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Pine,
Rose and Fleur de Lis
by
Susie Frances Harrison
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7
P. M.
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Eyes
looking out to the darkness—for what?—not
the star
That sparkles down there in the distance, or is
it a car
With its red light or green at the end of the street
that she sees?
Pshaw! she’s not looking that way at all;
all her soul’s in the trees
That move darkly above her, and lean to the passionate
gust
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Of
the night wind and rain; there is firmness and sweetness
and
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trust |
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In
that sweet face of hers. Not the girl nor the woman
to mind
The cold drops on cheek and on hail, though the
last he will find,
All uncurling and sleek and pushed back from the
brows—
Though
is it a lover? |
10 |
Who
knows?
I only
suppose,
For I do not know her—I caught but her face
and her eyes,
As I passed in the rain, muffled up in an autumn
disguise
Eager to be with my own by the side of a fire,
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My
own that count seven every night and never will
tire
Of the day’s work and doing told lazily round
the big table,
Where with her knee-pinned seam, sits Mabel, wife
Mabel.
Years ago—I was rather a desperate fellow
they say.
Perhaps they are right, and perhaps I had but my
day
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Of
loud careless deeds and a louder and more careless
tongue;
But then
I met Mabel. “Too young!”
That was
flung
In our faces for months, till I suddenly took for
my own
What so clearly was meant for me—why, had
she lastly not grown
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To
leap at my coming and fall on my neck? Lovely, too!
This was the wife that I married. Oh! Pity that
you,
My good sir, her father, a dear old man too in your
way,
Should have met me with curses and begged of your
daughter to |
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stay. |
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she stay? That I asked her, but she with her love
made |
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wild, |
30 |
Just
turned on her heel, (she too was a wayward child)
And that
was the end of it. Since—
Why it
makes me wince,
When I remember, that only one moment at night,
In a car-flashed glance, did she see that old man
alight,
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35 |
The
only time since we were married—Is she
still there,
At the door with the rain beating down on her cheeks
and her |
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hair! |
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Rain
makes one moralize. Now, I should not like
to think
That it is for the lover she waits; not the woman
to shrink—
I caught that—from anything. Perhaps, if it
be not a lover |
40 |
It
may be her husband. Will women ever discover
How selfish men are and how little worthy the waiting?
Yet if
Mabel had thought so, relating
Our happy
mating
Would be out of the question. Now we are happy of
course;
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45 |
Our
struggle for place and position and money—the
source
Of all good and beautiful things one would have
for one’s own—
All the struggle I say, all our troubles are well-nigh
flown
Only sometimes I have thought—how cold the
wind grows!
Never mind, but one short block more and then for
a coze—
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I
fervently hope that the unknown and sweet-faced
girl,
She with her eyes on the dark and her hair out of
curl,
Has gone in from the cold and the rain—I was
going to say
That my
wife, with her way,
—A
womanly way—
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Might
do much—ah! so much—for an old man at
home like him,
Her father I mean. I suppose now, my eyes will be
dim,
And my walk be a totter, with everything dropping
away
Into the echoing past or the echoless future, some
day,
And then, why a womanly touch on my shoulder or
hair,
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Will
not be, I grant, a superfluous thing to bear.
But then is not now. For the present, I really believe
That I shook off but yesterday Mabel’s small
hand from my sleeve;
I was writing, I think—ah! “Persephone,”
now I remember!
The dullest of tragedies grows in a dull November,
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And I
do not write,
With the
easy flight
All-compelling of yore, why, it takes me far longer
to fill in
One page in these days than a dozen of former distilling,
When the blood (that of youth) was up ever and ever
enjoying,
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And
pleasure and mirth ran high with never a cloying.
The wind, what a wind! Is Mabel, I wonder, peering
Out from her pleasant comfort to watch me steering
My way through the cold dreary mistiness wind and
rain?
It’s beating I know, ’gainst her red
curtained window pane;
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It’s
beating directly, I fancy, against another
South window I know, where in summer the roses half
smother
Its cosy half-length—I stood among them there
often.
Will things ever be better? Who knows? ’Tis
for him to soften;
What we have done we have done; yet perhaps had
we tried,
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Things
had been better ere, now and the twelve years’
pride
Broken down or dissolved, or never suffered to live.
After twelve years it is easy to say forgive,
And as
hard to say, forget.
His Mabel!
His pet!
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I
figure him now by a fire in an easy chair,
But no one to bend over, kissing the whitened hair;
He was fond of the taste of a pipe; on the mantleshelf
It used to be kept—can he reach it now himself?
Ah! a woman care! Now I should like to
think that the girl—
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She
with her eyes on the dark, with her hair out of
curl,
Is waiting and watching, neither for friend nor
for lover,
Neither for friend nor for brother, while it darkens
above her,
But only—ah, Mabel my darling, my loved one—oh!
rather,
Rather a thousand times, say, for only her father!
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*
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* *
Four steps, now the door—so dark I can hardly
find it,
The red blind at last, and Mabel’s dear shadow
behind it!
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