Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses | Page 8

names and our blessed Mother's?Fra Paolo, I have tried them o'er and o'er,?And like a blade bent backward at first thrust?They yield and fail me--and the questions stay.?And so I thought, into some human heart,?Pure, and yet foot-worn with the tread of sin,?If only I might creep for sanctuary,?It might be that those eyes would let me rest. . .
Fra Paolo, listen. How should I forget?The day I saw him first? (You know the one.)?I had been laughing in the market-place?With others like me, I the youngest there,?Jostling about a pack of mountebanks?Like flies on carrion (I the youngest there!),?Till darkness fell; and while the other girls?Turned this way, that way, as perdition beckoned,?I, wondering what the night would bring, half hoping:?If not, this once, a child's sleep in my garret,?At least enough to buy that two-pronged coral?The others covet 'gainst the evil eye,?Since, after all, one sees that I'm the youngest--?So, muttering my litany to hell?(The only prayer I knew that was not Latin),?Felt on my arm a touch as kind as yours,?And heard a voice as kind as yours say "Come."?I turned and went; and from that day I never?Looked on the face of any other man.?So much is known; so much effaced; the sin?Cast like a plague-struck body to the sea,?Deep, deep into the unfathomable pardon--?(The Head bowed thrice, as the whole town attests).?What more, then? To what purpose? Bear with me!--
It seems that he, a stranger in the place,?First noted me that afternoon and wondered:?How grew so white a bud in such black slime,?And why not mine the hand to pluck it out??Why, so Christ deals with souls, you cry--what then??Not so! Not so! When Christ, the heavenly gardener,?Plucks flowers for Paradise (do I not know?),?He snaps the stem above the root, and presses?The ransomed soul between two convent walls,?A lifeless blossom in the Book of Life.?But when my lover gathered me, he lifted?Stem, root and all--ay, and the clinging mud--?And set me on his sill to spread and bloom?After the common way, take sun and rain,?And make a patch of brightness for the street,?Though raised above rough fingers--so you make?A weed a flower, and others, passing, think:?"Next ditch I cross, I'll lift a root from it,?And dress my window" . . . and the blessing spreads.?Well, so I grew, with every root and tendril?Grappling the secret anchorage of his love,?And so we loved each other till he died. . . .
Ah, that black night he left me, that dead dawn?I found him lying in the woods, alive?To gasp my name out and his life-blood with it,?As though the murderer's knife had probed for me?In his hacked breast and found me in each wound. . .?Well, it was there Christ came to me, you know,?And led me home--just as that other led me.?_(Just as that other?_ Father, bear with me!)?My lover's death, they tell me, saved my soul,?And I have lived to be a light to men.?And gather sinners to the knees of grace.?All this, you say, the Bishop's signet covers.?But stay! Suppose my lover had not died??(At last my question! Father, help me face it.)?I say: Suppose my lover had not died--?Think you I ever would have left him living,?Even to be Christ's blessed Margaret??--We lived in sin? Why, to the sin I died to?That other was as Paradise, when God?Walks there at eventide, the air pure gold,?And angels treading all the grass to flowers!?He was my Christ--he led me out of hell--?He died to save me (so your casuists say!)--?Could Christ do more? Your Christ out-pity mine??Why, yours but let the sinner bathe His feet;?Mine raised her to the level of his heart. . .?And then Christ's way is saving, as man's way?Is squandering--and the devil take the shards!?But this man kept for sacramental use?The cup that once had slaked a passing thirst;?This man declared: "The same clay serves to model?A devil or a saint; the scribe may stain?The same fair parchment with obscenities,?Or gild with benedictions; nay," he cried,?"Because a satyr feasted in this wood,?And fouled the grasses with carousing foot,?Shall not a hermit build his chapel here?And cleanse the echoes with his litanies??The sodden grasses spring again--why not?The trampled soul? Is man less merciful?Than nature, good more fugitive than grass?"?And so--if, after all, he had not died,?And suddenly that door should know his hand,?And with that voice as kind as yours he said:?"Come, Margaret, forth into the sun again,?Back to the life we fashioned with our hands?Out of old sins and follies, fragments scorned?Of more ambitious builders, yet by Love,?The patient architect, so shaped and fitted?That not a crevice let the winter in--"?Think you my bones would not arise and walk,?This bruised body (as once the bruised soul)?Turn from the wonders of the seventh heaven?As from the antics of the market-place??If this