A LAST CONFESSION.
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Regno Lombardo'Vencto, 1848.) Our Lombard country-girls along the coastWear daggers in their garters : for they knowThat they might hate another girl to deathOr meet a German lover. Such a knifeI bought her, with a hilt of horn and pearL Father, you cannot know of all my thoughtsThat day in going to meet her, — that last dayFor the last time, she said ;^of all the loveAnd all the hopeless hope that she might changeAnd go back with me. Ah I and everywhere^At places we both knew along the road,Some fresh shape of herself as once she wasGrew present at my side ; until it seemed —So dose they gathered round me — they would allBe with me when I reached the spot at last.To plead my cause with her against herselfSo changed. O Father, if you knew all thisYou cannot know, then you would know too. Father.And only then, if God can pardon me.What can be told FU tell, if you will hear. I passed a village-fair upon my road.And thought, being empty-handed, I would takeSome little present : such might prove, I said,Either a pledge between us, or (God help me I)A parting gift And there it was I boughtThe knife I spoke of, such as women wear. A LAST CONFESSION. 19 That day, some three hours afterwards, I foundFor certain, it must be a parting gift.And, standing silent now at last, I lookedInto her scornful face ; and heard the seaStill trying hard to din into my earsSome speech it knew which still might change her heart.If only it could make me understand.One moment thus. Another, and her faceSeemed further off than the last line of sea,So that I thought, if now she were to speakI could not hear her. Then again I knewAll, as we stood together on the sandAt Iglio, in the first thin shade o' the hills. "Take it," I said, and held it out to her.While the hilt glanced within my trembling hold ;" Take it and keep it for my sake," I said.Her neck unbent not, neither did her eyesMove, nor her foot left beating of the sand ;Only she put it by from her and laughed. Father, you hear my speech and not her laugh ;But God heard that Will God remember all ? It was another laugh than the sweet soundWhich rose from her sweet childish heart, that dayEleven years before, when first I found herAlone upon the hill-side ; and her curlsShook down in the warm grass as she looked upOut of her curls in my eyes bent to hers.She might have served a painter to pourtrayThat heavenly child which in the latter daysShall walk between the lion and the lamb.I had been for nights in hiding, worn and sickAnd hardly fed ; and so her words at firstSeemed fitful like the talking of the treesAnd voices in the air that knew my name.And I remember that I sat me downUpon the slope with her, and thought the world to A LAST CONFESSION. Must be all over or had never been,
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