Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/131

To see another merry whom she loved.
She whispered once (the children side by side,
With mutual arms entwined about their necks)
‘Your mother lets you laugh so?’ ‘Ay,’ said Rose,
‘She lets me. She was dug into the ground
Six years since, I being but a yearling wean.
Such mothers let us play and lose our time,
And never scold nor beat us! Don’t you wish
You had one like that?’ There, Marian, breaking off
Looked suddenly in my face. ‘Poor Rose,’ said she,
‘I heard her laugh last night in Oxford Street.
I’d pour out half my blood to stop that laugh,—
Poor Rose, poor Rose!’ said Marian.
She resumed.
It tried her, when she had learnt at Sunday-school
What God was, what he wanted from us all,
And how, in choosing sin, we vexed the Christ,
To go straight home and hear her father pull
The name down on us from the thunder-shelf,
Then drink away his soul into the dark
From seeing judgment. Father, mother, home,
Were God and heaven reversed to her: the more
She knew of Right, the more she guessed their wrong;
Her price paid down for knowledge, was to know
The vileness of her kindred: through her heart,
Her filial and tormented heart, henceforth,
They struck their blows at virtue. Oh, ’tis hard
To learn you have a father up in heaven
By a gathering certain sense of being, on earth,

Still worse than orphaned: ’tis too heavy a grief,