Thomas Hardy - The Flirt's Tragedy lyrics

Here alone by the logs in my chamber,   Deserted, decrepit - Spent flames limning ghosts on the wainscot   Of friends I once knew - My drama and hers begins weirdly   Its dumb re-enactment, Each scene, sigh, and circumstance pa**ing   In spectral review. - Wealth was mine beyond wish when I met her -   The pride of the lowland - Embowered in Tintinhull Valley   By laurel and yew; And love lit my soul, notwithstanding   My features' ill favour, Too obvious beside her perfections   Of line and of hue. But it pleased her to play on my pa**ion,   And whet me to pleadings That won from her mirthful negations   And scornings undue. Then I fled her disdains and derisions   To cities of pleasure, And made me the crony of idlers   In every purlieu. Of those who lent ear to my story,   A needy Adonis Gave hint how to grizzle her garden   From roses to rue, Could his price but be paid for so purging   My scorner of scornings: Thus tempted, the lust to avenge me   Germed inly and grew. I clothed him in sumptuous apparel,   Consigned to him coursers, Meet equipage, liveried attendants   In full retinue. So dowered, with letters of credit   He wayfared to England, And spied out the manor she goddessed,   And handy thereto, Set to hire him a tenantless mansion   As coign-stone of vantage For testing what gross adulation   Of beauty could do. He laboured through mornings and evens,   On new moons and sabbaths, By wiles to enmesh her attention   In park, path, and pew; And having afar played upon her,   Advanced his lines nearer, And boldly outleaping conventions,   Bent briskly to woo. His gay godlike face, his rare seeming   Anon worked to win her, And later, at noontides and night-tides   They held rendezvous. His tarriance full spent, he departed   And met me in Venice, And lines from her told that my jilter   Was stooping to sue. Not long could be further concealment,   She pled to him humbly: "By our love and our sin, O protect me;   I fly unto you!" A mighty remorse overgat me,   I heard her low anguish, And there in the gloom of the calle   My steel ran him through. A swift push engulphed his hot carrion   Within the can*l there - That still street of waters dividing   The city in two. - I wandered awhile all unable   To smother my torment, My brain racked by yells as from Tophet   Of Satan's whole crew. A month of unrest brought me hovering   At home in her precincts, To whose hiding-hole local story   Afforded a clue. Exposed, and expelled by her people,   Afar off in London I found her alone, in a sombre   And soul-stifling mew. Still burning to make reparation   I pleaded to wive her, And father her child, and thus faintly   My mischief undo. She yielded, and spells of calm weather   Succeeded the tempest; And one sprung of him stood as scion   Of my bone and thew . . . But Time unveils sorrows and secrets,   And so it befell now: By inches the curtain was twitched at,   And slowly undrew. As we lay, she and I, in the night-time,   We heard the boy moaning: "O misery mine! My false father   Has murdered my true!" She gasped: yea, she heard; understood it.   Next day the child fled us; And nevermore sighted was even   A print of his shoe. Thenceforward she shunned me, and languished;   Till one day the park-pool Embraced her fair form, and extinguished   Her eyes' living blue. - So; ask not what blast may account for   This aspect of pallor, These bones that just prison within them   Life's poor residue; But pa** by, and leave unregarded   A Cain to his suffering, For vengeance too dark on the woman   Whose lover he slew.