Wyndham Towers

Or sit at trencher with good smoking meat,
If I heard not, in middle of the night,
The cock crow thrice, and took it for a sign.”
“So, marry, ‘t was—that thou wert drunk again.”
But no one laughed save he that made the jest,
Which often happens.  The long hours wore on,
And gloaming fell.  Then came another day,
And then another, until seven dawns
In Time’s slow crucible ran ruddy gold
And overflowed the gray horizon’s edge;
And yet no hosts at table—an ill thing!
And now ‘t was on the eve of Michaelmas.

What could it mean?  From out their lethargy
At last awaking, searchers in hot haste,
Some in the saddle, some afoot with hounds,
Scoured moor and woodland, dragged the neighboring weirs
And salmon-streams, and watched the wily hawk
Slip from his azure ambush overhead,
With ever a keen eye for carrion:
But no man found, nor aught that once was man.
By land they went not; went they water-ways?
Might be, from Bideford or Ilfracombe.
Mayhap they were in London, who could tell?
God help us! do men melt into the air?
Yet one there was whose dumb unlanguaged love
Had all revealed, had they but given heed.
Across the threshold of the armor-room
The savage mastiff stretched himself, and starved.

Now where lags he, upon what alehouse bench
‘Twixt here and London, who shall lift this weight?
Were he not slain upon the Queen’s highway
Ere he reached Town, or tumbled into ford
With too much sack-and-sugar under belt,
Then was his face set homeward this same hour,
Why lingers he?  Ill news, ‘t is said, flies fast,
And good news creeps; then his must needs be good
That lets the tortoise pass him on the road.
Ride, Dawkins, ride! by flashing tarn and fen
And haunted hollow!  Look not where in chains
On Hounslow heath the malefactor hangs,
A lasting terror!  Give thy roan jade spur,
And spare her not!  All Devon waits for thee,
Thou, for the moment, most important man!
A sevennight later, when the rider sent
To Town drew rein before The Falcon inn
Under the creaking of the windy sign,
And slipped from saddle with most valorous call
For beer to wash his throat out, then confessed
He brought no scrap of any honest news,
The last hope died, and so the quest was done.
“They far’d afoot,” quoth one, “but where God wot.”

The blackthorn bloomed anew, and the long grass
Was starred with flowers that once Griselda prized,
But plucked not.  She, poor wench, from moon to moon
Waxed pale and paler: of no known disease,
The village-leech averred, with lips pursed out
And cane at chin; some inward fire, he thought,
Consumed.  A dark inexplicable blight
Had touched her, thinned her, till of that sweet earth
Scarce more was left than would have served to grow
A lily.  Later, at a fresh-turned grave,
From out the maiden strewments, as it were,
A whisper rose, of most pathetic breath,
Of how one maid had been by two men loved—
No names, God’s mercy!—and that neither man
Would wed her: why?—conjecture faltered there,
For whiter was she than new-drifted snow,
Or bleached lamb’s wool, or any purest thing,
Such stuff in sooth as Heaven shapes angels of;
And how from their warm, comfortable beds
These two men wandered out into the night,
Sore stricken and distempered in their mind,
And being by Satan blinded and urged on
Did fling them headlong from a certain crag
That up Clovelly way o’erhangs the sea—
O’erhangs the sea to tempt unhappy folk.
From door to door the piteous legend passed,
And like a thrifty beggar took from each.
And when the long autumnal season came
To that bleak, bitter coast, and when at night
The deep was shaken, and the pent cloud broke
Crashing among the lurid hills of heaven,
And in brief sudden swoonings of the gale
Contentious voices rose from the sand-dunes,
Then to low sobs and murmurs died away,
The fishwives, with their lean and sallow cheeks
Lit by the flickering driftwood’s ruddy glow,
Drew closer to the crane, and under breath
To awestruck maidens told the fearful tale.

The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.
‘T was said that once the Queen reached out her hand—
This was at Richmond in her palace there—
And let it rest on Burleigh’s velvet sleeve,
And spoke—right stately was she in her rouge:
“Prithee, good Master Cecil, tell us now
Was ‘t ever known what ill befell those men,