Wyndham Towers | Page 7

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?
? 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 had need at heart?For sight of Wyndham Towers against the sky;?But chiefly did he bask him by the Thames,?For there 't was that Young England froze and thawed?By turns in GLORIANA'S frown and smile.
As some wild animal that gets a wound,?And prescience hath of death, will drag itself?Back to its cavern sullenly to die,?And would not have heaven's airs for witnesses,?So Wyndham, shrinking