 | The Soldier of Fortune |  |
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PART I.
ACT I.
SCENE I.
The Audience Hall in Sigismund's Palace. Enter a Herald, followed by a Pursuivant.HERALD
The King is risen, and the day begins.
PURSUIVANT
This is the marriage morn of Sigismund!
Let cannon tell the cloud, cloud tell the stars,
Till, on the pealing echoes of our news,
The sun-ball, floated in its lake of air,
Is jarred, and trembles!
(A burst of ordnance.)
[Enter rather hurriedly the Count of Gemmingen and a Courtier. Other Nobles and Courtiers begin to pass confusedly across the stage during their dialogue frequently whispering together.
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(in a low voice)
Arnheim fell this morning.
COUNT OF GEMMINGEN
Art perfect upon this? Who told thee so?
COURTIER
'Tis blazed already; there is a pack of troopers
Cursing anent these tidings: honest fellows,
They mint ingenious oaths in their dismay.
COUNT OF GEMMINGEN
Conrad must ride to rescue. Think you, friend,
This upstart harbours any martial pith?
COURTIER
Trust me, no cantle! 'Tis a moodish youth
Propt on the favour of our shallow queen.
COUNT OF GEMMINGEN
She doth affect him? Why?
COURTIER
Some rusty Count
Begat this Conrad, who a world of years
Ago was our Queen Bertha's quondam true-love.
They say, she was contracted half to him;
But Sigismund cast favourable glances,
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And shelved the musty Count.
COUNT OF GEMMINGEN
Court favour runs
Upon the strangest wheels.
COURTIER
That knowledge came
Before my first court-suit had dropt a button,
Or moulted one gold tag. Our life is crammed
Here with surprises. No man may predict
Upon what veering eddy, what rash wind,
This royal pair, Bertha and Sigismund,
Will launch their paper boats.
COUNT OF GEMMINGEN
I find him altered
Rarely of late. Last night, after his ride,
He seemed more like a charnel-shelf's dry mummy
Than a live, breathing king.
COURTIER
Our eye-shot tallies—
He cannot last much longer.
COUNT OF GEMMINGEN
If he die—
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(whispers)
You are the next in blood.
COUNT OF GEMMINGEN
That nearness makes me
So faintly welcome here. But I regard
These things as naught; a cup of good canary
Is sweeter than ambition.
COURTIER
Sir, you are wise—
Our sultan, he sleeps late!
COUNT OF GEMMINGEN
He quaintly chooses
His morn of over-rest. His doting wits
Replace themselves in cradle, and want pap-meat,
To find an opiate syrup in this news,
Which rends our realm as earthquake.
SECOND COURTIER
(coming up from behind and tapping his shoulder)
Curb your tongues:
Hush, he is coming: duck your heads and go.
COURTIER
(to Gemmingen)
Shall we make exit or remain?
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Go, quickly;
Our Emperor comes with an angry eye;
'Twere better to defer our salutations.
(He turns to withdraw.)
A NOBLE
Sir, you are on my foot.
SECOND COURTIER
Sir, you have caught
Your sleeve-lace in my sword-knot.
[Exeunt Count of Gemmingen, Courtier, Nobles and Courtiers, hurriedly, jostling each other off. Sigismund and Bertha enter from different sides of the stage. They meet in the centre.
BERTHA
Nay, both hands,
Both hands, my husband: shall our wedding morn
Enter our halls ungreeted? Dear old Day,
A little weaker and more white each year
He comes from roaming in the void with stars;
Humbly returns, true to his time, knocks once
Feebly upon the panel, sighs, looks round,
And takes his annual seat beside our hearth,
Revives his withered fingers at our fire,
Warms in his corner, chats with us his hour,
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And stumbles out again for one more year,
Lame, blind, and grey, to wrestle in the march
And radiant onset of more mighty stars.
The vast and burning pathways of the void
Vex his old feet: severe with golden eyes
The strong young planets with their consort moons
Despise and pass him. But the old wanderer
Crawls round his orbit somehow with the best
Of Ether's rolling children: and once more
He comes into his chair, and whispers, ‘Hail,—
I made you one some forty years ago,
And, like an ancient swallow, I return,
To the old wedding-nest beneath your eaves.
I go and I return—if I return—
For such a blindness deepens round my eyes,
I fancy, I may never come again,—
And, therefore, this time welcome me the more.
For in that steep and labyrinthine void,
Stars drop, like summer flies, and are not found.
So shall I sink down somewhere in that night,
And feel the beaming wheels of God's elect
New lights, that churn and grind me into haze—
So I may come no more!’
SIGISMUND
Old day of bells,
Welcome! There goes the minster's thunder growl,
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Of fellow watch-dogs down. A furlong east,
Second in emphasis and harshness, rocks
The swinging tongue of Holy Sepulchre.
Then, with her pert white steeple perched in air,
Sweet little Sainted Emily chimes in,
Like the sudden laughter of a girl surprised;
Or the repeated tinkle of a thrush
Before he settles into his stream of song.
The wind shakes with the music of them all
Giving me joy: joy on this sable morn,
When the mute knell should be unchained and break
This carillon with dirges. Shall I send
And chide their irony of triumph dumb,
Because we know—
BERTHA
Nay, let that rest, my lord,
For the division of a day.
SIGISMUND
It shall.
This is my wedding morn: I claim an hour
Before I cope with this vexation. Come,
And let me kiss thy kindly wishes back,
My Bertha, best old bride with silver hair;
Trouble will keep, so let them clash their bells,
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Come to thy old man, read how worn he is:
Kiss out the wrinkled lines across his brow:
Relume the faded eyes which found thee fair
On this day forty years— (a pause)
. Merciful God!
Four times ten slow long years! How are they gone?
Wife, wife, how dare we sit outside our graves
After such lapse enormous? Can we dream
To see another anniversary?
BERTHA
God keep you, Sigismund, for many more.
SIGISMUND
Nay, sweet, that cannot be. My feet tread down
The ruined brinks of bone-pits. A bruised thing,
My instinct is to hide and crawl away
Out of the strong reproachful stress of light
Into dark places. For the noon begins
To sting with an intolerable beam
My haggard eye-balls. Others, fair and young,
Wide-eyed out-stare the vivid Phœbus, hold
Orbs, that wink not, full on his disc, and dare
Ascend a staircase ladder broad in beams;
And the god teems out amber aureoles
On their ascending foreheads, till they burn
As daffodils just level with the sun
Steeping blue distances of April dawn;
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They bathe their heads, new Memnons in whose curls
Auroral torches bicker. Up they go
To reach down stars!
BERTHA
And presently descend
Foul-handed as the folk who rake at fires;
They went to glean the starry floors for gold,
And found some lumps of clay, no better grained
Than the red mud caked round the hoofs of swine,
Whose styes are near the hovels of their birth;
Wherein their wiser brothers dwell content,
And heed their hogs with unaspiring hearts,
And mock these sky-explorers on return
With a sneer baleful, saying, ‘It is best
To take thy fate in quiet. Feed and rot
After thy feast in chambers with the worm;
Why wilt thou scale the stars in thy desire?
Clay art thou, and clay only shalt thou find;
For, as the hand that seeketh, so shall be
Its treasure trove; and thou, impure, shalt rake
Pollution from the living herb of heaven.’
SIGISMUND
Alas, my Bertha, thou hast imaged well,
How youth aspires to wrench his crown off God,
And presently is tumbled out of heaven,
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I fain must lift my withered voice and cry,
How beautiful is Youth, despite its folly,
Despite its mad presumption; glory of God,
Gloss of the flower-face, whither art thou gone?
Thou movest with such beauty in thy limbs,
That, ere we understand one tithe of the grace
In which thou glidest o'er us, thou art past,
And with thee go garland, and feast, and song,
The cup-wine is exhausted to its grounds;
The very hand, which holds the beaker, aches.
Spectre of man, limp home: thy turn is done:
Thy foot-hold feeble, all thy fingers numb;
Thou tremblest as a feather on a pool,
Where there is hardly any hint of wind
Moving the level water just at eve,
And yet it twists and drives and has no peace.
BERTHA
Hale are you yet near others of your age.
SIGISMUND
I know, that we are both of us quite grey,
And, that I sit more near the shore of shade
By half a decade than this wife of mine,
Who is not young to shake so with her hand:
Ah, poor old love, cold are thy lips indeed,
And grey thy cheek; I miss its patch of rose.
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My roses brought me thee: their use is past;
Let them go then: old husband, thou art mine,
Rosy or grey, fast till the final dawn.
Let the bloom perish, I can laugh; for Love
Is stronger than the poppy's petal shed
After an hour's expansion. Smile with me,
Old sweetheart, for the most triumphant river
Runs into briny death, and spring's best leaf
Awaits the wormy ground. So smile or weep!
SIGISMUND
I am out of tune for smiling with the cold;
The East lays silver crust on palace pipes,
Whence wary swallows long have flitted home.
The shrewd wind pinches my old shoulder-blades:
These halls of mine used to be weather-proof;
But now in legion icy currents creep
Through mason-work and window lozenges—
A sorry palace; we could warm our bones
As well inside a wind-mill on a moor.
The year is ebbing and the land is sad
With blots of vapour. Sere leaf-terraces
Shudder beneath the black breeze stinging them,
And grind their rusty masses, leaf on leaf,
Branch against branch. And over all the rack
Rides paler than a moon-mist, and its cloud
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This make-believe, whose few belated flowers
Stare numbly upwards at the place of stars,
Born after time. Come hither, love, and gaze
Out at my side across the frosty lands;
Lo, at our oriel, this old lover pair,
Bridegroom and bride, link frozen fingers, set
Chill palms together, as in rose-time once
In that long yesterday since we were one.
Does not this prospect emblem our life well?
Nearly a waste, outspreading its gaunt sides
Of flat, coarse herbage to the region hills;
A scrub of woodland, bushes more than trees;
A huddled hamlet, like a broken comb
With half the teeth gone. Bertha, search this waste,
Sweeten its ragged unfertility,
I am sick of such a kingdom: I am shamed
That we have journeyed by so mean a road:
Have all those miles we came no land-mark?
BERTA
One—
There is a bourn, whereby one mother found
Infinite weeping. Far, far off it lies;
When on its heavy grasses the light turns,
Then it burns out, one small white sepulchre,
The shallow grave of our sole baby son—
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When we were dust, in purple.
SIGISMUND
Peace, have peace!
You break me on your words as with a wheel.
Why do you bring this up? Well, my son died,
Who had a realm to give him; while among
The fetid lanes and pestilential stews,
My hinds are overrun with rats and sons,
And have no crust for either!
BERTHA
God changed that;
And gave us afterwards another child.
SIGISMUND
A girl he gave us, which in heirless halls
Is changing rubies for red tinselled glass,
Or nightingales for lapwings.
BERTHA
Petulant!
Use better words; the girl is well enough.
SIGISMUND
Ay, in all else save boyhood amply well,
Which wanted, we remain in need of all.
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Across our leaden evening life she moves;
A golden star, beneath whose tender beams
The shepherd of the shadow quietly
Shall call us to our pens and fold us both
In for the night. O Bertha, were this all,
And had we hope of limping to our graves
In peace, the girl would do. But hark! out there,
The turbulent hoarse trumpet, the wild drum,
The stained and shaggy pack of soldier wolves
Raise hymns to Discord. Up, our armies, out:
Stem back this cloud of furies! Ah, my queen,
Our host is ready, who shall captain it?
A girl! And is our house dwindled to this,
Who nursed so many warriors in her day?
Can Adelheid encase her limbs in iron?
Steel gloves would strain her wrist and nerveless hand;
Her long hair would not pack inside a helm;—
And so the full sting of our loss bites home.
O for a son, to back my battle steed,
And make the air sing round my falchion's sweep!
O for some kindred hand to catch this slave
By his crisp beard, and toss him prone to earth,
And trample on this hireling captain's head,
This Conrad, whom my penury of boys
Makes me endure detestable and trust
With all my armies; though I read him plain
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Traitor in all but daring to rebel!
BERTHA
You lead whole funerals of weeping words
Along the dusty purlieus of your past;
And in their midst, as on a dead man's car
Hung round with answerable garlands, lies
One thought, which cannot speak with upturned eyes,
The dreadful thing we dare not talk about,
Or name out plainly yet. While, to divest
Our minds of this dread image, which we bear,
We wail aloud for others long since dead;
And, with this hireling retinue of woe,
These weepers paid to pull lip-corners down,—
We deign to pitch our grief. O shame, my king!
Turn round and face the bier, strip back its pall,
Envisage close, peruse the lineaments
Of this disaster. 'Tis a child pretence
To bear it shrouded on its graveyard way,
And by a tacit compact to pretend
We carry nothing dustwards.
SIGISMUND
Bertha, Bertha,
Give me a little time. I will be brave
Soon. Do not chide me. I am nearly ready:
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Break on me now.
BERTHA
Like a drowned foeman's face,
The more we try to cram it under the flood,
The more it rises up at us—and stares!
So with this topic most detestable,
It will recur—Good Sigismund—
SIGISMUND
I say,
Tell me the news, for there is news. I am knit
And resolute to hear it now: speak on!
BERTHA
Well, well, if you be calm—
SIGISMUND
So calm I am,
That not this storm of tidings can unleaf
One branchlet of my patience!
BERTHA
They have told you?
Ah, but I feared they would.
SIGISMUND
There is no fear,
I have not heard it! In the utter hush
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Just when the doze lay sweetest at my heart
In pulses of supreme beneficence
Bland as an angel's feather—in it rolled
A hustle and a clamour, at my head
A scraping of great heels, and they flowed in,
Scared varlets, rubbing open their dazed eyes,
With one big word tripping their drowsy tongues,
‘Arnheim is lost, is sacked, is overthrown,
Is fallen, is blazed into fine cinder-dust!’
Pealing the dismal changes like a pack
Of bellmen, ‘dole, death, dust:’ roaring it out
Above my pillow with no more concern
Than if they haled a ploughman from his crib
To quench his rick a-burning. By Saint Paul,
To rouse a king so roughly was ill done:
To crush in on me, like a cry of hounds,
Without the prelude of one usher's knock,
And snap my precious spell of morning sleep—
Arnheim is lost! Why, lost then let her be:
They might have surely let an old man doze!
BERTHA
And thou art wise, my king, who canst salute
Tidings of harm with one calm ‘is it so?’
Why should we rave? why reach up hands at God
To alter, which He cannot, yesterday?
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The finger of their King alone is strong
Now and to-morrow. Ah! no tear redeems
Our little frontier town. My sole regret
Is, that these ravens of ill-omened news
Should flap across the morning we were wed:
And I lament that almanacks next year
Will have black crosses at its number set,
And prick our feast for reprobation out,
Changing its daring, ruby-lettered name
Into a sentence like an epitaph.
So shall they change our day, as its wreaths alter,
Whose pale dry buds—I save them even now—
Crumble to dust—and we shall follow them—
Then is poor Arnheim lost!
SIGISMUND
Why, so she is;
And I can say, ‘she is gone;’ and then sit down;
And find we are fallen into a chiller year,
And chafe my palms, and chatter trifling things.
Only time has been—not so long ago—
When at this news I should have hurled my limbs
Into the saddle blindly with a roar.
And dug my spurs in backwards, shaken reins
And ridden charger after charger dead,
Until, my armour flaked with blood and foam,
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I thundered on her gates with gloves of steel
And dragged her back or died!
BERTHA
Love, be content;
See, how you cough and shake!
SIGISMUND
Ah! town, my town,
I played among thy streets: my mother died
Up in the grey gaunt castle near the well
And chestnuts. I have lost even her grave:
Another kingdom's earth holds her, not mine;
They might have left me this one cantle of grass,
This turf or two of daisy roots. Gone, gone!
Ah! Bertha, but indeed I loved the town;
My little city clean as a child's toy,
Set in a square with hooded corner towers
And white bright walls, the turf swells up at them;
Then in a heap the quaint dun-gabled roofs
Crowning it all. Why, you could take it up
Almost into the hollow of your hand.
So snug it lies, compacted in its nook,
Here where my crutch goes, in a scoop of pine-wood—
For, you must know, the forest clings about it
To north and east, borders and hems it in
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Suddenly round the corner, sees the pines
And plunges off among them with a wail—
They must have bridged it since; but I recall
Spitting a bayed red wolf where my shoe rests;
We pricked him in the pines, he scambled down,
And here he made his stand, and snapt and whined
Against us in a crimson flash of tide.
My Arnheim! No, their Arnheim! O my God!
Leave me not rusting in this crust of age;
Waken me up, flash anger into my brain;
A poor old feeble king, hard on his grave,
Dull, weary, almost blind; turning his cheek
To any smiter. Out, hot tears, and flow
At thy dishonour. In thy name thou art
Monarch and great, but in all strength to save
A phantom with a crown. For Arnheim weep;
Ah, city, fair and lost—Who yielded her?
Who flung her gates wide with such ready wrists?
Whose hireling hand beckoned the alien in
So easily? I scent Rebellion here,
And Treason winds her finger in this web,
Or never trust me more. All comes out plain.
Traitors, it seems, are crawling round and in,
Frequent as flies along our corridors.
They will betray a mistress or a friend,
A town, a king, a sister, or a secret,
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Push greasy gold across their prurient palms,
And they will cringe and smile and call thee god—
Hounds of the gutter, kennel dogs, lean curs,
Who will be-slaver any master's heels,
Detestable. Ah, sweet saints up in heaven,
Rend them and ruin their accursèd herd,
Fall in blue forks and split their houses up,
Singe all their faces like a bed of reeds,
And let them burn, burn slowly and burn long!
BERTHA
Leave them to God and let these curses rest.
SIGISMUND
Let them beware, I say, let them beware!
The aged lion is a lion still,
Ay, and a king, and dreadful to his last;
Although he roams the desert-side no more
Among his tawny sons, but bides at home,
Grey-golden, breathing thunder, in his lair.
Let no man say, ‘He drowses, hath no harm,
His fangs are worn away; turn in our dogs,
And let us bate him like a village steer!’
BERTHA
None deem thee thus; none dare to nurse this mind.
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Nay, by those starry seven that watch the pole,
You need not travel to the brink of the world,
Or search the steep of Thule to unearth
Such gracious vipers; native to this room
They bask among our bedding, nest in floors,
And honey-comb the palace as their own.
I know them, and indeed you know them well;
And some are courtiers, and a captain one,
But adders, Bertha, adders all of them.
Mark, how they slide about on audience days,
Veiling their sneers at one old man enthroned
With varnish of unwilling deference.
They push about in careless unconcern,
As if they were at market; they ignore
The presence of the deputy of God;
They loll against the columns quite at ease;
They shrug, they nod, they whisper at their will,
To inform the general herd below the ropes,—
That, with protesting laughter in their sleeve,
These gentlemen are good enough to come,
And flash in radiant plumes along our halls.
Still, while this moth of worm-worn palace fringe,
This maggot of old velvet, Ceremony,
Seals up their lips just now, let gestures speak
And tell the honest rabble all they mean;
Which would run thus could dumb thought gain a tongue:
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Be not deluded if we bow and cringe:
We are content to pay a little show
Of reverence to this regal dotard pair:
Usage exacts this serious pantomime,
And Custom, which is God to gentlemen,
Says, so it has been, therefore let it be;
And we obey: but notice well, good hinds,
Who turn our furrows and crowd in to stare—
We are your rulers, not this king of straw.
He is our puppet: all his tapes and wires
Are in our hand to tighten: showmen we
Of this old majesty, this bunch of capes:
We put him on a crown, set straight its rim.
And wedge the sceptre ready for his fist:
Then we arrange his mantle, drape its folds
To mask the shrivelled kernel of the man.
So, bravely he begins to shine in gold
And purple. There he sits against the blue
Like an incarnate sunset flushing gems:
It is a pretty sight. No harm is done.
The delvers are impressed, go home and dig
The better, howl no more for civic rights,
And with meek spades divide their cousin worms,
Since they are clothed in fustian, he with Heaven!
Not useless are these pageants, you observe;
Merely remember, that one master hand
Unseen doth dress the doll and deck the stage.
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Rest and remain in our most righteous hands.
We are the state, not this old spectre, we!’
BERTHA
Why dost thou weapon crude Rebellion's lips
With such an armed audacity of words?
Who does thee wrong, my king? No soul of all.
SIGISMUND
O, they are mighty, captains of renown;
They sit at home and wage big wordy wars—
Why, such a feeble phantom as myself
Could yield a town at the first bugle-call,
As in their valour they with Arnheim did.
But I will break the slumber of my age,
And flash in panoply on Arnheim yet.
We are none so broken as these boasters deem—
O, we have supped with men on battle-eves,
Who were as gods to these rash puny boys;
Insolent boys, who gibe and dare not smite,
Who fill my halls of peace with blaring words,
And at the crack of danger crouch meek dogs;
Who snarl and sneer. O God, wise God in rest,
Breathe back into my arm its ancient iron;
Fill me with lusty battle for a day;
Sough off this scaly pestilence of age;
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To teach these children how their fathers fought
Who thought no coffin sweeter for their bones
Than, if they lost a citadel, to lie
Under its fallen rampart; overthrown,
Yet with no hint of shame upon their shield!
O Arnheim, Arnheim!
BERTHA
Peace, my husband, peace!
Our sorrow is our sorrow. But a king
Should seem above the wound of mortal harm,
And rear himself more upright in his chair,
And nurse a prouder eye. He royalest
Can mutely watch his once calm sea upcurling
To such a head of hurrying tempest-wrath,
That it must whelm and snap him like a reed;
And yet with no lament can dumbly see
His liquid grave swing on.
SIGISMUND
You bid me perish
More tamely than a sheep. But wolves are round,
And one lamb of my cities have they torn,
So I will bleat and bleat. These raveners,
Hearing me wail, may drop her from their jaws,
For not a clown will budge!
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Vex not thy soul.
One finger only of thy realm is reft.
One town thou art the poorer; no great woe,
And nothing shameful. In the game for land
Kings lose and win, like dicers tossing cubes,
Lose one day, win to-morrow. Sup one eve
With Crœsus, beg with Belisarius
The morning after. Thou shalt win.
SIGISMUND
Enough
Red earth to roof my face in silver rain,
And keep my feet unfrosted in the snow,
When I do sleep dishonoured. Let those rest
Upon the pillow of whose dying bed
Victory lays her chaplet; who have earned.
Mighty in hand, their haven of repose.
But I, the last page of whose clean-writ life
Is blotted with defeat, how shall I doze
Yet in my grave until my name be clean?
Shall I desire to lay my harness by
Amid this rumour of beleaguered towns,
Loss and reproof? when traitors perch their nest,
Like martins, flat against my window sills
And in the hinges of my very doors,
Breeding and sitting watchful;—when I wake
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My kingdom of a limb; and no man goes
To stanch her bleeding? If I had a son—
My son is in his grave these many years,
He keepeth bitter silence and is cold—
Could he arise and ease my shoulder-blades
Loaded with many burdens. Could he hear
The laughter of the rebel as I strain
And stumble, breathing hard,—I think the dead
Would gather tear-rain in his dusty eyes,
At such forlornness! To no living man
Will I commend my sorrow. Look around;
Holpen of none, abandoned, almost scorned,
Whence shall we hope for love, whose ears are tired
With empty deference of many mouths?
Can we find one to trust, whom all obey?
Who shall be worthy of our seat, our sword,
And wear our empty robes when we are gone?
Who shall weigh life and death as grains of sand,
My doomsman with my signet on his hand,
My frown across his forehead, almost mine
The gesture, mine the voice? Who shall be son
Of my hereafter? who shall woo a girl,
And find a kingdom in a virgin's ‘yea,’
And raise, as monarch from her nuptial bed,
Graft of my daughter's love, replacing us,
With hurry of little feet, that patter down
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Shall sit like little sparrows in the sand
And watch the fountains? Whose this youngest bud,
Who fills the dusty cradle covered up
In the closed chamber where our baby died?
Where is the prince of promise, where is he?
Are his feet weary with the mountain glens,
And doth he dally with the vineyard girls?
Or laggard, on some river-island, turns
His boat, and slumbers in the wild swan's home?
One thing I know, our chosen is not here.
I search the narrow faces round my throne,
Between these apes and goats I cannot choose;
There is no brow among the lordlings here
Meet to sustain the intolerable load
Of splendour in this irksome diadem,
As consort to our child, king that shall be.
But I take oath upon the cup of Christ,
That men shall never stamp our ducats here
With Conrad's hateful face.
BERTHA
What voice in the street,
What cupboard whisper, what bird's note in the air
Hath made thee harp on that? This man defamed
Hath done thee service and shall do thee more.
Thy soldier, watching for thy word, he slays.
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‘Peace!’ and he sheathes again his duteous sword.
None lead men out as he does: no man's word
Is better with the host. Regard, O King,
Thine other captains; he, as Hesper, shines
Among a flock of leaden clouds: he soars
A golden drifting eagle of the foam
Over the cackle of the hoarse grey gulls.
As to our youngling daughter, this poor bird
Would shudder at the clash of marriage bells;
Leave her in freedom for a few more moons:
If she has fancies—and all girls have some—
She knows her duty and will lay them by
In lavender with other childish gauds;
When the right royal lover clatters in,
With a cloud of plumes, barons and pursuivants,
She shall say ‘Yes,’ if policy says so;
And leave that blind attraction men call love
To common girls and milkmaids. Adelheid
Will give one sigh for Conrad and say, ‘Come,
Royal and great and husband, I am here;
The bride is ready, Come! Poor Conrad!’
SIGISMUND
Plague
And pestilence increase his poverty,
Who is rich at least in dupes, who tire their arms
30
Ay, traitor; I do mean it; I speak plain,
And teach how far a traitor, how untrue,
How arm-pit deep in treason's pasty mire;
While Loyalty, which should ascend to God,
Benumbed by serpent fascination trails
Its heavy wings: for all Kings under Christ
Watch the great Python, who with hungry eyes
Sits coiled beneath our thrones, to whom we toss
Morsels and sops, when he puts up his flat
Lean head and faintly flickers with his fangs,—
And lull him back to sleep, whose bestial name
Is Liberty; and many fools run mad
At his faint hissing, which in crazy ears
Sounds like the laughter of a mermaid's song;
And this worm may have bitten Conrad's hand;—
For I do know him sour and malcontent,
Cruel and cold, bitter and bloodthirsty,—
One measuring us daily with steel eyes,
As if he chose the knife-spot. Ay, you wince,
For this it comes to; neither less nor more—
Brief would our session be, if Conrad's love
Knew how to make its briefness shorter still.
The love of my supplanter chides my stay:
Away, old man, hide somewhere, out of sight!
Hast then no refuge? Nay, not one: my heaven
Is wanted for the young new star, my sea
31
Alone remains, my spacious outspread earth:
But here not less my rival's glory needs
Such elbow-room, such freedom for its stride,
That he would push me under with the mole,
Lest, scarecrow-like, my insignificance
Should vex him, as he swings along our meads—
You do commend me a meek son-in-law—
BERTHA
There, out you flash again!
SIGISMUND
Great patient Lord,
Hesperus, Osprey, Conrad—by what name
We may approach thee unapproachable—
We do confess that we are grown quite grey:
We have been unmolested on our throne
Too many days, so long. Thou hast forborne
Divinely, deeply tried. O wax not wroth,
O be not very angry, that we breathe
And take our meat; Death is in fault, not we,
Who have outpast the customary term.
We know 'tis hardly decent to be here,
And yet, young Phœbus, spare us! See, I kneel—
BERTHA
Have done: you are a child.
32
At which last word
Another sorrow, thick as Hell, glooms out,
To herald me such news as Œdipus
Heard once at Thebes, and trod his crown in mire.
But thou, our heiress, maid of many woes—
Better be born of our least vine-dresser,
Rather be cradled in a swineherd's hut,
Than be one step in the ladder for this knave
To scale up at the sun with; spurned away,
When he sits supping in the golden halls;
Heiress of evil, orphan of content—
When we are in our graves!
BERTHA
Who talks of tombs?
We yet can guard our heads; this shaft of sorrow
Sings towards us, and we shelter till its barb
Bite the dull ground and quiver harmless there.
SIGISMUND
You argue ill: the blind God mischievous
Hath twanged his arrow to a hair's-breadth true.
Laugh, if you list. You women are all one.
I cannot simper at this inference;
Our shrewd suspicion, almost certitude,
That the detestable—I name him not—
33
And half-a-hundred gilded sugar-plums
Of lover lies stale as the Deluge dove,
Wins for his easy kingdom our meek child's
Most unsuspicious bosom. O these girls
Are won with feigning all days in the year—
You hardly need put bait upon the barb,
So briskly in all weathers will they come.
Why should I break my heart with discontent
About so stale a thing? God made girls fools
For some wise purpose. With their shallow hearts
An honest wooer will most poorly speed—
A rogue of lies and tinsel always wins.
And, since to name the sun brings out his beams,
Here, nothing loth, our gentle treason comes
Primed with disaster to the very beard.
And, as first beadlet on his string of woes,
Lo, he begins with Arnheim!
Enter Conrad and Raban
CONRAD
King and great,
Disaster needs no usher to thy throne,
Peril and Death tread ceremony down,
And at thy footstool we unbidden kneel,
Arnheim and duty our excuse. Sire, Sire!
Thy city is up, hot at her inmost heart
34
Wakes up, looks scared, and asks each passer-by,
‘Am I awake; or do I, dreaming, hear
The chances of a dream?’ They toll the bells:
No wagons swing along the public ways:
None sell or buy; the market baskets stand
Deserted; and the painted mountebanks
Forget their poles, and crowd to read the news.
Pale children, haggard women at their doors,
Gather and whisper. In the public squares
The men in noisy clusters, up and down,
Discuss the portent, point, gesticulate;
And, if a soldier passes, a low growl
Tells him the solid burgher grows afraid
For his fat bales at home. One cry goes out,
That even now the spoiler on thy walls
Is marching. As before him Arnheim fell,
So shall this mother-city in his snare
Be broken, be abolished. As I came,
I heard a drunken fellow on a cask,
Under a tavern-porch, wine on his face,
Wine on his hands, sawing them emptily
Over a swarm of boors, to whom he made
Oration, roaring out, ‘Ye are dead dogs,
One cometh with a halter for you all.
Lap the sweet wine a little longer: none
Drinks when the lips are worn off from his skull.
35
Whose heralds are at Arnheim, cutting throats
For the red yule-tide of their master's birth.’
So sings he out, and some catch up the cry,
Of how the spoiler in his glory comes:
As on between the clouds some golden light
Rolls down the dawn; or, great with silver rains,
A lordly river, swollen in its pride,
Wipes at its tread the harvest-promise prone,
And, on the hill-sides tearing, fills and fills
The earth with deluge. If our Arnheim died
At the mere lifting of his banner's wing,
At the first crash in ether of his flutes,
At the storm shaken from his trumpet tubes,
Without one arrow sailing, one bow strung,
How shall our gates resist his whirlwind arm?
Arise, for it is time, our lords, and save us!
SIGISMUND
We thank them and their meek ambassador,
It is a fair complaint.—Am I a god,
To hold all sorrow from your doors and mine?
To sweep the world clean of this cobweb Care
Will be my duty next. Answer these hounds—
They are not worth my saving, if I could;
So they may yap and yell. Save such, indeed
Hath no king ever lost a town before,
36
Should dog the hearse of this one? Save the boors!
How save them? Is there magic in our robes?
Or is our sceptre a diviner's wand,
That all these mouths should roar and rate at us
For being merely human? Are ye come,
Revolters, disobedient, malcontents,
At the first gleam of steel and crack of danger,
Crowding as abjects round my purple knees?
Must the King save you? Have you done your King
Such service? Hath he profit at your hands?
What tribute have you brought these many days?
None, save that one sour berry from a tree
Grown in your devil's garden, full of tares—
The apple of death and treason. Have your bills
In at the rind, and crunch it, kites and ganders!
In your good days ye kick against my throne,
More ready none to pluck its sides away,
And tear its slabs up into breaches; when
Sour Tribulation, bound about with flowers,
Snores in the lap of Peace; while Goblin Fear
Dreams at a barrel-head, and damns the King.
But when each phantom wakens, rubs its lids,
Hungrier, out of temper, from its sleep,
Then, then begins their furious festival
To tune of crackling villages a-glare,
To light of leaping cloud in lurid globes,
With mad complexities of moribund
37
In helter-skelter flying, who feel Death
Come at their refluent ringlets, twisting in
The stealthy fingers, ere his backward clutch—
Then, when you cannot step in the street for dead,
These cravens cry on me. Lo, then it comes,
That to one goal they hustle, wrestle, crouch,
Crawl on one point in heaps of prone despair,
Toss themselves in before me, strew my floors,
A jumbled sea of arms and writhing limbs,
Come to be saved, healed, coaxed and comforted—
Whither? By Chaos, to their mocked-at King!
Can he, your ridicule of yesterday,
Become the pivot of a reeling earth?
Ye pray to one ye spat upon before
To shield your faces and to save your hides,
Because—he is paid to do it, being King,
Else why should they maintain a King at all?
They dare rush in and roundly tell me this—
For all entreaty savours of command
When they entreat. They bully when they pray,
Saying, ‘O lord, the oppressor is coming on,
The vale-heads tremble with his instant wheels,
He reaches out his hand to rend our gates,
His fingers almost scrape their brazen tires;
Before him fans his breath as furnace-air,
And in it we are shrivelled up and rolled
Together as a beech-leaf. Now begins
38
Thy battle, lead and vanquish, up, prevail!
Wipe him away; snap off his charger's hoofs,
Break up his chariot wheels, strike off his helm—
Or else beware, a thing of greater fear,
Our formidable curse!’ The curse of hares,
Who mouth against the lion in his sand!
These are my most obedient burghers, they
Who, when their garners burst and teeth are tired,
Will haggle with me on each silver disc
And doit of tribute. Blunt and honest souls,
Plain men are they. We tax them overmuch.
Why should their sweat pay for a world of pageant,
A costly court, a useless army too?
They are plain folk, care not to pick their phrase.
But only let a dozen helmets gleam
Under the walnuts in a frontier pass,
Their note is rarely altered. Ah, the sneer
Becomes a howl of ‘save us!’ Curs, curs, curs!
O, but they chafe and chafe me. ... You do well,
Conrad, my lord, to let us largely hear,
How the town gutters mock the palace vane!
CONRAD
O, Sire, dismiss this anger. We must act
Before the dial creeps another hour,
Or lose this city always.
39
Lose or win,
How can they push this loss inside my doors?
If my mere wish can save beleaguered towns,
Which cranes, rams, ladders, arrows, catapults,
And men with iron backs, like burnished flies
In number and persistence, day and night
Settle around and try to creep within—
If such effect from my volition flow,
I shall learn soon that 'tis my royal task
To keep the demi-dead in hospitals
Quick and alive, to redden leathern cheeks,
To polish up lack-lustre filming eyes,
To find new breathing cells for putrid lungs,
To heal whole wards, lest if one cripple die
The rabble roar, ‘Depose him!’
CONRAD
In this view
Thy hands are clean, my King, of Arnheim's fall!
The event came on us like a sudden knife,
Too swift to catch the assassin at the wrist.
Hearten us, King, in saying, ‘So it was:
All rumour else is idle. God came down
And smote this city from us at a blow.’
The shepherd wakes in vain, if, as of heaven,
A sudden blot drops earthwards out of the sun,
40
And rises up an eagle with a kid.
If in this way the foeman's iron heels
Fastened on Arnheim, we, thy remnant herd,
Reproach thee nowise for the missing lamb.
But there are whispers, and disloyal ones,—
Rumours which make allegiance mutineer,—
How, faint with famine, half her garrison
On crutches at the loopholes, eating rats
And drinking tainted wells, day after day
She wrote for succour; and each morning rose,
And yet her iron girdle narrowed in,
But no help came. Once more she wrote, and fell
Cursing—ah, whom? Forgive her; she is dead!
SIGISMUND
Now, by my sword, this moves my soul to flame.
Beautiful Arnheim, did they leave thee, then,
To wail aloud so long in agony?
Could thy tear pluck no dastard from his chair
In my great comfortable hall? Would none
Turn out into the whitened roads austere,
And ride their faces red against the flakes?
And these are—well, God save the mark—my soldiers,
And not a bevy of white dancing girls
Who play at mock assaults with bullrushes ...
I am the worst served monarch in the world,
41
I do adjure you, Conrad! Raban! all!
Why did no succour march?
CONRAD
By Christ his tree,
I, King, reply that, till this morning, pealed
No hint of Arnheim's peril on my ears.
For aught I knew, our northern frontier lay
Still as a child is with a cherry bunch.
RABAN
They say, the townsmen sent a piteous scroll,
That should have groaned if parchment had a voice.
SIGISMUND
Is Arnheim's letter melted into air?
RABAN
Melted or lost! They say his wits are both,
The loon, who brought this sorrow in his pack;
Who rode and rode, until the land grew dark
Before him, fainting at thy palace gate,
Blind from the saddle. Some one picked him up,
And wisely put him into hospital,
Where now he most uncomfortably raves;
Wits has he none to speak of, yet avers
42
And drew the parchment from his feeble gripe,
Saying, the King should see it presently.
And now—being merely madman—he enquires
If ‘presently’ means ‘never’ here at Court?
SIGISMUND
Who bade you speak?
RABAN
My lord, I am reproved,
And kiss thy footstool!
SIGISMUND
Thou, a crippled scribe,
Born in my stable, littered with my dogs,
To speak so pertly, when these gentlemen,
Leaders and lords, are in this audience dumb. ...
As for this letter ... it is surely lost. ...
And yet how lost ... our judges shall enquire. ...
Now for the town: ride, Conrad, hurry and ride:
Take men, men, men: my army—take it all.
Do what you will; you are named General.
Be absolute as I am in this war:
Hurry and ride: I gird my sword on you;
Redden it well and bring it home: ride, ride—
You will get Arnheim once again, good Conrad—
I say you will—now go.
43
It shall be done.
[Exeunt Conrad, Raban, and Captains.
SIGISMUND
Let me get air and breathe. ... Are they quite gone?
I am well rid of them ... the pack may ride
To Erebus; I care not. Hearken, sweet,
I was in peril, yet I baffled them—
Warily, ay. Thank Heaven, I hold a brain:
That Raban nearly nosed my secret out.
Indeed, I made a kind of slip. ... Saints, kings,
St. Peter, David, suffered lapses each. ...
Well gone are they. How shall an old man keep
A clear, cool head in this new whirl of time?
A tinsel age of mock and make-believe,
Of strange wants and reverberate emptiness!
But in my father's days a King was King,
Able to feel his feet and have his way
With reason or no reason, wrong or right:
That I call reigning: but these modern ways
Of asking leave and ducking to the crowd
Disgrace the ermine. If thou be a King,
Bear a King's nature: art thou reptile born,
Crawl on contented in thy wormy rings.
Had I but ruled in those gone, worthy days
I had built my throne into such adamant,
44
Not one mere slip due to these failing eyes
Should shake its fabric like a weanling's toy!
BERTHA
Speak out, my King: deal not in devious phrase:
Hast thou misread their letter craving aid?
Safe ears are mine and faithful.
SIGISMUND
Hearken then—
Bury this secret in sepulchral lips
Never to come again out at the air.
When Arnheim wrote ... come nearer, lean thy ear ..
Thus it befell ... did you hear something move
Behind yon curtain'd door? Up! Fling it wide ...
No one? The wind among our tapestries
Is like a mocking bird, and takes the sound
Of feet and heavy breath and crumpled gowns.
Well, caution, best of watch-dogs, oft must bark
At nothing. .. You shall hear it from the egg
Without more prelude. Know, these untried boys
Sneer at the pilot, whose worn heavy eyes
Guide on the vessel through the floating miles
Night after night; while they in easy beds
Dream of the shore and curse the laggard keel,
He must watch always, wakeful, unrelieved,
45
At length the harbour: cabled to the side
Safe rocks the ship: out they leap: hurry home:
Who turns to thank the helmsman? Surely none.
Grateful? Not they: this loon was paid to steer;
And, though they might have provendered the shark
And supp'd the dog-fish, if his eyes had closed—
Who now fears drowning, sure of steadfast earth?
But if a little thorn of twinkling rock,
Undotted in a chart of devious seas,
Scratch out a plank or drill an eyelet hole
In the good timbers of our floating home,
Whereby these drowsers in the cabin find
Salt in their mouths, and Neptune gushing chill
Round their warm berths. On whose devoted head
Do execrations thicken? Rend and tear
The silly pilot. To a man the crew
Rush up and rate him, author of their bale.
Dismiss the parable and learn the fact—
Upon a certain night, when three or four
Great stars begin to rule the vacant heaven;
They, that is some one, cram a paper in
Beneath my palace gate. No fool of mine
Informs me whence it came, who wrote its lines;
My pursy seneschal, dull as a mule,
Pompously enters, sets the missive down,
Bows and retires with a flourish of his leg.
46
I find its seals are difficult to rend,
That it bemires my fingers with red mud,
That, even as I clasp it, warmth exudes
Yet from the haste of some ignoble hand;
I shudder and I set it down to dry.
O, I supposed it naught; some petty wrong;
Some boor, who beat his fellow in a ditch
About a freckled wench or glass of ale;
Whereon, the weaker and the worsted hind
Must have at least a royal arbiter
To salve his bruises and restore his trull.
Add, that the missive came at my dull hour
Inopportunely; when my senses ache,
And I am chiefly drowsy, mad for rest.
Who shall impeach me, if I thrust the scroll
Yet unperused beneath my pillowed head?
That night I slept, a miracle for me,
As soundly as a woodman or a girl;
The bundle lulled me like a sack of hops.
Night passes; and a budget of new cares
Clamour with dawn against my bedroom doors,
And, ere I well be wakened, cry, ‘Hear us!’
So in the crush and jostle of affairs,
Which strive for audience in my kingly mind,
This one poor letter is unheard, thrust out,
And sheer forgotten.—Now my breast is clean
47
Sure I am old: do I deny my age?
I will not be perused with such blank eyes:
What have I done to draw these glances out?
Bertha, say something: look not thus at me:
Make some reply. Why, many scores of towns
Have sent appeals and letters by the ream
In the long years of my most weary reign
To which I gave no answer; and no brick
Has loosened out of any of their walls
For my anterior silence. It is strange
And pitiful. Thy arm, my Bertha; come:
No hint of this to Conrad: let us go.
[Exeunt.
48
ACT II.
SCENE I.
A dimly-lighted Corridor in the Palace. Conrad alone, waiting.CONRAD
Will my sweet come? Listen! I think, I hear
The singing of her robe along the ground,
As the whisper of a far-off little wave
Crisping and trembling at the lip of land—
It rustles there! Alas, it comes no more;
The arras swings, and the old elms outside
Brush their harsh leaves together. The grey roofs
Pipe through their crannies to the floating moon.
Indoors, small breezes, like belated children
Of that large full-blown storm-blast in the air,
Roam, whining down deserted passages;
And seem to cry aloud upon their father,
Some giant in the moving mist, who rocks
The onward cloud,—howl out on him to feed them;
Who, eagle-like, in the havoc rides, and seeks
49
I wait in vain. Fantastic images
Swarm on my soul's impatience. All is still;
Yet on the buzzing air I forge her footsteps,
And conjure the extremity of silence
Into the sound which Love's most hungry ear
Pines after, till it draws into itself
The echo of a nothing. Adelheid,
Come, or I perish! How the ticks of time
Swing on their slow and laggard pendulum
Dragging the hateful seconds out to years!
Will she come never? Ah, some chance of Hell
Has caged her in from coming. See, she beats,
Dove-like, in vain her little wings to come,
And strains her bright breast on the door of wire,
And wounds her throat against the flimsy grate
That holds her in from love and larger air!
O had my hand its rending! Come, O come,
I faint with asking God to send thee soon:
My lips burn with petition, and my eyes
Glaze with delay. It is thy very time:
And yet I hear no rustle, nor discern
Under the dim lamps, moving like the moon,
My queen in her great golden hair. All still!
Yet the blood maddens and races in my veins;
I can hear nothing; yet she must be near.
She will come.
[Adelheid enters.
50
Conrad!
CONRAD
Darling!
ADELHEID
Look at me;
You bear no wound?
CONRAD
Not any.
ADELHEID
O, thank God!
CONRAD
I have no scratch of iron.
ADELHEID
I could weep
I am so blest. My soul is so surcharged
With benediction, that, as a wood-blossom
Whose cup is heavied with excess of dew—
She leans it over and spills some drops of it.
CONRAD
Thus will I brush aside this happy rain,
And never give you any time between
51
How could you creep to me and come unheard?
I found you at my side: you have coaxed silence
To strew your path with wool: I caught your footfall
No more than a bird's wing upon the air.
ADELHEID
The echo of the drums around your brain
Have beaten out my steps.
CONRAD
They did not so;
Thy step, thy voice, thy form, thy pictured eyes
Went out to battle with me; and endured,
Like presences of quiet heaven near one,
Who stumbles on the sulphur crust of Hell,
And beats the swooping demons from his head.
For the mid fight ran every way as foul,
When Mars on many thunders splashed and roared
Among a horrible coil of wounded limbs,
And maimed distortions: who, as severed worms
Drag ghastly bulks a few red inches on,
Crawled, and lay prone, and quivered, then were still.
There the unwholesome sun, like some vast star
With edges strangely blurred and copper face,
Melted meteorous on the side of heaven,
And from its rent and ragged under-rim
52
While on the verge an awful luminous haze
Thickened and sickened upwards from the field—
Like steam and breath of fighters, quick and dead—
Not very high this vapour swayed in flat
And heaving strands; turned like a heavy wave
Rolling and yellowed; as some river is
When flushed with loam at flood-tide from torn fields.
And in that lurid twilight wrought and raged
The fight with onset after onset, till
All its hoarse noises at a clap flared out
To sudden silence, dreadfuller than sound.
Then we drew breath; and, lifting up our eyes,
Searched the expanse of death from north to noon,
And saw its surface dotted with great forms
Shining; who, as they bent to wipe their swords,
Flashed fairly once or twice like golden stars:
But seemed mere scythemen cleaning scythes of dew
In a morning meadow peaceful. For it all
Looked most unreal, like an acted fight,
Or a dream movement, soon to snap and end.
Then went there out a whisper we had won.
Then some leant panting on their stainèd spears;
Some flung them down to sleep, some stared wide-eyed
Upon their fellows: one man gratingly laughed
53
In such a silence, pathos in it past
All pitch of groaning. Thus we drew long breaths.
Round us the battle lay like roods of plough,
Haze in their outskirts, in their furrows death.
And I arose to count their loss and ours,
And roamed from group to group, saying, ‘Well done.’
Till in my round I reached where they broke earth
In the easy sand of an old torrent bed,
And scooped two parallel wide ditches out
For the last service a man needs, who till
That brink be reached for much plagues men and God.
And here I found them, busy as black bees,
The white-cowled priests and waist-stripped grave-diggers,
These with the slain, these with the demi-dead,
Whispering, digging, praying, shovelling.
The gaping trench lay handy for its guests,
Half full already: thick within its sides
They lay pinned down, like dead sheep in a ditch,
With a snow of quick-lime on their brow and hands,
Till the next layer of death packed over these
Should mask them out of sight, and stamp them down,
Done with for ever. And for pity of them
Mine eyes began to glisten, and the soldiers
Began around to whisper, and I was shamed;
When it rose on me wave-like, all at once,
54
That could I change places with one poor knave,
Whom at that instant I saw shovelled in,
With wide lip and eyes earnest in their films,
Whose most enduring hatred twisted in
His long nails cat-like in a foeman's hair—
So that for want of time to free the twain
They shot them in together. ‘Ah!’ said I,
‘If hate out-last the rigour of the end,
Shall love be weaker? Let the wretch lie there,
Who would debase the eldest-born of heaven,
By such a blasphemy of unbelief.’
Nay, were I him, so rolled into my grave,
I know that my last thought which caught at time
Would steep itself wholly in Adelheid;
I know the last convulsion of my lips
Would make the name in moans out if I could,
As I slid down those brinks to my death-place
In the pit, my dark hot grave!
ADELHEID
Ah, Conrad, peace!
You slay me with such syllables: have done.
CONRAD
Ah! but indeed I thought so—
55
God has laid
That woe behind us. You are surely come.
That is enough, you are safe: I hold you here.
I might have also died had you been slain.
I think, I must have shortly followed you,
Like a poor child who goes wild in the dark,
Losing the comfort of one candle flame
With whose companionship, it only dared
Sanely to face the circumambient gloom.
CONRAD
And were you then so anxious?
ADELHEID
Let that pass:
The sorrow of it is over and over well.
I have prayed and cried—so much.
CONRAD
The track of tears
Has worn the gracious colour from your face;
I note it somewhat wasted since I went.
You are gone pallid as the fleecy cloud
That cushions morning's star. In your regard
The echo of your lover's danger lives
Still written white in rose-loss.
56
That comes back
On the wing of the blush which, now you kiss me, darling,
Repairs the past: see, am I altered now?
I shall spoil all and weep.
CONRAD
O eyes of rain,
Your dew-drenched rays are precious in my sight,
And you are more than lovely so bedimmed
With pity of my absence. Should I care
To hear my little bird had chirped as well
While I was gone away?
ADELHEID
In my cage here
I drooped and not a note came. Out a-field
O'er lengths of clover late incarnadine
Shivered a line of equal-mounted larks.
The jay dodged grating in and out the dells.
The mutinous republic of the rooks
Scolded the rising beam. Above the dome,
Thrice nearer heaven than its top pinnacle,
I saw a giant bird take northward wing,
And to my heart I said, he goes to Arnheim
Scenting the slain of the great battle there—
And that dread thought held me quite dumb all day.
57
He did not tinge his talons in this heart
Which is my darling's. Did you credit him
With such a dismal errand for his flight?
Nay, silly one, you did.
ADELHEID
It was so sudden:
You were here—you were gone—no leave-taking:
Then the suspense of sitting with clenched hands,
To count the limping seconds, till they told me
You were among the heroes or the dead.
CONRAD
I am returned, so kiss—
ADELHEID
What hast thou brought me?
CONRAD
Honour! Nothing but this. On that red field
No other morning flower had leave to grow.
Some of its leafage I have brought thee home;
See, dove, a wreath; if thou art caged here, hang it
Against thy wires. I think some men have died
In reaching after worse wreaths for their loves.
ADELHEID
I never bade thee go and gather such.
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Are they not lovely when between our hands?
ADELHEID
The bloom is honey and the berry death.
So my nurse told me, when my child-lips craved
That pretty thing called shadow of the night.
CONRAD
Is glory such—my glory?
ADELHEID
God forefend!
I jested only, lest my happy eyes
Should over-brim their silly fountain brinks.
Is not thy Fame my fairest earthly good,
Except thy Love? One hems me round as air,
With subtle, soft, unseen investitude;
That is thy Love. Thy Fame works otherwise;
This, evident as the fire-fingered Sun,
Fans out each liquid branch of trembling gold
And bathes my temples with irradiate threads.
One makes me live, the other makes me sing!
CONRAD
Have I done well then? Of all maiden mouths
I wish those lips to kiss me with their praise.
59
Hero and Love, in thy new glory hail!
How beautiful thou art in laurel leaves,
Returned most welcome.
CONRAD
Thou hast lifted me
On wings with thine approval.
ADELHEID
Shall I hide
My joy that thou art famous? Folks in the street
Are loud upon it. Noisy market-wives,
And sicklemen at swarming tavern-doors,
And hinds who rub down horses sibilant—
All toss thy name about; blind mendicants
Chatter about thee o'er their blinking dogs
Broiling upon the pavement, where the fountain
Cools the great square in vain. I do believe
Its stony nymphs and stucco triton soon
Will take the tale up and appraise thy deed;
Since with one throat the land says only ‘Conrad,’
And all lips meeting mould this common sound,
Except one lady's. She—she dare not breathe
That name, which in the casket of her heart
Long time lay guarded. No one knew the gem,
Or that it was a jewel, save herself,
Now all proclaim it for a princely pearl;
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And only midnight corridors shall hear
She cares to see thee great. For she must creep,
And whisper out love—as some wretch divulging
Crime in the ear of heaven's confessional,
With low short respiration, hurrying words,
And wild eyes turning sideways at the doors,
As though he feared their panels to unroll
And toss his victim in, bleeding and tied
White in its grave-clothes. With no braver heart
I watch here in the shadows and the sounds.
I am routed at the footsteps of the wind,
And, if a lamp-flame leaps, my blood stands fast.
By Heaven, this fearful wooing shames my race;
A milk-maid in this fashion should be won
At hide and seek between the twilight stacks.
But otherwise the heiress of a realm
Should render love in such a regal way,
As the Moon lays her halo on some cloud
In the grey heaven, regarded of all stars,
In a great modesty of shameless light
Bathing her cloud Endymion with bright dew
Of silver kisses; as the woods, and towns,
And crisping ocean inlets and round meres
Gaze up and give her worship as she burns.
CONRAD
Child of the many kings, I have presumed
Beyond my mean deservings. Who am I
61
Around the meteor sweetness of thy way?
All is amiss, and all the guilt is mine;
Reprove, reproach me, though thy chiding voice
Hurts in among my heart-chords like a blade,
And sprinkles on these weather-broken cheeks
Some girlish dew. Would the grim battle-God
Had made one swing at Arnheim with his net,
And dragged me to his silent river-shore,
Whereby he sits and sorts into his buckets
The gasping nations of the newly-dead;—
Ere I had lived to shame thee coming home
With these vile limbs unwounded. O my queen,
Who from the rabble of mean men, no more
Than they who scrape the earth-face for their bread,
Wouldst catch me up into the rosy clouds
With thy celestial preference, there to keep
State in their purple loved of gods and kings;—
I have repaid thee with a fair return
To drag thee down instead into my clay
And soil thee with vile secrecies. O sweet,
Let us take oath and hand somehow to mend
This flinty pathway of our shame-faced love,
Whereby he crawls dishonoured, with veiled head,
And brows afraid of morning.
ADELHEID
Mend it now,
Ere men forget to laud thee. Thine this hour:
62
With such ripe honour bound about thy helm,
With such a blush of conquest on thy cheek,
With such a surging triumph at thy heels,
Such retinue of throats intoning praise,—
What suitor with such urgencies behind
Ever went home unanswered? Ask and win:
The dial of thy glory points at noon;
Ask, for the utmost burnish of the day
Endures a moment only. Never or now
Press to the audience chamber, boldly speak.
None dare refuse thee, who to-morrow may.
Ask with thy lips hot from the battle-breath,
And wed me in the sight of priest and king,
Hero of Arnheim, worthy to ascend
And sit beside me, husband, in bright robes,
Inheritor and partner of my power
In those dumb years which are not born, but shall be
As steeds to draw the chariot of our reign.
CONRAD
I will consider.
ADELHEID
O my love, beware!
For Gratitude no longer than the moon
Keeps full and fat, both soon grow shallow-breasted;
63
And build her time-eroded circle up;
Not so poor shrunken Gratitude, she starves
For good and all. Her lean sides ne'er re-fill.
CONRAD
Then I will speak—
ADELHEID
And speaking you shall win;
I seal you thus for second victory.
[Kisses him.
Farewell, be brave, my darling, and prevail.
[Adelheid goes out.
CONRAD
Gone like the shadow of a rose petal,
When the great mother-flower dissolves in fragments
Her o'er-expanded beautiful great heart;
And all the garden-side is saturate
With the incense of her ruin. Gone, my rose,
Treasure of April, gone! Why then the air
Is subtle with thy presence. Let no hand
Move till the echo of thy richness dies.—
[A pause.
So she is gone; and I remain a fool
Fantastical with love, whose mouth drops over
With wreaths and rose-buds. Am I surely Conrad,
The mercenary Conrad, fierce at heart,
64
Who hacks for any king, and laps up lives
As thirsty dogs will water? Must this wolf
Lick the pink sandal-tip of one meek child
And caper in her chains of daisies wound
To the pipe of the enchanter, call him Lust
Or Love, I care not, he has fooled me so,
I am not nice to name him nicely? Mars
Is not so fell, and brews of discord less
Than this mild cheat, mock god of whining girls;
His white fingers unclose like water-lilies
To beckon on ravenous ranks of spears,
Close as a pine-wood's boles or bulrush beds,
The heads of whose advancing shafts divide
Into a stream of stars the steady sun.
This is God Love, whose hand is weak as rain,
Whose touch is tender as a cowslip's cup;
Pitiful Love, at whose hest armies slay;
Who weeps and gives no quarter, whose least whim
Sprinkles dead faces in a wide grass land
Thick as the windfalls on an orchard floor.
Or as a newly-shaven meadow lies
With all its foolish speckled tulip-heads
Prone in the math. I cared no feather, none;
It mattered not one down of thistle beard
To me if Arnheim stood or Arnheim fell.
I heeded not whose ring was round her throat;
If, as our frontier watch-dog or the foe's,
65
I cared none either way: my trade is war.
Let old kings sleep, and famine open gates
And turn the virgin city prostitute;
I wail not over such a common chance.
It will be good for fighting and bring grist
To that great mill of onset which I turn,
Having no land: my sword is any man's:
They call me mercenary, hireling, here;
Let the name stick; I shall not alter it:
I smite down three while patriots push at one.
They lose their cities, I recapture them;
Such service is not readily forgiven.
They take revenge in—such an epithet!
Hireling indeed! What fighter for mere hire
Would tilt into this Arnheim, stuffed with foes,
With a few horsemen at his back? This ride
Savours of madness more than money greed.
I wear the livery of this king; I sign
Compact to carry arms against fair odds;
Doth that bring obligation to go out
And fight a legion single-handed? Nay.
Yet in the teeth of death, of my free will
I chose this venture. Why? O lame response!
Because a certain girl named Adelheid
Would think me a fine fellow if I won.
66
SCENE II.
The Audience Chamber. Sigismund; Conrad.SIGISMUND
Room for the victor. Lord of Arnheim, hail!
CONRAD
I kneel before my monarch, and salute
Humbly the hand that gave my hand its sword.
SIGISMUND
I greet thee, prince of captains, and accord,
With much fair love, the audience thou hast craved.
We thank the saviour of our frontier town.
Our royal lips, unused to such a sound,
Do not disdain to say, we owe thee much.
The thanks of kings are given reluctantly
Once in a hundred years; like aloe flowers,
They sit upon the rock, which is their throne,
Nor care to show the light their inmost heart,
And nurse in thorny foldings their reserve—
But rise, my captain; rise, and kneel no more.
I augur some petition by thine eyes:
67
We great kings of the earth are never served
For simple loyalty and hearty faith,
Who do the right with no eye on reward
To follow. So it was in the old days.
Now the crown buys obedience: that's no news.
We traffic in our kindness; love by scale,
And borrow duty at high interest.
Nothing in that: the trader's heavy shoe
Treads on the royal buskin; merchandise
Elbows religion to the ditch; our peers
Shoulder the packs of pedlars, and appraise
Allegiance as the buttons on a coat—
And now thou comest: ask and have, and go!
CONRAD
Now, by thy sceptre, King, thou hast misread
The fashion of my asking. If my prayer
Were ducats and more ducats, I could phrase
Glibly enough petition for a sack
Of such and such dimensions. Any fool
Can ask for bread or money; else ere this
Half of thy land were dead of hunger pangs.
But this my suit is halt, and lame of tongue,
Heavily trips, and will not come in words,
And on thy doors knocks with a clumsy hand,
And cannot tell its name.
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You want reward;
And kings reward men in a hundred ways.
Choose from this century your recompense.
Why should your preface, like a blushful girl,
Stand craning at its wish?
CONRAD
If it be well
That royal masters measure recompense,
Bringing the good we do them into poise
With the reward demanded, set the scale,
And toss this Arnheim on, thy kingdom's key,
Weigh in the risk, the weather, many dead,
And estimate the deed.
SIGISMUND
You have done well
For a young soldier well, and well again.
I do not blame your valour, but your youth,
That in your random onset I discern
No settled system and no battle plan,
And miss all tincture of stragetic lore.
Yet you did well; for in you stoutly rode
With a wild flash and crash of deafening drums;
Out came your swords: ‘Charge,’ said the trumpet peal.
69
Hip to haunch, beard to chin, steel crossing steel,
Until they yielded, more surprised than hurt.
O, you did well—a thought too rashly, indeed,
If I must fix my finger on a flaw;—
But the event atoned empiric war.
Fortune, who loves beginners, smiled you on.
Well, I disparage nothing; win by rule
First, if you can, but win at any cost.
And we have won, with all deductions made,
A pretty victory enough, except—
But never mind exceptions; they can keep:
And you deserve a festival to-night,
And in the morning you shall have reward—
Proportionate reward.
CONRAD
If I should say,
King, I had set my heart to ask of thee
Coined bullion, bars of treasure, silver cups,
Nobles, and marks, and angels, and bezants—
Why—you would give me some, send me away
With both arms full, and finish with my suit.
But of such dross, I answer, give me none;
But certain gold, more golden than our mines
Possess; some treasure of such priceless gleam,
That never yet the storehouse of our kings
Its equal held!
70
An eloquent demand!
My captain is become an orator:
The great mute Memnon of our puny wars
Hath seen some rosy-silver Dawn in heaven
To which his hand would reach, his heart would climb,
And through the silence of his stony lips
Pours unaccustomed music, chord on chord.
CONRAD
Sir, you are right: the Dawn, the Dawn it is
That I desire. For never in his waste
Did that old Æthiop idol watch the grey
Cloud galleries grow fiery from behind
With her rich rising that is Queen of dews,
Who wraps her glittering shoulders in a robe
More amber than the cowslip's;—never did
That tawny giant-child of sunrise yearn
With hungrier eyes upon his mother's star
Than I await her coming, who to me
Is morning-beam and music. O my King,
Her beauty smooths these rugged soldier lips:
On such a theme the blunt mouth of a fool
Could cope with those old mighty lords of language,
Who strove with Philip and with Catiline.
Perfection needs no preface of my praise
To seat the highest in the world up higher;
71
Loves me again—
SIGISMUND
You rave to tell me so!
Fury and storm light on my palace roofs,
Crack them and let the wild rain batter in!
Insolent boy—lest your blood stain this hall,
Out and begone: my sworded arm on high
Wavers; creep out beyond its reach and run.
CONRAD
Smite, King, my breast is ready, and smite sure,
Lest laurel of thine Arnheim turn the edge.
SIGISMUND
I have heard wrong; unsay this quickly and go;
Sounds are uncertain in my aged ears—
Some echo in the rafters, God knows how,
Carried to me such daring syllables,
That I beheld a madman with a chain
Among the tombs as speaker—no, no, no!
Conrad forget his duty and speak thus?
I tell you nay. He never dared!
CONRAD
He did,
O Sire; and once again, ready for fate,
He must repeat the perilous sweet words:
72
Swaying its head, a leaf on either side.
I speak it clear, and I can merely die
With these three words laid sweetly on my tongue;
And no king's hand or frown can hinder me.
In this all rulers are most impotent,
To make men love at order or desist
From love by proclamation. Love obeys
The edict of no mortal emperor.
Love and his saints all worship; she is one,
My Adelheid, and I to her may bend
Uncensured; and none aureoled in love's choir
Is purer with more whiteness; save that she,
This adoration, still abides on earth,
And being with us is more pitiful,
And nearer to the worship of our lips,
Than her sky sisters—nearer, not less fair.
Hence, in her ruth she hath not yet dissolved
Her hair into a garland of crips stars,
Hath not withdrawn her beauty into cold air
Beyond where planets take their pastime, still
Is here and draws all love into those eyes
Bluer than wells where round rosed angels sit
Under a wood of roses!
SIGISMUND
Braggart hound,
Be dumb. You push presumption to its hilt.
73
Better my girl were gone and in her grave
Than I should sit in abject greyness still,
And hear thy coarse lips praise and catalogue
Her pure perfections. Can I keep her name
Clean, if all knaves may mouth it as they will?
Who gave this mean apprentice of the drum
License to judge my daisy? Once I saw
A scavenger pick up a fallen rose;
He turned its faint leaves over with foul hands,
Examined, ruined, soiled, and tore it half,
So flung it from him with a shoulder-shrug,
And went on carting carrion and rank sludge;
And this he understood, but not the rose.
Wherefore, my master, you who tell me straight
That you will chirp this princess at my ears,
Whether I will or will not, all the same,—
Listen—I give you but a little word
And then much silence. You remind me well
That no king's sceptre ever quelled or broke
The salt imaginations of a man.
Worms creep inside the temple doors of God,
And lay their slime along the holy cups
And burrow in the bread. Then comes the priest
And smears them to the pavement with his heel.
Vengeance is done, but still pollution cleaves
Around the altar; their enduring harm
74
So might I—
CONRAD
Ay, so might you, King, and once
Again so may you never. Words are idle,
And I have done. When men are full of bread
The sower of the harvest is forgot.
SIGISMUND
Have I not hired you, man, to tread my field
And shed the seed of war? Then dare you come
And prate and haggle when the ear is full,
And sell the very harvest off my roods
To me its master? And it comes to this—
To-day you ask my daughter, and to-morrow
My crown as aftermath of benefits;
And so I pay for one lean victory
Denuded to a stalk of all my leaves
Of honour. Down, all kings, upon your knees
And pray to be defeated. What poor king
Can keep a decent mantle round his hips
Under the clutch and importunity
Of such victorious captains? God, my God,
Let me be very patient with this knave!
I will disdain to spend one fiery pulse
Of anger on his slavish head. Go forth,
Chafe me with no reply.
75
I leave thy face,
And ponder on the gratitude of kings
In silence; and hereafter as my wage
Shall be my service.
SIGISMUND
Hear this sword-monger,
Who sells his valour, bargain! He will bleed
So much on such a quarrel and no more.
A ducat's hero and a stiver's dastard,
As he is paid. O hear him! this is Mars,
Who measures valour with a huckster's ell,
And honour on the inches of a stave.
And, since I underpay this son of fame—
Good—he will budge no more, but let my towns
Tumble and crash, while he sits lolling near
And smiles, ‘I told you so.’ Am I then grown
So feeble, demi-dead, irresolute,
So crazy in my chair, so out of gear,
That you must vent your ironies on me,
Sneer at my silver and anointed hairs,
And mock me to my face, my bondsman, you,
My slave, whom I have clothed and fed to wage
The battles of my house? As certain dogs
Are fed to turn my spits or guard my doors,
Do these come when my joint is roasted well,
76
But young Sir Valour cannot save a town—
Which succour is his duty, nothing grander—
But he must rate with princes for the deed,
And mate with grand princesses purple-born!
Mad with the pride of winning one small field,
The wide earth and its increase must be his,
By right of that large impudence, which likens
A blind mole pushing up a little earth
In a wide plain gazed over with great hills;
While, in its own conceited estimate,
This thing, which sees two inches past its nose,
Is Titan piling mountains up at heaven,
To get among the gods and wrench their thrones—
And you shall never climb into my seat,
Whose ancestry bores but with shallow fang
Beneath the deep-earthed past, wherein the autumns
Of many rotting generations mingle,
And whose successions mock immeasurable
The newly-gilded leaf, that swings to-day
Brave in its little summer. And you dare
To this great hall, where kings on kings have sat
In the dim years, my fathers, judging men,
Push in and vapour out your paltry claims,
Who are of nothing, whose ephemeral race
Became ennobled somehow yester-year—
A mushroom house, rank from the rotten ground,
77
Found orifice to hang with leathern gills,
And fester fly-blown ere two evenings old!
You, lineaged with a scanty train of sires,
Two counts and then a warehouse, and beyond
Kith at the wheel and kinsmen at the loom,
For all God knows! You, neither more nor less,
Must come in roundly, hitch me by the sleeve,
Nod and begin, ‘I want your daughter, sire,
Here, now, to-day; so you may ring the bells
And bid the bishop gird his cassock on:
The maid is royal, but who now counts that?
These rules of caste are growing obsolete.
In fine, I like the princess—that's enough,
Who am Achilles, Rowland, Amadis,
Stour Hercules and Lancelot in one—
And, if I need a thing, who dare say no?
Not one old king, whom we shall shovel soon
Under the flags of the cathedral floor;—
Whom, dead and done with not a sand too soon,
I shall succeed, by merit of my own
And in the right of this pale rose-leaf thing,
His daughter; whom, indeed, I tolerate
And greaten with bestowal of my hand;
Since such a consort planes my upward road,
And snuffs out certain cousins of the blood,
Who might become pretenders in my path
78
When I with gracious ease, robed out a king,
Lead Adelheid in one hand to divide
The dais awning; bow me left and right,
Adjust a certain unaccustomed cap,
And nod the signal to a well-packed hall
To roar “God save King Conrad!” Shallow fool,
I will rip out your thoughts for men to read,
And teach the laughing nations how Conceit
Postures itself in fancied diadems,
And trails along in purple robes of air.
My hours may be as brief as you desire,
Yet in that briefness I have time enough
To chide presumption. Never shall you set
A burgher scion in our royal boughs;
Therefore, begone; yet with free limbs depart,
Because our wrath is mild and merciful.
Worthy of many fetters, chainless go.
Out of my sight at once: in case I change
My clemency, let that rebellious brow
Keep exile from our audience, lest I shear
Its head, which only Arnheim saves to-day!
[The King goes out.
CONRAD
Upon the board of fate the die has rung,
And I rise up a beggar from the game:
I who came in full-handed with the coin
79
With pouch and pocket empty as the blind
Heart of a fool; wherein, if one store kindness,
And at a pinch reclaim deposit thence,
He finds mere broken benches and an echo
Of selfish laughter. Yesterday's rich man,
I sit to-morrow ragged in the ditch,
And see some new and paltry god of the hour
Ride by with roaring throats and streaming flags
As I did. Why the market-wives pressed in
To pat the very charger I bestrode,
And grandams wrestled madly for a niche
Whence to discern the feather in my helm.
Then all the town, as some vast swarming hive,
Buzzed in my wake. Such praiseful echo clashed
Around me, that the casements shook like reeds
Beside my path of triumph, each of them
A bunch of faces craning out, all eyes,
To see the victor pass—the man of men—
The marvel of the minute. Then night dips
The scene in greyness: home the pageant hies:
The faded daylight thickens into rain.
The wind goes down the empty street and leaves
A few great drops in going: the last boys
Pull collars up at ears and skelter home.
Some folks at windows hitch their carpets in,
And rip their pasteboard allegories down;
Unfasten limp festoons, roll up long flags,
80
In the genista wickers; yawning, chain
The doors and close the shutters; and so dies
My day of glory. For the bravest show
Ends, as the dullest of thy days of life,
In sleep and supper.
Enter Raban.
RABAN
Is my Conrad here?
The King is gone?
CONRAD
Raban, I am alone
Communing with my anger.
RABAN
Then indeed
Your company is bad. I thought as much;
Your eyes caught on my face so lofty-earnest
As I came in.
CONRAD
How goes the court?
RABAN
Why, well;
In a calm mood of sleepy shepherd lads
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About some honour-nymph, who kissed them once
And will not kiss again. 'Tis very pretty!
And you?
CONRAD
I fare as one whose wounded feet
Rest in a viper's nest, whose clotted curls
Are crawled about with scorpions.
RABAN
Here's a contrast!
Are you in earnest?—Let me search your face:
O captain of the thunder-cloud, what cheer,
What outlook on the breakers of the world,
Can steep your visage in such folds of night
That I forget my friend?
CONRAD
Is this an hour
To simper and look sweet, to duck and cringe?
When here he stood—the echo of his feet
Scarce faded as you entered—here he spake
Tricked out in kingly robes a seeming king,
And for a season kingly in his phrase,
Till, roughened by a stormy petulance,
His soul began a rocking like the sea's,
82
And all his mien changed to a parish fool's,
Whose vacant forehead wears instead of gold
The madman's grasses.
RABAN
Rain, my masters, rain:
These clouds rove out of such a weeping west,
I cannot keep the sky-roof's hoarded tears
From wetting nature, if this growling god
Push his ripe drift about in this fierce way;
The air will drench with deluge, as if ocean
Fell through its flooring into Satan's house
And slaked his half-baked inmates.
CONRAD
Leave your gibes,
And listen: Sigismund, our argument—
This ancient sleeper, like a white-faced owl,
Drops off to dose at daybreak, snores at noon,
And blinks at sunset with half-open eyes;
But, if a searching glory of brave deeds
Flare, like a fervid sunflake out of heaven,
Across his nest and somnolent repose,—
Hooting, he raises out white flapping arms,
And with a scream is gone.
83
So let him go,
Man, and be merry; you are green at court
To turn your mouth down for a few hard names.
CONRAD
Bitter his face should be whose soul has found
Gall of reproof and wormwood of disdain;
Who came from doing well for his reward,
And found a phantom thing cursing his deeds
And mumbling maledictions.
RABAN
Did he so?
Then we must fawn and nurse right humble eyes,
And, when his goad bites, scrape and bow our best
And look quite cheerful. That's the road to fame.
Cringe to this idol—to this puppet kneel—
King he must be, though stuffed inside with straw,
God he must be, though all his blood is bran.
If not within he is just outside heaven—
I heard a friar preach so some days since,
Who taught the gaping hen-wives all a-row
How God and King were cousins: think of that!
CONRAD
I have no heart for laughter, Raban, none:
I am faint with hatred; earth is sick and leer
84
Only a lame, pale sun grating along
Above me in an awful mirk of clouds.
The grassy valleys of the landscape seem
Red with the knots of interlacing worms,
Plum-coloured coils with yellow humpy bands;
The garden leaves are drilled away to ribs
By the palmer and the locust. There were meadows,
But they seem poisoned as with furnace scum.
Here went a grass-green mountain rivulet,
And now the filthy mother of the stye
Would hardly snuff at those polluted waves,
Where the green ribbon crusts the stinking ooze.
O Raban, wash my fancy, cleanse mine eyes:
Extinguish from mine ears this terrible
Hiss of a giant furnace: my mouth sweeten
Raw with a sick salt taste like mine own blood
Welling away, which leaves me faint and fainter.
And all my being like a limp dry leaf,
Seeks something sweeter than the rainy spring
To perished grasses. O my sickness needs
One anodyne—Hush! vengeance. Did you hear
Vengeance, my comrade? Fancy, how the flower
Drains fever-lipped the ardent drench of God,
When the cloud cracks at last, so will I slake
To the red dregs the hatred of my soul.
RABAN
You ended in a whisper.
85
I was wise.
RABAN
O wise enough, since any curtain here
May harbour in its fold a palace cat.
And we have many: well they watch—for birds.
CONRAD
You heard my almost silence?
RABAN
The word's flash
More than its sound I caught. Methought, I heard
A knife drawn cleanly through a mellow pear,
And so I guessed your drift.
CONRAD
A brave word, clear,
And keen, and ringing as a glove of steel
Flung down against the flags. We muffle it
Just now and thrust it back into our pouch
Quietly, lest it tinkle; but some day
Down it shall sing, a knell to him who hears.
RABAN
Said like a soldier, purposed like a king. (Half aside)
Did he but know what royal makings lay
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And fibre of a king; did he but know—
Did he but know!
CONRAD
(appearing not to hear him)
Well! What sour mutter'd purpose
Curdles your lips? Speak out: wilt dip an oar
Behind my rowlock in these rolling vales
Of a huge, hoarse, unnavigable sea?
'Tis a black broth to launch our shallop in.
Dare you push out among this seething scum,
Where the flake whitens up against the wind,
And sighs in wild crests at a few great stars?
RABAN
My fortunes and thy danger have one helm.
CONRAD
Then watch my anger's signal to spread sail:
Watch! Need I roll my further purpose out?
RABAN
My soul is as a mirror to my friend,
Reflecting clear the double of his will.
CONRAD
The strong hand to the subtle brain says—done.
He who can comrade these may quell the earth.
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Our functions in this peril—you agree?
RABAN
Perfectly; yes. I penman, drudge of peace,
Unwarlike chattel, lump of twisted limbs,
Weak as a mouse, reared on a king's sour crumbs,
Bring the great lion of the forest heart,
And whisper, ‘I am with him.’ He can rend
And I can nibble.
CONRAD
Ay, the file is good,
When the axe falters blunted.
RABAN
Thou shalt win,
My champion; lo, my prophet wishes tinge
Thine onward path with tingling glories. Leave
The unwarlike dregs to me of thy great task;
Leave me the mean, have thou the valorous half
Of this our enterprise. If aid I can
By spurting innocent ink, this court shall roll
In sepia clouds fuliginous; within
Whose canopy, do thou thy will, feel out
Wide, ambient arms, soft sinuous rings as iron;
My Briareus of the sea, touch, tighten, fold
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Till thou reject again into stained waves
A pale mass, done with, blurred, a formless pulp,
A skin, a bloodless shadow, to be rolled
By random waters on to casual shores,
Rocked by the aimless and irreverent tides;
The rollers' plaything and the breakers' pastime,
Till the last sinew rot!
CONRAD
Thine emphasis
Comes like the sudden sea-rush, warm and wild,
Salt, windy, bitter-sweet, and full of sun,
And sings like the storm water on the beach,
Whose petrel at mine ear trills—‘Vengeance!’
RABAN
Right!
O sweet bird, Vengeance! dove of tender plume;
Step gently: she is timid, and sings least
At moulting time, red are her wing-feathers,
Else is she dusky as a nightingale,
Yet stays a household robin all the year,
By the window twigs at watch. If anyone
Could whistle her to glide down quietly
And peck her meal off even from his palm,
I think that one were Conrad.
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And his sword
Is not a reed, my friend; and wears a hand
Not easily unlocked, when round the hilt
Are riveted red fingers, that slip least
Because they are red. The moister hand-grip holds.
RABAN
There sang a vulture floating o'er the slain.
Why, man, learn milder music. Here at court
The fashion is to lisp out silken lines,
And tinker sighing ballads to a rose.
Suppose some pretty wench of honour heard
This gruff broad-chested fury. Here all spring
We sit on velvet, simper, and tease lutes,
Pretend we are in love, say ‘well-a-day,’
And stretch our limbs and gape. O blare not in,
With noises of the camp and kettledrums,
Hoarse as the wind and stained with battle-drops.
You will flutter all our rose-girls and their fools
Who play at kissing blindfold.
CONRAD
O most right!
A secret, by the stars, a secret, Raban—
All, to the King himself, play hoodman here,
And he plays best. For dotage oft resumes
Its childish pranks; so up he binds his brows,
90
On post and column, and the courtiers fawn—
Did ever King dispense so well with sight,
Was ever Lord so clever without eyes?
So witless stumbles he o'er resting lions,
And hair-brained kicks dog-dragons in their gills,
And sets his shoe on some doe-hydra's tail.
So, darkened, he doth curse at those who see,
And fallen he will rail at those who stand,
Until a dark hand sudden in his hair
Tears off the bandage and he sees—a grave.
RABAN
The voice of one that crieth in the waste,
I too will rail at princes: how they doze,
How some are half and others quite asleep,
All carry golden rings above their ears;
And one has crept up to the brink of time,
As a lean caterpillar nosing space
On the leaf's utmost tip. Suppose he fell
Plumb down the gulf. I wonder, who would weep?
Would one dog leave his bone, one child stop play
In the gutter, one clown in his alehouse sigh?
So men lament their gods who have attained
Their final consecration.
CONRAD
Let it come
Swiftly: let this grey creature soon resume
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It may be kind to put this moldwarp down
Where he can scoop himself a sleepy ledge.
RABAN
Now or next year?
CONRAD
The famine of my hate
Watches the leaden hours and will not feed.
RABAN
Faith! Is it come to hours? Then wary men
Had better carry cloaks or bide indoors:
An evil night begins for hoodless brows.
There is a singing in the air of rain.
And the dogs creep away beneath the chairs
Snuffing the thunder ere it sound. I think,
God thunders better than our toothless King:
Who minds this mumbler, who?
CONRAD
His injuries
Are mightier than himself. This crumbling ruin,
Roofless with broken sides and bulging bricks,
Is overgrown with deadly weed, and green
With ramping stems whose fat and acrid gum
Is in the taster's mouth hot death and fire.
And at their root the adder litters young,
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The newt craves harbour. So this king ere death
Seems to be storehouse and supreme resort
Of all corrosive thoughts and wrathful whims;
And these things make the old man terrible,
And terrible he is. O Raban, Raban,
There he stood blinking, there he spake and quavered,
The meanest living man I think on ground—
O, but he gave me foul reproof, my Raban,
Being most helpless; it was hard to bear
From one so feeble yet so venomous,
Worse in a hundred ways. Had twenty men
Young, strong, and noble hounded me with lies,
I had borne it with a less tumultuous ire.
RABAN
What said he then?
CONRAD
All things which wound and grieve,
All shameful things, wild lies, and furious words,
From a full urn and cask of bitter sides
He shed out bravely.
RABAN
Let a bed of worms
Silence his violent lips; let grass and gravel
Choak up his eyes for this; most shallow fool,
93
And call the night in on his naked side:
Let him feel after darkness with his hands,
And draw a shroud of shards across his feet,
Immeasurable dotard?
CONRAD
Hear me, friend;
I asked, and I was worthy, and he sneered.
Raging he would have pelted me away
Out of his hall with words like any dog.
RABAN
How grew this husk of discord, on what kernel?
CONRAD
You mock me, for you know.
RABAN
I have cracked many
A nut of human sorrow, and have found
The same white maggot there.
CONRAD
You mock me more.
RABAN
I have seen armies meet in thunder-clouds,
And such thick darkness masked their congress, none
94
We will see why: so, wading through the fume,
We sought into the midmost vapour, passed
Through each successive envelope of darkness,
Till at the very core of tumult, lo!
We came upon a pretty rose-red thing,
Weeping her amethyst eyes out, innocent:
O, she knew nothing how the turmoil grew!
CONRAD
Scorn me not, Raban, in my hour of tears;—
I loved her very much and told him so,
I made my suit right humbly at his knee;
His kingdom and his capital he owed me,
The very roof over his head he owed me,
And I forbore to tell him—
RABAN
How ere this
He might have had for palace some damp rock,
A brace of ravens as his seneschals,
Square bats for courtiers, who should squeak to him
How great he was, king of wild glen and grass,
With daffodils for honour-maids, a lily
Instead of our adorable, his daughter!
CONRAD
Were there no lilies in his realm but one?
One I demanded: I had saved them all
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Trembling divine, in orchard avenues
Of his great land, on many a woodland floor
Nurtured in honour, damsels among flowers,
Pale, moist mid shining dew, and folded round
With wide hoods sheathing them to the white chins up,
Shrinking and holy. God himself had wept,
If some rank fox had come with bestial snout,
And laid them bare and broken and defiled.
RABAN
Is this about a lily or a maid?
CONRAD
Either, or both, or neither at thy will!
Wilt hear another image?
RABAN
Faith, I must:
'Tis penalty for knowing one in love.
CONRAD
The birds of blood came round my little lamb,
As she lay sleeping in her fold. I heard
The beating of their feathers in the storm,
The grinding of their wings against the hail;
I rose and smote the swooping harpies dead,
Dead with their talons fastening on their prey;
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And cursed me for my deed, and laid his staff
About my shoulders.
RABAN
Allegory still!
In fine, to strip all feathers off your phrase,
You want a wife. Our father Sigismund
Hath such a wifely daughter, good at need,
And clear as custard. Having done this king
Brave service, you demand her, he denies,
Adds evil names, and so the quarrel hangs.
CONRAD
You take my heart like an anatomist
And carve it into pieces. Frigidly
You reason on its fibres. O my friend,
Have you no fairer comfort?
RABAN
By the mass,
I'd rather wish you joy than wrinkle brows
Into condolement here. Go to: there is much
In such a loss to mitigate despair.
It may be, that, denying you a bride,
The gods are wholly gracious after all.
97
You are merry.
RABAN
And with reason I rejoice,
Who never came off lighter by one tear
In Cupid's service. Who would play as soon
With a rope-end as a girl's finger tips;
Who keeps his lips for wine and flesh of beeves,
And never cared how kisses tasted yet—
I Raban, hunched and bunched, the crippled scribe,
A wart of nature, not a natural man,
Thwart spine and twisted limbs and bulging brows—
Viler than offal of her sacrifice
To lady Venus, eyesore to the herd
Of smirking maidens round the queen of fools,
The mother of sweet lies and cankered roses.
O Aphroditè, in thy prurient fanes,
By thy tainted reek, the whispers, and the worms,
By the dim candles, and the draggled robes,
Thy shameful altars and polluted floors—
I cannot find thee god. I rather find thee
A leper queen, whose bright unwholesome breast,
Sweet at a distance only, is marvellous
With the whiteness of her curse; and in whose limbs
The poisoned fire of many shameful days
Eats on for ever. Horrible thou art;
98
Are these thy worshippers, love's veterans,
Who come with the flat skull-like face of lust
To clasp thy knees, vast harlot, spurious queen!
Lo! I abhor thee, I whom God has made
Ridiculous, for any wayside fool
To grin and gape upon, a limping toad
Among the lithe and beautiful young men;
How the clear brain perfectly formed, intense,
Pines in the bestial vesture of such flesh
As my untended mother in her throes
Pushed me into the light with. O good brain,
Be to me for strong hands and graceful feet,
Be thou instead of speed and supple sinews;
Though locked to lie obscured in such a husk,
Yet art thou fair in thy omnipotence,
Despised, deformed, rejected. Thou art I,
Not these enfoldings, which are only meant
To do thy pastime, Love. These crutch-like limbs
Will do to move my brain on: more I need not;
And as for Love, I will write upon his altar,
‘Let Love be cursed in the lowest!’
CONRAD
Friend, my friend,
I'd rather bite a finger off my hand,
Than jeer at thee, in whom Dame Nature wrought
So well within, that careless of the crust,
99
Would I exchange thee for a regiment
Of idiots faced as Phœbus, limbed as Mars?
Mere Force doth idly beat the unwounded air,
But at his elbow Craft sees where and when,
And, nodding, with her furtive index shows
The rift-place in the armour. I thank God,
We are together in this matter, friend;
For I should blench, nay by the mass, I should
Though retinued with armies, if I saw
Thy small unwarlike knuckles wield their pen
Against my train approaching.
RABAN
We are one,
One sword of purpose in the hand of doom,
I am the hilt and you the blade. My brother,
How can we break asunder? In your wrong
I see a brother scorned: at your rebuke
I feel myself degraded; at your lash
I wince, in your disgrace I hide my head.
O see, the long day of our patience flags
In tired sunset. See, all hands are limp,
All hearts are weary. On his palace wall
Discord hath ripened as an apple long.
The time is heavy with this dotard's reign;
And we must mend it, leaving truce to fools
And compromise to caitiffs; not as boys
100
Or breaking idle reeds against his coat;
No, but as soldiers, driving arrows home
Up to the feather in his iron heart.
We have endured this palsy for a king
Through many watches of obedience, now
Thy star arises, Conrad, and its name
To him is wormwood. One, who saw him, told me
That, as thy triumph clashed in music past,
He never went to the window; each acclaim
That pierced his deafness, huddled at the fire,
Stung him like eager pain. Each ringing cheer
Lengthened his parchment face in envious seams.
Be not amazed, if after such repast
On a young rival's praises, when you met
He gave you peevish curses. Kings regard
Their kingdoms as their wives, in whose meek mouths
A husband's commendation may be heard,
But no man's else. Look up, my prince of spears;
What remedy in hanging down the head,
What help in sighing is there? He may die
To-morrow, or the next day, or the next!
CONRAD
I think his tedious briefness will wear out
Some wagon-load of moons. His saying good-bye
Will last a cycle. Till I see the mould
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I shall believe him here. The spice of power
Keeps him from rotting; till the latest last
Will this bald bully clutch his bauble rule,
And prove himself alive by teasing us,
Until the coffin plate is on his heart.
Death has forgotten him. He will not die.
The spectral hunter on his hackney Time,
Whose game-bag is the grave, has seen him often,
And finds him as familiar to the sight
As those grey dogs, disease and war, who follow
And lick the phantom's heels. As soon would he
Draw arrow upon Sigismund as these.
RABAN
For Death and he have lived in one small house
So long together, that, as cat and dog
Both in one narrow cottage born and fed,
They lick each other lovingly, and share
The hearth in perfect friendship.
CONRAD
You are right;
Death in his memory does not bear the name
Of Sigismund.
RABAN
Then Death must be reminded;
And we might gently nudge his shadowy wrist,
102
Playing with straws and mowing at the moon,
An insult to the purple and the light.
CONRAD
Meaning—O friend, my very anger pales,
When in thy words I see my thought take form,
Vestured as one at midnight, who returns
With red hands and wild eyes and silent feet
Out of a sleeping chamber: as he glides,
He leaves a track behind him, like a man
Who has bathed; the lamps are low, but in the morn
Will these be drops of water?
RABAN
Is my captain
Become a girl? Then, Sigismund, retain
Thy throne, for they, who questioned on thy claim,
Are turned such babies, that they fear to enter
The dark room of rebellion; quickly quell them.
CONRAD
I am no weakling, yet my nature quails;
As at the portal of some hideous cave
We take slow farewell of the upper air,
Creep in, and feel on downwards to our deed.
As we descend the wide and awful deeps
103
Are giant rocks and a vast midnight sea,
Whose lengths of spume are rocking terribly
Against the brinks of blue-black terraced cliffs;
And in their nooks and ledges, sheer in air,
Are built huge kilns, which redden and grow pale
Alternately, making their flame beat time
To the pulse of the waters under them; as if
Within the cliff walls unseen channels fused
Water with fire, and wave with lambent flame.
So to the mountain furnaces that sea
Rocks up in time its dreadful tidal wave
And roars and draws and soughs— (a pause)
—horrible vision!
RABAN
The nightmare of a day-dream, bred on thoughts
Which are distempered; air, and smoke, and megrims
Of no validity to scare a sparrow.
These visions are as vapour in the eye;
Whistle them off. If dreams can blanch thy brow,
'Tis time to sheathe the sword and take the distaff.
CONRAD
Raban, I may be rebel but no butcher.
Pure is my palm, my thought alone is red.
Let him alone: Death's hand is on his heart.
104
At such a creature? Let him crawl away
Into a crack of earth.
RABAN
A pretty change!
We leap into smooth weather; Boreas
Transformed to smirking silvery Zephyrus
In the moulding of a moment, at one clap;
O, let the birds upon the vanes beware,
And shift their iron tails in season round.
CONRAD
I will not turn assassin at thy sneer
For a few weeks of patience; I am human
And in my anger placable—But thou—
RABAN
Let me conclude—am something in my spirit
Not humbler than a worm, not wholly cowed;
Something which carries purpose in its teeth
To close upon and rend the insolent heel
That spurns it in the face.
CONRAD
Thou hast no Love:
He is at least her father.
105
A most fair
Remorseful afterthought. Our talk began,
Whether to use a pillow or a poniard.
We questioned on the fashion of his exit;
That we must dress him somehow for his grave,
Methought, was most abundantly conceded,
Ere we began to clatter teeth and tongue
On this conspiracy. Now through my Lion
Peeps out the lover Lamb! You are but dough
Moulded by this girl's knuckles any way!
CONRAD
My mood is ended: I am patient now.
RABAN
This patience is an estimable mule;
Load her as Atlas she will not repine.
The lash by day is music in her ears,
A bag of rye at nightfall her reward.
Her livelong toil brings money to his pouch,
Who scores his thanks in wheals upon her hide;
And, when her joints are stiff and eyes are scaled,
She rests among the thistles, and attains
That paradise of donkeys, pasture grass.
CONRAD
Goad me not, Raban—
106
Nay, there is no need.
Thou hast a neck that draws the collar well.
CONRAD
Be mute!
RABAN
As thou art patient.
CONRAD
I have seen
The red drops gather on my naked sword,
As the fight clashed and lightened at my side:
I heeded them no more than dew or rain.
But here at home, in the awful hush of peace—
An old grey bloodless man—
RABAN
Must die at once,
Who, left alone, would die some early day
In a most brief hereafter. Is that stuff
To wet an eye-lash on, or stint a smile?
Weep not, my friend, the tyrant; but bewail
His tyrannies. They are the enduring part
Of this old snake soon to be charmed asleep,
107
Dust and oblivion. Then, you want this girl,
Or fancy that you want her, which is one;—
I cannot find much wisdom in her need;
But let that pass;—If I were in your clothes,
Pining for such a smooth white piece of plague,
Which some old peevish fool in spite withheld,
Feebly audacious, shouting to prevent
The pathway of the lion to his mate,—
When one most gentle push would clear the pass,
And let me through the gate to fairy-land,
Where my most silver maiden sits and weeps,—
Think you, that I,—the hunchback, half a man,
Most unheroic, whose lame feet have craft
To avoid the nets of passion plainly spread,
Which mow the swift ones down and tear their wings,—
Think you, that I would pocket up such wrong?
Nay, I would have at grey-beard in the pass,
And either roll him flatling to the ditch,
Or crush him on the flints that fringe the wall,
Leaving compassion to more martial souls.
CONRAD
I will consider.
RABAN
Meaning you relent.
108
It shall be, as he uses me to-night
At the great banquet. If I there be shamed
Among my soldiers, ere this moon shall wane,
Strange sound shall come at midnight in these doors,
Fear and a cry. Then moaning shall arise
A weeping phantom in a yellow crown,
Leaving its royal couch for larger rest;
And, where it lay, shall trembling hands disclose
A heap of limp robes and white ruined limbs.
109
SCENE III.
Adelheid's Chamber in the Palace.Adelheid and Letalda.
ADELHEID
Whose days are best, mine or a peasant maid's,
Born on an alp, who shepherds some few ewes,
And from the mountain valleys brings them in
When the star rises. Happy heart she bears
To see them in their dewy cabins warm,
Happy to waken ere the swallow does,
And lead them out again where grass is crisp,
And rivulets, with music like their bells,
Trickle through little orchards of the wild
Blue bilberry. My alpine shepherdess,
The wolf and eagle are your only cares;
Mine are not bred in woods or eyrie rocks,
But in such bitter multitudes they come,
That I would change into thy humble sphere,
And loan thee all my splendour.
LETALDA
You would tire
Of sheep-cotes, sweet, in one long summer morning
110
And lightly fingered o'er in madrigals,
Than crushed between the honest palms of truth.
No lover—though his locks were burnished hoarfrost,
His lips the tender rose-pale willow-weed,
His cheek outgraining the best cheek on all
The sunny side of the orchard,—though his breath
Were calamus, his sighing air of India,—
Not the best boy compact of shining clay
Should by defection send me tenting goats,
Or watching swine at run, or bulls at stall.
ADELHEID
You jest to drive this lapwing of my woe
From wailing o'er the fallow of its nest.
LETALDA
Nay, but no care on earth could make me change
A palace for a cow-shed.
ADELHEID
Any beggar
Might crave of me the outward husk, and form,
The stately shell, which wraps my weary days,
And have them all for asking.
LETALDA
Runs thy wave
Up to this inch of sorrow?
111
Ay, my sweet,
Beyond the sea-wall's nicks of ancient seas,
And all the strand-lines of forgotten floods,
And up, my girl, and over them this tide
Swims greenly by a fathom, and leaps on
To higher desolation.
LETALDA
It will turn
And only tinge thine instep and thy skirt
With woolly wash of foam-drift.
ADELHEID
I would rather
Pass from my nature—be an eft, an emmet,
A fallow mole, a fountain centipede,
Than chidden as I am. A chidden princess!
There is no natural marriage in these words,
That jar united. Let them save their chiding
For boys and girls at school. I think, Letalda,
That I am natured proud and resolute,
That I would drive a dagger in my side
As lief as suffer slighting. I speak strangely
For one, whose cloistered girlhood has but seen
Men pass in books and quarrel on white pages;
112
On worm-drilled vellum of old-world revenges,
Done, when a man was nearly dead of shame,
For some vast wrong endured—Ah, then, Letalda,
I heard an echo-pulse cry at my heart,
‘I should have wrought as they did!’ (A pause.)
Hast thou heard
How fares the King this dawn?
LETALDA
He sits, as ever,
And chews upon the bitter drug of anger;
His worn grey face gleams with a savage leer;
He furnaces fresh fuel ever on
His glowing piled displeasure. Wait, my princess,
And let him burn away. The Queen is with us,
She chides in semblance only, dotes on Conrad,
And feigns half-hearted wrath: she is bound to echo
Thy father to appease him by degrees.
She labours on thy side with all her soul,
And bends in policy before the storm-blast.
To champion thee or Conrad at this nick
Would be to drive a taper in dry hay,
Or drop a match on brimstone!
ADELHEID
Woe the while
To this poor desolation of myself,
113
Whose mother only looks at her and weeps,
Whose father wounds her with a cold regard,
Or sits with gathered mantle at his eyes
Nursing a stormy silence. Daylight turns,
And the leaves beat the window; there they sit
On in the gloaming like two tongueless ghosts,
Or as the marble guardians of a gate
At stony watch. Untasted at his hand
The wine-cup bubbles. His old hunting dog,
Reading the tumult of his master's brow,
Forbears to crave his meal. I dare not say—
‘My father, am I dead that you forget
To love me? Then the dead should be forgiven.
But, since I live and you pronounce me faultful,
I bring you tears and sorrow. I could bring
No more to God himself—so pardon me.’
LETALDA
Thy handmaid yields no succour and no gift;
And only says she is sorry with thy sorrow.
ADELHEID
Come, tell me this—are other damsels doomed
To love and see love wither, to admire
And find their glory flung a broken heap
Under the wheels of time? In my good day
114
I pinnacled his image half-way heaven,
And swung from foolish censers many sighs
Up to him every morn. He is fallen now,
And dusty degradation stains his face.
Why is he fallen? Answer, bitter heart:
Because thy glance came softly where he stood,
And brake him from his pedestal. Ay, surely
I have an evil eye, and could blast kine,
Give rosy children chin-cough, welter sheep;
Let all nail up a horse-shoe where I love,
And grow St. John's wort—I am dangerous.
If I be deadly when my favour falls,
Lord of my youth, forget me, and farewell
Last of my lovers. In my father's land
Are many graves; among them dig me one:
There must be room for one more sleepy face.
LETALDA
Thy syllables are bitter as the wail
Of a girl over her first child born dead.
Lady, arise, have comfort, sleep or sing;
Unclasp this girdle of anguish, give thy heart
Freedom to beat. Thy rose lips were not born
Yet to say sorrow; neither were such eyes
Made to bear only rounded fruit of tears.
115
I have wedded Desolation with a ring;
A graven posy runs inside of it—
‘Tears beget patience.’ Many wives wear such,
And cannot make the inward letters out.
We can pray also; add this to the scroll,
Then will it run—patience and tears and prayer;
Woman's epitome; three reasons why
We come into this painted field of earth.
LETALDA
A watcher for a step that will not come;
A weeper near a face that cannot smile;
A worshipper of saints who never hear;—
These are the only parts we girls are given
To play in an old time-worn tragedy
Called ‘Love belated in a world of sighs.’
ADELHEID
I never thought so until yesterday,
When suddenly God's hand came out of heaven,
And withered up my paradise of dreams,
And drave me from the garden where I lived
With my girl's heart right merry. I arose
Exiled, and, going, heard a foul wind smite
The corners of the temple of my past,
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Ashes and fallen roof and burning beams.
LETALDA
We did not augur sorrow, when we watched
The troopers in from Arnheim; whom among
Thy soldier came, chief rose in Honour's crown.
ADELHEID
Nay, sweet, that morn my heart was bathed in heaven,
As the bells clashed, and they came spurring past;
And he, the noblest, in his burning mail
Rode grandly through the square with thoughtful eyes;
And none so poor a maiden in the street
But crushed and pushed to get her glance at him.
Then in his might and glory I was glad;
And in the sombre background of my soul
Bright thoughts began to rise, each after each
In a fair order, shedding gold; as when
The clear and calm procession of the stars
Is lifted up in ether, one by one,
And the brown twilight sorrowful recedes,
And all the coppice and dun under-shrubs
Begin to glitter as with showery rain;
Though dryer than a road the nightly land.
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The voices of the people praising him
Rose as a furnace full of withered boughs.
ADELHEID
I leant among the swallows at my casement,
And watched my lover's triumph wind below;
And the pied martins fluttered round my head,
And dipped into the street and back again
To sun their panting bosoms on the tiles,
And bided there a little, then cried out
And tossed themselves out swiftly on the air
Down and away; then raced their children back
Into the necks of their grey wasplike homes,
Niched just above my window. Presently
There rose an urgent longing in my soul,
That one of these that flitted in the void
Midway between the martial pomp below
And my face wistful, watching overhead,
Would carry down a wreath for Conrad's brow
And lay it on his passing helm for me,
Who could not reach to crown him with my hand,
And had not dared to wreathe him if I could.
LETALDA
Pity, thou hadst no carrier dove to send him
A twig of olive down; he gave us peace;
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And made our kingdom foam, he turned the sea.
ADELHEID
Lo, at my window, there I had a dream,
Searching the lands of sleep with open eyes,
That he would halt at our great door, and call
With prelude of a trumpet, ‘I return
To claim, O King, my chosen and thy child.’
And from our palace should a clarion peal
In answer, ‘It is well: thy chosen comes.’
Then should they lead me vestured as a bride,
And the old king should follow laying hands
Of blessing on us both; whence rising we
Should ride away into the morning land,
Turning us, ever and anon, to see
The old home vapour-melted far behind
And its grey towers a streak upon the verge.
LETALDA
Did thy dream pass at this, or lengthen on?
ADELHEID
Yea, the trance held; and onward I discerned
The married years, as strips of calm rosed cloud
Laid one behind the other in the lake,
And olive-golden concave of the dawn—
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With his achievement, weak no more: no girl
Mewed in a silken chamber from the air
And the great living wind of human deed;
But out with him among the whirling leaves
Of mortal wishes, letting all the rain
Of the world's weeping sweep against my face:
Womanly still, yet in his service iron:
Watching my hero's eye, waiting his lip;
I might transmute my soul by love unslumbering,
And colour all my nature to his tone;
My neutral self, my ragged lines cut clean
And finished after him; till I emerged
The copy of his greatness, made indeed
At a great distance, vague and blurred in parts,
Yet like enough for men to know us one.
Did I dream well?
LETALDA
God's dew was on thy dream,
A devil's hoar-frost on thy waking up.
The rich dream leaves us in a naked world
With idle empty hands.
ADELHEID
Then let us sew
To cure sore eyes: our tapestry was traced
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With orange globes of myrtle; pansies rubbed
In wreaths against the blue-black cheeks of grapes;
And strawberries wild, which underpeeped blue arches
Of curly hyacinth. We'll change all that.
Sad sewers make sad samplers. We'll be sorry
Down to our finger-ends, and broider emblems
Native to desolation—cypress sprays,
Yew tufts, and hectic leaves of various autumn,
And bitter tawny rue and bent black thorns.
LETALDA
And we can feed our birds, peruse our Hours,
And count the flies in the window; we can fold
Our hands and then unfold them; we can listen
To all the tunes in the wind, to the street foot-falls,
Where children patter past lighter than leaves,
And old men grind along as heavy wains—
ADELHEID
And think he may be passing, but my heart
Is slow to hear her music so removed.
He may be glancing up, but these grey walls
Shed barrier black; and so the little loves,
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And cannot reach each other fondling hands.
LETALDA
Thy Life is like a phantom with a torch
Groping her way in chambers underground
To find white ashes, dust in broken urns.
ADELHEID
Lo, this my Life was light and crowned and sweet,
But she shall sicken and doff her festal robe,
And wrap around her shining sides instead
The sackcloth cincture of a leper's limbs;
About her face shall go a dead man's cowl;
And hooded so,—as one, who crawls away,
Lest he infect his dearest, wife and child,
Having beheld the plague-spot on his flesh,
And prays to die unfound, apart from all—
So shall my Life creep to some charnel-porch,
And grovel in the bitter grass of graves,
And rest her live cheek on a lettered tomb,
And prone reach out her palms beyond her head,
And so lie steeped in that strange light, which flares
Out of a sun low-swimming, moribund,
Just ere the fingers of an ink-black cloud
Creep out, and, crawling upwards, grip at him,
And drown him downwards in the dark gulf dead.
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These pictures are the pencillings of woe,
Weird as the fragments of a broken night
Reeling around the moon. Draw down the blind
And come away, refuse to see them; sleep
Or pray, until thy sun re-enter heaven
With a beam milder.
ADELHEID
Girl, I charge thee, peace!
My road is chosen: I must tread thereby
In anguish. This inexorable eld,
My deathsman, and my father, and my king,
Seeing me hunger for the bread of love
Gave me the flint rejection. These old men
Sit in frost-bitten shadows; Love, the lark,
Sails up above their haze, and finds the sun,
And flutters warm in gold; but they crouch low
With rime around their shoulders and their knees.
LETALDA
He heard not Pity, Peril he shall hear,
And so be reconciled with Conrad; one
Is weak at lips, the other is a roar
To turn the laden eagle, halfway home,
Back in his heaven, though hungry in their nest
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The land is dangerous: O royal maid,
The large affliction of thine innocent eyes
Hath made me, daughter of the people, turn
A traitor to the people, and divulge
Their simmering wrath, their opportunities,
Their drawing back to spring. My kith and kin
Would burn my blabbing lips off, if they heard me;
But weak compassion with strong cords has haled
The secret from my most unwilling heart.
Approach thy sire; O seek him, sweet, at once,
And bid him lean his ear along the ground,
And listen—By the Lord, he will do well
To listen; for Rebellion at his doors
Raises so deep a clarion brazen-bound,
Leans back to blow and purses shaggy lips
And fills the apples of his cheeks with storm;—
The terror of whose trumpet is a blast
Full of black wind, hail cloud, and thunder fire,
Rending the wide-branched cedar, plucking forth
The oak-king like a daisy from the sward.
ADELHEID
Thy words sweep out over my head as rain.
How shall this be? Rebellion! I see none:
Listen, around this palace, as of old,
The pace of guardian sentinels goes on:
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The market fills with ruby-kirtled wives:
The burghers bring their tables out-of-doors
And in long glasses chink a health to Peace.
LETALDA
These minnows haunt dead-waters of the stream
And guess not how the central current swirls.
In their small pools the wave is crystal clear,
But yellow flood boils yonder, full of roots,
Foam, and the scum of unwashed city sides.
ADELHEID
Let it roll on. The throne is guarded well.
LETALDA
How guarded?
ADELHEID
Why, with hearts of gold, true spears,
Who tossed the foeman, like a truss of hay,
Out of the walls at Arnheim.
LETALDA
Soldiers, lady,
Are mutable as children; if you wrench
The instant's plaything rudely from their hand,
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Our troops are mutinous: the cause is plain.
The king strikes out at Conrad; and, behold,
In angry pain his entire army thrills
Writhing, and in a shudder of cold sweat
With clenched lips tingles. Say you, ‘Can this be?’
I say, 'twere stranger false and likelier true;
For Conrad is our soldiers' oracle,
Their idol, pattern, conscience; round his brow
The rays of these four various reverences
Converge into a nimbus. Woe the day,
When thy blind father fell at odds with him.
Were all his councillors as blind as he?
Did all our watchmen sleep? Ye ancient wisdoms,
Who stand about the throne, and move your faces
To search the four wide quarters overhead
Of star and cloud, ye surely slumbered then,
Or blind corrosion of some dusty dream
Held you in thrall though wakened, and made trees
Men and men bushes. Otherwise, I know,
Ye ne'er had held such sad-eyed silence, when
The wrathful monarch rose with axe in hand
To knock the main-prop of his palace out,
And leave the fabric rocking in the gale
To stand or tumble in as luck decreed.
Then at the feast—
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This morn one of my girls
Spake of new quarrels at the banquet risen;
But, being sad enough, I asked no more
Knowing her news was bad, and all my help
Was sitting still.
LETALDA
Right, O my princess, right:
And silence as a chain shall bind my lips.
A bad and bitter banquet! Ask no more.
ADELHEID
Nay, thou shalt speak; there are two agonies,
The pain of guessing and the pain to hear:
The last is lightest. Speak.
LETALDA
I loathe the task.—
The tables in that high ancestral hall
Were triple, furnished bravely for the feast.
One for thy sire with those who, nearest him
In lineage, office, or sustained esteem,
Might break their crust upon a common board
With the right regal master of this harvest
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As his whole garden-realm's selected buds,
To bloom at feast in a king's neighbourhood;
All circled round and towards him all converged,
Who, as a rubious aster, golden-stamened,
Held state in midst, or seemed authentic sun
To these, who leant as sunflowers to his beam.
So they, our nation's noblest, richly dight
In capes of vair, and ermine-lappet robes,
Looped russet hoods, or amber-purple sleeves,
Shone on each hand of where their monarch blazed
Utterly crimson save his tawny tiar.
And on this table meat was delicate,
And viand dainty. Here a queen might eat
With her imperial daughters, and fare well.
Here overhead the trophies swept and swung;
Here Arnheim's hot and newly-gathered spoils
Flapped in two wide crossed banners on the wall
With laurel and this motto—‘I have won.’
Below, the myriad lights, the costly cups,
Huge silver salvers heaped with perfumed fruit,
Tankards of wine, the clank of glittering chains,
Soft velvet phrases, jewelled hands reached out—
Made such a rich confusion, that a guest,
Feasting, might think he dreamt of festivals,
And presently would waken in his sheets,
And, hungry, eyelids rub. Two lesser tables,
By some steps sunk beneath the upper one,
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Nearer the entrance, further from the king;
A precinct where white scullions thrust in game
At kitchen hatches, or bore seething in
Trenchers of flesh, all vapour from the pans.
Above these boards the lamps, more rarely swung,
And wider intervals of clustered candles
Gave out less copious starlight. This had use,
For some, who feasted there in demi-shade,
Seemed like the sons of spiders in their old
And dismal splendour, passed from sire to child,
And now unfolded, carious from the chest,
To grace this day of pomp, more suited surely
To a decent twilight gleam. Such numb extremes
Made up the ends and fingers of that feast:
Paltry officials, ancients, pages, scribes,
Minstrels—ignoble all: hedge-company
Caught in to fill the forms and pack the hall,
Lest Sigismund should note with eye displeased
Blank vacancy, misfeatured to the pride
Of monarchs flushed with hospitalities.
Into this region, where no honour sat,
A pursy usher, strutting down the hall,
Beckons me Conrad, signs him into seat
Hard by the gusty entrance, out of hail
Of all co-equals, neighboured in with boors,
Crushed up with burghers in their civic tags,
Knights without land, and out-at-elbow squires
129
Pledge him in horn: in horn he drinks again,
Sighs a great sigh and glances up the hall,
Rolling his eyes; yet silent, as a shaft
Of basalt poised on some sea-ledge above
The clangour of the trivial breakers there;
Dark as a cloud, when tempest colours him;
So stood he all his height, and seemed one frown
Above the ripple of laughter, and the sparkles
Of agate and of emerald and of gold;
Contemplating the far-off dais, where
Some of his peers, and many a lesser man,
Drank wine around their king in precious cups;
And, in great shame at his right humble seat,
He sighed again; and loathingly glanced down
Between the brace of round-backed citizens,
His neighbours in repast. Then down sat he
At last with a most sullen emphasis,
And all his armour echoed through the hall;
And men said, ‘What is that?’ and ushers stared
Prying upon him curiously. Whereat,
He called the nearest, saying, ‘Good Sir Spy,
Since you were placed to peer how I digest
My degradation, and to carry word
To the arch-ape, whom you his lesser monkeys
Beslaver: I will spare your further watch,
And of myself send tidings how I feel.
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So the wretch ran in terror and wide-eyed
Between the backs of feasters up the hall;
He felt the eye of Conrad on him still,
He feared his promised death; that drave him on;—
Up to the King he came, then halted dumb,
But saw, even there, with a corner of his eye
Conrad afar across the feasters wave
An angry arm: then, kneeling, dead with fear,
He plucked this message forth from quivering lips—
‘Conrad, thy captain, pledges thee, O King,
Out of his humble horn. Do thou drink back
In a great cup and yellow. Conrad cries,—
To-night his wine is sour and bitter-thin;
Yet in the morning he will brew a cup
For thee and thine red as the rolling ray:
The rim thereof is clay-bound as the grave;
Its depth two fathoms, and its vintage such,
That, if a king once drink between its brims,
He thirsts no more: so Conrad bids thee hail.’
And, as he heard the message, Sigismund
Flushed, and went pale, and flushed, and plucked his robe,
And griped his chair. Then, like one out of breath,
Turned to his chancellor, and said, ‘My Lord,
I am deafer than my wont in all this noise,
And the knave gabbles; heard you what he said?
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Old wine between a fool's unseasoned lips
Is parent of much drivel. Slave, begone;
Sleep off thy rouse forgiven. I cannot rear
A gallows on a night of victory,
But 'ware thy next offence: fly, knave.’ He fled:
And Conrad saw him leap out like a hare
Through the great doors, and, seeing, knit his brows;
And to his horn bent down, austere and dumb.
ADELHEID
The insult at this feast was rashly done.
LETALDA
The gauntlet of his threat as wildly thrown.
ADELHEID
Nay, he meant nothing; Conrad will relent.
I'll laugh him tame: his anger in my hand
Shall turn into a very turtle-dove
And coo for pardon. Most I fear my sire,
Cold in his crust of age, implacable,
With one grey shadow steadfast on his face.
O foolish youth, to launch at this white head,
Inexorable, thine innocuous fire,
Sheeting the verge without a bolt or sound.
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And his renown is come before his beard.
Yet, O my father, how extenuate
Folly in thee? Let boys be granted fools;
Still, age should load much wisdom on old men,
As oaks catch snows when winter air is still;
Yet hath unwisdom rained on thee as meal;
For what fool ever made a wedding supper,
And benched the bridegroom lowest at the door?
For Arnheim's winning you carouse: the man,
Who won this red bride with the ring of war,
Must feast in some dishonoured corner, held
Unworthy to dip finger in thy dish.
LETALDA
O antic pride! I will go sup with clowns;
For shepherds do not wrangle for degrees
Around a bowl of milk.
ADELHEID
In this king's house
Let all men eat henceforth their bread alone.
For yesterday our guests came in as doves
With a soft winnowing sound; and, having fed,
They rose and went away as tawny wolves,
With awkward slouch and one lip-corner raised.
133
Your speech is truer than you understand.
ADELHEID
Then did the banquet grow to worse?
LETALDA
It did.
Certain there were, who in those golden halls
Sate with the chief, on whose most royal souls
The degradation of our greatest captain
Fell like their own disgrace. But lesser things,
There seated, smiled, and rubbed insidious hands,
And whispered in keen relish, little worms!
But those great goodly hearts of generous strain,
Seeing their peer so seated, could not taste
That royal wine with any more content,
And in their mood, abhorring tables spread
With loathsome dainties and insipid cheer,
Rose up, one-minded all, and out they went;
And clashed in gleaming armour down the hall,
And turned their shoulders on the royal face,
Which, watching their defection, flared up red;
As its lord fiercely to his varlets signed
To cram their vacant benches with a drove
Of more obsequious revellers.
134
And Conrad?
LETALDA
Hinge of this discord, hero of this storm,
Sate in his humble place and did not go.
ADELHEID
How looked he then?
LETALDA
Still as a cat, who sits
Watching a crevice, mute, with cruel eyes;
Disdaining to abridge his shameful penance
By the least sand-grain in the hour-glass neck;
Seeming to flaunt his insult, as a flag
Unfurled on largely-breathing heaven, which bears
Revolt in rolling letters on its face.
So he sat on, and gave no man a word
In dumb endurance. Then, arose the last
Of feasters in the slowly-emptying hall,
And, with apparent dilatory musing,
Gained in no haste the greatly-sculptured doors,
And passed out wrathful to the quiet stars.
135
Did none of all that many seeing him
In the deep waters offer out a hand?
LETALDA
One limped into the darkness after him,
And plucked his sleeve and tiptoed at his ear,—
A wried thing, bitter-dangerous, and small,
That maggot speck, that gnaws its way and feeds
On ink and vellum—call him nothing, since
His very name is poison in good mouths.
ADELHEID
Did Raban comfort Conrad? Can my love
Give heed to such a worm? It cannot be.
The twain are sundered wide as vale of heaven
And glen of sulphur-land. O poor love wounded!
LETALDA
And tempted with a snake.
ADELHEID
O perilled love,
Thou art lonely in thy desolation, none
But evil mouths are ready at thy ear.
The nets are spread to catch my lion's feet;
136
And have their muzzles stifled. Frightened birds
Spring from the branches; hunters narrow in.
But thou art in thy slumber, lion-heart,
Seëst and hearest nothing; how the gale
Is big with whispers of thy death and doom—
O God, Letalda, is there time to save him?
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SCENE IV.
A dark corridor in the Palace. Time, Midnight.Enter Conrad and Raban softly.
RABAN
Is pity yet our watchword in this realm
Sick with the trouble of a dotard's reign?
Must we endure? When in our utter patience
He finds God's finger signing with approval
His eldish pranks and crazed audacities.
Last night beneath the stars I found you keen;
How fares Revenge, that apple of grim night-shade,
Wall-fruit of graves, Death's orchard jenneting,—
After one glaring daylight intervened?
Has it drawn colour swinging in the sun,
And from the soft air sucked maturity,
As from a mother's breast? Or is it tumbled
A crude green windfall in the careless grass
For swine to crunch, and boys to play at ball with?
CONRAD
That I am here is thy sufficient answer.
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Ay, ay, the midnight stars are round again;
Morning will soon be written in the silver
Rift there outside, beyond that sentry's head—
This fellow very wisely guards his king:
The foes he fears are mainly from without!—
The hour you bade me come burns out in heaven;
We meet: the time is apt: the place convenient:
The chamber of our quarry well in reach,
Yet not too near; say now, what shall be done?—
By God, I will not trust those milky brows!
CONRAD
Raban, my face is very firm for vengeance,
Flint-like as yours, inexorably set—
In my good time I strike—in my good time.
Tease me no more with your perpetual note
Of now, now, now. My marsh-frog, croak not death,
Death, at my elbow all the winter day.
Doth the grey field-kite, poising at its prey,
Hasten its swoop or expedite its blow,
Because some fussing grasshopper looks up,
And wonders why it flutters there so long?
The injury is mine beyond dispute,
And in my hand alone it rests to choose
The season for requital. But you prate,
As if we held this pain in partnership;
139
You take the talking, I endure the sting.
RABAN
You are in love, my hero—with delay.
This girl has caught your dagger-arm between
Her rose-leaf fingers, meshed she holds it there.
Strike! You are past all striking: bedward wishes
Tinkle with more alluring emphasis
Than this alarum rocking out your wrongs.
CONRAD
I tell thee, there is time.
RABAN
And so there is:
Just time enough for hiding those huge limbs,
And not a moment more to play with mouths,
And toy with fingers. Up, man, hide or run!
Creep underneath some cavern-lip of rock,
Crouch in the fretted oak, or, safer yet,
Souse in some peaty marish to thy ears
And shiver sweetly. Out the blood-hounds come.
They have given them Arnheim's garland for a scent,
And on thy road of triumph laid the trail.
Fly! Get thee to the heights! Hale from his den
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Instead of him, thy need is more than his;
For all the mountain-side is full of horns,
And men in green to catch thee!
CONRAD
By God's fire,
If this be jesting, I am sick of such,
If earnest, I am ready; let them come.
And yet 'tis sudden. Can one old black spider
Spin such a coil of mischief in one day?
Was nothing purposed when I saw you last?
RABAN
This stormy bantling is a few hours old.
CONRAD
Baits this old ferreter some rabbit-gin?
RABAN
This crazy Jove, to whom we press our hands,
And only breathe by license from his eye,
Whose name is Sigismund, whose brain is pulp,—
Prepares a singing thunderbolt to greet
The rival of his glory, well-beloved,
The captain, who caught cities while he slept,
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For which iniquities this leader dies;
Jove take thy bolt up: poise, ignite, and hurl,
Heave it out torch-like on the night of heaven,
Blue at the head, silver between, and last
Orange amid its trailing locks of fire;—
O, it will crackle rarely launched in the air;
Fate grant, it do not scorch the royal fingers.
CONRAD
Whether it singe the stars or quench its head
In the cold sea, I care not. I am here
With folded arms and eyes that quail not. Smite,
Smite, if thou dar'st, thou palsy called a king!
No mock thou canst devise or I endure
Can touch me; insult is my daily meat,
And scorn the usual raiment of my limbs.
Why am I smitten? Faith, I hardly know.
RABAN
Then must I teach you: your indictment's this.
First, you are young, and, next, you are deserving:
Then, have you teased King Frost with rebel Fire,
And brandished lust of life before the grave;
More, you have spoken well of innocence
Before a torpid hornet; last, have praised
The use of pinions to a wingless worm.
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O, they learn better, who strike root at court:
The King comes first and Nature after him,
As is most meet. For Nature at her best
Is but a nurse of clowns and reaping hooks,
A thing as common as the pasture grass.
But if a king feel snowy all year through,
Good manners will assent, and kindle fires,
When Sirius rages. Perfect breeding learns
To shiver while it sweats, if Sigismund
Come in with chattering teeth. But you, sir, you,
Full of the blowsy summer, bundle in
Where winter rules by edict; rush in warm,
Turbulent, hopeful, pushing in a swarm
Of little naked loves and butterflies;
Swearing against all taste and precedent,
That it is April and you want a wife.
Marry indeed, what have you done? Why this—
You have reversed the universal order.
For every courtier knows, that, if a king
Ordain it shall be cold, why cold it is.
CONRAD
Goad me no longer, Raban; I have fed
So much on fury, that its taste is grown
Weary and stale and dull. All doings here,
All slights, all strifes of this most petty court
143
Fretting and rising full of noise and foam
And hushed to-morrow.
RABAN
Calm as halcyon waves!
The petrels home are gone: dame Ocean sleeps;
And in her mood my hero watches Fate,
Grandly resigned. He will not wail or wince;
Though fragments of a broken universe
Clatter around his philosophic brain,
This shall not move him in his mighty calm.
CONRAD
Why this preamble? Are you Æolus,
And is this bag, you hitch upon your knee,
The cavern of some storm-wind. What comes here?
RABAN
Read and perpend. I draw my treasure out.
Merely a written scroll; peruse it well;
For each one word—there are not many—leaves
Its parchment, like an arrow with a twang,
Sailing to find its target in thy breast
And burrow there—My young philosopher,
Read all, and, if you can, smile afterwards.
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How came this in your keeping? Why, the words
Are Raban's writing. Then my hour is come:
I am betrayed; and you, this monarch's spy,
Have wormed my secrets out, hired scrivener,
To stamp me into prison with your pen!
RABAN
Philosopher, my young philosopher,
What is a prison? Why, a wall and bars;
Nothing to one, who reasons, how a wall
And bars are matter merely, and must perish
In the race and wrack of ages.
CONRAD
By my life,
I will be answered.
RABAN
By that half-cracked nut-shell—
Which steads you for a life to swear upon,
Through which the enfranchised kernel called the soul
Is all but out—my answer is most simple.
By luck, the Rhenish of last night's carouse
Flowed to the fingers of the king's own scribe,
Making his letters stagger like himself,
145
Stiffened in legal buckram to their chins—
And so this sottish penman on his knees
Entreats as deputy my sober wrist.
CONRAD
A miracle of most auspicious chance;
As yet this warrant lacks the royal name?
RABAN
That is soon mended. In his closet yonder
Our clement king sits long past bedward hour,
Blinking, with pen in fist, and rarely fuming
At our delay; in goes the parchment, pat
His hand dips, like a swallow, at the ink,
Poises, and, rising, sweetly signs his name.
Then in one royal flourish turns the key
On my spruce Conrad, with good night to him.
CONRAD
So hoary yet so false! So weak and still
So full of venom! Dost thou slink, old fox,
To catch an eagle in a woodcock wire?
Sleep not just yet or thou mayst never waken.
The sands our patience gives thee trickle fast. (A pause)
Shall I tear up this rag and sow its shreds
146
In filthy corners of polluted lanes?
Or shall I treasure this, and bear it in
With crawling gait and mildewed deference,
Mock-humble, to his majesty; and speak?—
‘Lord of my long and tedious servitude,
Great king and wise one, lo, thy slave is here,
Around whose neck the rope at thy command
Is fastened: let thy hand adjust its ring.
I come into thy presence as one slain,
Wearing my grave-clothes; in my hand I bring
Thy written passport of my journey home.
Sign it, thou knowest best: I kiss the pen.
For life and death are feathers in thy hand;
And we are grigs that chirp before the light
Of thy face shining; dumb when it withdraws.
I anger thee, so sign and send me down
To tell the phantoms of the red profound,
That Sigismund is coming; and I come
His herald to prepare his couch below,
And warm his slippers.’
RABAN
Take the scroll and go;
But hide the dagger in between its leaves;
Both at his breast-bone offer with a sweep.
O, the rare sight—repaying in a moment,
147
To see the tyrant wince, the dotard howl,
And grovel gasping; when thy bright wasp springs
Out of its yellow leaves, and stings his heart
In through the purple and the jewels, deep
And deeper.
CONRAD
O revenge, sweet falcon bird,
Mellow and great, with keen wings like the sun,
And fierce deep eyes that search all space for prey;
Hold her well in, then loosen; she will soar
Straight, and her beak will strike the quarry down,
And tear this white and fluttering owl-thing dead.
RABAN
Art thou resolved?
CONRAD
O, Raban, I have read
Too long the book of patience. I have nursed
Pity, because his foolish head was grey,
And his false hands were wrinkled. In return
He winds his wicked fingers round my throat—
For so doth royal gratitude embrace us—
And in defence, because the law of God
Allows it, I do rip the monster's face,
And fling him down, clay in a cloth of gold.— (A pause)
148
Thy hand—I am ready (Goes to the window)
. Look out there, my friend,
See yonder moon swims low, a silvern heart
Folded in amber; she rolls royally,
A creature laughing at eclipse and shame,
Strong with the heavens about her for a shield,
Fierce with all seas beneath her for a road—
Stay and count twelve—Death has gone up at her
In a mist, in a wreath; and now black-red she falls
Under the horizon dead!
RABAN
My conqueror,
Go and return a king?
CONRAD
I strike for life,
Not for that other bauble.
RABAN
As you please.
Strike deep enough and do not reason why.
One sleeper more gives morn to all this land:
One who sleeps always now; thou dost but heal
Some few and meagre waking-fits in him.
Go, with the footfall of a bridesman, go,
149
And hears the tinkle of the lutes within.
Go! Doth my feaster, raising up the cup,
Tremble, because in tasting deeply and long
A little red runs over?
CONRAD
By my soul,
I hunger, I am ready, he is slain.
RABAN
Wave only thy great hand and it is done:
I will await thee, meanest of thy slaves,
To wipe my master's blade.
CONRAD
I hear a wind
That calls me—and farewell!
RABAN
It brings the day.
There is a noble incense in your speech,
Which breathes like battle mornings. On my soul,
You shall lead men yet as a king should lead.
You have royal makings in you. We have seen
Your star arise in our oppressions: come,
150
Fearless ascend this tyrant's empty seat,
Empty it is, raise but your finger, lord.
[Conrad goes out, but, after a pause, he re-enters hurriedly.
CONRAD
Now by that orb which I shall never snatch,
All is ruined, all awry. Here's Adelheid
Roaming the court to find me. I must pass her
To reach her father's rest. O mocking gleam,
That shows us for an instant diadems,
Then glooms and they are gone. I hear her coming:
I think she weeps.
RABAN
I wish she wept in the grave,
For Satan sends her in to tease and baulk us
At thy most golden instant. God! these girls
Come whimpering in, when earth, air, man, and fiend
Would crown thee in the deep and fleeting hush
Of opportunity. All things conspire
To make this moment ripe to king thee, and, Lo,
The whole stupendous fabric of thy onwards
Cracks into shards: at what? A girl's tear! Folly
Can shear no closer fatuous Samson's curls;
Thy Delilah will cord thee nicely!
151
Rave not;
I will obey thee; speak suggestion—
RABAN
Dawdler!
Brush her aside, be rough and short for once;
Roll her against a column, if she block
Your onward foot; admit no question. God!
This tinted fly spoils the best cup of wine
That life has brewed us—She must flutter in.
O, snatch her out and drink.
CONRAD
Shall I turn churl
Through peril of my life, and put to use
Discourtesies with her I love? No Raban,
That's in no soldier's bond. What knight of worth
Lives at such ransom?
RABAN
Fool of love, remain
And chatter with your puppet. There's more pith
Of purpose in my small distorted body
Than in this mountain of an athlete. I,
152
And pocket up vengeance and enterprise,
Because a white wench meets you on the stairs—
No wiser than a bull!—Give me your knife.
CONRAD
Insolent!
RABAN
Nay, forgive me, gracious lord,
Why will she come just in the nick of mischief?
O friend, O captain, O my King (that may be),
See you not how we're each of us dead men?
I say, no better; therefore, I must smite,
If you will dally. Prithee, give it me,
The poniard—now the parchment—That's my Conrad.
I, hunched and frail, have might enough for him.
He is unworthy carrion for your sword:
I am good enough to end him: give the word,
So your assent shall arm me like a god
With mandate to destroy.
CONRAD
Go, in my name
And slay him: on my head be half the deed.
153
I go with a light step and merry mind;
To knife a tyrant cuts this baby world
Clear of another leading-string. I'd rather
Do it than build cathedrals. Breathe on me,
Such as I am, great mother Liberty!
Breathe Brutus' might on thy mis-shapen child.
[Raban goes out.
CONRAD
The end comes swiftly: I have touched the spring,
And all the cogs and wheels in Death's great mill
Begin revolving, grinding, buzzing; earth
Seems trembling fathoms down—My God, he is gone!
Shall I recall him? Nay, the chance is timely,
Which rinses this red errand off my hands,
And gives me, as foul deputy, this toad,
Who loves to limp, and trail his bloated paunch
In any slimy bloodshed.—Has he reached?
Nay, listen, there his halting footfall drags—
He pauses at the chamber of the King—
He speaks with some one; ay, that's Adelheid:
Now silence, and a knock: within that panel
There lies the doomed one, in my fancy dead.
How will the old man look when it is done,
154
Seem then? I know so well its angry turn.
Will Raban falter? Hark! He passes in;
A door swings and he enters. The great God
Sits up in heaven and listens. At whose side,
The pale torn Christ with percolating drops
Of blood, like black-drawn tears, beneath his thorns—
Maimed as we maim our brother every hour,
Ghastly and white, as in their road-side chapels—
Sits pointing down upon this murder!
[Enter an Usher hurriedly.
USHER
Captain—
My Lord—the Princess—instantly must see you.
CONRAD
I come—as instantly do thou be gone!
(Exit Usher.)
This green-bronze carrion-fly must haunt our shambles,
Just when the ox is hewn.—My soul is sick
With all the crowded bloodsheds of the world
From Cain's first blow to Raban's latest knife.
I seem to see below me the abyss
Grinding its rocks with scummy waterfalls;
Which, as a cauldron spills o'er pitchy sides
Turbulent drenches of wan smoking waves,
155
In far-down chasms full of mist, and great
With voices of torn tossing floods, most dim
Save for some ghostly streaks of heaving pools.
And, at the utmost outlet of this gulf,
A river shears itself and bounds away
With such expanse of turmoil that wings only
Not oar or sail could traverse. It soughs up
Foul exhalation, and goes swinging on
By red-mire banks, sodden with scurf, and set
With curled imbedded branches hung with pale
Dead drift of grass and rubbish, like old snakes
Drowned in the deluge, sun-dried. There are some
Back-pools of calmer current, but they harbour
Things that should be i'th' ground with broken sides,
Who rock and fester, rainbowing with pollution
The face of the water, oil-like, on black slime
And the rough root-tags of abolished reeds—
A sickly dream—Is he about it yet?
[Enter Adelheid hurriedly.
ADELHEID
Thank God, that I have found you—
CONRAD
(absently)
God may claim
Some thanks to-day for such a treasure trove.
156
You may play hide and seek through all the earth
And not refind me then.
ADELHEID
You're ill—or wounded?
Why do you send at me such dazed blank looks?
I know you are in peril, woe the day,
But Danger never looked through Conrad's eyes
In such an eager, wistful, chidden glance,
As now I quail beholding. O my best one,
What direst bolt, what arrow barbed with ruin,
Forged in the devil's stithy of mischance,
Hath given you such a face?
CONRAD
(still absently)
'Tis a rough day,
And we who try to keep our feet i'th' gale,
Must needs look grim about it. I will simper
When the still air returns.
ADELHEID
(indignantly)
I will depart,
If biding I displease. Our vaunted love
Has only grazed your soul with swallow wings:
You're a slight lover; now I know this, sir,
157
Need bring no prison key. You give me up,
And so pass free and harmless.
CONRAD
(aside)
Shall she leave
And so misread me? Ay: let her be gone
Wide of this cresting skirt of ghastly wave.
(Aloud.)
Yes, my sweet, go; see, I am ill, am absent;
To-morrow I will make my Love's defence,
And you shall hear his wherefore and his why;
Till then, he can but droop with imputation,
But kiss him now in faith—O sweet, go swiftly.
ADELHEID
Whither? To beat upon my father's doors
And beg thee free!
CONRAD
(aside, with a painful change of manner)
Go rather to hell's brink.
(Aloud.)
Nay, to the west wing of the palace, past
The noises of this bustling eastern side.
ADELHEID
Come, then I'll look thee full into the eyes,
And see what I can read. By Mary's babe,
This fellow is afraid! (Starts from him)
158
Sweet torturer,
Spare me an hour and go.
ADELHEID
Are you so beaten
By the wild panic of one stormy hour,
That all your love is shaken to the earth
Out of your life, as summer dust is shed
From an old nuptial garment? You—a soldier—
And only love me to the point where Fear
Stands sentinel with levelled arquebus,
And cries, ‘Halt there: no further!’
CONRAD
(throwing off his previously assumed manner)
To the winds
This counterfeited coldness! I refuse
To hear my passion treasoned, meted out
By lying landmarks. Fix a fence in the sun,
And plant a quickset in Orion's sides,
Yet will the boundaries of my vast love
Be still unsounded. O you speak to try me,
Who love you to the very brinks of death,
And in and under through the grave-flag's earth,
And out beyond into that fiery void
Around God's seat—so far my spirit's arms
159
Beyond the white point in the burning mist
To which, as to a presence without form,
The seraphs bend in fear and veil their eyes
Stung with tremendous ardours.
ADELHEID
There again
My wonted Conrad spake. But as for him,
This cowering hangdog double of yourself,
What did it mean? Why must you grieve and mock me
With such an abject mask?
CONRAD
My ruined rose-face,
See, how I love you even in this. I stood
Scared out of hope and broken out of heaven,
Until I heard the ripple of your robes
And the echo of your foot-fall. Then, O then,
The thunder-veiled seclusions of my deep
Began to move with rays. My soul, all cloud,
Took in a little day. Until your voice
Came thwarting through my mirk, I held myself
Brother to fallen spirits. A black bar
Seemed laid across the white page of my life.
I felt, by forecast and pre-ordinance
160
Who bleat the wrong side of the throne. I said,
‘If I am lost, I will be lost yet more,
And I am ripe for any fiery deed,
Ready to push in the furnace my fool hands,
And reach out roasted fruit for any fiend,
Who holds me worth his prompting.’ And one came,
And when you joined me he was newly gone,
But his black cloud was left. You found me in it.
ADELHEID
Ah! Raban, on my life—
CONRAD
But now, love, now,
At the mere touching of your innocent hands
The veil of my impenetrable ire
Cracks o'er my head and on each side slips down;
While Heaven breaks out around me, star and blue,
And star-points passing into cherub heads,
As the gulfed azure arches and melts out
To perfect nothingness of white.
ADELHEID
My brave,
You shall not go to prison.
161
That's past sureness
That I must go there. Mercy's dead and rotten
And tossed into the ditch, while her successor
In this accursed house has holes for eyes
And rows of grinning teeth. He does the office
Of our dead Mercy here.
ADELHEID
O silence, darling;
They shall not drag you to this death, unless
They hew you out with hatchets from my arms.
CONRAD
How prettily this passion speaks in sunset
Along your cheek; means it my night must follow?
Strange is it not, my child, in whose most sweet
And rainy eyes compassion, like a gem,
Continually glistens? Yet your pity
Is perilous and brings no wedding garment;
But rather sits beside a grave half-dug,
And sews upon a shroud. 'Tis strangely settled,
That, if a man think love of you, death comes
To love him instantly. Would heart suppose,
That in the wondrous lips of my fair peril
Resides a subtle foretaste of the ground,
And on their curves and in their coral corners,
162
And drink this dangerous vintage: I discern
Only a pleasure of faint April dews
Rolling buds open. There's no grave-taste here.
May be, you carry death-power in your curls
As Samson carried might. Come, let me poise them:
This hair is full of pale and perfect light,
Which lives along it, like the subdued sunshine
That saturates a mist. Beautiful witch,
In your great fleecy waterfall of tresses,
Consider, they are going to shear my neck
For playing with these ringlets; they are royal
And saved for kings alone. For me remains
The narrow porch of clay. You'll weep a little?
Give me some tears, I do not ask for many.
Nature will dry your eyes in her good time;
And I shall lie contented in my tomb
Hearing no rival's kiss upon your mouth;
Ay, they shall send and fetch you a fine prince,
Out of some petty kingdom past the hills,
To come and wed you, with a pretty face
In a fine suit of clothes.
ADELHEID
You break my heart.
Is my love made of such slight elements,
As, in the wasting of one moon, to dance
163
And sea-like catch my colour from the cloud
That passes any hour. If I must lose you,
And after such a losing move and breathe,
I will cast earthly love behind my heel
And put my heart to school with solitude,
And seek the grey walls of some sisterhood;
And speak to no one but the pure white Christ
And Mary and the saints; who spring like flowers
In the cloud-furrows that go round God's garden.
But now I hold you given me of God,
And will not slip my cable-knot of arms
For any wrench or shock of human danger.
These myrmidons of darkness, let them come,
And chain us in their foulest prison-cave
Deeper than ever mole made winter-house,
And strap us there together in the dark;
Will not that sweet ‘together’ shed its beam
Over us captives like a lamp of God?
CONRAD
Like a pale snowdrop manacled with chaining
Rime ropes and steely links of icicles—
So would my darling be. Shall she wear fetters
For one poor soldier out of grace with kings?
The dungeon bread is sour, its water dim;
But that's not all. Some prison implements
164
I dreamt; that in this sepulchre of cells
Waking I found a masked bush-bearded man,
Who leaning, large in darkness, tried his nail
Along a great axe with an upturned edge.
ADELHEID
(sinking back)
Mother of God! sustain me; is light gone
Black all at once before my swimming eyes?
Slay thee, who dares to slay thee? My swift curse
Wither his wicked head and impious hands!
CONRAD
Peace, darling, God hath gone away from us.
There is no more to say.
ADELHEID
Then fly at once,
And let us palter with no more farewells.
Most instantly begone: the stairs are yonder,
And at their base free air, the boundless hills;
Hurl thyself down with thunder of swift heels,
Rush, melt into the night, and be no more
Found than a tear of tempest.
CONRAD
O April face,
What can I answer save a foolish sigh?
165
My God, he will be taken—Are you mad?
CONRAD
O queen of tears, I need no saving, none—
[He listens, and continues absently
And, if you hear a wind there's nought in that,
And, if you hear a raven nought in him,
For men are slain at all hours of the twelve,
And some bleed very little.
ADELHEID
Are you mazed
To give me riddles here; to stare and tremble?
I feel we both are in that frightful hush
Which comes before a tragedy; I know
The air is heavy with Death's angel sailing
In the gale round our turret; I am sure
That yonder narrow morn-beam will divulge
A day so hideous, that my after years
Will blench to see the map of eastern heaven
So coloured till I die. I know you're menaced,
And, therefore, think this danger strides at you;
O, be not tamely taken, by the touch
Of our first kisses, by that love of loves
Which is between us, fly!
166
No flight for me:
My place is here to bide and bear thee up;
And, when this giant wave of sorrow smites thee,
My presence, as a bulwark interposed,
Shall break and blunt the gathering rush of surge.
ADELHEID
Come, bring me with this portent face to face;
I will remember of what race I come
And never quail ignobly. Conrad, husband,
By this first-used, impossible, sweet name,
Which God hath said, my empty onward years
Shall never find, by this most strong adjuring,
By this most tender word; ah, rend the veil,
And tell me what is coming? (A pause.)
Mute? still mute.
Nay, then I've done. There is no more to say.
God succour all. For I have shot in vain
My sweetest arrow, my last bolt of prayer.
CONRAD
Adelheid! Adelheid!
ADELHEID
Merciful Heaven,
Are you a man and weeping?
167
(with a sudden change of manner)
Nay, a dog,
Ay, meaner, if you will, a rascal rat,
A fool's heart in the armour of a man,
Who brings girl's eyes to gauge a warrior's wrong—
A babe, a shadow, a most craven hound,
One who would lick the thongs of his own scourge,
And fawn upon the hand that knots his halter.
Who lets his anger flutter, like loose rags
Tied in a garden to scare off tom-tits.
Who takes a tripod full of embered fury
And weeps it out with pity—I am shàmed
To let you see me shed this tear-stuff down,
To let your love so weaken and woman me,
That, like a noisy wailer at a wake,
I cannot watch near death in silence—Hist!
There—there again—The wind squeals like a mouse;
Or the rats fear this tumult in the stars,
And scale the wainscots in full cry—All's silent!
Surely the end is near. (Aside.)
Will he remain
Millions of years about it? (Aloud.)
Listen—a step
Or a groan—which?
ADELHEID
You blench at any noise.
The court is full of rumours. Night and morning
Seem at great odds. See, yonder cloud-bulk rocks,
Like a great sponge full of black rain.
168
The air
Seems full of blood.
ADELHEID
Nay, you are looking out
Through the red mantle of that window saint.
That colours all the fields.
CONRAD
Ay, through this pane
I see them green enough.
ADELHEID
So is your face
Sick with some giant fear. I think that noise
Comes from my father's room. I'll run and listen.
CONRAD
And you shall go, but hear me first.
ADELHEID
Your secret
Glares in your eyes again.
169
O, love, it rends
My very soul asunder, cracks my walls
Of life, and here it is, a hideous babe
To make the midwife shriek. Death is not much,
And I will die to save you a little woe,
Divulging this, for which I shall be slain.
I whistle my great wrong down all the winds.
And say, ‘live Sigismund, your daughter saves you.’
Run to your father's chamber, rouse the guards,
Awake the palace, break his door with hatchets,
Rebellion and Conspiracy inside
Hang on his throat like leeches; at this instant
I think I hear him fighting for his life.
On, like a brave girl, save him. Is there time?
Nay, by that groan which rings out, ‘never more.’
You shall not go: another king is clay!
ADELHEID
(wildly, about to rush out)
Nay, not too late, if God sits up in heaven—
CONRAD
(gently detaining her)
Peace, Peace, poor love; God sits there even now,
And sees a new soul to his footstool rise,—
A pale new soul who shows a wound to him,
And frightens all the angels! Love, remain;
170
Here art thou safe at least and peril-free;
And he is—as he is—monarch of fate,
Beyond rebellion and the dagger's bite,
The venomed cup, the envy of the clown—
For yonder Raban comes with stealthy tread,
And in his vampire face is written ‘blood!’
ADELHEID
Conrad! my Conrad!
CONRAD
O, poor darling, peace!
Do not provoke this bat, who slays the sleeper:
I must awhile dissemble, speak him fair,—
His power is terrible.
ADELHEID
Whose might, this worm's?
I see a baleful cringing weakness only.
CONRAD
Hist! for thy life, love, hist!
ADELHEID
I hardly know
What I am saying; all the world's a dimness!
171
RABAN
I have nicked the grey goose in the neck, and broken
The feathers of his flight. (Looking towards Adelheid)
—Get her away—
He fluttered just a little and croaked twice,
And then dropped quietly beneath his perch.
It was just nothing; for another spite
I would act the play again, find him again,
Wake him again—
CONRAD
More softly, lest she hear—
RABAN
I reck not if she do; since you are mad
To carry female lumber in your arms
At your most ripe and golden hour of fate.
Push her away, bar her out, bolt her in;
We least require this fool of rose-buds here
To get in the way and whimper. They must come,
And find him in five minutes. Pack her forth!
CONRAD
(hesitatingly)
This gentleman is full of weighty news—
And therefore—
172
(fiercely)
I must go, and be content
To rule my steps, daughter of many kings,
At the bidding of one hunchback; neither man
Nor gentle, but a slave, a fiend, a Cain,
Once cringing at my instep; now erect
Rearing his ravenous crest and venomed eyes,
Because, because—How shall I speak it out?
Dry fire is in my lips—My accents burn me—
The world is going—Help me, Conrad—dark,
A dark and giddy world—Ah— (She faints.)
CONRAD
(raising her up)
She has swooned,
Guessing her father dead.
RABAN
She has done wisely:
I'd rather have her quietly entranced,
Than pealing out her panic-stricken yells,
Dishevelled through the palace. All goes smooth;
Thank our black cherub, blessed among fiends,
That at the gusty passion of this grief
Her five wits flared and presently went out.
May she endure a long trance and a sound one,
173
This royal orchard's ripe and fallen fruit,
Unvexed by female clamour—Heave her down,
Shake off this silken burthen from your arms;
By Mars, you'll need both hands free soon enough
For act more doughty than to pillow round
These drowsy ringlets. Up, man; she will do.
Bestride this passage. Give all comers steel.
Whip out your sword. This knave removed and dead
May gather friends; who, present, with his whims
Curdled all duty. Pity for his blood,
With certainty he cannot plague them more,
May make him half lamented by some fools,
Who will give trouble. Therefore every second's
A kingdom—up and act!
CONRAD
(leaning over ADELHEID)
As beautiful
As happy death in its first day art thou!
Nearly as still. Did I not count her heart,
I might believe, that her pure ghost had flown
To uphold and prop her father's weary limbs
That stumble on the coasted crags of cloud,
Which base an arduous paradise. She breathes
A little; yes, she breathes. O pale love, rest
And sleep, till this most hideous incident
Is covered up and cleansed away. Sleep, bird;
Our waking life does not deserve thee back.
174
Lover and fool, zany and moralist—
Unless I anger him our cause is gone— (Aside)
Pity will keep and kissing, ay, for that;
But, by the prince of sulphur, in an hour
Thou shalt be torn in pieces or a king,
Have dust between thy fingers or an orb—
So shake thy wits together, stand upright,
And meet the roaring of this flood, that comes
To trample and abolish.
CONRAD
(rising and coming forward)
I am thine now.
Weakness is dead. Listen! Like many leaves
Roaring along the forest-paths, they come!
And I forget my guilt in one great joy
And pulse of onset, which along my veins
Is leaping, sweet as love. O, let them come,
I feel a king already in my heart; (He goes to the window)
And yonder, see, the sun in nascent fire
Lifts up his orb, and first beholds the realm
Of me, King Conrad! Yonder is born in heaven
The first day of my reign: I am King!—King!
RABAN
I draw free breath; hail, safety! Roused at last—
175
And all the devils leap over and rush in.
[Enter many Guards confusedly.
GUARDS
The King is dead, is murdered, the good King,
The poor sweet King; who did it? where hides he?
Blood, give us blood! O rare to catch the wretch,
O sweet to hunt him down to death with dogs.
O joy to crack him slowly upon wheels,
To rend his fibres, revel in his groans:—
Is he here? is he there? No! Is he yonder?
RABAN
Hearken and hear me. If one king be slain,
Who was a shadow and no king at all—
Not for that reason say, the King is dead.
The King dies never. Yonder is your King,
Who rises as a sun-god glorious
Out of the old grey ashes of the Past.
Regard him, see the ineffable great smile
Of kingship lies already on his lip,
Calm as a god's. Is this the man to lead you?
Is this the man you love? A hundred ayes
Leap from your lips like thunder. O, well done,
Roll out upon the dawn with loud acclaim
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A king, a king indeed, the flower of kings,
None more beloved, none fairer, none as brave.
And I, my liege, kneel to thee first of men
And kiss thy royal hand with duteous lips,
And rising cry—and so cry all of you—
All hail, King Conrad!
GUARDS
Hail and live, King Conrad!
FIRST GUARD
The wise God keep and hold thee in thy throne.
SECOND GUARD
Come, let us cross our spears and raise him up
Over our heads; and then, with one fierce cry,
Tell the most distant stars we have a king!
GUARDS
All hail, King Conrad!
| The Soldier of Fortune | |