimate
Arnheim is steep and difficult to scale—
But for the living and the soldier stuff
That cram her stony sides—why, weak she is,
As one old woman in a hut of reeds
With half-a-dozen curs for her allies
To keep the lion out. So Arnheim is
Packed full of troops, who quarrel, snarl, and sleep,
Insult the citizens, are mutineers
And turbulent. Her menace lies within;
And, though the mountains bristle above with spears,
She could deride them, did no recreant heart
Within her whisper ‘lost.’ Not adamantine
Bulwarks, nor Nimrod's citadel itself,
Not walls Cyclopean, Alps heaved in between,
Can keep a dastard safe. Stout hearts can hold
Walls like an egg-shell, hearts it is save towns,
Not wheelbarrows or mortar.

ARCHBISHOP
Will not gold
Bribe these curs into courage?

CHANCELLOR
You have struck
The very keynote of their mutiny.
These soldiers watching menaced battlements
With bloodshot eyes and empty vitals, leer
And clung with gnawing hunger, almost fainting
Each in his heavy shell of rusty steel
Have had no pay for months. They watch and growl,—
‘Why should I serve this king, who starves me here
To keep his harlot plump?’

ARCHBISHOP
The end comes swiftly:
Canst show me any ray of dawn?

CHANCELLOR
I can.
All this I saw, and to my heart I said,
Is the world broken, and its shadow gone
Forever from the moon-face? Must we say
To this old lion of calamity,
Take us and ours and at thine ease munch both?
Or can I gripe him by his tawny mane
And fling the monster sideways? In my tower
I pondered many a night; till, like a planet,
The scheme of this betrothal rose in air.
So vapour-vague at first, so dimly specked
On the utmost edge of darkness, the last brink
Of the illimitable coast of stars;—
That half I feared, my vision's weariness
Had conjured up a point by straining for it.
But presently this globe swam out defined
In ether; and, I thought, in thy fair beams,
O planet, may our sickly world grow hale
And wholesome. Be Urania shedding dew,
Distilled in purest heaven, to sanctify
The compact of these children. Their betrothal
May strew a halcyon silence o'er that deep,
Wherein we fast are breaking.—Hear my scheme.
I will espouse with Conrad's baby heir
The no less infant heiress of this Raymond,
Who kings it on our borders towards the noon.
And I do think, that bell, which rings their marriage,
Will, with its soft vibrations, melt away
The ragged edge of that Cimmerian war,
Whose cloudy masses thicken over Arnheim,
And roll this blight back to its arctic home,
Workshop of fog and domicile of gloom-drift.
For I intend against this realm of icebergs,
Whose wintry monarch on our frontier thunders,
To march the kingdom of the olives up,
And clash against him with united armies,
Swelling our feeble ranks with friends behind;
And so prevail—though weak as jaded hackneys,
Burst at the knees, and whealed with lash and thong
By the vexing of this shallow governor,
Who calls himself our king and is God's scourge.
Let the good thews of this alliance win,
When our poor palsied fingers drop the sword.
If Raymond fail us, then the prince of snow-drifts
Will litter down his nags in Violet's splendours,
And water his great charger at her fountains,
Ere yonder moon grow slim.

ARCHBISHOP
I well believe it.
And what said doting Conrad, when you spread
The map of this new marriage on his knees?
What, when you showed him all the vales and hills,
The new discovered inlets of a scheme,
Which his crass soul and flaccid indolence
Had raised no foot to find?

CHANCELLOR
He rose at once,
When I had shown him the least silver side
Of my new bait. Up came he with wide jaws,
Keen as a pike, who for a mile of river
Has met no shoaling dace. He merely snapt,
Stayed not to chew upon the scheme, but said,
‘'Tis good and it will do.’

ARCHBISHOP
The rumour runs,
He made you write upon the spur.

CHANCELLOR
He did;
And jogged my writing elbow with his chin,
And like a gaoler rubbed against my side,
And looked across my shoulder, chose the pens;
And held me fast imprisoned with his presence,
Till the imperishable parchment bore
My fleeting thought, stampt in clear sentences,
For his most royal brother in the south
To nod to or renege. Then out goes Conrad,
And gets his own steed saddled, a mare roan,
Lithe as a snake, with lion-coloured mane,
Shod with the swiftness of a blush's wing;
Fleet as the sound, half shiver and half breeze,
Which sets the bushes crisp, a little hour
Ere the day tingles out between the cloud ways.
He chose a knight, flower of his retinue,
To back her swiftness: him he bade ride on
Right into the red rift of future dawn:
Through the long leagues of midnight, on and on;
Until, arriving, when the day was broad,
He galloped in among the dewy streets,
And unawakened eyes of shrouded casements,—
Rode with one final push of spurry heels,
And one last rattle of his foamy rein,
Into our Raymond's palace-citadel;
And, planting there a trump against the ear
Of Raymond's sleeping self, pealed loud and clear
‘I want thy daughter!’

ARCHBISHOP
Good! And what says Raymond
To our most sudden challenge of appeal?
Hath he rent friendship from us as a sleeve,
Or sewn our lands together like a hem?
Which? In that ‘which’ we wither or revive.

CHANCELLOR
He flutters, as a stock-dove is perplexed
Between a scarecrow and a field of beans.
A spacious champaign for his girl to queen
Is well enough, where rich grain ripens gold,
And merry rivers roll abundantly,
Rich-mouthed along the meads. These tempt him on.
But then the rugged clapper of rough war.
With drain of men, and more appalling still,
With drain of treasured gold, whose yellow discs
His miser fingers itch to hold, and pine
To pay away on thews of fighting men—
These fear him from alighting in our corn.
So doth mean Raymond balance chance with chance.
But in the end, believe me, we shall win him.
For nothing is so sweet to any man,
As meddling at his nearest neighbour's house;
And in an ancient friend's embarrassments
To intervene with lofty patronage,
And help him—just a little.

ARCHBISHOP
I believe you.
Our peril preaches credence in your scheme.
The land is halt, and you a crutch have found it,
Wherewith to reach the healer Safety's doors.
If Raymond will not marry us his girl,
We were a realm, but we are one no longer
Swallowed as Jonas by this arctic whale—
So reassure me, saying, ‘All frames well!’

CHANCELLOR
The mainspring is well oiled, a side-wheel hitches.
Is it not strange, that, talking here together,
We seem agreed to drop one name out quite?
A name of power it was not long ago;
You have not yet found heart to speak it, Bishop.
'Tis now the barking stock of any cur;
They call her in the taverns— (Whispers.)


ARCHBISHOP
Such a jest
Is bridegroom to the grave and the worm's cousin.
I would not whisper this into the reed-beds,
Lest at one sweep I should lose ears—and head.

CHANCELLOR
Cheer up, man, 'tis in vogue to scatter mire,
Where our most gracious Conrad plasters it.
The crowned arch-hunter brought the eagle down:
But, fallen as she is, the scurviest knave
Can spirit show and loyalty at once
In rending forth a plume to write his gibes
Upon those wings, that once disdained the cedars,
And moved among the stars. So this poor princess,
Who once sat up between the sickled moon
And the bright bundle of the Pleiades,
Is tumbled from the air of royal favour
Prone on the plain, a seraph castaway,
Her vans all broken! Let us bravely come
And add our kick.

ARCHBISHOP
You bring her wisely in.
She on this rite may claim a casting voice.
She made the limbs of this young master, who learns
Love with his whistle-pipe; who may wear willow
In leading-strings, and furnace out a sonnet,
Before he knows a letter in his horn-book—
What says the queenly mother? Right is hers
To interpose opinion.

CHANCELLOR
Nay, for that,
She said the merest shadow of a nothing,
And wept to say that much. For, when these nuptials
Grew into shape, and half the realm had inkling,
That such an egg of royal policy
Would soon be laid by our great ostrich Conrad,—
I took occasion with this secret bird.
To say—‘Most royal master, may thy slave
Inform thy wisdom with one little hint?
Were it not wise and easy and politic,
And after thy magnanimous great heart,
To give the Queen, my lady, one kind word;
Wheedle and coax her into saying “Ay”;
Pretend to make her counsel launch the boat,
Which stems, already far, the central tide;
And mother this our scheme on her assent,
Who at its birth stood extern and apart.
I tremble, lest she thwart us at the last,
If left to brood outside thy council-doors
A cipher; when the whole land's ringing lips
Canvass the bargain of her weanling sold
To bring its country peace, and loose the zone
Of menace from the forehead of the realm.
Shall she, with her large mother share in him,
Have neither hand nor lot in all this stir?
But rock the cradle like a hireling nurse,
Whom the high destinies of that small mouth,
To which she sells her breast, concern noways:
Pushed sidelong, as a cow, when nature's office
Is served, and held no higher in our Rome,
Than was that Capitolian wolfish mother,
Who lent her teats to Remus. Fie, my king,
Enwind her in thy councils, ask her mind;
Let her arrange some trivialities
To balm the sense of slight: seem to concede
Something not worth concession: mould her so
Into our projects, that she push our way
And not athwart us. Shallow womankind
Forgive a year of wrong for one kind day.

ARCHBISHOP
He did thy council.

CHANCELLOR
Ay, with meagre grace:
Said a few niggard words, that he was sorry
For the raw past between them, roughly told her,
That, if she chose, the coming years might mend;
Her hand had been too hard upon his mouth:
He was a king, no jade to set his paces
At anyone's direction: wife she was,
Not despot: guided he would be, not mastered:—
And in this tenor more. She asked him mildly,
Whither his converse tended, why he came
To mock her desolation? For he came
So rarely now, the cause that drew him then
Should be indeed right urgent. Had he come
To let her know, that she was doomed to die?
If so, she thanked him for civility
And found his tidings sweet. At this he laughed
A harsh forced laughter, to his lip-roots pale,
And kissed her hand. She seemed so lost and careless,
She did not even snatch the hand away,
But like a dead weed let it lie in his.
Whereat he answered, ‘Marriage and not death
Brings me to-day.’ She with a bitter smile,
Leaving the hand still with him, flashed reply,—
‘You cannot marry until I be dead,
So, if you come on marriage here to-day,
You come not less on death, a trivial one,
That must precede her crowning.’ ‘Nay, you are mad,’
He said and trembled. ‘Will you sanely speak,
Or shall I go, and send my Chancellor
To say what I would say?’ She snatched the hand
Fiercely and flared—‘I bear no go-betweens;
Say mouth to mouth your business or be dumb.
Are we not, as God sees us, wife and man?
Can twenty rosy harlots hinder that
By brazen intervention: rive our chain
By baying, curs, in chorus?’ ‘Dame!’ he cried,
‘Be civil.’ ‘King,’ she answered, ‘deeds which lie
Creep under civil cloak and speak you sweetly
In honey syllables and mouths of meal.
But honest anger when it deals with dogs,
Does not go bowing and scraping for a phrase,
But simply names the nature of the cur,
And gets the matter done.’ He chewed his lip
Fiercely and fingered at his hilted side,
And flowed in equal thunder, ‘Mad-woman,
Hear, mad-woman; deaf sleeper in the storm,
Rise up and wake, rouse you and feel ashamed;
Who, in the boom of sky-rack and cloud-clash,
Hear but your own small grievance, egotist,—
The miserable wail-chirp of one grig,
When all the meadowy vastness of the realm
Is wild with tossing elms, and waving grass,
And churned crops flatling laid with hammering hail;
While all the distance, a red tempest smoke,
Reeks up in anger. Will you listen, listen?
I have such peril on my foreland north,
Such mutiny within my kingdom's veins,
Such stint of feeding gold to nourish her,
That there is left one safety from the death,
Which creeps in at her heart. Strengthless we may
Ally ourselves with strength; and baffle doom
By setting other sinews than our own
To grapple with this angel of the dark
In the great plain of shadows. We encounter
Death by vicarious onset with his edge;
So will our limbs elude his swinging scythe,
Which, feeble-jointed, are too shrunk and lean
To be marched up against these sons of snow;
Broad, turbulent, and blood-distended knaves,
Ruddy with rapine, solid as their beeves;
Impenetrable as the boles of oaks
To arrow-head or spear or brandished sword.
Therefore, I wrote in my extremity
To Raymond, saying, “Let my foes be yours,
And whom I hate, hate also. Let us join
Front warlike with the world. Let him, who cribs
A rood of either, feel the lash of both.”
Then in the midmost of the letter came
The kernel of request, for there I proffered,
As a strong cord to wrench alliance tight,
That we betroth our infants, son and girl,
His girl with my son—our son, I would say—
What say you, Queen, to this?’ The shallow King
Made such an abrupt ending and curt close,
That all the woman in his consort's heart
Grew fiery at the slighting: round she turned,
And knitted up the fingers in her hand,
And made a silent motion with her mouth,
But did not look at him. Again he asked her
About this child-betrothal, ay or no,
As at her lips he must have yes or nay;
Whereat, she merely said,—‘Your child, at first,
And our child after. Lo, the kinder last
Allows me a little corner of my babe
To make me proud withal: delusive pride,
For he is sold already like a sheep
With no leave taken from the mother ewe.
Child, O my child! Is he my child at all?
I did not dream that you had left me him.
Then I be richer by one baby's heart;—
Nay, you do wrong to leave me this rich thing,
Who have despoiled me of all else held dear.
All good things have been taken long ago
Out of my life and heart, and air and eyes.
Complete my spoliation. Leave not one.
Love is gone, honour followed, self-esteem
Went afterwards: hope, joy, content, repose,
Sat once like starlings in the boughs of Time:
But now the tree is dead: and, with a whirl,
They are gone into the red divided disc
Of sunset: they are gone? Must the child go?
Earth has a many sorrows: I fear one—
That on some morning you will come, my Lord,
And claim your child, and bear him to your love,
To be a little page to lift her skirts
And tend her lap-dogs. Ay, my Lord, thus do!
You have taken her my life, take him as well:
For I am such a beggar in this world,
It seems unequal with my other fate
To be so richly childed. It were simpler
To play the sonless Niobe as well
As Ariadne on the Naxian dunes:—
So take the child, and wed him—if you list—
Or strangle him: I care not!’ There she ended,
And in a storm he left her.

ARCHBISHOP
Did he so?
Nay, but this brews to mischief, by my crozier!

CHANCELLOR
God knows the issue of all this; not I!
Meantime, do you with me, as duty leads,
Grasp the state's helm and stormwards keep her head.
And, while this dotard King and frenzied Queen
Drill in the ship's side holes, let us take heart,
And pilot her to haven—if we may!

ARCHBISHOP
Sir, I will second you and pray to God.

[Exeunt.

ACT V.

SCENE I.

The cathedral, gorgeously decked and illuminated for a church festival with wreathes, flags, and tall candles. The Archbishop in full pontificals stands at the High Altar. Behind him are bishops and priests in rich vestments. On the altar-steps appear boys in white with red sleeves, swinging censers. The organ plays and the bells are ringing. To the right of the Archbishop is King Raymond's Ambassador; on a raised dais at his side is set a cradle with lace curtains, containing an infant asleep. On the Archbishop's left is placed Conrad. Near him is a similarly constructed dais, but on this no cradle is yet rested. At each side of the altar are ranged ladies, nobles, guards, pages, heralds, &c. In the outer portion of the dome a vast concourse is densely packed, watching the ceremony.
ARCHBISHOP
Lo! in the name of God I cite thee, Conrad,
And thou, who in the person of thy lieger
Appearest, Raymond, thee I summon also;
Twain kings upon this holy morning met
At the high altar of a greater Lord,
In this vast dome crammed with the entire realm,
To see this nuptial done; whose living faces
And bent eyes watch me innumerably round!
Now let the rite proceed. Fling incense up,
And make the ribbed roof crack with organ throbs;
For never in our annals came a day
Grander than this. The boys in your vast crowd
Shall wag, years hence, their winter-hoary heads
And chatter, ‘I was there!’ The little maiden,
Just old enough to keep unstable perch
Upon her father's shoulder, half afraid
Yet more delighted, blinking like a bird
Into the blur of lights—shall tell hereafter
Her grand-daughter about the golden show;
When of the breathing mass within this dome
Two-thirds are dust. O beautiful live men,
And comely breathing women fresh as spring,
O ye that listen to me and feel so elate,
So sure upon the pivot of your days,
So firm upon the planting of your heels;
Who feel at life so strongly with your hands,
Who root yourselves so deep in human love,
In hope, and pomp of earth; who in your veins
Feel throbbing stuff sufficient at this instant
To keep your eyes open a thousand years—
You acres of earnest faces, over whom
I stretch my ancient arms and number you,
One, ten, a hundred, and the hundreds roll
To thousands, and dim thousands swell behind—
Lo, I the ripest apple on Time's bough,
The soonest to drop dust-ward, cry to the child,
Saying, ‘A little while and a little wind,
A few more swathings of the head in sleep,
A few more changes of the crumpled leaves,
A few more airy mornings fed with sun,—
And all these glorious creatures, whom I see
So excellent in loveliness, shall come
To lie down very darkly in the dust
Without sweet words, eye-wish, or brain-endeavour,
Till in the rounding earth their atoms mingle;—
As, if one pour a wine-cup on the sea,
A few short rockings does the stain remain
Insoluble and separate, and then
The liquid giant changes the red patch
With the inroads of his salt immensity,
And rolls the red speck blue. So shall ye fade
In the ocean of the grave, when the wind raving
Rocks up in air the roots of Death's own yew,
And mingles in the ashes of our bones
With inorganic dust. But, though the man
Wither, and though his hand rot off the wrist;
Yet, if it cut the rock deep with his name,
The after generations will go by
And read of him for ever. A great deed
Burns in a stormy turret wave-beset:
And bright ephemeral vessels come and go
Over the waves at foot, like butterflies,
And, wafting soon their short-lived pomp away,
Sink in rude seas or rot in harbour sides;
Yet still that great light steadies on the sea,
And the new fleets roll in it and rejoice.
Therefore, not one day or a thousand years
Will wash the bond we consecrate to-day
Out of Time's annals. Two great lands are come
Under this dome, two lands of vengeful past
And immemorial hate—in wedding robes
Are come to fold each other with tight arms,
And kiss away that past on mouths which hunger
From abstinence of love. Press palm on palm;
And round each wrist I will such cordage wind,
Such interchange of fatherhood to-day,
That Raymond wound in brother-bond with Conrad,
Shall plan no war apart, no truce alone;
But they shall bid the vulture-bearing storm-blasts
Of their hereafter battle-fields unroll
One ensign, on whose silky billowing sheet
The arms of either monarch interlaced
Shall crimsonly expand o'er miles of spears.
Let hand lock hand, till Time, which is Love's shadow,
Build up in sweet maturity the limbs
Of either childhood, his with manly bloom,
Hers softer than a rose-leaf; until both
These wedded flowers be ripe for mutual fruit,
And mould an infant bud, who shall be grandson
To Raymond as to Conrad. I have said,
And may God send a rapid angel down
To catch my words before they fall to earth;
And feather them with strong prophetic plumes
To sail the kingdoms till fulfilment come.
And now, my Conrad, stand up here on high
The central star-point of all watching eyes,
Greatened in incense fume, rise out alone—
And lay thy right hand on the cup and bread,
Thy left on the black altar crucifix,
Which bears aloft the nailed God in His woe,—
And, grasping each, swear with a great voice, swear!
On the wood of His passion, on the chalice of His blood,
On the crumbs of the incarnate sitter on stars,—
That, while He give thee eyes to light thy brain,
Good hands to feel thy fortunes, and stout feet
To bear thee bravely o'er thy kingdom's soil,—
That, till the grave end eye-light, touch, and going,
Thou wilt to this alliance bear thee true,
So Christ thee succour!

CONRAD
With a firm true heart
I swear, I will be faithful to this bond,
Touching the flesh of Him, who left His stars
To be a baby in a trough of kine—
Handling the blood, which fed the hyssop roots
On Calvary; whereby the souls, that swam
In the wide stake-nets of Hell's fisher-fiend,
Expecting fire, brake mesh and flapped away
With joyous fins erect into the fruitful
Rivers of paradise—Hereon I swear;
By my soul's hope of climbing into Heaven,
By all that consecrates a monarch's days,
By wafer, wine, and crucifix, once more,—
I will love Raymond with a brother's love
Now, and hereafter, till I drop to dust!

AMBASSADOR
And I for Raymond on these elements
Swear with an equal emphasis the echo
Of his loud adjurations. For my king,
I say, these seething proffers of your loves
Are cold to our vast incandescent heart,
Which here out-rays on Conrad and his realm
Whole atmospheres of kindness; as the sun
Turns his abounding warmth across the globe,
And gives, and gives, and gives. Never to end
We stablish here alliance. Never to snap
We hang in angels' sight a golden cord
From Conrad's star to Raymond's. O ye faces,
Eyes earnest, and innumerable brows,
Reach forward in your crowding, crane and see;
(Pointing to the cradle)
Have I not rightly said, she is a star,
This infant planet cradled in her heaven
Of cloudy down: which rises, as she sleeps,
On either hand of the small head, rose-rare,
And gently breathing in her flushes, pure,
Waxen, and warm, clad with the gloss of flowers,
And beamed upon with the mixed light of morn
And the last faded moon-ray? Bud of kings!
See, as I part the cradle-curtains, shines
This wonder to be wedded! Ah, in her sleep
Doth the bride know the terrible sweet hour
Slides out of Heaven, and, winging towards her bed,
Hovers and poises, one hand on its lips?
Ah, does she tremble, catching through her dream,
Some rustle of his silent vans, some sigh,
Some drip of a tear? Will she wake, and find day
Torn as a leaf, and night poured on the ground,—
When the bridegroom knocks? Ah no, she will sleep child-like,
And years and years shall push this picture back,
Until it shall be limned in love and fire.
But she is ignorant, poor thing, to-day,
That on her tiny hand whole empires lean;
She saw not many faces heretofore,
Except her nurse and mother. She recoils
Into her pink cream-coloured cradle-shell,
And buries down her forehead in the lace
Among the satin sides and broidered fringes,
And marvellously sewn and folded lawns.
She shrinks at such a storm of sudden eyes,—
As some small tender snail held up to light
Contracts inside the cavern of its home.
O King and people, I am here to-day:
My arms are treasured with this breathing gift,
The royalest, which ever Lieger bore
From the bosom of his King, to give away;
Because his brother in the purple here
Said, ‘Give me of thine innermost and best:
That which thou sparest readily I refuse.
Give me thy very flesh, rend it away,
And in the ache of this great loss sit thou
Dazed, dull, and bleeding: thus I shall make sure,
Thus deeply prove thy love commensurate
With my exorbitance. Thus shall I sound
The fathoms of thy generosities:
So, thirsting, shall I gauge, how large a bowl
Contains the measure of thy kingly trust.
Therefore, I now exact no less a thing
Than thy one child.’ Whereon, my master said,
Not even in this have I refused thee, brother;
Take her yet shining with a father's tears
As after rain a lily. Ere these dry,
May some one in that other garden kneel
And kiss with greater right the brow they chilled!
So, from the weeping face of him I serve,
Bearing this wonder in my arms, I came
Through the deep valleys to her nuptial day.
Lo! she is here. Clash bells: call in the groom!

ARCHBISHOP
All things are ready for our sacrament
Of spousal benediction. Holy Church
Steeped to her lips with blessings, brinked to flow,
Says to her children—‘kneel; and ye shall taste
My welding consecration!’ Royal Conrad,
Whence comes this tardy tarriance of thy queen?
Why is our yearling lover's cradle absent?
The bride keeps better time. This little lady
Will rate her true-love laggard as a toad,
To hold her waiting at the altar rails!—
Comes not the Queen? (Aside to Conrad.)


CONRAD
By our Redeemer's tree,
She trifles, ay, she trifles.—You and you,
Why stare ye dumbly at your neighbour's nose,
And budge no foot? Rush out and fetch her here:
Begone, an army of my satellites,
Instead of trembling there before my face,
Useless, without expedient. Instantly
Scour to this moody Queen; in thunder say,
That, if she comes not hither in an eye-wink,
I will out and push her here with battering rams,
And hoist her in upon a catapult.
Fly, run, tear up the flags!

[Exeunt Attendants hurriedly.
CHANCELLOR
There is no need:
A hushing wave of silence smites the crowd
Around the giant door-ways of the dome;
Stiller and stiller grow the wrestling heads,
How pale the people at a clap seem gone!
Now a hoarse ripple of wild whisper comes,
Crisping across their blank astonished brows—
That's a strange buzz, which deepens on us inwards,
As shivers, which begin at finger tips
And to the heart roll on. I feel, the Queen
Has reached the doors and comes; but I do fear
She comes in no good fashion. (Aside.)


CONRAD
Coming—coming!
By God, I say, 'tis time indeed she came.
These women must be late for everything,
And dawdle out their lives. I do believe,
That at the day of judgment they will creep
Too late out of their grave-brinks. Coming—coming!
She takes her leisure fairly over it,
And up the aisle drags on her leaden steps,
Pausing and panting. Can these robes be black;
Or does the shadow tinge them? At this pace,
She will burn down the day-light getting here,
Through the divided lane of bowing heads:
She snuffs up adoration like a goddess,
And lingers out its taste. This makes her crawl
So crab-like up our aisles.

[Adelheid enters attired in black. She walks on feeble steps slowly up the centre of the cathedral. The crowd opens her out a passage. Behind her come Letalda and another lady, bearing between them a completely white satin-covered cradle; of this the lace curtains are closely drawn across the front, so as to veil its child occupant. The cradle is deposited facing that containing Raymond's daughter on a similar dais. Adelheid takes her stand over it.
CONRAD
So, Madam, you at length do condescend
To greet our pining gaze. We fear, you derogate,
Though late you come, in being here at all.
You hoard your presence in such high seclusion,
You fear to waste upon our trivial show
The aroma of your rose-bud privacies.
The slight occasion of a son's betrothal
Is hardly worth the wear of shoe-leather,
It may have cost you coming! We have watched
And wearied for your advent,—that must please you.
A King has waited in his Lieger's person,—
That sweetens on the palate of your pride!
The whole mute realm—King, Commons, Army, Church—
Have held suspended breath; and, straining ear,
Yearned, ‘Will she never come?’ And that must please you!
For, by the Mass, I speak, good Madam Queen,
For this assembled concourse, as its head,
And we allow, that you have made us all
A thousand Jobs to dog behind your whims,
As humble scholars in your school of patience.
Sweet Queen, 'tis well and very wisely done:
'Tis burnt across our souls in lines of fire,
That you are so insufferably great,
That, though the pot of empire over-boil,
We must not jog your pace into a run
To lift it off the blaze. You take occasion
Of a wise day and an auspicious one,
To flaunt these ragged whimsies of revolt,
To daub your discontents o'er sacred walls;
'Tis well to advertise this face-crammed dome
The ductile wife your good man has in you!
How bland his sleep must be, what dreams of heaven
Must visit Conrad in that hornet's nest,
Miscalled his marriage bed. All this you have told us,
And sweetly and most sanely blared it out!
And, as your deeds are lunatic at core,
And whimsical as pieces of a dream,
Harsh as a braying mule or wheezing boar,
Ill-sorted as a hay-rick, out of tune
As a frayed fiddle or a squealing brat:—
Black in a word—black as your arrogant heart—
So is your garb one-coloured with your act.
Why come you here arrayed to mock our rite
In such audacious dissonance of sables?
Why do you spill this ink on the fair page
Of our most clear and candid ceremony?
Why do you stalk in here, like some dead nun
Lashed from her grave by devils for her sins?
She could not come in inkier than you do!
Whom are you here to bury in that weed?
Came you to hide in earth your shrewd ill-humours,
No grave more blessèd ever yet was dug,
No sepulchre more golden for us all,
Grassed with the snow-drop peace! No, no, 'tis merely
The moonish itch to be at odds with all men,
To give offence, rub time against the grain:
To say, ‘when folks are laughing, I will weep.
If they wind orange wreaths, I gather cypress;’
And make them stare and say,—‘How grand she is!’
And in such rank unweeded insolence
You dare to treat us to this antic guise:
Where are the crows, whom you intend to scare
By mimicking their rusty backs so well?
Most gracious dame, have you misread the bells?
It were sheer merriment and insult laughter
To ring them at that canter o'er a coffin,
And to dance music shovel in the dead.
No, Queen of sullens, there is some mistake:
We celebrate no obsequies to-day:
A wedding this, a wedding, and a grand one!

ADELHEID
One thing is grander—death! I came in hearing
His plumes above my head—I seem to see him—
Some folks have died upon their marriage morn!
As for my robe—I am sorry it mislikes you.
I merely thought to match the mind I wear.
Best is she robed, who robes for any chances,
Who, if those merry metals in the roof
Calmed down to intermittent drag of iron,
Need not trudge home and shift her garish fleece;
But in good time prophetically mourns
First in the ranks of sorrow!

CONRAD
And I am sorry,
Most sorry, my good Lord Ambassador,
That on the rainbow of this fair occasion
So sour a cloud should set its inky brow.
That in this beaming pomp, this vast assembly—
A concourse, which in varied glory vies
Almost with the emparadised sweet scenes
Of our expected saintship!—I am sorry,
That, when all hearts throb to one pulse of concord,
And in their myriad beatings hold one time—
That this forlorn, distraught, desponding woman,
Who anguishes in the gate of agonies,
And in corrosive madness eats away
Her own heart's fibres, gnawing at herself,
A vulture cannibal; as if Prometheus
Needed no bird of Jove to come and rend him,
But did its hideous office on himself.
I am sorry this distracted shadow Queen
Should intervene among these sanctities,
And stain the crystal of felicity
With ravings worthy of a madhouse chain.
The pity of her state, my Lord, is this:
She ebbs and flows, like an afflicted tide,
At any moon's impulsion. Moon at wane:
You might as well in fetters case a dove!
After a sennight, Luna growing round,
More wisely shall you rob a wood-bear's young
Than baulk her flimsiest whim. What man or spirit
Can say her dove days or her tigerish hours,
Or chain her variance to prediction down?
Meek-eyed and piteous, yesterday she came
And craved permission to attend. I urged
Her frequent illness: she insisted, promised
No tumult should ensue. I, easy man,
Nodded reluctant leave; in fear I gave it:
For in the perilous balance of her brain
A hair will overset her swagging wits:
A dry leaf grating on a gravel path
Will lash her into frenzy: rivet eyes
Upon her face, she shivers like a reed.
So in the exaltation of this day's
Great serious rite, her fit recurs in rigour.
I might have known as much. But, being so,
She must be borne. We have no choice but bearing.
Proceed, Archbishop, and regard her not.
Get quickly through the rite: betroth these children:
Catch not her eye: keep thine upon thy book,
And mumble on despite of interruption.
Ignore her accents, thine can beat them down—
Read, at a gallop, read!

[Adelheid presses forward in front of Conrad and the Archbishop, and addresses the crowd from the edge of the altar platform.
ADELHEID
O bitter wolf,
Mad am I then? Ay, carrion fox, you tear
The sane sun of my reason from my breast,
That in its darkened absence you may take
Your lecher ease, and feed on sinning hid.
Of outward honour you long since bereft me,
And now you come to swear away my soul;
And to crush out that last, that latest spark,
Which keeps my miserable body sweet,
And strong enough to count your perfidies:
Which gives my miserable body rushlight
Enough to singe this creature of the stews.

CONRAD
(to the Archbishop)
Man, read her down in thunder—

ADELHEID
God read him
Black in the last book, if he dares: be silent. (To the Archbishop.)

If I held not one riving arrow strung, (To Conrad)

And nearly twanged against thy panther heart,—
I could weep—could weep—

ARCHBISHOP
Madam, be temperate:
You have strangely moved the King.

ADELHEID
He shall be riven
More strangely yet.—Sides then the Church with vipers?
Doth she push down the bruised and broken lives,
And help them into the fanged mouths of tyrants?
You hold your bishoprick on gracious service
To wait in harlots' ante-rooms. Be dumb,
Or I will hold your varnished holiness
Up as a muddied mirror, cracked and flawed,
To the wild people.

ARCHBISHOP
Madam, I have regretted
Always the King's new—ties: I will be silent.

CONRAD
On thine allegiance—read!

ADELHEID
God will reward
Thy dumbness. (She addresses the crowd.)
O my people and many faces,
Save me a little silence, for, God knows,
I think, that I have ended, almost done
My day of earthly speech. O patient folk,
Like calm contented oxen roped and harnessed
To pull along one paltry tyrant's plough,
To drag his shares across your mother land,
And make her bosom bleed to profit him.
O Titan folk, who ear this weakling's field,
Who hold your mighty-thewed great hands abroad,
Your myriad-wrinkled palms, supreme in toil,
For the lean wage of one weak man's oppressions—
I have seen your shameful servings, I have seen
You reeking under huge laborious loads,
As waggon horses stream in frosty air.
All this I saw, and in this hound's behoof
I wronged you much in once my golden day,
And ask you at my last to pardon one
Abolished out of queendom, near her end,
And hardly mistress of her own sad soul,
As Conrad rightly tells you: mad in much,
And chiefly in this delusion lunatic,
That I laid down best love, best blood, best service
On a hound's kennel. Now discrowned I wake
Sane to revenge. God's winnowing fan in hand,
God's word inside my brain-beat, sane to act
My wrong's unwronging. Very sane to know,
When the last stone is built into the pile,
And the arch stands for ever, monument
For any wife and any mother here
To plant with grateful flowers, when I am gone.
Some mother out among you there, come near!
I would have such an one approach and scan me.
It seems an idle fancy, but I would
Press the live blood within her hand on mine,
Once more, because she is a mother merely.
Is not that strange? But dying folk have whims.
Forbear me for a little and allow them!
Here, mother, you I want: peruse my features.
These (would you now believe it?) once made up
A pretty face enough. You see such faces
On many rosy maidens of eighteen;
And some of these, when their poor bud sniffs spring,
Will conjure up mad dreams in multitude,
Which, as we sane-mad grave-brink people know,
Come true by opposites. These girls persuade you—
Poor hearts, they know no better, pardon them—
That Love is not a lie—We know he is!
That the chance congress of swine meeting swine
Is not called wedlock—But we know it is.
That motherhood is not a curious wheel,
Whereon our husband tyrants tie our hearts,
And break them, nerve by nerve, and string by string,
Through years and years of married agony—
That much the stupid world knows very well,
And sees it every day, and shrugs, and cares not
Even to break a scurril jest thereon,
So wholly stale the wrong.—I do not speak
To all who front me: nay, to mothers only.
Ye, ye shall judge me alone: since o'er our patience
The same toothed harrowing wrong has torn and past,
And ye have bled and shuddered as I bleed.
On you I make my cry, mothers, who hold
Live babies at the fountains of your milk,
I charge you by your love to these—avenge me!
I pray you every wife in this great crowd
To mark this fellow: he is adulterous.
I clasp this nailed Christ by these bleeding feet,
And swear on them my death lies at his doors,
At Conrad's, Conrad's doors! I feel your hearts
Bound up in answer, ye are moved: I see it.
O joy, God speaks out plainly in your faces.
Come in your millions, crush him at the altar,
Rend him asunder with his harlot girl,
And sow the mangled pieces of each swine
Over the altar face, good sacrifice,
Sweet to the nostril of an angry God.

[A hoarse and ominous murmur rises from the outermost portion of the crowd. A fierce movement commences from behind. Those in front are pushed inwards. The guards endeavour to drive them back.
CONRAD
To the winds patience! I do fling it from me,
As useless scabbard to the sword of courage.
Is this a rabid woman dog, who flings
Such mortal poison from her foaming teeth?
Who can use ceremony with a tigress?
She works the people up to murder us.
In self-defence brief ending this deserves:
Out we must hale her like a drunken drab.
On her, my guards! A hundred marks to him,
Who plucks her up and bears her wrestling door-wards.
You need not be too tender of her head
Against the columns, if she grapple fiercely.
Out, at all cost, she goes! A hundred marks!
Remember: now, men, with me: all at once—

[As Conrad advances fiercely with his guards to seize the Queen, Adelheid draws forth a dagger. Conrad and his satellites recoil in confusion.
ADELHEID
The show is nearly done. A little patience
And we shall get the curtain of death down,
And put the lights of the world out. Mothers, see,
I am the best of all you mothers round me.
The proof is easy: ye shall grant me this
Dearest distinction ere my night clouds come.
Draw in and learn my vast solicitude.
I am more tender of my infant's peace,
I love to lap him longer in my arms
Than any mother here. Sweeter to me
It is to give him suck, to rock him sweeter
To sleep upon my heart. O mothers, mothers,
So have I rocked him now. This is the day
Of his betrothal, and I have betrothed him—
Only my bride and Conrad's are not one.
The father made his choice, the mother hers:
Neither asked neither, both were swift and silent:
But my bride first is with my little son—
No lass of veering Raymod's: earthly wives
Are not so soft and dark and wholly good,
As is my choice—Nay, ye shall see her swiftly—
Mine is a virgin young as yesterday
And old as God's beneficence, who made her.
She does not sigh or murmur or talk at all:
And, once she gets her arms about her groom,
She is too loving ever to unclasp them.
To her I have given this baby, not to thee,
Heiress of mortal monarch. Can you guess
The name of the new bride? He lies in there
Wedded already. Strip the curtains back, (suddenly unveiling the cradle-head)

And crowd in, all of you, and crack your eyes
With gazing.—See, nay, see! Why start ye back?
Her name is Death! He is asleep with her—
Fools, will ye waken up the blessed bridegroom?
Fools, will ye see, that he is dead—dead—dead!
I cannot find a tear. This strange betrothal
Is done. You may go, all of you. (Waving her arms.)


[Great confusion in the cathedral. A rush takes place towards the doors. Other surge violently forward.
CONRAD
(clasping his brow)
Murderous demon!
Thou shalt be torn into the grave for this
With such ingenious pangs, such writhing torment,
That the worst death, which traitress ever died,
Shall seem to thy fierce agonies a bed
Of downy sleep. My judges shall unearth
All records of the direst cruelties,
Which ever hatred's torture-teeming brain
Proved on the limbs of weak humanity
To glut stupendous vengeance, which has fed
For ages like a leech of painful veins.
They shall rake through and harrow up that hell,
Which in the bitter death-books of the past
Lies chronicled with shrieks and ghastly sobs.
And they shall crush their essence from all woes,
And pour it on together, till thy carcase
Be one great boil of suffering.

ADELHEID
Prithee, husband,
Be cruel a little quickly, else I fear
I may outstrip the laggard faltering wings
Of thy benevolence. Poor foolish ape,
Lord of one little patch of wintry ground
Misnamed a kingdom. Thou the slave thereof,
I cannot call thee King, whom paltry passion
And abject lust crown with the cap of fools,
And hang with bells that clouded diadem
Thou stolest. Hear my words, and, as thou hearest,
Grind round upon a wheel of fiery pain—
Listen! I kissed my angel all night long,
But I had promised with the morning light
That he should drink. I rose up quietly—
Made no great fuss—I did it, as I had done
A thousand common household things before—
I merely went and laid some deadly poison
Upon my breast: I kissed him as he drank.
I did not weep. Who weeps in real sorrow?
My beautiful, ah my beautiful, how I felt him
Drawing the death in from me. The sweet made
A quiet holy end. I laid him there
I'th' cradle. I am poisoned too, my husband!
We slew each other: his dear lips diffused
The drug into my bosom. Prettily
I' faith he killed me. I've an hour to live,
And, maybe, half an hour. Is that not strange?
I can laugh and pinch his cheek. Now torture me,
Who am nearly with my darling. We shall sleep
Beyond thy kindness.—Liar! Listen: I seem
Endued with fire prophetic, as my eyes
Begin to swim with darkness, and strange thrills,
Forerunners of the end, begin to clench
And rive my withering frame—Hearken, I hear
A sound of vengeance singing down from God,
I hear His curse, winnowed on giant wings,
Slide out of heaven on thee. (A noise.)
It strikes. Thank God!
I thank Thee, gentle Christ.

[Adelheid sinks back exhausted on the ground, supported by Letalda. Renewed tumult succeeded by a dead hush; during this a lane is cloven through the crowd, by which a Messenger rushes up the church to Conrad.
MESSENGER
The Countess Violet,
Scared by a letter from thy furious Queen,
Fell into bitter pangs an hour ago,
And in her swoon died— (pants)
died—

CONRAD
(veiling his head)
Thou hast said it—died!

ADELHEID
(on the ground, rocking the cradle vacantly)
My treasure, my poor treasure, could we live,
You and I, once again, and let me feed you,
And with my kiss unpoison your sweet lips!
But they are hard here, child, and death is softer—
'Tis better where we go! (She dies.)


[A second Messenger here enters, and comes rapidly up the aisle amid increasing panic and confusion.
SECOND MESSENGER
To arms, to arms—
Arnheim is taken, sacked, and overthrown.
The garrison hungry, betrayed, surprised,
Are cut into the fragments of a worm;
And I, alone out of the jaws of hell,
Fled on with dripping wounds before their lances,
To warn my King. O man thy bulwarks briefly;
The foe are marching hither like a sea,
With thousands and with thousands. By the noon
They will be here.

CONRAD
Thou hast said it. We can die.

A CAPTAIN
Nay, my King, up and wrestle for our lives.
I followed thee to Arnheim years ago,
And then we got her back, quelling worse flood
Than surges on us now. Lead us once more,
And rescue Arnheim; thou art young as then:
Captain, King, father! Once thy soldiers loved thee
I kneel to thee: brush off these hideous sorrows:
Lead us again.

CONRAD
(flinging himself on the body of Adelheid)
I cannot lead you now!

(The curtain falls slowly.)