fires of selfless passion burned
Beneath the still gray smoldering of him.
There was a rakehell lad, called Little Jim,
Jamie or Petit Jacques; for scarce began
The downy beard to mark him for a man.
Blue-eyed was he and femininely fair.
A maiden might have coveted his hair
That trapped the sunlight in its tangled skein:
So, tardily, outflowered the wild blond strain
That gutted Rome grown overfat in sloth.
A Ganymedes haunted by a Goth
Was Jamie. When the restive ghost was laid,
He seemed some fancy-ridden child who played
At manliness ‘mid all those bearded men.
The sternest heart was drawn to Jamie then.
But his one mood ne’er linked two hours together.
To schedule Jamie’s way, as prairie weather,
Was to get fact by wedding doubt and whim;
For very lightly slept that ghost in him.
No cloudy brooding went before his wrath
That, like a thunder-squall, recked not its path,
But raged upon what happened in its way.
Some called him brave who saw him on that day
When Ashley stormed a bluff town of the Ree,
And all save beardless Jamie turned to flee
For shelter from that steep, lead-harrowed slope.
Yet, hardly courage, but blind rage agrope
Inspired the foolish deed.
’Twas then old Hugh
Tore off the gray mask, and the heart shone through.
For, halting in a dry, flood-guttered draw,
The trappers rallied, looked aloft and saw
That travesty of war against the sky.
Out of a breathless hush, the old man’s cry
Leaped shivering, an anguished cry and wild
As of some mother fearing for her child,
And up the steep he went with mighty bounds.
Long afterward the story went the rounds,
How old Glass fought that day. With gun for club,
Grim as a grizzly fighting for a cub,
He laid about him, cleared the way, and so,
Supported by the firing from below,
Brought Jamie back. And when the deed was done,
Taking the lad upon his knee: “My Son,
Brave men are not ashamed to fear,” said Hugh,
“And I’ve a mind to make a man of you;
So here’s your first acquaintance with the law!”
Whereat he spanked the lad with vigorous paw
And, having done so, limped away to bed;
For, wounded in the hip, the old man bled.
It was a month before he hobbled out,
And Jamie, like a fond son, hung about
The old man’s tent and waited upon him.
And often would the deep gray eyes grow dim
With gazing on the boy; and there would go—
As though Spring-fire should waken out of snow—
A wistful light across that mask of gray.
And once Hugh smiled his enigmatic way,
While poring long on Jamie’s face, and said:
“So with their sons are women brought to bed,
Sore wounded!”
Thus united were the two:
And some would dub the old man ‘Mother Hugh’;
While those in whom all living waters sank
To some dull inner pool that teemed and stank
With formless evil, into that morass
Gazed, and saw darkly there, as in a glass,
The foul shape of some weakly envied sin.
For each man builds a world and dwells therein.
Nor could these know what mocking ghost of Spring
Stirred Hugh’s gray world with dreams of blossoming
That wooed no seed to swell or bird to sing.
So might a dawn-struck digit of the moon
Dream back the rain of some old lunar June
And ache through all its craters to be green.
Little they know what life’s one love can mean,
Who shrine it in a bower of peace and bliss:
Pang dwelling in a puckered cicatrice
More truly figures this belated love.
Yet very precious was the hurt thereof,
Grievous to bear, too dear to cast away.
Now Jamie went with Hugh; but who shall say
If ’twas a warm heart or a wind of whim,
Love, or the rover’s teasing itch in him,
Moved Jamie? Howsoe’er, ’twas good to see
Graybeard and Goldhair riding knee to knee,
One age in young adventure. One who saw
Has likened to a February thaw
Hugh’s
