As mad besiegers hammer at a gate, To life came back, and turned on heel to fly From that accursed spot and all that was, When once more the girl's laugh made rich the night, And melted, and the silence grieved anew. Like lead his feet were, and he needs must halt. Close upon this, but further off, a voice From somewhere--Echo at her trick again!-- Took up the rhyme of Sweetheart, sigh no more. It was with doubt and trembling I whispered in her ear. Go, take her answer, bird-on-bough, That all the world may hear-- Sweetheart, sigh no more! Sing it, sing it, tawny throat, Upon the wayside tree, How fair she is, how true she is, How dear she is to me-- Sweetheart sigh no more! Sing it, sing it, tawny throat, And through the summer long The winds among the clover-tops, And brooks, for all their silvery stops, Shall envy you the song-- Sweetheart, sigh no more. 'T is said the Malays have an arrow steeped In some strange drug whose subtile properties Are such that if the point but prick the skin Death stays there. Like to that fell cruel shaft This slender rhyme was. Through the purple dark Straight home it sped, and into Wyndham's veins Its drop of sudden poison did distill. Now no sound was, save when a dry twig snapped And rustled softly down from branch to branch, Or on its pebbly shoals the meagre brook Made intermittent murmur. “So, 't is he!” Thus Wyndham breathing thickly, with his eyes Dilating in the darkness, “Darrell--he! I set my springe for other game than this; Of hare or rabbit dreamed I, not of wolf. His frequent visitations have of late Perplexed me; now the riddle reads itself. A proper man, a very proper man! A fellow that burns Trinidado leaf And sends smoke through his nostril like a flue! A fop, a hanger-on of willing skirts-- A murrain on him! Would Elizabeth In some mad freak had clapped him in the Tower-- Ay, through the Traitor's Gate. Would he were dead. Within the year what worthy men have died, Persons of substance, civic ornaments, And here 's this gilt court-butterfly on wing! O thou most potent lightning in the cloud, Prick me this fellow from the face of earth! I would the Moors had got him in Algiers What time he harried them on land and sea, And done their will with scimitar or cord Or flame of fagot, and so made an end; Or that some shot from petronel or bow Had winged him in the folly of his flight. Well had it been if the Inquisitors, With rack and screw, had laid black claw on him!” In days whose chronicle is writ in blood The richest ever flowed in English veins