University of Virginia Library

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.