THE FLIRT'S TRAGEDY

Here alone by the logs in my chamber,

Deserted, decrepit -

Spent flames limning ghosts on the wainscot

Of friends I once knew -

My drama and hers begins weirdly

Its dumb re-enactment,

Each scene, sigh, and circumstance passing

In spectral review.

- Wealth was mine beyond wish when I met her -

The pride of the lowland -

Embowered in Tintinhull Valley

By laurel and yew;

And love lit my soul, notwithstanding

My features’ ill favour,

Too obvious beside her perfections

Of line and of hue.

But it pleased her to play on my passion,

And whet me to pleadings

That won from her mirthful negations

And scornings undue.

Then I fled her disdains and derisions

To cities of pleasure,

And made me the crony of idlers

In every purlieu.

Of those who lent ear to my story,

A needy Adonis

Gave hint how to grizzle her garden

From roses to rue,

Could his price but be paid for so purging

My scorner of scornings:

Thus tempted, the lust to avenge me

Germed inly and grew.

I clothed him in sumptuous apparel,

Consigned to him coursers,

Meet equipage, liveried attendants

In full retinue.

So dowered, with letters of credit

He wayfared to England,

And spied out the manor she goddessed,

And handy thereto,

Set to hire him a tenantless mansion

As coign-stone of vantage

For testing what gross adulation

Of beauty could do.

He laboured through mornings and evens,

On new moons and sabbaths,

By wiles to enmesh her attention

In park, path, and pew;

And having afar played upon her,

Advanced his lines nearer,

And boldly outleaping conventions,

Bent briskly to woo.

His gay godlike face, his rare seeming

Anon worked to win her,

And later, at noontides and night-tides

They held rendezvous.

His tarriance full spent, he departed

And met me in Venice,

And lines from her told that my jilter

Was stooping to sue.

Not long could be further concealment,

She pled to him humbly:

“By our love and our sin, O protect me;

I fly unto you!”

A mighty remorse overgat me,

I heard her low anguish,

And there in the gloom of the calle

My steel ran him through.

A swift push engulphed his hot carrion

Within the canal there -

That still street of waters dividing

The city in two.

- I wandered awhile all unable

To smother my torment,

My brain racked by yells as from Tophet

Of Satan's whole crew.

A month of unrest brought me hovering

At home in her precincts,

To whose hiding-hole local story

Afforded a clue.

Exposed, and expelled by her people,

Afar off in London

I found her alone, in a sombre

And soul-stifling mew.

Still burning to make reparation

I pleaded to wive her,

And father her child, and thus faintly

My mischief undo.

She yielded, and spells of calm weather

Succeeded the tempest;

And one sprung of him stood as scion

Of my bone and thew...

But Time unveils sorrows and secrets,

And so it befell now:

By inches the curtain was twitched at,

And slowly undrew.

As we lay, she and I, in the night-time,

We heard the boy moaning:

“O misery mine! My false father

Has murdered my true!”

She gasped: yea, she heard; understood it.

Next day the child fled us;

And nevermore sighted was even

A print of his shoe.

Thenceforward she shunned me, and languished;

Till one day the park-pool

Embraced her fair form, and extinguished

Her eyes’ living blue.

- So; ask not what blast may account for

This aspect of pallor,

These bones that just prison within them

Life's poor residue;

But pass by, and leave unregarded

A Cain to his suffering,

For vengeance too dark on the woman

Whose lover he slew.