Page:Poems of Sentiment and Imagination.djvu/126

122 Some hours later on that evening, Crozat sat beside the pillow

Of his child, now deeply sleeping in her beauty, still and pale;

But his features were grown softer—there was oil upon the billow,

And a fiat had gone forth to still the fury of the gale.

He had saved a fragile vessel, with its fine and costly burden,

And he hoped in time to trust her freight again upon the sea;

And what matter that it cost him dear! her safety was the guerdon

He had asked, and all he cared for; and the purchase had been free.

But the stain upon his conscience not the end attained could alter;

In the price he purposed giving was his honor not included;

From the truth he would not vary—in the right he could not falter,

And the bidding of his manly soul was not to be eluded.

And still, not quite the time had come for priest or for confession,

And until it came, his life of lives hung by a single hair—

His daughter's life, more dear than his—oh, dear beyond expression;

For the world, with all its treasures, with his one could not compare.

Thus, with love and pride at warfare—with his noble soul attainted

Of a treason 'gainst the son of him who was his earliest friend—

Mused the merchant-noble, on whose mind one only scene was painted,

And that scene his daughter's death, which he was striving to forefend,

So no sleep came to his eyelids—through the long night slowly pacing

O'er and o'er the velvet carpet, watched he how his darling rested;

Watched her breath, and watched her pulses, and the shadows that kept chasing

Through her soul, disturbed by visions on her changing face attested.