Aldrich Thomas Bailey
Wyndham Towers

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     So still the soul of silence seemed to grieve
     The loss of that sweet laughter. In his tracks
     The man stopped short, and listened. As he leaned
     And craned his neck, and peered into the gloom,
     And would the fabulous hundred eyes were his
     That Argus in the Grecian legend had,
     He saw two figures moving through a drift
     Of moonlight that lay stretched across the lawn:
     A man’s tall shape, a slim shape close at side,
     Her palm in tender fashion pressed to his,
     The woven snood about her shoulders fallen,
     And from the sombre midnight of her hair
     An ardent face out-looking like a star—
     As in a vision saw he this, for straight
     They vanished. Where those silvery shadows were
     Was nothing. Had he dreamed it? Had he gone
     Mad with much thinking on her, and so made
     Ghosts of his own sick fancies? Like a man
     Carved out of alabaster and set up
     Within a woodland, he stood rooted there,
     Glimmering wanly under pendent boughs.
     Spell-bound he stood, in very woeful plight,
     Bewildered; and then presently with shock
     Of rapid pulses hammering at heart,
     As mad besiegers hammer at a gate,
     To life came back, and turned on heel to fly
     From that accursed spot and all that was,
     When once more the girl’s laugh made rich the night,
     And melted, and the silence grieved anew.
     Like lead his feet were, and he needs must halt.
     Close upon this, but further off, a voice
     From somewhere—Echo at her trick again!—
     Took up the rhyme of Sweetheart, sigh no more.
          It was with doubt and trembling
          I whispered in her ear.
          Go, take her answer, bird-on-bough,
          That all the world may hear—
            Sweetheart, sigh no more!

          Sing it, sing it, tawny throat,
          Upon the wayside tree,
          How fair she is, how true she is,
          How dear she is to me—
            Sweetheart sigh no more!

          Sing it, sing it, tawny throat,
          And through the summer long
          The winds among the clover-tops,
          And brooks, for all their silvery stops,
          Shall envy you the song—
            Sweetheart, sigh no more.
       ‘T is said the Malays have an arrow steeped
     In some strange drug whose subtile properties
     Are such that if the point but prick the skin
     Death stays there. Like to that fell cruel shaft
     This slender rhyme was. Through the purple dark
     Straight home it sped, and into Wyndham’s veins
     Its drop of sudden poison did distill.
     Now no sound was, save when a dry twig snapped
     And rustled softly down from branch to branch,
     Or on its pebbly shoals the meagre brook
     Made intermittent murmur. “So, ‘t is he!”
      Thus Wyndham breathing thickly, with his eyes
     Dilating in the darkness, “Darrell—he!
     I set my springe for other game than this;
     Of hare or rabbit dreamed I, not of wolf.
     His frequent visitations have of late
     Perplexed me; now the riddle reads itself.
     A proper man, a very proper man!
     A fellow that burns Trinidado leaf
     And sends smoke through his nostril like a flue!
     A fop, a hanger-on of willing skirts—
     A murrain on him! Would Elizabeth
     In some mad freak had clapped him in the Tower—
     Ay, through the Traitor’s Gate. Would he were dead.
     Within the year what worthy men have died,
     Persons of substance, civic ornaments,
     And here ‘s this gilt court-butterfly on wing!
     O thou most potent lightning in the cloud,
     Prick me this fellow from the face of earth!
     I would the Moors had got him in Algiers
     What time he harried them on land and sea,
     And done their will with scimitar or cord
     Or flame of fagot, and so made an end;
     Or that some shot from petronel or bow
     Had winged him in the folly of his flight.
     Well had it been if the Inquisitors,
     With rack and screw, had laid black claw on him!”
      In days whose chronicle is writ in blood
     The richest ever flowed in English veins
     Some foul mischance in this sort might have been;
     For at dark Fortune’s feet had Darrell flung
     In his youth’s flower a daring gauntlet down.

       A beardless stripling, at that solemn hour
     When, breaking its frail filaments of clay,
     The mother’s spirit soared invisible,
     The younger son, unhoused as well he knew,
     Had taken horse by night to London town,
     With right sore heart and nought else in his scrip
     But boyish hope to footing find at Court—
     A page’s place, belike, with some great lord,
     Or some small lord, that other proving shy
     Of merit that had not yet clipt its shell.
     Day after day, in weather foul or fair,
     With lackeys, hucksters, and the commoner sort,
     At Whitehall and Westminster he stood guard,
     Reading men’s faces with most anxious eye.
     There the lords swarmed, some waspish and some bland,
     But none would pause at plucking of the sleeve
     To hearken to him, and the lad had died
     On London stones for lack of crust to gnaw
     But that he caught the age’s malady,
     The something magical that was in air,
     And made men poets, heroes, demi-gods—
     Made Shakespeare, Rawleigh, Grenvile, Oxenham,
     And set them stars in the fore-front of Time.
     In fine, young Darrell drew of that same air
     A valiant breath, and shipped with Francis Drake,
     Of Tavistock, to sail the Spanish seas
     And teach the heathen manners, with God’s aid;
     And so, among lean Papists and black Moors,
     He, with the din of battle in his ears,
     Struck fortune. Who would tamely bide at home
     At beck and call of some proud swollen lord
     Not worth his biscuit, or at Beauty’s feet
     Sit making sonnets, when was work to do
     Out yonder, sinking Philip’s caravels
     At sea, and then by way of episode
     Setting quick torch¹ to pirate-nests ashore?

     Brave sport to singe the beard o’ the King of Spain!
     Brave sport, but in the end dreamed he of home—
     Of where the trout-brook lisped among the reeds,
     Of great chalk cliffs and leagues of yellow gorse,
     Of peaceful lanes, of London’s roaring streets,
     The crowds, the shops, the pageants in Cheapside,
     And heard the trumpets blaring for the Queen
     When ‘t was the wind that whistled in the shrouds
     Off Cadiz. Ah, and softer dreams he had
     Of an unnamed and sweetest mystery,
     And from the marble of his soul’s desire
     Hewed out the white ideal of his love—
     A new Pygmalion! All things drew him home,
     This mainly. Foot on English earth once more,
     Dear earth of England his propitious fame
     A thorn in none but crooked Envy’s side,
     He went cross-gartered, with a silken rose
     At golden lovelock, diamond brooch at hat
     Looping one side up very gallantly,
     And changed his doublet’s color twice a day.
     Ill fare had given his softer senses edge;
     Good fortune, later, bade him come to dine,
     Mild Spenser’s scholar, Philip Sidney’s friend.
     So took he now his ease; in Devonshire,
     When Town was dull, or he had need at heart
     For sight of Wyndham Towers against the sky;
     But chiefly did he bask him by the Thames,
     For there ‘t was that Young England froze and thawed
     By turns in GLORIANA’S frown and smile.

       As some wild animal that gets a wound,
     And prescience hath of death, will drag itself
     Back to its cavern sullenly to die,
     And would not have heaven’s airs for witnesses,
     So Wyndham, shrinking from the very stars
     And tell-tale places where the moonlight fell,
     Crept through the huddled shadows back to hall,
     And in a lonely room where no light was,
     Save what the moon made at the casement there,
     Sat pondering his hurt, and in the dark
     Gave audience to a host of grievances.
     For never comes reflection, gay or grave,
     But it brings with it comrades of its hue.
     So did he fall to thinking how his day
     Declined, and how his narrow life had run
     Obscurely through an age of great events
     Such as men never saw, nor will again
     Until the globe be riven by God’s fire.
     Others had ventured for the Golden Fleece,
     Knaves of no parts at all, and got renown,
     (By force of circumstance and not desert,)
     While he up there on that rock-bastioned coast
     Had rotted like some old hulk’s skeleton,
     Whose naked and bleached ribs the lazy tide
     Laps day by day, and no man thinks of more.
     Then was jade Fortune in her lavish mood.
     Why had he not for distant Colchis sailed
     And been the Jason of these Argonauts?
     True, some had come to block on Tower Hill,
     Or quittance made in a less noble sort;
     Still they had lived, from life’s high-mantling cup
     Had blown the bead. In such case, if one’s head
     Be of its momentary laurel stripped
     And made a show of stuck on Temple Bar
     Or at the Southwark end of London Bridge,
     What mattered it? At worst man dies but once—
     So far as known. One may not master death,
     But life should be one’s lackey. He had been
     Time’s dupe and bondsman; ever since his birth
     Had walked this planet with his eye oblique,
     Grasped what was worthless, what were most dear missed;
     Missed love and fame, and all the sum of things
     Fame gets a man in England—the Queen’s smile,
     Which means, when she ‘s in humor, abbey-lands,
     Appointments, stars and ribbons for the breast,
     And that sleek adulation that takes shape
     I’ the down-drooping of obsequious lids
     When one ascends a stair or walks the pave.
     Good Lord! but it was excellent to see
     How Expectation in the ante-room
     Crooks back to Greatness passing to the Queen—
     “Kind sir!” “Sweet sir!” “I prithee speed my suit!”
      ‘T was somewhat to be flattered, though by fools,
     For even a fool’s coin hath a kind of ring.
     Yet after all—thus did the grapes turn sour
     To master Fox, in fable—who would care
     To moil and toil to gain a little fame,
     And have each rascal that prowls under heaven
     Stab one for getting it? Had he wished power,
     The thing was in the market-place for sale