The Story
of Saville
VI.
But at last came a day when she failed to come, when the reed bent rottenly down,
And he sat in a cruel impatience, his face deformed by a frown,
And he listened in vain for the crystalline tinkle of feet through the crepitant grass,
The delicate laugh of dismay at a drift or haply a tiny crevasse,—
He waited half sick of a hope deferred, till his marrow was turned to ice,
And the orange and garnet chilled out of the sky, and the lad had come for him thrice,
And then he arose and doggedly trudged to his poor pain-tenanted room,
That crawled as with slimiest horrors through out the reticulate gloom,
And he shrank from shutting himself alone into that living tomb.
And he had no lilies at all that night, no languorous lullings of spice,
No hope of remote reparation, no visions to lure and entice,
Naught but the old, old Tantalus-mood, that had gathered new malice and gall
From disuse, as a robe gathers mildew and moth, hanging forgot on the wall,
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