Was wont to scratch with hoof and scrape with horn
At ground where once the Danes had razed a church.
Thither he went, and there he dug, and thence
He disinterred the image he conveyed
In pomp to Londres yonder, his domain.
You liked the old place better than the new.
The Count might surely have divined as much:
He did not; someone might have spoke a word:
No one did. A mere dream had warned enough
That back again in pomp you best were borne:
No dream warned, and no need of convoy was;
An angel caught you up and clapped you down —
No mighty task, you stand one mètre high,
And people carry you about at times.
Why, then, did you despise the simple course?
Because you are the Queen of Angels: when
You front us in a picture, there flock they,
Angels around you, here and everywhere.
“Therefore, to prove indubitable faith,
Those angels that acknowledge you their queen,
I summon them to bear me to your feet
From Clairvaux through the air, an easy trip!
Faith without flaw! I trust your potency,
Benevolence, your will to save the world —
By such a simplest of procedures, too!
Not even by affording angel-help,
Unless it please you: there’s a simpler mode:
Only suspend the law of gravity,
And, while at back, permitted to propel,
The air helps onward, let the air in front
Cease to oppose my passage through the midst!
“Thus I bestride the railing, leg o’er leg,
Thus, lo, I stand, a single inch away,
At dizzy edge of death, — no touch of fear,
As safe on tower above as turf below!
Your smile enswathes me in beatitude,
You lift along the votary — who vaults,
Who, in the twinkling of an eye, revives,
Dropt safely in the space before the church —
How crowded, since this morn is market-day!
I shall not need to speak. The news will run
Like wild-fire. ‘Thousands saw Miranda’s flight!
‘T is telegraphed to Paris in a trice.
The Boulevard is one buzz ‘Do you believe?
Well, this time, thousands saw Miranda’s flight:
You know him, goldsmith in the Place Vendôme.’
In goes the Empress to the Emperor:
‘Now — will you hesitate to make disgorge
Your wicked King of Italy his gains,
Give the Legations to the Pope once more?’
Which done, — why, grace goes back to operate,
They themselves set a good example first,
Resign the empire twenty years usurped,
And Henry, the Desired One, reigns o’er France!
Regenerated France makes all things new!
My house no longer stands on Quai Rousseau
But Quai rechristened Alacoque: a quai
Where Renan burns his book, and Veuillot burns
Renan beside, since Veuillot rules the roast,
Re-edits now indeed ‘The Universe.’
O blessing, O superlatively big
With blessedness beyond all blessing dreamed
By man! for just that promise has effect,
‘Old things shall pass away and all be new!’
Then, for a culminating mercy-feat,
Wherefore should I dare dream impossible
That I too have my portion in the change?
My past with all its sorrow, sin and shame,
Becomes a blank, a nothing! There she stands,
Clara de Millefleurs, all deodorized,
Twenty years’ stain wiped off her innocence!
There never was Muhlhausen, nor at all
Duke Hertford: nought that was, remains, except
The beauty, — yes, the beauty is unchanged!
Well, and the soul too, that must keep the same!
And so the trembling little virgin hand
Melts into mine, that’s back again, of course!
— Think not I care about my poor old self!
I only want my hand for that one use,
To take her hand, and say ‘I marry you —
Men, women, angels, you behold my wife!
There is no secret, nothing wicked here,
Nothing she does not wish the world to know!’
None of your married women have the right
To mutter ‘Yes, indeed, she beats us all
In beauty, — but our lives are pure at least!’
Bear witness, for our marriage is no thing
Done in a corner! ‘T is The Ravissante
Repairs the wrong of Paris. See, She smiles,
She beckons, She bids ‘Hither, both of you!’
And may we kneel? And will you bless us both?
And may I worship you, and yet love her?
Then!” —
A sublime spring from the balustrade
About the tower so often talked about,
A flash in middle air, and stone-dead lay
Monsieur Léonce Miranda on the turf.
A gardener who watched, at work the while
Dibbling a flower-bed for geranium-shoots,
Saw the catastrophe, and, straightening back,
Stood up and shook his brows. “Poor soul, poor soul!
Just what I prophesied the end would be!
Ugh — the Red Night-cap!” (as he raised the head)
“This must be what he meant by those strange words
While I was weeding larkspurs yesterday,
‘Angels would take him!’ Mad!”
No! sane, I sav.
Such being the conditions of his life,
Such end of life was not irrational.
Hold a belief, you only half-believe,
With all-momentous issues either way, —
And I advise you imitate this leap,
Put faith to proof, be cured or killed at once!
Call you men, killed through cutting cancer out,
The worse for such an act of bravery?
That’s more than I know. In my estimate,
Better lie prostrate on his turf at peace,
Than, wistful, eye, from out the tent, the tower,
Racked with a doubt “Will going on bare knees
All the way to The Ravissante and back,
Saying my Ave Mary all the time,
Somewhat excuse if I postpone my march?
— Make due amends for that one kiss I gave
In gratitude to her who held me out
Superior Fricquot’s sermon, hot from press,
A-spread with hands so sinful yet so smooth?”
And now, sincerely do I pray she stand,
Clara, with interposing sweep of robe,
Between us and this horror! Any screen
Turns white by contrast with the tragic pall;
And her dubiety distracts at least,
As well as snow, from such decided black.
With womanhood, at least, we have to do:
Ending with Clara — is the word too kind?
Let pass the shock! There’s poignancy enough
When what one parted with, a minute since,
Alive and happy, is returned a wreck —
All that was, all that seemed about to be,
Razed out and ruined now for evermore,
Because a straw descended on this scale
Rather than that, made death o’erbalance life.
But think of cage-mates in captivity,
Inured to day-long, night-long vigilance
Each of the other’s tread and angry turn
If behind prison-bars the jailer knocked:
These whom society shut out, and thus
Penned in, to settle down and regulate
By the strange law, the solitary life —
When death divorces such a fellowship,
Theirs may pair off with that prodigious woe
Imagined of a ghastly brotherhood —
One watcher left in lighthouse out at sea
With leagues of surf between the land and him
Alive with his dead partner on the rock;
One galley-slave, whom curse and blow compel
To labour on, ply oar — beside his chain,
Encumbered with a corpse-companion now.
Such these: although, no prisoners, self-entrenched
They kept the world off from their barricade.
Memory, gratitude was poignant, sure,
Though pride brought consolation of a kind.
Twenty years long had Clara been — of whom
The rival, nay, the victor, past dispute?
What if in turn The Ravissante at length
Proved victor — which was doubtful — anyhow,
Here lay the inconstant with, conspicuous too,
The fruit of his good fortune!
“Has he gained
By leaving me?” she might soliloquize:
“All love could do, I did for him. I learned
By heart his nature, what he loved and loathed,
Leaned to with liking, turned from with distaste.
No matter what his least velleity,
I was determined he should want no wish,
And in conformity administered
To his requirement; most of joy I mixed
With least of sorrow in life’s daily draught,
Twenty years long, life’s proper average.
And when he got to quarrel with my cup,
Would needs outsweeten honey, and discard
That gall-drop we require lest nectar cloy, —
I did not call him fool, and vex my friend,
But quietly allowed experiment,
Encouraged him to spice his drink, and now
Grate lignum vitæ , now bruise so-called grains
Of Paradise, and pour now, for perfume,
Distilment rare, the rose of Jericho,
Holy-thorn, passion-flower, and what know I?
Till beverage obtained the fancied smack.
‘T was wild-flower-wine that neither helped nor harmed
Who sipped and held it for restorative —
What harm? But here has he been through the hedge
Straying in search of simples, while my back
Was turned a minute, and he finds a prize,
Monkshood and belladonna! O my child,
My truant little boy, despite the beard,
The body two feet broad and six feet long,
And what the calendar counts middle age —
You wanted, did you, to enjoy a flight?
Why not have taken into confidence
Me, that was mother to you? — never mind
What mock disguise of mistress held you mine!
Had you come laughing, crying, with request,
‘Make me fly, mother!’ I had run upstairs
And held you tight the while I danced you high
In air from tower-top, singing ‘Off we go
(On pilgrimage to Lourdes some day next month)
And swift we soar (to Rome with Peter-pence)
And low we light (at Paris where we pick
Another jewel from our store of stones
And send it for a present to the Pope)!’
So, dropt indeed you were, but on my knees,
Rolling and crowing, not a whit the worse
For journey to your Ravissante and back.
Now, no more Clairvaux — which I made you build,
And think an inspiration of your own —
No more fine house, trim garden, pretty park,
Nothing I used to busy you about,
And make believe you worked for my surprise!
What weariness to me will work become
Now that I need not seem surprised again!
This boudoir, for example, with the doves
(My stupid maid has damaged, dusting one)
Embossed in stucco o’er the looking-glass
Beside the toilet-table! dear — dear me!”
Here she looked up from her absorbing grief,
And round her, crow-like grouped, the Cousinry,
(She grew aware) sat witnesses at watch.
For, two days had elapsed since fate befell
The courser in the meadow, stretched so stark.
They did not cluster on the tree-tops, close
Their sooty ranks, caw and confabulate
For nothing: but, like calm determined crows,
They came to take possession of their corpse.
And who shall blame them? Had not they the right?
One spoke. “They would be gentle, not austere.
They understood and were compassionate.
Madame Muhlhausen lay too abject now
For aught but the sincerest pity; still,
Since plain speech salves the wound it seems to make,
They must speak plainly — circumstances spoke!
Sin had conceived and brought forth death indeed.
As the commencement so the close of things:
Just what might be expected all along!
Monsieur Léonce Miranda launched his youth
Into a cesspool of debauchery,
And if he thence emerged all dripping slime,
Where was the change except from thin to thick,
One warm rich mud-bath, Madame? — you, in place
Of Paris-drainage and distilment, you
He never needed budge from, boiled to rags!
True, some good instinct left the natural man,
Some touch of that deep dye wherewith imbued
By education, in his happier day,
The hopeful offspring of high parentage
Was fleece-marked moral and religious sheep, —
Some ruddle, faint remainder, (we admit)
Stuck to Miranda, rubbed he ne’er so rude
Against the goatly coarseness: to the last,
Moral he styled himself, religious too!
Which means — what ineradicable good
You found, you never left till good’s self proved
Perversion and distortion, nursed to growth
So monstrous, that the tree-stock, dead and dry,
Were seemlier far than such a heap grotesque
Of fungous flourishing excrescence. Here
Sap-like affection, meant for family,
Stole off to feed one sucker fat — yourself;
While branchage, trained religiously aloft
To rear its head in reverence to the sun,
Was pulled down earthward, pegged and picketed,
By topiary contrivance, till the tree
Became an arbour where, at vulgar ease,
Sat superstition grinning through the loops.
Still, nature is too strong or else too weak
For cockney treatment: either, tree springs back
To pristine shape, or else degraded droops,
And turns to touchwood at the heart. So here —
Body and mind, at last the man gave way.
His body — there it lies, what part was left
Unmutilated! for, the strife commenced
Two years ago, when both hands burnt to ash,
— A branch broke loose, by loss of what choice twigs!
As for his mind — behold our register
Of all its moods, from the incipient mad,
Nay, mere erratic, to the stark insane,
Absolute idiocy or what is worse!
All have we catalogued — extravagance
In worldly matters, luxury absurd,
And zeal as crazed in its expenditure
Of nonsense called devotion. Don’t we know
—
We Cousins, bound in duty to our kin, —
What mummeries were practised by you two
At Clairvaux? Not a servant got discharge
But came and told his grievance, testified
To acts which turn religion to a farce.
And as the private mock, so patent — see —
The public scandal! Ask the neighbourhood —
Or rather, since we asked them long ago,
Read what they answer, depositions down,
Signed, sealed and sworn to! Brief, the man was mad.
We are his heirs and claim our heritage.
Madame Muhlhausen, — whom good taste forbids
We qualify as do these documents, —
Fear not lest justice stifle mercy’s prayer!
True, had you lent a willing ear at first,
Had you obeyed our call two years ago,
Restrained a certain insolence of eye,
A volubility of tongue, that time,
Your prospects had been none the worse, perhaps.
Still, fear not but a decent competence
Shall smooth the way for your declining age!
What we propose, then . . .”
Clara dried her eyes,
Sat up, surveyed the consistory, spoke
After due pause, with something of a smile.
“Gentlemen, kinsfolk of my friend defunct,
In thus addressing me — of all the world! —
You much misapprehend what part I play.
I claim no property you speak about.
You might as well address the park-keeper,
Harangue him on some plan advisable
For covering the park with cottage-plots.
He is the servant, no proprietor,
His business is to see the sward kept trim,
Untrespassed over by the indiscreet:
Beyond that, he refers you to myself —
Another servant of another kind —
Who again — quite as limited in act —
Refer you, with your projects, — can I else?
To who in mastery is ultimate,
The Church. The Church is sole administrant,
Since sole possessor of what worldly wealth
Monsieur Léonce Miranda late possessed.
Often enough has he attempted, nay,
Forced me, well-nigh, to occupy the post
You seemingly suppose I fill, — receive
As gift the wealth entrusted me as grace.
This — for quite other reasons than appear
So cogent to your perspicacity —
This I refused; and, firm as you could wish,
Still was my answer ‘We two understand
Each one the other. I am intimate
— As how can be mere fools and knaves — or, say,
Even your Cousins? — with your love to me,
Devotion to the Church, Would Providence
Appoint, and make me certain of the same,
That I survive you (which is little like,
Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series Page 173
