Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/290

Rh ‘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,