No love lost; a romance of travel

■

Cx. P. Putnam fc Son N.l

NO LOVE LOST

A ROMANCE OF TRAVEL

BY

W. D. HOWELLS

AUTHOR OF "VENETIAN LIFE," ETC.

NEW YORK
G. P. PUTNAM & SON 661 BROADWAY

1869

PS

Entered according to Aft of Congress, in the year 1869, by

W. D. HOWELLS,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the
Southern District of New York.

The New York Printing Company,

81, 83, and 85 Centre Street,

New York.

No Love l_

ost

A ROMANCE OF TRAVEL

Bertha — Writing from Venice.

I.

f~\ N your heart I feign myself fallen —

^— * ah, heavier burden,

Darling, of sorrow and pain than ever

shall rest there ! — I take you
Into these friendless arms of mine, that you

cannot escape me —

6 No Love Lost.

Closer and closer I fold you and tell you

all, and you listen
Just as you used at home, and you let my

sobs and my silence
Speak, when the words will not come — and

you understand and forgive me.
— Ah ! no, no ! but I write, with the

wretched bravado of distance,
What you must read unmoved by the pity

too far for entreaty.

II.

Well, I could never have loved him, but
when he sought me and asked me, —
When to the men that offered their lives,
the love of a woman

No Love Lost. 7

Seemed so easy to give ! — I promised the

love that he asked me,
Sent him to war with my kiss on his lips,

and thought him my hero.
Afterward came the doubt, and out of

long question, self-knowledge ;
Came that great defeat, and the heart of

the nation was withered, —
Mine leaped high with the awful relief

won of death. But the horror,
Then, of the crime that was wrought in

that guilty moment of rapture, —
Guilty as if my will had winged the bullet

that struck him —
Clung to me day and night, and dreaming

I saw him forever,
Looking through battle-smoke with sor-
rowful eyes of upbraiding,

8 No Love Lost.

Or, in the moonlight lying gray, or dimly

approaching,
Holding toward me his arms, that still

held nearer and nearer,
Folded about me at last . . . and I would

I had died in the fever! —
Better then than now, and better than ever

hereafter !

III.

Weary as some illusion of fever to me
was the ocean —

Storm-swept, scourged with bitter rains, and
wandering always

Onward from sky to sky with endless pro-
cessions of surges,

No Love Lost. 9

Knowing not life nor death, but since the

light was, the first day,
Only enduring unrest till the darkness pos-
sess it, the last day.
Over its desolate depths we voyaged away

from all living :
All the world behind us waned into vaguest

remoteness ;
Names, and faces, and scenes recurred like

that broken remembrance
Of the anterior, bodiless life of the spirit

— the trouble
Of a bewildered brain, or the touch of

the Hand that created ; —
And when the ocean ceased at last like

a faded illusion,
Europe itself seemed only a vision of eld

and of sadness.

io No Love Lost.

Naught but the dark in my soul remained

to me constant and real,
Growing and taking the thoughts bereft of

happier uses,
Blotting all sense of lapse from the days

that with swift iteration
Were and were not. They fable the bright

days the fleetest :
These that had nothing to give, that had

nothing to bring or to promise,
Went as one day alone. For me was no

alternation
Save from my dull despair to wild and

reckless rebellion,
When the regret for my sin was turned

to ruthless self-pity —
When I hated him whose love had made

me its victim,

No Love Lost. 1 1

Through his faith and my falsehood yet

claiming me. Then I was smitten
With so great remorse, such grief for him,

and compassion,
That, if he could have come back to

me, I had welcomed and loved him
More than man ever was loved. Alas, for

me that another
Holds his place in my heart evermore !

Alas, that I listened
When the words, whose daring lured my

spirit and lulled it,
Seemed to take my blame away with my

will of resistance!
Do not make haste to condemn me : my

will was a woman's
Fain to be broken by love : yet unto the

last I endeavored

1 2 No Love Lost.

What I could to be faithful still to the

past and my penance ;
And as we stood that night in the old

Roman garden together —
By the fountain whose passionate tears but

now had implored me
In his pleading voice — and he waited my

answer, I told him
All that had been before of delusion and

guilt, and conjured him
Not to darken his fate with me. The

costly endeavor
Only was subtler betrayal. O me, from

the pang of confession,
Sprang what strange delight, as I tore

from its lurking that horror —
Brooded upon so long — with the hope

that at last I might see it

No Love Lost. 13

Through his eyes, unblurred by the tears
that disordered my vision !

Oh, with what rapturous triumph I hum-
bled my spirit before him,

That he might lift me and soothe me,
and make that dreary remembrance,

All this confused present seem only some
sickness of fancy,

Only a morbid folly, no certain and actual
trouble !

If from that refuge I fled with words of
too feeble denial —

Bade him hate me, with sobs that en-
treated his tenderest pity,

Moved mute lips and left the meaningless
farewell unuttered —

She that never has loved, alone can wholly
condemn me.

14 No Love Lost.

IV.

How could he other than follow ? My

heart had bidden him follow,
Nor had my lips forbidden ; and Rome

yet glimmered behind me,
When my soul yearned towards his from

the sudden forlornness of absence.
Everywhere his face looked from vanishing

glimpses of faces,
Everywhere his voice reached my senses

in fugitive cadence.
Sick, through the storied cities, with wretched

hopes, and upbraidings
Of my own heart for its hopes, I went

from wonder to wonder,
Blind to them all, or only beholding them

wronged and related,

No Love Lost. 1 5

Through some trick of wayward thought,
to myself and my trouble.

Not surprise nor regret, but a fierce, pre-
cipitate gladness

Sent the blood to my throbbing heart
when I found him in Venice.

" Waiting for you," he whispered ; " you
would so." I answered him nothing.

V.

Father, whose humor grows more silent

and ever more absent,
(Changed in all but love for me since the

death of my mother),
Willing to see me contented at last, and

trusting us wholly,

1 6 No Love Lost.

Left us together alone in our world of
love and of beauty.

So, by noon and by night, we two have
wandered in Venice,

Where the beautiful lives in vivid and
constant caprices,

Yet, where the charm is so perfect that
nothing fantastic surprises

More than in dreams, and one's life with
the life of the city is blended

In a luxurious calm, and the tumult with-
out and beyond it

Seems but the emptiest fable of vain as-
piration and labor.

Yes, from all that makes this Venice
sole among cities,

No Love Lost. 17

Peerless forever — the still lagoons that
sleep in the sunlight,

Lulled by their island-bells — the night's
mysterious waters

Lit through their shadowy depths by stems
of splendor that blossom

Into the lamps that float, like flamy lo-
tuses, over —

Narrow and secret canals, that dimly gleam-
ing and glooming

Under palace-walls and numberless arches
of bridges,

List no sound but the dip of the gon-
dolier's oar and his warning

Cried from corner to corner — the sad, su-
perb Canal azzo

Mirroring marvellous grandeur and beauty,

and dreaming of glory

2

1 8 No Love Lost.

Out of the empty homes of her lords

departed — the footways
Wandering sunless between the walls of

the houses, and stealing
Glimpses, through rusted cancelli, of lurk-
ing greenness of gardens,
Wild-grown flowers and broken statues and

mouldering frescoes —
Thoroughfares filled with traffic, and throngs

ever ebbing and flowing
To and from the heart of the city, whose

pride and devotion,
Lifting hiffh the bells of St. Mark's like

prayers unto heaven,
Stretch a marble embrace of palaces tow'rd

the cathedral
Orient, gorgeous, and flushed with color

and light, like the morning! —

.-.i-sCS^O

No Love Lost. 19

From the lingering waste that is not yet

ruin in Venice,
And her phantasmal show through all of

being and doing —
Came a strange joy to us, untouched by

regret for the idle
Days without yesterdays that died into

nights without morrows.
Here, in our paradise of love we reigned,

new-created,
As in the youth of the world, in the days

before evil and conscience.
Ah ! in our fair, lost world was neither

fearing nor doubting,
Neither the sickness of old remorse, nor

the gloom of foreboding,
Only the glad surrender of all individual

being

20 No Love Lost.

Unto him whom I loved, and in whose
tender possession,

Fate-free, my soul reposed from its an-
guish.

— Of these things I write you
As of another's experience — part of my

own they no longer
Seem to me now through the doom that

darkens the past like the future.

VI.

Golden the sunset gleamed, above the
city behind us,
Out of a city of clouds as fairy and lovely
as Venice,

No Love Lost. 21

While we looked at the fishing-sails of

purple and yellow
Far on the rim of the sea, whose light

and musical surges
Broke along the sands with a faint, re-
iterant sadness.
But, when the sails had darkened into

black wings, through the twilight
Sweeping away into night — past the broken

tombs of the Hebrews
Homeward we sauntered slowly, through

dew-sweet, blossomy alleys ;
So drew near the boat by errant and

careless approaches,
Entered, and left with indolent pulses the

Lido behind us.

22 No Love Lost.

All the sunset had paled, and the cam-
panili of Venice

Rose like the masts of a mighty fleet
moored there in the water.

Lights flashed furtively to and fro through
the deepening twilight.

Massed in one thick shade lay the Gar-
dens ; the numberless islands

Lay like shadows upon the lagoons. And
on us as we loitered

By their enchanted coasts, a spell of in-
effable sweetness

Fell and made us at one with them ; and
silent and blissful

Shadows we seemed that drifted on through
a being of shadow,

Vague, indistinct to ourselves, unbounded
by hope or remembrance.

No Love Lost. 23

Yet, we knew the beautiful night as it

grew from the evening : —
Far beneath us and far above us the

vault of the heavens
Glittered and darkened ; and now the moon

that had haunted the daylight
Thin and pallid, dimmed the stars with her

fulness of splendor,
And over all the lagoons fell the silvery

rain of the moonbeams
As in the chanson the young girls sang

while their gondolas passed us —
Sang in the joy of love, or youth's desire

of loving.
Balmy night of the South ! Oh perfect

nis^ht of the Summer !
Night of the distant dark, of the near

and tender effulgence ! —

24 No Love Lost.

How from my despair are thy peace and

loveliness frightened !
For, while our boat lay there at the will

of the light undulations,
Idle as if our mood imbued and controlled

it, yet ever
Seeming to bear us on athwart those

shining expanses
Out to shining seas beyond pursuit or

returning —
There, while we lingered, and lingered, and

would not break from our rapture,
Down the mirrored night another gondola

drifted
Nearer and slowly nearer our own, and

moonlighted faces
Stared. And that sweet trance grew a

rigid and dreadful possession,

No Love Lost. 25

Which, if no dream indeed, yet mocked

with such semblance of dreaming,
That, as it happens in dreams, when a

dear face, stooping to kiss us,
Takes, ere the lips have touched, some

malign and horrible aspect,
His face faded away, and the face of the

Dead — of that other —
Flashed on mine, and writhing, through

every change of emotion, —
Wild amaze and scorn, accusation and

pitiless mocking, —
Vanished into the swoon whose blackness

encompassed and hid me. .

Philip — To Bei'tha.

AM not sure, I own, that if first I

-*- had seen my delusion

When I saw you, last night, I should be
so ready to give you

Now your promises back, and hold my-
self nothing above you,

That it is mine to offer a freedom you
never could ask for.

Yet, believe me, indeed, from no bitter
heart I release you :

You are as free of me now, as though
I had died in the battle,

No Love Lost. 27

Or as I never had lived. Nay, if it is

mine to forgive you,
Go without share of the blame that could

hardly be all upon your side.

Ghosts are not sensitive things ; yet,

after my death in the papers,
Sometimes a harrowing doubt assailed this

impalpable essence :
Had I done so well to plead my cause

at that moment,
When your consent must be yielded less

to the lover than soldier?
'' Not so well," I was answered by that

ethereal conscience
Ghosts have about them, "and not so

nobly or wisely as might be."

28 No Love Lost.

— Truly, I loved you, then, as now I love
you no longer.

I was a prisoner then, and this doubt

in the languor of sickness
Came ; and it clung to my convalescence,

and grew to the purpose,
After my days of captivity ended, to seek

you and solve it,
And, if I haply had erred, to undo the

wrong, and release you.

Well, you have solved me the doubt.
I dare to trust that you wept me,
Just a little, at first, when you heard of
me dead in the battle ?

No Love Lost. 29

For, we were plighted, you know, and
even in this saintly humor,

I would scarce like to believe that my
loss had merely relieved you.

Yet, I say, it was prudent and well not
to wait for my coming

Back from the dead. If it may be I
sometimes had cherished the fancy

That I had won some right to the palm
with the pang of the martyr,

Fondly intended, perhaps, some splendor
of self-abnegation —

Doubtless all that was a folly which mer-
ciful chances have spared me.

No, I am far from complaining that Cir-
cumstance coolly has ordered

Matters of tragic fate in such a common-
place fashion.

3°

No Love Lost.

How do I know, indeed, that the easiest
isn't the best way ?

Friendly adieux end this note, and our
little comedy with it.

4T=

Fanny — To Clara.

I.

VTES, I promised to write, but how

*- shall I write to you, darling?
Venice we reached last Monday, wild for

canals and for color,
Palaces, prisons, lagoons, and gondolas,

bravoes, and moonlight,
All the mysterious, dreadful, beautiful

things in existence.
Fred had joined us at Naples, insuff'rably

knowing and travelled,
Wise in the prices of things and great

at tempestuous bargains,

32 No Love Lost.

Rich in the costly nothing our youthful

travellers buy here,
At a prodigious outlay, of time and money

and trouble ;
Utter confusion of facts, and talking the

wildest of pictures,
Pyramids, battle-fields, bills, and examina-
tions of luggage,
Passports, policemen, porters, and how he

got through his tobacco —
Ignorant, handsome, full-bearded, brown,

and good-natured as ever:
Annie thinks him perfect, and I well

enough for a brother.
Also, a friend of Fred's came with us

from Naples to Venice;
And, altogether, I think, we are rather

agreeable people,

No Love Lost. 33

For we've been taking our pleasure at all
times in perfect good-humor, —

Which is an excellent thing that you'll
understand when you've travelled,

Seen Recreation dead-beat and cross, and
learnt what a burden

Frescos, for instance, can be, and, in gen-
eral, what an affliction

Life is apt to become among the antiques
and old masters.

Venice we've thoroughly done, and it's
perfectly true of the pictures —

Titians and Tintorettos, and Palmas and
Paul Veroneses ;

Neither are gondolas fictions, but verities,
hearse-like and swan-like,

34 No Love Lost.

Quite as the heart could wish. And one

finds, to one's infinite comfort,
Venice just as unique as one's fondest

visions have made it:
Palaces and mosquitoes rise from the

water together,
And, in the city's streets, the salt-sea is

ebbing and flowing
Several inches or more.

— Ah ! let me not wrong thee, O

Venice !
Fairest, forlorn est, and saddest of all the

cities, and dearest !
Dear, for my heart has won here deep

peace from cruel confusion ;
And in this lucent air, whose night is but

tenderer noon-day,

No Love Lost. 35

Fear is forever dead, and hope has put on
the immortal !

— There ! and you need not laugh. I'm
coming to something directly.

One thing: I've bought you a chain of
the famous fabric of Venice —

Something peculiar and quaint, and of
such a delicate texture

That you must wear it embroidered upon
a riband of velvet,

If you would have the effect of its exqui-
site fineness and beauty.

" Isn't it very frail ? " I asked of the work-
man who made it.

"Strong enough, if you will, to bind a
lover, signora," —

With an expensive smile. 'Twas bought
near the Bridge of Rialto.

36 No Love Lost.

(Shylock, you know.) In our shopping,

Aunt May and Fred do the talking:
Fred begins always in French, with the

most delicious effront'ry,
Only to end in profoundest humiliation

and English.
Aunt, however, scorns to speak any tongue

but Italian :
" Quanto per these ones here ? " and

" What did you say was the prezzo ? ,:
" Ah ! troppo caro ! Too much ! No, no !

Don't I tell you it's troppo ? "
All the while insists that the gondolieri

shall show us
What she calls Titian's palazzo, and pines

for the house of Othello.
Annie, the dear little goose, believes in

Fred and her mother

No Love Lost. 37

With an enchanting abandon. She doesn't
at all understand them,

But she has some twilight views of their
cleverness. Father is quiet,

Now and then ventures some French when
he fancies that nobody hears him,

In an aside to the valet-de-place — I never
detect him —

Buys things for mother and me with a
quite supernatural sweetness,

Tolerates all Fred's airs, and is indispen-
sably pleasant.

II.

Prattling on of these things, which I
think cannot interest deeply,

38 No Love Lost.

So I hold back in my heart its dear and

wonderful secret
(Which I must tell you at last, however

I falter to tell you),
Fain to keep it all my own for a little

while longer, —
Doubting but it shall lose some part of

its strangeness and sweetness,
Shared with another, and fearful that even

you may not find it
Just the marvel that I do — and thus turn

our friendship to hatred.

Sometimes it seems to me that this
love, which I feel is eternal,
Must have begun with my life, and that
only an absence was ended

No Love Lost. 39

When we met and knew in our souls that

we loved one another.
For, from the first was no doubt. The

earliest hints of the passion,
Whispered to girlhood's tremulous dream,

may be mixed with misgiving,
But, when the very love comes, it bears

no vagueness of meaning ;
Touched by its truth (too fine to be felt

by the ignorant senses,
Knowing but looks and utterance), soul

unto soul makes confession,
Silence to silence speaks. And I think

that this subtile assurance,
Yet unconfirmed from without, is even

sweeter and dearer
Than the perfected bliss that comes when

the words have been spoken.

4<d No Love Lost.

— Not that I'd have them unsaid, now!
But, 'twas delicious to ponder

All the miracle over, and clasp it, and
keep it, and hide it.

While I beheld him, you know, with
looks of indifferent languor,

Talking of other things — and felt the di-
vine contradiction

Trouble my heart below!

And yet, if no doubt touched
our passion,
Do not believe for that, our love has been

wholly unclouded.
All best things are ours when pain and

patience have won them :
Peace itself would mean nothing but for
the strife that preceded —

No Love Lost. 41

Triumph of love is greatest, when peril
of love has been sorest.

(That's to say, I dare say. I'm only re-
peating what he said.)

Well, then, of all wretched things in

the world, a mystery, Clara,
Lurked in this life dear to mine, and

hopelessly held us asunder
When we drew nearest together, and all

but his speech said, " I love you."
Fred had known him at college, and then

had found him at Naples,
After several years, — and called him a

capital fellow.
Thus far his knowledge went, and beyond

this began to run shallow

42 No Love Lost.

Over troubled ways, and to break into

brilliant conjecture,
Harder by far to endure than the other's

reticent absence —
Absence wherein at times he seemed to

walk like one troubled
By an uneasy dream, whose spell is not

broken with waking,
And it returns all day with a vivid and

sudden recurrence,
As a remembered event. Of the past that

was closest the present,
This we knew from himself: He went at

the earliest summons,
When the Rebellion began, and falling,

terribly wounded,
Into the enemy's hands, after ages of

sickness and prison,

No Love Lost. 43

Made his escape at last; and, returning,
found all his virtues

Grown out of recognition and shining in
posthumous splendor, —

Found all changed and estranged, and, he
fancied, more wonder than welcome.

So, somewhat heavy of heart, and dis-
abled for war, he had wandered

Hither to Europe for perfecter peace.
Abruptly his silence,

Full of suggestion and sadness, made here
a chasm between us.

But we spanned the chasm with conver-
sational bridges,

Else talked all around it, and feigned an
ignorance of it,

With that absurd pretence, which is always
so painful or comic,

44 No Love Lost.

Just as you happen to make it or see
it.

In spite of our fictions,
Severed from his by that silence, my

heart grew ever more anxious,
Till last night when together we sat in

Piazza San Marco
(Then, when the morrow must bring us

parting — forever, it might be),
Taking our ices al fresco. Some stroll-
ing minstrels were singing
Airs from the Trovatore. I noted with

painful observance,
With the unwilling minuteness, at such

times absolute torture,
All that brilliant scene, for which I cared

nothing, before me :

No Love Lost. 45

Dark-eyed Venetian leoni regarding the
forestieri

With those compassionate looks of gentle
and curious wonder

Home-keeping Italy's nations bend on the
voyaging races,

Taciturn, indolent, sad, as their beautiful
city itself is;

Groups of remotest English — not just the
traditional English

(Lavish Milor is no more, and your trav-
elling Briton is frugal),

English, though, after all, with the Channel
always between them,

Islanded in themselves, and the Conti-
nent's sociable races :

Country-people of ours — the New World's
confident children,

46 No Love Lost.

Proud of America always, and even vain

of the Troubles
As of disaster laid out on a scale une-
qualled in Europe ;
Polyglot Russians that spoke all languages

better than natives ;
White-coated Austrian officers, anglicised

Austrian dandies,
Gorgeous Levantine figures of Greek, ai-d

Turk, and Albanian —
These, and the throngs that moved

through the long arcades and Piazza,
Shone on by numberless lamps that flamed

round the perfect Piazza,
Jewel-like set in the splendid frame of

this beautiful picture,
Full of such motley life, and so altogether

Venetian.

No Love Lost. 47

Then, we rose and walked where the
lamps were blanched by the moonlight

Flooding the Piazzetta with splendor, and
throwing in shadow.

All the facade of Saint Mark's, with its
pillars, and horses, and arches;

But the sculptured frondage, that blossoms
over the arches

Into the forms of saints, was touched
with tenderest lucence,

And the angel that stands on the crest
of the vast campanile,

Bathed his golden vans in the liquid light
of the moonbeams.

Black rose the granite pillars that lift the
Saint and the Lion ;

Black sank the island campanili from dis-
tance to distance ;

48 No Love Lost.

Over the charmed scene there brooded a

presence of music,
Subtler than sound, and felt, unheard, in

the depth of the spirit.

How can I gather and show you the
airy threads of enchantment

Woven that night round my life and for-
ever wrought into my being,

As in our boat we glided away from the
glittering city ?

Dull at heart I felt, and I looked at the
lights in the water,

Blurring their brilliance with tears, while
the tresses of eddying seaweed

Whirled in the ebbing tide, like the tresses
of sea-maidens drifting

No Love Lost. 49

Seaward from palace-haunts, in moonshine
glistened and darkened.

Sad and vague were my thoughts, and

full of fear was the silence,
And, when he turned to speak at last, I

trembled to hear him,
Feeling he now must speak of his love,

and his life and its secret, —
Now that the narrowing chances had left

but that cruel conclusion,
Else the life-long ache of a love and a

trouble unuttered.
Better, my feebleness pleaded, the dreariest

doubt that had vexed me,

Than my life left nothing, not even a

doubt to console it ;

4

50 No Love Lost.

But, while I trembled and listened, his
broken words crumbled to silence,

And, as though some touch of fate had
thrilled him with warning,

Suddenly from me he turned. Our gon-
dola slipped from the shadow

Under a ship lying near, and glided into
the moonlight,

Where, in its brightest lustre, another gon-
dola rested :

/ saw two lovers there, and he, in the
face of the woman,

Saw what has made him mine, my own
beloved, forever !

Mine ! — but through what tribulation, and
awful confusion of spirit!

Tears that I think of with smiles, and
sighs I remember with laughter,

No Love Lost. 51

Agonies full of absurdity, keen, ridiculous

anguish,
Ending in depths of blissful shame, and

heavenly transports !

III.

White, and estranged as a man who

has looked on a spectre, he mutely
Sank to the place at my side, nor while

we returned to the city
Uttered a word of explaining, or comment,

or comfort, but only,
With his good-night, incoherently craved

my forgiveness and patience,
Parted, and left me to spend the night

in hysterical vigils,

52 No Love Lost.

Tending to Annie's supreme dismay, and

postponing our journey
One day longer at least; for I went to

bed in the morning,
Firmly rejecting the pity of friends, and

the pleasures of travel,
Fixed in a dreadful purpose never to get

any better.

Later, however, I rallied, when Fred,
with a maddening prologue

Touching the cause of my sickness, in-
cluding his fever at Jaffa,

Told me that some one was waiting; and
could he see me a moment?

See me? Certainly not Or, — yes. But
why did he want to ?

No Love Lost. 53

So, in the dishabille of a morning-gown
and an arm-chair,

Languid, with eloquent wanness of eye
and of cheek, I received him —

Willing to touch and reproach, and half-
melted myself by my pathos,

Which, with a reprobate joy, I wholly
forgot the next instant,

As, with electric words, few, swift, and
vivid, he brought me,

Through a brief tempest of tears, to this
heaven of sunshine and sweetness.

Yes, he had looked on a ghost — the
phantom of love that was perished ! —
When, last night, he beheld the scene of
which I have told you.

54 No Love Lost.

For to the woman he saw there, his troth
had been solemnly plighted

Ere he went to the war. His return from
the dead found her absent

In the belief of his death; and hitherto
Europe he followed, —

Followed to seek her, and keep, if she
would, the promise between them,

Or, were a haunting doubt confirmed, to
break it and free her.

Then, at Naples we met, and the love
that before he was conscious,

Turned his life toward mine, laid tortur-
ing stress to the purpose

Whither it drove him forever, and whence
forever it swerved him.

How could he tell me his love, with this
terrible burden upon him?

No Love Lost.

55

How could he linger near me, and still

withhold the avowal ?
And what ruin were that, if the other

were doubted unjustly,
And should prove fatally true! With

shame, he confessed he had faltered,
Clinging to guilty delays, and to hopes

that were bitter with treason,
Up to the eve of our parting. And then

the last anguish was spared him.
Her love for him was dead. But the

heart that leaped in his bosom
With a great, dumb throb of joy and

wonder and doubting,
Still must yield to the spell of his si-
lencing will till that phantom
Proved an actual ghost by common-place

tests of the daylight,

56 No Love Lost.

Such as speech with the lady's father.

And now, could I pardon —
Nay, did I think I could love him ? I

sobbingly answered, I thought so.
And we are all of us going to Lago di

Como to-morrow,
With an ulterior view at the first conve-
nient Legation.

Patientest darling, good-by! Poor Fred,
whose sense of what's proper

Never was touched till now, is shocked
at my glad self-betrayals,

And I am pointed out as an awful ex-
ample to Annie,

Figuring all she must never be. But, O,
if he loves me ! —

No Love Lost. 57

POSTSCRIPT.

Since, he has shown me a letter in
which he absolves and forgives her

(Philip, of course, not Fred. And the
other, of course, and not Annie).

Don't you think him generous, noble, un-
selfish, heroic ?

L' Envoy. — Claras Comment.

Well, I'm glad, I am sure, if Fanny
supposes she's happy.
I've no doubt her lover is good and no-
ble — as men go.

58

No Love Lost

But, as regards his release of a woman

who'd wholly forgot him,
And whom he loved no longer, for one

whom he loves, and who loves him,
/ don't exactly see where the heroism

commences.

— "^^V^vr-KtSW^ *v_ .

PS

2031

N6

Howell s, William Dean
No love lost

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