The Poem

116 MYSTERIES: SCENE IV. The next morning. Esméin bed asleep. Enter Vaughan. VAUGHAN. OOR child, poor child, how are you? You have not slept, I know. Why, she is still asleep! Hush! How calmly and regularly she breathes! How fresh she looks! How she smiles! It is wonderful! It is impossible! Esmé! Esmé! it is a pity you cannot always sleep so, and never wake up to the cruel sorrow of yesterday. Ah me! When we all thought to be so happy. And in a month he would have married her: in a day he would have finished the poem. What a wonderful poem it was! One could hear, above the angels that sang, the voice of God in that awful music that made his lines quiver and shimmer like live coals. And the end was to have been so perfect: there was on the last passage of his work a hush, a silence almost as if the world—his world—awaited the voice of some great one. And now the silence is not broken. Perhaps men were not ready for those final chords. Perhaps to hear them would be to pass where he has passed! But oh! the pity! To leave his greatest task undone! To be stricken down in the last charge, a good soldier to the end! Would God he could come back only