| |
| THEY say that she died of a broken heart | |
| (I tell the tale as ’t was told to me); | |
| But her spirit lives, and her soul is part | |
| Of this sad old house by the sea. | |
| |
| Her lover was fickle and fine and French: | 5 |
| It was nearly a hundred years ago | |
| When he sailed away from her arms—poor wench— | |
| With the Admiral Rochambeau. | |
| |
| I marvel much what periwigged phrase | |
| Won the heart of this sentimental Quaker, | 10 |
| At what golden-laced speech of those modish days | |
| She listened—the mischief take her! | |
| |
| But she kept the posies of mignonette | |
| That he gave; and ever as their bloom failed | |
| And faded (though with her tears still wet) | 15 |
| Her youth with their own exhaled. | |
| |
| Till one night, when the sea-fog wrapped a shroud | |
| Round spar and spire and tarn and tree, | |
| Her soul went up on that lifted cloud | |
| From this sad old house by the sea. | 20 |
| |
| And ever since then, when the clock strikes two, | |
| She walks unbidden from room to room, | |
| And the air is filled that she passes through | |
| With a subtle, sad perfume. | |
| |
| The delicate odor of mignonette, | 25 |
| The ghost of a dead and gone bouquet, | |
| Is all that tells of her story; yet | |
| Could she think of a sweeter way? * * * * * | |
| I sit in the sad old house to-night,— | |
| Myself a ghost from a farther sea; | 30 |
| And I trust that this Quaker woman might, | |
| In courtesy, visit me. | |
| |
| For the laugh is fled from porch and lawn, | |
| And the bugle died from the fort on the hill, | |
| And the twitter of girls on the stairs is gone, | 35 |
| And the grand piano is still. | |
| |
| Somewhere in the darkness a clock strikes two; | |
| And there is no sound in the sad old house, | |
| But the long veranda dripping with dew, | |
| And in the wainscot a mouse. | 40 |
| |
| The light of my study-lamp streams out | |
| From the library door, but has gone astray | |
| In the depths of the darkened hall. Small doubt | |
| But the Quakeress knows the way. | |
| |
| Was it the trick of a sense o’erwrought | 45 |
| With outward watching and inward fret? | |
| But I swear that the air just now was fraught | |
| With the odor of mignonette! | |
| |
| I open the window, and seem almost— | |
| So still lies the ocean—to hear the beat | 50 |
| Of its Great Gulf artery off the coast, | |
| And to bask in its tropic heat. | |
| |
| In my neighbor’s windows the gas-lights flare, | |
| As the dancers swing in a waltz of Strauss; | |
| And I wonder now could I fit that air | 55 |
| To the song of this sad old house. | |
| |
| And no odor of mignonette there is | |
| But the breath of morn on the dewy lawn; | |
| And mayhap from causes as slight as this | |
| The quaint old legend is born. | 60 |
| |
| But the soul of that subtle, sad perfume, | |
| As the spiced embalmings, they say, outlast | |
| The mummy laid in his rocky tomb, | |
| Awakens my buried past. | |
| |
| And I think of the passion that shook my youth, | 65 |
| Of its aimless loves and its idle pains, | |
| And am thankful now for the certain truth | |
| That only the sweet remains. | |
| |
| And I hear no rustle of stiff brocade, | |
| And I see no face at my library door; | 70 |
| For now that the ghosts of my heart are laid, | |
| She is viewless forevermore. | |
| |
| But whether she came as a faint perfume, | |
| Or whether a spirit in stole of white, | |
| I feel, as I pass from the darkened room, | 75 |
| She has been with my soul to-night! | |
| |
