Donal Grant

Which untrod will yet creak and shake,
Deep in a distant chamber,
A ghost was coming awake.

In the growing darkness growing—
Growing till her eyes appear,
Like spots of a deeper twilight,
But more transparent clear—

Thin as hot air up-trembling,
Thin as a sun-molten crape,
The deepening shadow of something
Taketh a certain shape;

A shape whose hands are uplifted
To throw back her blinding hair;
A shape whose bosom is heaving,
But draws not in the air.

And I know, by what time the moonlight
On her nest of shadows will sit,
Out on the dim lawn gliding
That shadow of shadows will flit.

V

The moon is dreaming upward
From a sea of cloud and gleam;
She looks as if she had seen us
Never but in a dream.

Down that stair I know she is coming,
Bare-footed, lifting her train;
It creaks not—she hears it creaking,
For the sound is in her brain.

Out at the side-door she's coming,
With a timid glance right and left!
Her look is hopeless yet eager,
The look of a heart bereft.

Across the lawn she is flitting,
Her eddying robe in the wind!
Are her fair feet bending the grasses?
Her hair is half lifted behind!

VI

Shall I stay to look on her nearer?
Would she start and vanish away?
No, no; she will never see me,
If I stand as near as I may!

It is not this wind she is feeling,
Not this cool grass below;
'Tis the wind and the grass of an evening
A hundred years ago.

She sees no roses darkling,
No stately hollyhocks dim;
She is only thinking and dreaming
Of the garden, the night, and him;

Of the unlit windows behind her,
Of the timeless dial-stone,
Of the trees, and the moon, and the shadows,
A hundred years agone.

'Tis a night for all ghostly lovers
To haunt the best-loved spot:
Is he come in his dreams to this garden?
I gaze, but I see him not.

VII

I will not look on her nearer—
My heart would be torn in twain;
From mine eyes the garden would vanish
In the falling of their rain!

I will not look on a sorrow
That darkens into despair;
On the surge of a heart that cannot—
Yet cannot cease to bear!

My soul to hers would be calling—
She would hear no word it said;
If I cried aloud in the stillness,
She would never turn her head!

She is dreaming the sky above her,
She is dreaming the earth below:—
This night she lost her lover,
A hundred years ago.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

A PRESENCE YET NOT A PRESENCE

The twilight had fallen while he wrote, and the wind had risen. It was now blowing a gale. When he could no longer see, he rose to light his lamp, and looked out of the window. All was dusk around him. Above and below was nothing to be distinguished from the mass; nothing and something seemed in it to share an equal uncertainty. He heard the wind, but could not see the clouds that swept before it, for all was cloud overhead, and no change of light or feature showed the shifting of the measureless bulk. Gray stormy space was the whole idea of the creation. He was gazing into a void—was it not rather a condition of things inappreciable by his senses? A strange feeling came over him as of looking from a window in the wall of the visible into the region unknown, to man shapeless quite, therefore terrible, wherein wander the things all that have not yet found or form or sensible embodiment, so as to manifest themselves to eyes or ears or hands of mortals. As he gazed, the huge shapeless hulks of the ships of chaos, dimly awful suggestions of animals uncreate, yet vaguer motions of what was not, came heaving up, to vanish, even from the fancy, as they approached his window. Earth lay far below, invisible; only through the night came the moaning of the sea, as the wind drove it, in still enlarging waves, upon the flat shore, a level of doubtful grass and sand, three miles away. It seemed to his heart as if the moaning were the voice of the darkness, lamenting, like a repentant Satan or Judas, that it was not the light, could not hold the light, might not become as the light, but must that moment cease when the light began to enter it. Darkness and moaning was all that the earth contained! Would the souls of the mariners shipwrecked this night go forth into the ceaseless turmoil? or would they, leaving behind them the sense for storms, as for all things soft and sweet as well, enter only a vast silence, where was nothing to be aware of but each solitary self? Thoughts and theories many passed through Donal's mind as he sought to land the conceivable from the wandering bosom of the limitless; and he was just arriving at the conclusion, that, as all things seen must be after the fashion of the unseen whence they come, as the very genius of embodiment is likeness, therefore the soul of man must of course have natural relations with matter; but, on the other hand, as the spirit must be the home and origin of all this moulding, assimilating, modelling energy, and the spirit only that is in harmonious oneness with its origin can fully exercise the deputed creative power, it can be only in proportion to the eternal life in them, that spirits are able to draw to themselves matter and clothe themselves in it, so entering into full relation with the world of storms and sunsets;—he was, I say, just arriving at this hazarded conclusion, when he started out of his reverie, and was suddenly all ear to listen.—Again!—Yes! it was the same sound that had sent him that first night wandering through the house in fruitless quest! It came in two or three fitful chords that melted into each other like the colours in the lining of a shell, then ceased. He went to the door, opened it, and listened. A cold wind came rushing up the stair. He heard nothing. He stepped out on the stair, shut his door, and listened. It came again—a strange unearthly musical cry! If ever disembodied sound went wandering in the wind, just such a sound must it be! Knowing little of music save in the forms of tone and vowel-change and rhythm and rime, he felt as if he could have listened for ever to the wild wandering sweetness of its lamentation. Almost immediately it ceased—then once more came again, apparently from far off, dying away on the distant tops of the billowy air, out of whose wandering bosom it had first issued. It was as the wailing of a summer-wind caught and swept along in a tempest from the frozen north.