A LAST CONFESSION.

(Regno Lombardo-Veneto, 1848.)

*

OUR Lombard country-girls along the coast
Wear daggers in their garters; for they know
That they might hate another girl to death
Or meet a German lover. Such a knife
I bought her, with a hilt of horn and pearl.

Father, you cannot know of all my thoughts
That day in going to meet her,—that last day
For the last time, she said ;-of all the love
And all the hopeless hope that she might change
And go
back with me. Ah! and everywhere,

At places we both knew along the road,
Some fresh shape of herself as once she was

Grew present at my side; until it seemed

So close they gathered round me-they would all
Be with me when I reached the spot at last,

To plead my cause with her against herself

So changed. O Father, if you knew all this

You cannot know, then you would know too, Father,

And only then, if God can pardon me.

What can be told I'll tell, if you will hear.

I passed a village-fair upon my road,
And thought, being empty-handed, I would take
Some little present: such might prove, I said,
Either a pledge between us, or (God help me!)
A parting gift. And there it was I bought
The knife I spoke of, such as women wear.

That day, some three hours afterwards, I found

For certain, it must be a parting gift.

And, standing silent now at last, I looked

Into her scornful face; and heard the sea

Still trying hard to din into my ears

Some speech it knew which still might change her heart,

If only it could make me understand.

One moment thus. Another, and her face

Seemed further off than the last line of sea,

L

So that I thought, if now she were to speak
I could not hear her. Then again I knew
All, as we stood together on the sand

At 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 eyes Move, 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 sound Which rose from her sweet childish heart, that day Eleven years before, when first I found her

Alone upon the hill-side; and her curls

Shook down in the warm grass as she looked up

Out of her curls in my eyes bent to hers.
She might have served a painter to pourtray
That heavenly child which in the latter days
Shall walk between the lion and the lamb.

I had been for nights in hiding, worn and sick
And hardly fed; and so her words at first
Seemed fitful like the talking of the trees

And voices in the air that knew my name.

And I remember that I sat me down

Upon the slope with her, and thought the world.
Must be all over or had never been,

We seemed there so alone. And soon she told me

Her parents both were gone away from her.

I thought perhaps she meant that they had died;
But when I asked her this, she looked again
Into my face, and said that yestereve

They kissed her long, and wept and made her weep,
And gave her all the bread they had with them,
And then had gone together up the hill

Where we were sitting now, and had walked on
Into the great red light; 'and so,' she said,

'I have come up here too; and when this evening
They step out of the light as they stepped in,
I shall be here to kiss them.' And she laughed.

Then I bethought me suddenly of the famine ; And how the church-steps throughout all the town, When last I had been there a month ago,

Swarmed with starved folk; and how the bread was

weighed

By Austrians armed; and women that I knew
For wives and mothers walked the public street,
Saying aloud that if their husbands feared

To snatch the children's food, themselves would stay
Till they had earned it there. So then this child
Was piteous to me; for all told me then

Her parents must have left her to God's chance,
To man's or to the Church's charity,

Because of the great famine, rather than

To watch her growing thin between their knees.

With that, God took my mother's voice and spoke,

And sights and sounds came back and things long since, And all my childhood found me on the hills;

And so I took her with me.

I was young,

Scarce man then, Father; but the cause which gave The wounds I die of now had brought me then

Some wounds already; and I lived alone,

As any hiding hunted man must live.

It was no easy thing to keep a child

In safety; for herself it was not safe,

And doubled my own danger: but I knew