“Don’t think me a wretch to whine about
myself like this, but—but I’m all
in the dark, you know, and you can see.”
In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in
my resolve, though that was like the very parting
of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I would
stay since it was the last time.
“You think it is wrong, then?” she cried
sharply, though I had said nothing.
“Not for you. A thousand times no.
For you it is right.... I am grateful to you
beyond words. For me it would be wrong. For
me only....”
“Why?” she said, but passed her hand before
her face as she had done at our second meeting in
the wood. “Oh, I see,” she went on
simply as a child. “For you it would be
wrong.” Then with a little indrawn laugh,
“and, d’you remember, I called you lucky—once—at
first. You who must never come here again!”
She left me to sit a little longer by the screen,
and I heard the sound of her feet die out along the
gallery above.
FROM LYDEN’S “IRENIUS”
ACT III. Sc. II.
Gow.—Had it been your Prince instead of
a groom caught in this noose there’s not an
astrologer of the city——
PRINCE.—Sacked! Sacked! We were
a city yesterday.
Gow.—So be it, but I was not governor.
Not an astrologer, but would ha’ sworn he’d
foreseen it at the last versary of Venus, when Vulcan
caught her with Mars in the house of stinking Capricorn.
But since ’tis Jack of the Straw that hangs,
the forgetful stars had it not on their tablets.
PRINCE.—Another life! Were there any
left to die? How did the poor fool come by it?
Gow.—Simpliciter thus. She
that damned him to death knew not that she did it,
or would have died ere she had done it. For she
loved him. He that hangs him does so in obedience
to the Duke, and asks no more than “Where is
the rope?” The Duke, very exactly he hath told
us, works God’s will, in which holy employ he’s
not to be questioned. We have then left upon
this finger, only Jack whose soul now plucks the left
sleeve of Destiny in Hell to overtake why she clapped
him up like a fly on a sunny wall. Whuff!
Soh!
PRINCE.—Your cloak, Ferdinand. I’ll
sleep now.
FERDINAND.—Sleep, then.. He too, loved
his life?
Gow.—He was born of woman ... but at the
end threw life from him, like your Prince, for a little
sleep ... “Have I any look of a King?”
said he, clanking his chain—“to be
so baited on all sides by Fortune, that I must e’en
die now to live with myself one day longer?”
I left him railing at Fortune and woman’s love.
FERDINAND.—Ah, woman’s love!
(Aside) Who knows not Fortune, glutted on easy
thrones, Stealing from feasts as rare to coneycatch,
Privily in the hedgerows for a clown With that same
cruel-lustful hand and eye, Those nails and wedges,
that one hammer and lead, And the very gerb of long-stored
lightnings loosed Yesterday ’gainst some King.
