Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/290

‘A very pretty poet! I can guess
‘The motive’—then, to catch his eyes in hers,
And vow she does not wonder,—and they two
To break in laughter, as the sea along
A melancholy coast, and float up higher,
In such a laugh, their fatal weeds of love!
Ay, fatal, ay. And who shall answer me,
Fate has not hurried tides; and if to-night
My letter would not be a night too late,—
An arrow shot into a man that’s dead,
To prove a vain intention? Would I show
The new wife vile, to make the husband mad?
No, Lamia! shut the shutters, bar the doors
From every glimmer on they serpent-skin!
I will not let thy hideous secret out
To agonise the man I love—I mean
The friend I love . . as friends love.
It is strange,
To-day while Marian told her story, like
To absorb most listeners, how I listened chief
To a voice not hers, nor yet that enemy’s,
Nor God’s in wrath, . . but one that mixed with mine
Long years ago, among the garden-trees,
And said to me, to me too, ‘Be my wife,
Aurora!’ It is strange, with what a swell
Of yearning passion, as a snow of ghosts
Might beat against the impervious doors of heaven,
I thought, ‘Now, if I had been a woman, such
As God made women, to save men by love,—
By just my love I might have saved this man,