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THEN A STRONG MAN S BITTER SOBBING, AND A FRIAR S REVERENT PRAYER
Barely breathing, on his shoulder Joseph brought his sweetheart home.
Flung beneath her horse's trampling, all their joy that was to be ;
Never to his heart to hold her, whispering : ' ' My iirife — Marie ! ' '
On the bridal-bed they laid her, called a surgeon from the town ;
In the corridor he waited, pacing wildly up and down.
Now he cried fierce words to Heaven ; now he cursed, and now he prayed.
Like a maddened prisoner waiting tidings of a doom delayed ;
Tortured with the laggard minutes that crawl by so ghastly fast ;
Then the sick-room door was opened, and they summoned him at last.
Drifting out his love, his sweetheart, on the tides of every breath —
Out beyond his farthest yearning to the harbor-bar of Death !
''Dear — I — loved you" — faint and broken — "dear — I'll wait for you — out
there "
One last kiss of quivering, white lips ; one faint touch upon his hair ; Then a strong man's bitter sobbing, and a friar's reverent prayer. All the hopes his heart had builded, in his great house's stately walls. Leered, like ragged rents of ruin, thru the empty, echoing halls. Here a window he had pictured as a frame for her fair face. Here her boudoir, here her parlor, here an awed and holy place, "Where he dreamed, with eyes grown rev 'rent, of a cradle swinging slow. He and she, adoring, breathless, and their child asleep below. Harder than the hardest mem 'ries of sweet things that have passed by Are the unfulfilled imaginings, like sad ghosts that cannot die. The shy dream of Marie's presence had made sacred every room, And the loss of her was audible amid their dusty gloom. "Here I'll stay no longer," cried he, "that was built for you and me, With my widowed hopes and loneness and the need of you, Marie!" To a wretched Spanish family Joseph yielded up his home
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