Читать книгу Griselda: a society novel in rhymed verse - Blunt Wilfrid Scawen - Страница 2

Thus then it was. Griselda's childhood ends

With this untoward night; and what portends

May only now be guessed by those who read

Signs on the earth and wonders overhead.

I dare not prophesy.

What next appears

In the vain record of Griselda's years

Is hardly yet a token, for her life

Showed little outward sign of change or strife,

Though she was changed and though perhaps at war.

Her face still shone untroubled as a star

In the world's firmament, and still she moved,

A creature to be wondered at and loved.

Her zeal, her wit, her talents, her good sense

Were all unchanged, though each seemed more intense

And lit up with new passion and inspired

To active purpose, valiant and untired.

She faced the world, talked much and well, made friends,

Promoted divers schemes for divers ends,

Artistic, social, philanthropical:

She had a store of zeal for each and all.

She pensioned poets, nobly took in hand

An emigration plan to Newfoundland,

Which ended in disaster and a ball.

She visited St. George's hospital,

The Home for Fallen Women, founded schools

Of music taught on transcendental rules.

L. House was dull though splendid. She had schemes

Of a vast London palace on the Thames,

Which should combine all orders new and old

Of architectural taste a house could hold,

And educate the masses. Then one day,

She fairly wearied and her soul gave way.

Again she sought Lord L., but not to ask

This time his counsel in the thankless task

She could no more make good, the task of living.

He was too mere a stranger to her grieving,

Her needs, her weakness. All her woman's heart

Was in rebellion at the idle part

He played in her sad life, and needed not

Mere pity for a pain to madness wrought.

She did not ask his sympathy. She said

Only that she was weary as the dead,

And needed change of air, and life, and scene:

She wished to go where all the world had been —

To Paris, Florence, Rome. She could not die

And not have seen the Alps and Italy.

Lord L. had tried all Europe, and knew best

Where she could flee her troubles and find rest.

Such was her will. Lord L., without more goad,

Prepared for travel – and they went abroad.

I will not follow here from day to day

Griselda's steps. Suffice it if I say

She found her wished-for Paris wearisome,

Another London and without her home,

And so went on, as still the fashion was,

Some years ago, e'er Pulman cars with gas

And quick night flittings had submerged mankind

In one mad dream of luggage left behind,

By the Rhone boat to Provence. This to her

Seemed a delicious land, strange, barren, fair,

An old-world wilderness of greys and browns,

Rocks, olive-gardens, grim dismantled towns,

Deep-streeted, desolate, yet dear to see,

Smelling of oil and of the Papacy.

Griselda first gave reins to her romance

In this forgotten corner of old France,

Feeding her soul on that ethereal food,

The manna of days spent in solitude.

Lord L. was silent. She, as far away

Saw other worlds which were not of to-day,

With cardinals, popes, Petrarch and the Muse.

She stopped to weep with Laura at Vaucluse,

Where waiting in the Mistral poor Lord L.,

Who did not weep, sat, slept and caught a chill;

This sent them southwards on through Christendom,

To Genoa, Florence, and at last to Rome,

Where they remained the winter.

Change had wrought

A cure already in Griselda's thought,

Or half a cure. The world in truth is wide,

If we but pace it out from side to side,

And our worst miseries thus the smaller come.

Griselda was ashamed to grieve in Rome,

Among the buried griefs of centuries,

Her own sweet soul's too pitiful disease.

She found amid that dust of human hopes

An incantation for all horoscopes,

A better patience in that wreck of Time:

Her secret woes seemed chastened and sublime

There in the amphitheatre of woe.

She suffered with the martyrs. These would know,

Who offered their chaste lives and virgin blood,

How mortal frailty best might be subdued.

She saw the incense of her sorrow rise

With theirs as an accepted sacrifice

Before the face of the Eternal God

Of that Eternal City, and she trod

The very stones which seemed their griefs to sound

Beneath her steps, as consecrated ground.

In face of such a suffering hers must be

A drop, a tear in the unbounded sea

Which girds our lives. Rome was the home of grief,

Where all might bring their pain and find relief,

The temple of all sorrows: surely yet,

Sorrow's self here seemed swallowed up in it.

'Twas thus she comforted her soul. And then,

She had found a friend, a phœnix among men,

Which made it easier to compound with life,

Easier to be a woman and a wife.

This was Prince Belgirate. He of all

The noble band to whose high fortune fall

The name and title proudest upon earth

While pride shall live by privilege of birth,

The name of Roman, shone conspicuous

The head and front of his illustrious house,

Which had produced two pontiffs and a saint

Before the world had heard of Charles le Quint;

A most accomplished nobleman in truth,

And wise beyond the manner of his youth,

With wit and art and learning, and that sense

Of policy which still is most intense

Among the fertile brains of Italy,

A craft inherited from days gone by.

As scholar he was known the pupil apt

Of Mezzofanti, in whose learning lapped

And prized and tutored as a wondrous child,

He had sucked the milk of knowledge undefiled

While yet a boy, and brilliantly anon

Had pushed his reputation thus begun

Through half a score of tongues. In art his place

Was as chief patron of the rising race,

Which dreamed new conquests on the glorious womb

Of ancient beauty laid asleep in Rome.

The glories of the past he fain would see

Wrought to new life in this new century,

By that continuous instinct of her sons,

Which had survived Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Huns,

To burst upon a wondering world again

With full effulgence in the Julian reign.

In politics, though prudently withdrawn

From the public service, which he held in scorn,

As being unworthy the deliberate zeal

Of one with head to think or heart to feel;

And being neither priest, nor soldier, nor

Versed in the practice of Canonic lore,

He made his counsels felt and privately

Lent his best influence to "the Powers that be," —

Counsels the better valued that he stood

Alone among the youth of stirring blood,

And bowed not to that Baal his proud knee,

The national false goddess, Italy.

He was too stubborn in his Roman pride

To trick out this young strumpet as a bride,

And held in classic scorn who would become

Less than a Roman citizen in Rome.

A man of heart besides and that light wit

Which leavens all, even pedantry's conceit.

None better knew than he the art to shew

A little less in talk than all he knew.

His manner too, and voice, and countenance,

Imposed on all, and these he knew to enhance

By certain freedoms and simplicities

Of language, which set all his world at ease.

A very peer and prince and paragon,

Griselda thought, Rome's latest, worthiest son,

An intellectual phœnix.

On her night

A sudden dawn had broke, portentous, bright.

Her soul had found its fellow. From the day