Wyndham Towers | Page 7

up the rhyme of Sweetheart, sigh no more.
It was with doubt and trembling
I whispered in her ear.
Go, take her
answer, bird-on-bough,
That all the world may hear--
Sweetheart,
sigh no more!
Sing it, sing it, tawny throat,
Upon the wayside tree,
How fair she is,
how true she is,
How dear she is to me--
Sweetheart sigh no more!
Sing it, sing it, tawny throat,
And through the summer long
The
winds among the clover-tops,
And brooks, for all their silvery stops,

Shall envy you the song--
Sweetheart, sigh no more.
'T is said the Malays have an arrow steeped
In some strange drug
whose subtile properties
Are such that if the point but prick the skin

Death stays there. Like to that fell cruel shaft
This slender rhyme
was. Through the purple dark
Straight home it sped, and into
Wyndham's veins
Its drop of sudden poison did distill.
Now no
sound was, save when a dry twig snapped
And rustled softly down
from branch to branch,
Or on its pebbly shoals the meagre brook

Made intermittent murmur. "So, 't is he!"
Thus Wyndham breathing
thickly, with his eyes
Dilating in the darkness, "Darrell--he!
I set
my springe for other game than this;
Of hare or rabbit dreamed I, not
of wolf.
His frequent visitations have of late
Perplexed me; now the
riddle reads itself.
A proper man, a very proper man!
A fellow that
burns Trinidado leaf
And sends smoke through his nostril like a flue!

A fop, a hanger-on of willing skirts--
A murrain on him! Would
Elizabeth
In some mad freak had clapped him in the Tower--
Ay,
through the Traitor's Gate. Would he were dead.
Within the year what
worthy men have died,
Persons of substance, civic ornaments,
And
here 's this gilt court-butterfly on wing!
O thou most potent lightning
in the cloud,
Prick me this fellow from the face of earth!
I would

the Moors had got him in Algiers
What time he harried them on land
and sea,
And done their will with scimitar or cord
Or flame of fagot,
and so made an end;
Or that some shot from petronel or bow
Had
winged him in the folly of his flight.
Well had it been if the
Inquisitors,
With rack and screw, had laid black claw on him!"
In
days whose chronicle is writ in blood
The richest ever flowed in
English veins
Some foul mischance in this sort might have been;

For at dark Fortune's feet had Darrell flung
In his youth's flower a
daring gauntlet down.
A beardless stripling, at that solemn hour
When, breaking its frail
filaments of clay,
The mother's spirit soared invisible,
The younger
son, unhoused as well he knew,
Had taken horse by night to London
town,
With right sore heart and nought else in his scrip
But boyish
hope to footing find at Court--
A page's place, belike, with some great
lord,
Or some small lord, that other proving shy
Of merit that had
not yet clipt its shell.
Day after day, in weather foul or fair,
With
lackeys, hucksters, and the commoner sort,
At Whitehall and
Westminster he stood guard,
Reading men's faces with most anxious
eye.
There the lords swarmed, some waspish and some bland,
But
none would pause at plucking of the sleeve
To hearken to him, and
the lad had died
On London stones for lack of crust to gnaw
But
that he caught the age's malady,
The something magical that was in
air,
And made men poets, heroes, demi-gods--
Made Shakespeare,
Rawleigh, Grenvile, Oxenham,
And set them stars in the fore-front of
Time.
In fine, young Darrell drew of that same air
A valiant breath,
and shipped with Francis Drake,
Of Tavistock, to sail the Spanish
seas

And teach the heathen manners, with God's aid;
And so,
among lean Papists and black Moors,
He, with the din of battle in his
ears,
Struck fortune. Who would tamely bide at home
At beck and
call of some proud swollen lord
Not worth his biscuit, or at Beauty's
feet
Sit making sonnets, when was work to do
Out yonder, sinking
Philip's caravels
At sea, and then by way of episode
Setting quick

torch* to pirate-nests ashore?
0. Sir Francis Drake called this "singeing the King of Spayne's beard."
Brave sport to singe the beard o' the King of Spain!
Brave sport, but
in the end dreamed he of home--
Of where the trout-brook lisped
among the reeds,
Of great chalk cliffs and leagues of yellow gorse,

Of peaceful lanes, of London's roaring streets,
The crowds, the shops,
the pageants in Cheapside,
And heard the trumpets blaring for the
Queen
When 't was the wind that whistled in the shrouds
Off Cadiz.
Ah, and softer dreams he had
Of an unnamed and sweetest mystery,

And from the marble of his soul's desire
Hewed out the white ideal
of his love--
A new Pygmalion! All things drew him home,
This
mainly. Foot on English earth once more,
Dear earth of England his
propitious fame
A thorn in none but crooked Envy's side,
He went
cross-gartered, with a silken rose
At golden lovelock, diamond
brooch at hat
Looping one side up very gallantly,
And changed his
doublet's color twice a day.
Ill fare had given his softer senses edge;

Good fortune, later, bade him come to dine,
Mild Spenser's scholar,
Philip Sidney's friend.
So took he now his ease; in Devonshire,

When Town was dull, or he