Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Went on behind her; but she weeded out

  Her book-leaves, threw away the leaves that hurt,

  (First tore them small, that none should find a word),

  And made a nosegay of the sweet and good

  To fold within her breast, and pore upon

  At broken moments of the noontide glare,

  When leave was given her to untie her cloak

  And rest upon the dusty roadside bank

  From the highway’s dust. Or oft, the journey done,

  Some city friend would lead her by the hand

  To hear a lecture at an institute.

  And thus she had grown, this Marian Erle of ours,

  To no book-learning,–she was ignorant

  Of authors,–not in earshot of the things

  Out-spoken o’er the heads of common men,

  By men who are uncommon,–but within

  The cadenced hum of such, and capable

  Of catching from the fringes of the wind

  Some fragmentary phrases, here and there,

  Of that fine music,–which, being carried in

  To her soul, had reproduced itself afresh

  In finer motions of the lips and lids.

  She said, in speaking of it, ‘If a flower

  Were thrown you out of heaven at intervals,

  You’d soon attain to a trick of looking up,–

  And so with her.’ She counted me her years,

  Till I felt old; and then she counted me

  Her sorrowful pleasures, till I felt ashamed.

  She told me she was almost glad and calm

  On such and such a season; sate and sewed,

  With no one to break up her crystal thoughts:

  While rhymes from lovely poems span around

  Their ringing circles of ecstatic tune,

  Beneath the moistened finger of the Hour.

  Her parents called her a strange, sickly child,

  Not good for much, and given to sulk and stare,

  And smile into the hedges and the clouds,

  And tremble if one shook her from her fit

  By any blow, or word even. Out-door jobs

  Went ill with her; and household quiet work

  She was not born to. Had they kept the north,

  They might have had their pennyworth out of her

  Like other parents, in the factories;

  (Your children work for you, not you for them,

  Or else they better had been choked with air

  The first breath drawn;) but, in this tramping life,

  Was nothing to be done with such a child,

  But tramp and tramp. And yet she knitted hose

  Not ill, and was not dull at needlework;

  And all the country people gave her pence

  For darning stockings past their natural age,

  And patching petticoats from old to new,

  And other light work done for thrifty wives.

  One day, said Marian–the sun shone that day–

  Her mother had been badly beat, and felt

  The bruises sore about her wretched soul

  (That must have been): she came in suddenly,

  And snatching, in a sort of breathless rage,

  Her daughter’s headgear comb, let down the hair

  Upon her, like a sudden waterfall,

  Then drew her drenched and passive, by the arm,

  Outside the hut they lived in. When the child

  Could clear her blinded face from all that stream

  Of tresses . . there, a man stood, with beasts’ eyes

  That seemed as they would swallow her alive,

  Complete in body and spirit, hair and all,–

  With burning stertorous breath that hurt her cheek,

  He breathed so near. The mother held her tight,

  Saying hard between her teeth–’Why wench, why wench,

  The squire speaks to you now–the squire’s too good,

  He means to set you up and comfort us.

  Be mannerly at least.’ The child turned round

  And looked up piteous in the mother’s face

  (Be sure that mother’s death-bed will not want

  Another devil to damn, than such a look),

  ‘Oh, mother!’ then, with desperate glance to heaven,

  ‘Good, free me from my mother,’ she shrieked out,

  ‘These mothers are too dreadful.’ And, with force

  As passionate as fear, she tore her hands,

  Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,

  And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,

  Away from both–away, if possible,

  As far as God,–away! They yelled at her,

  As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell;

  She felt her name hiss after her from the hills,

  Like shot from guns. On, on. And now she had cast

  The voices off with the uplands. On. Mad fear

  Was running in her feet and killing the ground;

  The white roads curled as if she burnt them up,

  The green fields melted, wayside trees fell back

  To make room for her. Then her head grew vexed;

  Trees, fields, turned on her and ran after her;

  She heard the quick pants of the hills behind,

  Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet,

  Could run no more, yet somehow went as fast,–

  The horizon, red, ‘twixt steeples in the east

  So sucked her forward, forward, while her heart

  Kept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so big

  It seemed to fill her body; then it burst,

  And overflowed the world and swamped the light,

  ‘And now I am dead and safe,’ thought Marian Erle–

  She had dropped, she had fainted.

  When the sense returned,

  The night had passed–not life’s night. She was ‘ware

  Of heavy tumbling motions, creaking wheels,

  The driver shouting to the lazy team

  That swung their rankling bells against her brain,

  While, through the waggon’s coverture and chinks,

  The cruel yellow morning pecked at her

  Alive or dead, upon the straw inside,–

  At which her soul ached back into the dark

  And prayed, ‘no more of that.’ A waggoner

  Had found her in a ditch beneath the moon,

  As white as moonshine, save for the oozing blood.

  At first he thought her dead; but when he had wiped

  The mouth and heard it sigh, he raised her up,

  And laid her in his waggon in the straw,

  And so conveyed her to the distant town

  To which his business called himself, and left

  That heap of misery at the hospital.

  She stirred;–the place seemed new and strange as death.

  The white strait bed, with others strait and white,

  Like graves dug side by side, at measured lengths,

  And quiet people walking in and out

  With wonderful low voices and soft steps,

  And apparitional equal care for each,

  Astonished her with order, silence, law:

  And when a gentle hand held out a cup,

  She took it, as you do at sacrament,

  Half awed, half melted,–not being used, indeed,

  To so much love as makes the form of love

  And courtesy of manners. Delicate drinks

  And rare white bread, to which some dying eyes

  Were turned in observation. O my God,

  How sick we must be, ere we make men just!

  I think it frets the saints in heaven to see

  How many Desolate creatures on the earth

  Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship

  And social comfort, in a hospital,

  As Marian did. She lay there, stunned, half tranced,

  And wished,
at intervals of growing sense,

  She might be sicker yet, if sickness made

  The world so marvellous kind, the air so hushed,

  And all her wake-time quiet as a sleep;

  For now she understood, (as such things were)

  How sickness ended very oft in heaven,

  Among the unspoken raptures. Yet more sick,

  And surelier happy. Then she dropped her lids,

  And, folding up her hands as flowers at night,

  Would lose no moment of the blessed time.

  She lay and seethed in fever many weeks;

  But youth was strong and overcame the test;

  Revolted soul and flesh were reconciled

  And fetched back to the necessary day

  And daylight duties. She could creep about

  The long bare rooms, and stare out drearily

  From any narrow window on the street,

  Till some one, who had nursed her as a friend,

  Said coldly to her, as an enemy,

  ‘She had leave to go next week, being well enough,’

  While only her heart ached. ‘Go next week,’ thought she,

  ‘Next week! how would it be with her next week,

  Let out into that terrible street alone

  Among the pushing people, . . to go . . where?’

  One day, the last before the dreaded last,

  Among the convalescents, like herself

  Prepared to go next morning, she sate dumb,

  And heard half absently the women talk,

  How one was famished for her baby’s cheeks–

  ‘The little wretch would know her! a year old,

  And lively, like his father!’ one was keen

  To get to work, and fill some clamorous mouths;

  And one was tender for her dear goodman

  Who had missed her sorely,–and one, querulous . .

  ‘Would pay those scandalous neighbours who had dared

  To talk about her as already dead,’–

  And one was proud . . ‘and if her sweetheart Luke

  Had left her for a ruddier face than hers,

  (The gossip would be seen through at a glance)

  Sweet riddance of such sweethearts–let him hang!

  ‘Twere good to have been as sick for such an end.’

  And while they talked, and Marian felt the worse

  For having missed the worst of all their wrongs,

  A visitor was ushered through the wards

  And paused among the talkers. ‘When he looked,

  It was as if he spoke, and when he spoke

  He sang perhaps,’ said Marian; ‘could she tell?

  She only knew’ (so much she had chronicled,

  As seraphs might, the making of the sun)

  ‘That he who came and spake was Romney Leigh,

  And then, and there, she saw and heard him first.’

  And when it was her turn to have the face

  Upon her,–all those buzzing pallid lips

  Being satisfied with comfort–when he changed

  To Marian, saying, ‘And you? You’re going, where?’–

  She, moveless as a worm beneath a stone

  Which some one’s stumbling foot has spurned aside,

  Writhed suddenly, astonished with the light,

  And breaking into sobs cried, ‘Where I go?

  None asked me till this moment. Can I say

  Where I go? When it has not seemed worth while

  To God himself, who thinks of every one,

  To think of me, and fix where I shall go?’

  ‘So young,’ he gently asked her, ‘you have lost

  Your father and your mother?’

  ‘Both’ she said,

  ‘Both lost! My father was burnt up with gin

  Or ever I sucked milk, and so is lost.

  My mother sold me to a man last month,

  And so my mother’s lost, ‘tis manifest.

  And I, who fled from her for miles and miles,

  As if I had caught sight of the fires of hell

  Through some wild gap, (she was my mother, sir)

  It seems I shall be lost too, presently,

  And so we end, all three of us.’

  ‘Poor child!’

  He said,–with such a pity in his voice,

  It soothed her more than her own tears,–’poor child!

  ‘Tis simple that betrayal by mother’s love

  Should bring despair of God’s too. Yet be taught

  He’s better to us than many mothers are,

  And children cannot wander beyond reach

  Of the sweep of his white raiment. Touch and hold’

  And if you weep still, weep where John was laid

  While Jesus loved him.’

  ‘She could say the words,’

  She told me, ‘exactly as he uttered them

  A year back, . . since in any doubt or dark,

  They came out like the stars, and shone on her

  With just their comfort. Common words, perhaps;

  The ministers in church might say the same;

  But he, he made the church with what he spoke,–

  The difference was the miracle,’ said she.

  Then catching up her smile to ravishment,

  She added quickly, ‘I repeat his words,

  But not his tones: can any one repeat

  The music of an organ, out of church?

  And when he said ‘poor child,’ I shut my eyes

  To feel how tenderly his voice broke through,

  As the ointment-box broke on the Holy feet

  To let out the rich medicative nard.’

  She told me how he had raised and rescued her

  With reverent pity, as, in touching grief,

  He touched the wounds of Christ,–and made her feel

  More self-respecting. Hope, he called, belief

  In God,–work, worship . . therefore let us pray!

  And thus, to snatch her soul from atheism,

  And keep it stainless from her mother’s face,

  He sent her to a famous sempstress-house

  Far off in London, there to work and hope.

  With that they parted. She kept sight of Heaven,

  But not of Romney. He had good to do

  To others: through the days and through the nights,

  She sewed and sewed and sewed. She drooped sometimes,

  And wondered, while, along the tawny light,

  She struck the new thread into her needle’s eye,

  How people without mothers on the hills,

  Could choose the town to live in!–then she drew

  The stitch, and mused how Romney’s face would look,

  And if ‘twere likely he’d remember hers,

  When they two had their meeting after death.

  AURORA LEIGH. FOURTH BOOK.

  THEY met still sooner. ‘Twas a year from thence

  When Lucy Gresham, the sick semptress girl,

  Who sewed by Marian’s chair so still and quick,

  And leant her head upon the back to cough

  More freely when, the mistress turning round,

  The others took occasion to laugh out,–

  Gave up a last. Among the workers, spoke

  A bold girl with black eyebrows and red lips,–

  ‘You know the news? Who’s dying, do you think?

  Our Lucy Gresham. I expected it

  As little as Nell Hart’s wedding. Blush not, Nell,

  Thy curls be red enough without thy cheeks;

  And, some day, there’ll be found a man to dote

  On red curls.–Lucy Gresham swooned last night,

  Dropped sudden in the street while going home;

  And now the baker says, who took her up

  And laid her by her grandmother in bed,

  He’ll give her a week to die in. Pass the silk.

  Let’s hope he gave her a loaf too, within reach,

  For otherwise they�
�ll starve before they die,

  That funny pair of bedfellows! Miss Bell,

  I’ll thank you for the scissors. The old crone

  Is paralytic–that’s the reason why

  Our Lucy’s thread went faster than her breath,

  Which went too quick, we all know. Marian Erle!

  Why, Marian Erle, you’re not the fool to cry?

  Your tears spoil Lady Waldemar’s new dress,

  You piece of pity!’

  Marian rose up straight,

  And, breaking through the talk and through the work,

  Went outward, in the face of their surprise,

  To Lucy’s home, to nurse her back to life

  Or down to death. She knew by such an act,

  All place and grace were forfeit in the house,

  Whose mistress would supply the missing hand

  With necessary, not inhuman haste,

  And take no blame. But pity, too, had dues:

  She could not leave a solitary soul

  To founder in the dark, while she sate still

  And lavished stitches on a lady’s hem

  As if no other work were paramount.

  ‘Why, God,’ thought Marian, ‘has a missing hand

  This moment; Lucy wants a drink, perhaps.

  Let others miss me! never miss me, God!’

  So Marian sat by Lucy’s bed, content

  With duty, and was strong, for recompense,

  To hold the lamp of human love arm-high

  To catch the death-strained eyes and comfort them,

  Until the angels, on the luminous side

  Of death, had got theirs ready. And she said,

  When Lucy thanked her sometimes, called her kind,

  It touched her strangely. ‘Marian Erle called kind!

  What, Marian, beaten and sold, who could not die!

  ‘Tis verily good fortune to be kind.

  Ah, you,’ she said, ‘who are born to such a grace,

  Be sorry for the unlicensed class, the poor,

  Reduced to think the best good fortune means

  That others, simply, should be kind to them.’

  From sleep to sleep while Lucy slid away

  So gently, like a light upon a hill,

  Of which none names the moment when it goes,

  Though all see when ‘tis gone,–a man came in

  And stood beside the bed. The old idiot wretch

  Screamed feebly, like a baby overlain,

  ‘Sir, sir, you won’t mistake me for the corpse?

  Don’t look at me, sir! never bury me!

  Although I lie here, I’m alive as you,

  Except my legs and arms,–I eat and drink,

  And understand,–(that you’re the gentleman