The Story
of Saville
They were sitting the width of the room apart and she had been reading from “Maud,”
When sudden he spoke in a voice at once exultant and deeply awed,
“Saville,—dear heart! I have not dared to say what for days I have guessed—
That God in His infinite mercy and wisdom and love accounteth it best
To relume the lamps in their sockets, to summon the long-fled guest,
To roll the hideous weight away that years on my life hath pressed,—
There, as I point, is a grayness—a glimmer—a dark less Cimmerian profound,—
Am I right? Is it haply a glimpse through a curtainless casement of snow-covered ground?
Here on the left is a lurid lifting of shadow,—it almost is red,—
Is it only a sulphurous devil within, or the ruddy clear fire instead?
I scarcely dare hope,—yet I have remembered all of this year, Saville,
That the day we met you promised my sight—But what is it, love? Are you ill—
Are you gone from the room that I meet with alone this silence so strange and so chill?
Why, I looked for a tempest of laughter and doubts, and for floods of rejoicing tears,—
