“I knew them well, all three,” the old man said; “He was an unused force, and she a child. She caught him with her beauty, being a maid. The thought that she had trapped him drove him wild. He would not work with others, could not rest, And nothing here could use him or engage him; Yet here he stayed, with devils in his breast, To blast the woman who had dared to cage him. Then, when the scholar came, it made the three: She turned to him, and he, he turned to her. They both were saints: elopement could not be; So here they stayed, and passion plied the spur. Then the men fought, and later she was found In that green pool beyond the headland, drowned. “They carried her drowned body up the grass Here to the house; they laid it on the bed (This very bed, where I have slept, it was). The scholar begged to see her, being dead. The husband walked downstairs, to see him there Begging to see her as one asks an alms. He spat at him and cut his cheek-bone bare. ‘There’s pay,’ he said, ‘my poet, for your psalms.’ And then they fought together at the door, Biting each other, like two dogs, while she Lay dead, poor woman, dripping on the floor Out of her hair the death-drops of the sea. Later, they fought whenever they might meet, In church, or in the fields, or in the street.” Up on the hill another aged man Remembered them. He said: “They were afraid; They feared to end the passions they began. They held the cards, and yet they never played. He should have broken from her at all cost; She should have loved her lover and gone free. They all held winning cards, and yet they lost; So two were wrecked and one drowned in the sea. Some harshness or some law, or else some fear Stifled their souls; God help us! when we know Certainly, certain things, the way is clear. And yet they paid, and one respects them so. Perhaps they were too fine. I know not, I. Men must have mercy, being ripe to die.” So this old house of mourning was the stage (This house and those green fields) for all that woe. There are her books, her writing on the page; In those choked beds she made the flowers grow. Most desolate it is, the rain is pouring, The trees all toss and drip and scatter evil, The floods are out, the waterfall is roaring, The bar is mad with many a leaping devil. And in this house the wind goes whining wild, The door blows open, till I think to see That delicate sweet woman, like a child, Standing with great dark stag’s eyes watching me; Watching as though her sorrow might make plain (Had I but wit) the meaning of such pain.