Part 3

THE RIVAL

I DETERMINED to find out whose it was— The portrait he looked at so, and sighed; Bitterly have I rued my meanness And wept for it since he died!

I searched his desk when he was away, And there was the likeness—yes, my own! Taken when I was the season’s fairest, And time-lines all unknown.

I smiled at my image, and put it back, And he went on cherishing it, until I was chafed that he loved not the me then living, But that past woman still.

Well, such was my jealousy at last, I destroyed that face of the former me; Could you ever have dreamed the heart of woman Would work so foolishly!

HEREDITY

I AM the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can In curve and voice and eye Despise the human span Of durance—that is I; The eternal thing in man, That heeds no call to die.

“YOU WERE THE SORT THAT MEN FORGET”

YOU were the sort that men forget; Though I—not yet!— Perhaps not ever. Your slighted weakness Adds to the strength of my regret!

You’d not the art—you never had For good or bad— To make men see how sweet your meaning, Which, visible, had charmed them glad.

You would, by words inept let fall, Offend them all, Even if they saw your warm devotion Would hold your life’s blood at their call.

You lacked the eye to understand Those friends offhand Whose mode was crude, though whose dim purport Outpriced the courtesies of the bland.

I am now the only being who Remembers you It may be. What a waste that Nature Grudged soul so dear the art its due!

SHE, I, AND THEY

I WAS sitting, She was knitting, And the portraits of our fore-folk hung around; When there struck on us a sigh; “Ah—what is that?” said I: “Was it not you?” said she. “A sigh did sound.”

I had not breathed it, Nor the night-wind heaved it, And how it came to us we could not guess; And we looked up at each face Framed and glazed there in its place, Still hearkening; but thenceforth was silentness.

Half in dreaming, “Then its meaning,” Said we, “must be surely this; that they repine That we should be the last Of stocks once unsurpassed, And unable to keep up their sturdy line.”

1916.

NEAR LANIVET, 1872

THERE was a stunted handpost just on the crest, Only a few feet high: She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest, At the crossways close thereby.

She leant back, being so weary, against its stem, And laid her arms on its own, Each open palm stretched out to each end of them, Her sad face sideways thrown.

Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day Made her look as one crucified In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way, And hurriedly “Don’t,” I cried.

I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said, As she stepped forth ready to go, “I am rested now.—Something strange came into my head; I wish I had not leant so!”

And wordless we moved onward down from the hill In the west cloud’s murked obscure, And looking back we could see the handpost still In the solitude of the moor.

“It struck her too,” I thought, for as if afraid She heavily breathed as we trailed; Till she said, “I did not think how ’twould look in the shade, When I leant there like one nailed.”

I, lightly: “There’s nothing in it. For you, anyhow!” —“O I know there is not,” said she . . . “Yet I wonder . . . If no one is bodily crucified now, In spirit one may be!”

And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see In the running of Time’s far glass Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be Some day.—Alas, alas!