Collected Works (Vol. I)

62 THE POEM EsME. It is his heart ; see, my hand is all covered with blood. Give mea handkerchief. Here, I will staunch the wound. [She attempts to prevent the bleeding with her handkerchief.| Oh! Percy! [4 pause.] Oh! Percy! PERCY. Iam going away, Esmé. - I shall see you often. When you think of me I shall always be with you. One day you will come to me, Esmé! Kiss me! Your kisses must finish my poem. One day your pen must finish it. ESME. You know I cannot write a line. Oh, how sorry I am for that ! PERCY [Zo VAUGHAN]. Good-bye, my dear, dear friend. Take care of Esmé for me. [ shall watch over her myself, I and God together. She is so frail and white, and she understands. She sees my soul, and IIeaven is always open to her eyes when she looks up, and she is so beautiful. Will it seem Jong, Esmé, till we kiss again beyond the moon there—it is the moon, isn’t it, come to see that Esmé is not too sad about my dying? Be kind to her always, moon, when Iam gone beyond you ! You must finish my poem, Esmé; there is only a little to do. Kiss me the last time! (good-bye, my dear friends. I wish I could take your hands, but I am so weak. Kiss me, Esmé, quickly. I feel the voice of God come hke a shudder in my blood ; T must go to Him. Esmé! Esmé! Esmé! To am so happy ! [Dres. [smi fines herselfpasstonately on o the body, weeping and kisstug the dead face. Crrlain. SCENE IV. The next morning. Esm® in bed asleep. Enter VAUGHAN. VAUGHAN. Poor 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 impos- sible! Esmé! Esmé ! itisa 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 sany, 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. Jerhaps 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 for an hour to put the keystone to his palace that he built of running brooks and trees and buds and the sound of the sea, and all the lights of heaven to window it. [EsMi’s eyes oper.) Esme ! you must wake up and kiss father ! Esmt [ha/f awake]. Iie sang to me all night, not his voice only, but a deeper veice that I understood so well as I never understood, a voice like his poem, only more beautiful even than that, and T can’t remember one word, only that he kissed me all the night; and there was as it were a vapour, an incense-cloud, about me, and I could not see--and I am so happy.