Read Ebook: The farmer's bride by Mew Charlotte Mary

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Ebook has 136 lines and 28038 words, and 3 pages

THE CHANGELING

Toll no bell for me, dear Father, dear Mother, Waste no sighs; There are my sisters, there is my little brother Who plays in the place called Paradise, Your children all, your children for ever; But I, so wild, Your disgrace, with the queer brown face, was never, Never, I know, but half your child!

In the garden at play, all day, last summer, Far and away I heard The sweet "tweet-tweet" of a strange new-comer, The dearest, clearest call of a bird. It lived down there in the deep green hollow, My own old home, and the fairies say The word of a bird is a thing to follow, So I was away a night and a day.

'Times I pleased you, dear Father, dear Mother, Learned all my lessons and liked to play, And dearly I loved the little pale brother Whom some other bird must have called away. Why did They bring me here to make me Not quite bad and not quite good, Why, unless They're wicked, do They want, in spite, to take me Back to their wet, wild wood? Now, every night I shall see the windows shining, The gold lamp's glow, and the fire's red gleam, While the best of us are twining twigs and the rest of us are whining In the hollow by the stream. Black and chill are Their nights on the wold; And They live so long and They feel no pain: I shall grow up, but never grow old, I shall always, always be very cold, I shall never come back again!

KEN

When first I came upon him there Suddenly, on the half-lit stair, I think I hardly found a trace Of likeness to a human face In his. And I said then If in His image God made men, Some other must have made poor Ken-- But for his eyes which looked at you As two red, wounded stars might do.

He scarcely spoke, you scarcely heard, His voice broke off in little jars To tears sometimes. An uncouth bird He seemed as he ploughed up the street, Groping, with knarred, high-lifted feet And arms thrust out as if to beat Always against a threat of bars.

And oftener than not there'd be A child just higher than his knee Trotting beside him. Through his dim Long twilight this, at least, shone clear, That all the children and the deer, Whom every day he went to see Out in the park, belonged to him.

"God help the folk that next him sits He fidgets so, with his poor wits." The neighbours said on Sunday nights When he would go to Church to "see the lights!" Although for these he used to fix His eyes upon a crucifix In a dark corner, staring on Till everybody else had gone. And sometimes, in his evil fits, You could not move him from his chair-- You did not look at him as he sat there, Biting his rosary to bits. While pointing to the Christ he tried to say "Take it away."

Nothing was dead: He said "a bird" if he picked up a broken wing, A perished leaf or any such thing Was just "a rose"; and once when I had said He must not stand and knock there any more, He left a twig on the mat outside my door.

Not long ago The last thrush stiffened in the snow, While black against a sullen sky The sighing pines stood by. But now the wind has left our rattled pane To flutter the hedge-sparrow's wing, The birches in the wood are red again And only yesterday The larks went up a little way to sing What lovers say Who loiter in the lanes to-day; The buds begin to talk of May With learned rooks on city trees, And if God please With all of these We too, shall see another Spring.

But in that red brick barn upon the hill I wonder--can one own the deer, And does one walk with children still As one did here-- Do roses grow Beneath those twenty windows in a row-- And if some night When you have not seen any light They cannot move you from your chair What happens there? I do not know.

So, when they took Ken to that place, I did not look After he called and turned on me His eyes. These I shall see--

? QUOI BON DIRE

So I, as I grow stiff and cold To this and that say Good-bye too; And everybody sees that I am old But you.

And one fine morning in a sunny lane Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear That nobody can love their way again While over there You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.

THE QUIET HOUSE

When we were children old Nurse used to say, The house was like an auction or a fair Until the lot of us were safe in bed. It has been quiet as the country-side Since Ted and Janey and then Mother died And Tom crossed Father and was sent away. After the lawsuit he could not hold up his head, Poor Father, and he does not care For people here, or to go anywhere.

To get away to Aunt's for that week-end Was hard enough; At first I did not like my cousin's friend, I did not think I should remember him: His voice has gone, his face is growing dim And if I like him now I do not know. He frightened me before he smiled-- He did not ask me if he might-- He said that he would come one Sunday night, He spoke to me as if I were a child.

No year has been like this that has just gone by; It may be that what Father says is true, If things are so it does not matter why: But everything has burned and not quite through. The colours of the world have turned To flame, the blue, the gold has burned In what used to be such a leaden sky. When you are burned quite through you die.

Red is the strangest pain to bear; In Spring the leaves on the budding trees; In Summer the roses are worse than these, More terrible than they are sweet: A rose can stab you across the street Deeper than any knife: And the crimson haunts you everywhere-- Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our stair As if, coming down, you had spilt your life.

I think that my soul is red Like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower: But when these are dead They have had their hour.

I shall have had mine, too, For from head to feet, I am burned and stabbed half through, And the pain is deadly sweet.

The things that kill us seem Blind to the death they give: It is only in our dream The things that kill us live.

The room is shut where Mother died, The other rooms are as they were, The world goes on the same outside, The sparrows fly across the Square, The children play as we four did there, The trees grow green and brown and bare, The sun shines on the dead Church spire, And nothing lives here but the fire, While Father watches from his chair Day follows day The same, or now and then, a different grey, Till, like his hair, Which Mother said was wavy once and bright, They will all turn white.

ON THE ASYLUM ROAD

Theirs is the house whose windows--every pane-- Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass: Sometimes you come upon them in the lane, The saddest crowd that you will ever pass.

But still we merry town or village folk Throw to their scattered stare a kindly grin, And think no shame to stop and crack a joke With the incarnate wages of man's sin.

None but ourselves in our long gallery we meet, The moor-hen stepping from her reeds with dainty feet, The hare-bell bowing on his stem, Dance not with us; their pulses beat To fainter music; nor do we to them Make their life sweet.

The gayest crowd that they will ever pass Are we to brother-shadows in the lane: Our windows, too, are clouded glass To them, yes, every pane!

JOUR DES MORTS

Sweetheart, is this the last of all our posies And little festivals, my flowers are they But white and wistful ghosts of gayer roses Shut with you in this grim garden? Not to-day, Ah! no! come out with me before the grey gate closes It is your f?te and here is your bouquet!

THE FOREST ROAD

MADELEINE IN CHURCH

Here, in the darkness, where this plaster saint Stands nearer than God stands to our distress, And one small candle shines, but not so faint As the far lights of everlastingness I'd rather kneel than over there, in open day Where Christ is hanging, rather pray To something more like my own clay, Not too divine; For, once, perhaps my little saint Before he got his niche and crown, Had one short stroll about the town; It brings him closer, just that taint And anyone can wash the paint Off our poor faces, his and mine!

Is that why I see Monty now? equal to any saint, poor boy, as good as gold, But still, with just the proper trace Of earthliness on his shining wedding face; And then gone suddenly blank and old The hateful day of the divorce: Stuart got his, hands down, of course Crowing like twenty cocks and grinning like a horse: But Monty took it hard. All said and done I liked him best,-- He was the first, he stands out clearer than the rest. It seems too funny all we other rips Should have immortal souls; Monty and Redge quite damnably Keep theirs afloat while we go down like scuttled ships.-- It's funny too, how easily we sink, One might put up a monument, I think To half the world and cut across it "Lost at Sea!" I should drown Jim, poor little sparrow, if I netted him to-night-- No, it's no use this penny light-- Or my poor saint with his tin-pot crown-- The trees of Calvary are where they were, When we are sure that we can spare The tallest, let us go and strike it down And leave the other two still standing there. I, too, would ask Him to remember me If there were any Paradise beyond this earth that I could see.

Oh! quiet Christ who never knew The poisonous fangs that bite us through And make us do the things we do, See how we suffer and fight and die, How helpless and how low we lie, God holds You, and You hang so high, Though no one looking long at You, Can think You do not suffer too, But, up there, from your still, star-lighted tree What can You know, what can You really see Of this dark ditch, the soul of me!

We are what we are: when I was half a child I could not sit Watching black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burning in the sun, Without paying so heavily for it That joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were almost one. I could hardly bear The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk, The thick, close voice of musk, The jessamine music on the thin night air, Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere-- The sight of my own face even the scent of my own hair, Oh! there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the high seat Of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat My soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the street. I think my body was my soul, And when we are made thus Who shall control Our hands, our eyes, the wandering passion of our feet, Who shall teach us To thrust the world out of our heart; to say, till perhaps in death, When the race is run, And it is forced from us with our last breath "Thy will be done"? If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame, bloodless things. As pale as angels smirking by, with folded wings. Oh! I know Virtue, and the peace it brings! The temperate, well-worn smile The one man gives you, when you are evermore his own: And afterwards the child's, for a little while, With its unknowing and all-seeing eyes So soon to change, and make you feel how quick The clock goes round. If one had learned the trick-- quite early on, Of long green pastures under placid skies, One might be walking now with patient truth. What did we ever care for it, who have asked for youth, When, oh! my God! this is going or has gone?

There is a portrait of my mother, at nineteen, With the black spaniel, standing by the garden seat, The dainty head held high against the painted green And throwing out the youngest smile, shy, but half haughty and half sweet. Her picture then: but simply Youth, or simply Spring To me to-day: a radiance on the wall, So exquisite, so heart-breaking a thing Beside the mask that I remember, shrunk and small, Sapless and lined like a dead leaf, All that was left of oh! the loveliest face, by time and grief!

That is not always true: there was my Mother-- Yoked to the man that Father was; yoked to the woman I am, Monty too; The little portress at the Convent School, stewing in hell so patiently; The poor, fair boy who shot himself at Aix. And what of me--and what of me? But I, I paid for what I had, and they for nothing. No, one cannot see How it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity. If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came; Here, on our little patch of this great earth, the sun of any darkened day, Not one of all the starry buds hung on the hawthorn trees of last year's May, No shadow from the sloping fields of yesterday; For every hour they slant across the hedge a different way, The shadows are never the same.

"Find rest in Him" One knows the parsons' tags-- Back to the fold, across the evening fields, like any flock of baa-ing sheep: Yes, it may be, when He has shorn, led us to slaughter, torn the bleating soul in us to rags, For so He giveth His beloved sleep. Oh! He will take us stripped and done, Driven into His heart. So we are won: Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His everlasting wings-- I do not envy Him his victories, His arms are full of broken things.

But I shall not be in them. Let Him take The finer ones, the easier to break. And they are not gone, yet, for me, the lights, the colours, the perfumes, Though now they speak rather in sumptuous rooms, In silks and in gem-like wines; Here, even, in this corner where my little candle shines And overhead the lancet-window glows With golds and crimsons you could almost drink To know how jewels taste, just as I used to think There was the scent in every red and yellow rose Of all the sunsets. But this place is grey, And much too quiet. No one here, Why, this is awful, this is fear! Nothing to see, no face. Nothing to hear except your heart beating in space As if the world was ended. Dead at last! Dead soul, dead body, tied together fast. These to go on with and alone, to the slow end: No one to sit with, really, or to speak to, friend to friend: Out of the long procession, black or white or red Not one left now to say "Still I am here, then see you, dear, lay here your head." Only the doll's house looking on the Park To-night, all nights, I know, when the man puts the lights out, very dark. With, upstairs, in the blue and gold box of a room, just the maids' footsteps overhead, Then utter silence and the empty world--the room--the bed--

How old was Mary out of whom you cast So many devils? Was she young or perhaps for years She had sat staring, with dry eyes, at this and that man going past Till suddenly she saw You on the steps of Simon's house And stood and looked at You through tears. I think she must have known by those The thing, for what it was that had come to her. For some of us there is a passion, I suppose So far from earthly cares and earthly fears That in its stillness you can hardly stir Or in its nearness, lift your hand, So great that you have simply got to stand Looking at it through tears, through tears Then straight from these there broke the kiss, I think You must have known by this The thing, for what it was, that had come to You: She did not love You like the rest, It was in her own way, but at the worst, the best, She gave you something altogether new. And through it all, from her, no word, She scarcely saw You, scarcely heard: Surely You knew when she so touched You with her hair, Or by the wet cheek lying there, And while her perfume clung to You from head to feet all through the day That You can change the things for which we care, But even You, unless You kill us, not the way.

This, then was peace for her, but passion too. I wonder was it like a kiss that once I knew, The only one that I would care to take Into the grave with me, to which if there were afterwards, to wake. Almost as happy as the carven dead In some dim chancel lying head by head We slept with it, but face to face, the whole night through-- One breath, one throbbing quietness, as if the thing behind our lips was endless life, Lost, as I woke, to hear in the strange earthly dawn, his "Are you there?" And lie still, listening to the wind outside, among the firs.

So Mary chose the dream of Him for what was left to her of night and day, It is the only truth: it is the dream in us that neither life nor death nor any other thing can take away: But if she had not touched Him in the doorway of the dream could she have cared so much? She was a sinner, we are what we are: the spirit afterwards, but first, the touch.

And He has never shared with me my haunted house beneath the trees Of Eden and Calvary, with its ghosts that have not any eyes for tears, And the happier guests who would not see, or if they did, remember these, Though they lived there a thousand years. Outside, too gravely looking at me, He seems to stand, And looking at Him, if my forgotten spirit came Unwillingly back, what could it claim Of those calm eyes, that quiet speech, Breaking like a slow tide upon the beach, The scarred, not quite human hand?-- Unwillingly back to the burden of old imaginings When it has learned so long not to think, not to be, Again, again it would speak as it has spoken to me of things That I shall not see!

I cannot bear to look at this divinely bent and gracious head: When I was small I never quite believed that He was dead: And at the Convent school I used to lie awake in bed Thinking about His hands. It did not matter what they said, He was alive to me, so hurt, so hurt! And most of all in Holy Week When there was no one else to see I used to think it would not hurt me too, so terribly, If He had ever seemed to notice me Or, if, for once, He would only speak.

EXSPECTO RESURRECTIONEM

Oh! King who hast the key Of that dark room, The last which prisons us but held not Thee, Thou know'st its gloom. Dost Thou a little love this one Shut in to-night, Young and so piteously alone, Cold--out of sight? Thou know'st how hard and bare The pillow of that new-made narrow bed, Then leave not there So dear a head!

ON THE ROAD TO THE SEA

We passed each other, turned and stopped for half an hour, then went our way, I who make other women smile did not make you-- But no man can move mountains in a day. So this hard thing is yet to do.

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