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Wilfrid Scawen Blunt - Griselda: A Society Novel In Verse - Chapter V
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Griselda`s madness lasted forty days,
 Forty eternities! Men went their ways,
 And suns arose and set, and women smiled,
 And tongues wagged lightly in impeachment wild
 Of Lady L.`s adventure. She was gone,
 None knew by whom escorted or alone,
 Or why or whither, only that one morning,
 Without pretext, or subterfuge, or warning,
 She had disappeared in silence from L. House,
 Leaving her lord in multitudinous
 And agonised conjecture of her fate:
 So the tale went. And truly less sedate
 Than his wont was in intricate affairs,
 Such as his Garter or his lack of heirs,
 Lord L. was seen in this new tribulation.
 Griselda long had been his life`s equation,
 The pivot of his dealings with the world,
 The mainstay of his comfort, all now hurled
 To unforeseen confusion by her flight:
 There was need of action swift and definite.
 Where was she? Who could tell him? Divers visions
 Passed through his fancy--thieves, and street collisions,
 And all the hundred accidents of towns,
 From broken axle trees to broken crowns.
 In vain he questioned; no response was made
 More than the fact that, as already said,
 My lady, unattended and on foot,
 (A sad imprudence here Lord L. took note),
 Had gone out dressed in a black morning gown
 And dark tweed waterproof, `twixt twelve and one,
 Leaving no orders to her maid, or plan
 About her carriage to or groom or man.
 Such was in sum the downstairs` evidence.
 The hall porter, a man of ponderous sense,
 Averred her ladyship had eastward turned
 From the front door, and some small credit earned
 For the suggestion that her steps were bent
 To Whitechapel on merciful intent,
 A visit of compassion to the poor,
 A clue which led to a commissioner
 Being sent for in hot haste from Scotland Yard.
 And so the news was bruited abroad.

 It reached my ears among the earliest,
 And from Lord L. himself, whose long suppressed
 Emotion found its vent one afternoon
 On me, the only listener left in town.
 His thoughts now ran on ``a religious craze
 Of his poor wife`s,`` he said, ``in these last days
 Indulged beyond all reason.`` The police
 Would listen to no talk of casualties,
 Still less of crime, since they had nothing found
 In evidence above or under ground,
 But held the case to be of simpler kind,
 Home left in a disordered state of mind.
 Lord L. had noticed, now they talked of it,
 Temper less equable and flightier wit,
 ``A craving for religious services
 And sacred music.`` Something was amiss,
 Or why were they in London in September?
 Griselda latterly, he could remember,
 Had raved of a conventual retreat
 In terms no Protestant would deem discreet
 As the sole refuge in a world of sin
 For human frailty, grief`s best anodyne.
 ``The Times was right. Rome threatened to absorb us:
 The convents must be searched by habeas corpus.``

 And so I came to help him. I had guessed
 From his first word the vainness of his quest,
 And half was moved to serve him in a strait
 Where her fair fame I loved was in debate,
 Yet held my peace, nor hazarded a word
 Save of surprise at the strange case I heard,
 Till, fortune aiding, I should find the clue
 My heart desired to do what I would do.
 And not in vain. Night found me duly sped,
 Lord L.`s ambassador accredited,
 With fullest powers to find and fetch her home,
 If need should be, from the Pope`s jaws in Rome.

 Gods! what a mission! First my round I went
 Through half the slums of Middlesex and Kent,
 Surrey and Essex--this to soothe Lord L.,
 Though witless all, as my heart told too well;
 The hospitals no less and casual wards,
 Each house as idly as his House of Lords,
 And only at the week`s end dared to stop
 At the one door I knew still housing hope,
 Young Manton`s chambers. There, with reddened cheek
 I heard the answer given I came to seek.
 Manton was gone, his landlady half feared
 He too, in some mishap, and disappeared,--
 Proof all too positive. His letters lay
 A fortnight deep untouched upon the tray.
 She could not forward them or risk a guess
 As to his last or likeliest address.
 He was in Scotland often at this season,
 ``But not without his guns``--a cogent reason.
 And leaving, too, his valet here in town,
 Perplexed of what to do or leave undone.
 Abroad? Perhaps. If so, his friends might try
 As a best chance the Paris Embassy.
 He had been there last Spring, and might be now.

 Paris! It was enough, I made my bow,
 And took my leave. I seemed to touch the thread
 Of the blind labyrinth `twas mine to tread.
 Where should they be, in truth, these too fond lovers,
 But in the land of all such lawless rovers?
 The land of Gautier, Bourget, Maupassant,
 Where still ``you can`` makes answer to ``I can`t.``
 The fair domain where all romance begins
 In a light borderland of venial sins,
 But deepening onwards, till the fatal day
 Vice swoops upon us, plead we as we may.
 Griselda`s bonnet o`er the windmills thrown,
 Had surely crossed the Seine ere it came down.
 And I, if I would find and win her back,
 Must earliest search the boulevards for her track.
 And so to Paris in my zeal I passed,
 Breaking my idol, mad Iconoclast.

 There is a little inn by Meudon wood
 Dear to Parisians in their amorous mood,
 A place of rendezvous, where bourgeois meet
 Their best beloved in congregation sweet;
 Clandestine, undisturbed, illicit loves,
 Made half romantic by the adjoining groves,
 So beautiful in Spring, with the new green
 Clothing the birch stems scattered white between,
 Nor yet, in Autumn, when the first frosts burn
 And the wind rustles in the reddening fern,
 Quite robbed of sentiment for lovers` eyes,
 Who seek Earth`s blessing on a bliss unwise,
 And find the happy sanction for their state
 In nature`s face, unshocked by their debate,
 As who should say ``Let preachers frown their fill,
 Here one approves. `Tis Eden with us still.``

 Such fancy, may be, in her too fond heart
 Had led Griselda--with her friend--apart,
 Yet not apart, from the world`s curious gaze,
 To this secluded, ill--frequented place:
 A compromise of wills and varying moods,
 His for gay crowds, her own for solitudes.
 Manton knew Paris well, and loved its noise,
 Its mirthful parody of serious joys,
 Its pomp and circumstance. His wish had been
 To flaunt the boulevards with his captured queen,
 And make parade of a last triumph won
 In the chaste field of prudish Albion,
 Outscandalising scandal. Love and he
 In any sense but of male vanity,
 And the delirium of adventures new
 In the world`s eye--the thing he next should do--
 Were terms diverse and incompatible.
 Griselda, to his eyes was Lady L.,
 The fair, the chaste, the unapproached proud name
 Men breathed in reverence, woman, all the same,
 And not as such, and when the truth was said,
 Worth more than others lightlier credited.
 It all had been a jest from the beginning,
 A tour de force, whose wit was in the winning,
 A stroke of fortune and of accident,
 The embrace he had told of for another meant,
 While she stood grieving for a first grey hair
 (A psychologic moment) on the stair,
 And, kneeling down, he had adored her foot,
 The one weak spot where her self--love had root,
 And laughed at her, and told her she was old,
 Yet growing tenderer as he grew more bold.
 And so from jest to jest, and chance to chance,
 To that last scene at the mad country dance
 Where she had played the hoyden, he the swain,
 Pretending love till love was in their brain,
 And he had followed to her chamber door,
 And helped her to undo the dress she wore.

 Then the elopement. That had been her doing,
 Which he accepted to make good his wooing,
 And careless what to both the result might be,
 So it but served his end of vanity.
 It all had been to this vain boy a whim,
 Something grotesque, a play, a pantomime,
 Where nothing had been serious but her heart,
 And that was soon too tearful for its part.
 He wearied in a week of her mature
 Old maidish venturings in ways obscure,
 Her agony of conscience dimly guessed,
 The silences she stifled in her breast,
 Her awkwardness--it was his word--in all
 That love could teach; her sighs funereal,
 And more the unnatural laughter she essayed
 To meet the doubtful sense of things he said.
 She was at once too tender and too prim,
 Too prudish and too crazed with love and him.
 At a month`s end his flame had leaped beyond
 Already to friends frailer and less fond;
 The light Parisian world of venal charms
 Which welcomed him with wide and laughing arms:
 There he was happier, more at home, more gay,
 King of the ``High Life,`` hero of the day.

 Griselda, in her sad suburban nook
 Watched his departures with a mute rebuke,
 Yet daring not to speak. The choice was hers
 To stay at home or run the theatres
 With her young lover in such company
 As her soul loathed. She had tried despairingly
 To be one, even as these, for his loved sake,
 And would have followed spite of her heart`s ache,
 But that he hardly further cared to press,
 After one failure stamped with ``dowdiness.``
 That too had been his word, a bitter word,
 Biting and true, which smote her like a sword,
 Or rather a whip`s sting to her proud cheek,
 Leaving her humbled, agonised and weak.

 Poor beautiful Griselda! What was now
 The value of thy beauty, chaste as snow
 In thy youth`s morning, the unchallenged worth
 Of thy eyes` kindness, queenliest of the earth;
 The tradition of thy Fra--angelic face,
 Blessed as Mary`s, and as full of grace;
 The fame which thou despisedst, yet which made
 A glory for thee meet for thy dear head?
 What, if in this last crisis of thy fate,
 When all a Heaven and Hell was in debate,
 And thy archangel, with the feet of clay,
 Stood mocking there in doubt to go or stay,
 The unstable fabric of thy woman`s dower,
 Thy beauty, failed and left thee in their power
 Whose only law of beauty was the sting
 Lent to man`s lust by light bedizening?
 What use was in thy beauty, if, alas!
 Thou gavest them cause to mock (those tongues of brass)
 At thy too crude and insular attire,
 Thy naïvetés of colour, the false fire
 Of thy first dallyings with the red and white,
 Thy sweet pictorial robe, Pre--Raphaelite,
 Quaint in its tones and outré in design,
 Thy lack of unity and shape and line,
 Thy English angularity--who knows,
 The less than perfect fitting of thy shoes?

 Griselda, in her flight, had left behind
 All but the dress she stood in, too refined,
 In her fair righteousness of thought and deed,
 To make provision for a future need,
 However dire. She was no Israelite
 To go forth from her Pharaoh in the night,
 With spoils of the Egyptians in her hands,
 And had thrown herself on Manton and on France,
 With a full courage worth a nobler cause,
 Grandly oblivious of prudential laws.
 Her earliest trouble, marring even the bliss
 Of love`s first ecstasy, had come of this,
 Her want of clothes--a worse and weightier care
 At the mere moment than her soul`s despair
 For its deep fall from virtuous estate.
 How should she dress herself, she asked of Fate,
 With neither maid, nor money, nor a name?
 It was her first experiment in shame.
 Now, after all her poor economies,
 This was the ending read in his vexed eyes,
 And spoken by his lips: her utmost art
 Had failed to please that idle thing, his heart,
 Or even to avert his petulant scorn
 For one so little to love`s manner born.

 And thus I found them, at the angry noon
 Of their ``red month,`` the next to honeymoon:
 Two silent revellers at a loveless feast,
 Scared by hate`s morning breaking in their East--
 A dawn which was of penance and despair,
 With pleasure`s ghost to fill the vacant chair.
 I took it, and was welcomed rapturously,
 As a far sail by shipwrecked souls at sea,
 An opportune deliverer, timely sent
 To break the autumn of their discontent,
 And give a pretext to their need grown sore
 Of issue from joys dead by any door.

 Manton, all confidential from the first,
 Told me the tale of his last sins and worst,
 As meriting a sympathy not less
 Than the best actions virtuous men confess.
 He was overwhelmed with women and with debt--
 Women who loved him, bills which must be met.
 What could he do? Her ladyship was mad--
 It was her fault, not his, this escapade.
 He had warned her from the first, and as a friend,
 That all such frolics had a serious end,
 And that to leave her home was the worst way
 A woman would who wanted to be gay.

 ``For look,`` said he, ``we men, who note these things,
 And how the unthinking flutterers burn their wings,
 Know that a woman, be she what she will,
 The fairest, noblest, most adorable,
 Dowered in her home with all seraphic charms,
 Whom heaven itself might envy in your arms,
 A paragon of pleasure undenied
 At her own chaste respectable fireside,
 Becomes, what shall I say, when she steps down
 From the high world of her untouched renown?
 A something differing in no serious mood
 From the sad rest of the light sisterhood;
 Perhaps indeed more troublesome than these,
 Because she keenlier feels the agonies:
 A wounded soul, who has not even the wit
 To hide its hurt and make a jest of it;
 A maid of Astolat, launched in her barge,
 A corpse on all the world, a femme à charge.``

 ```Tis not,`` he argued, ``our poor human sins
 That make us what we are when shame begins,
 But the world pointing at our naked state:
 Then we are shocked and humbled at our fate,
 Silent and shamed in all we honour most--
 For what is virtue but the right to boast?
 A married woman`s love, three weeks from home,
 Is the absurdest thing in Christendom,
 Dull as a ménage in the demi--monde
 And dismaller far by reason of the bond.
 All this I told my lady ere we went,
 But warning wasted is on sentiment.
 You see the net result here in one word,
 A crying woman and a lover bored.``

 So far young Manton. She for whom I came,
 Griselda`s self, sweet soul, in her new shame
 Essayed awhile to hide from me the truth
 Of this last hap of her belated youth,
 Her disillusion with her graceless lover.
 She made sad cloaks for him which could not cover
 His great unworthiness and her despair,
 All with a frightened half--maternal air,
 Most pitiful and touching. To my plea,
 Urging her home, she answered mournfully,
 That she was bound now to her way of life,
 And owed herself no less than as his wife
 To him she had chosen out of all mankind.
 `Twas better to be foolish, even blind,
 If he had faults, so she could serve him still--
 And this had been her promise and her will.
 She would not hear of duties owed elsewhere:
 What was she to Lord L., or he to her?
 I need not speak of it. And yet she clung
 To my protecting presence in her wrong;
 And once, when Manton`s jibes made bitterer play,
 Implored me with appealing eyes to stay.
And so I lingered on.  Those autumn days,
 Spent with Griselda in the woodland ways
 Of Meudon with her lover, or alone,
 When his mad fancies carried him to town,
 Remain to me an unsubstantial act
 Of dreaming fancy, rather than the fact
 Of any waking moment in my past,
 The sweetest, saddest and with her the last--
For suddenly they ended.  We had been
 One Sunday for a jaunt upon the Seine,
 We two--in Manton`s absence, now prolonged
 To a third night--and in a steamboat, thronged
 With idle bourgeois folk, whom the last glory,
 Of a late autumn had sent forth in foray
 To Passy and St. Cloud, from stage to stage
 Had made with heavy souls our pilgrimage;
 And homeward turning and with little zest,
 The fair day done, to love`s deserted nest
 Had come with lagging feet and weary eyes,
 Expectant still of some new dark surprise,
 When the blow fell unsparing on her head,
 Already by what fortunes buffeted.

 How did it happen, that last tragedy?--
 For tragedy it was, let none deny,
 Though all ignoble. Every soul of us
 Touches one moment in death`s darkened house
 The plane of the heroic, and compels
 Men`s laughter into tears--ay, Heaven`s and Hell`s.
 How did it happen? There was that upon
 Their faces at the door more than the tone
 Of their replies, that warned us of the thing
 We had not looked for in our questioning;
 And our lips faltered, and our ears, afraid,
 Shrank from more hearing. What was it they said
 In their fool`s jargon, that he lay upstairs?
 He? Manton? The dispenser of our cares?
 The mounteback young reveller? Suffering? Ill?
 And she, poor soul, that suffered at his will!
 A sinister case? Not dying? Pitiful God!
 Truly Thou smitest blindly with Thy rod.
 For Manton was not worthy to die young,
 Beloved by her with blessings on her tongue.
And such a cause of death!  She never heard
 The whole truth told, for each one spared his word,
 And he lay mute for ever. But to me
 The thing was storied void of mystery,
 And thus they told it. Hardly had we gone
 On our sad river outing, when from town
 Manton had come with a gay troop of friends,
 Such as the coulisse of the opera lends,
 To breakfast at the inn and spend the day
 In mirthful noise, as was his vagrant way.
 A drunken frolic, and most insolent
 To her whose honour with his own was blent,
 To end in this last tragedy. None knew
 Quite how it happened, or a cause could shew
 Further than this, that, rising from the table,
 The last to go with steps perhaps unstable--
 For they had feasted freely, and the stair
 Was steep and iron--edged, and needed care;
 And singing, as he went, the selfsame song,
 Which I remembered, to the laughing throng,
 He had slipped his length, and fallen feet--first down.
 When they picked him up his power to move was gone,
 Though he could speak. They laid him on a bed,
 Her bed, Griselda`s, and called in with speed
 Such help of doctors and commissioners
 As law prescribed, and medicine for their fears.
`Twas his last night.  There, in Griselda`s hands,
 Young Jerry Manton lay with the last sands
 Of his life`s hour--glass trickling to its close,
 Griselda watching, with what thoughts, God knows.
 We did not speak. But her lips moved in prayer,
 And mine too, in the way of man`s despair.
 I did not love him, yet a human pity
 Softened my eyes. Afar, from the great city,
 The sound came to us of the eternal hum,
 Unceasing, changeless, pregnant with all doom
 Of insolent life that rises from its streets,
 The pulse of sin which ever beats and beats,
 Wearying the ears of God. O Paris, Paris!
 What doom is thine for every soul that tarries
 Too long with thee, a stranger in thy arms.
 Thy smiles are incantations, thy brave charms
 Death to thy lovers. Each gay mother`s son,
 Smitten with love for thee, is straight undone.
 And lo the chariot wheels upon thy ways!
 And a new garland hung in Père la Chaise!

 Poor soul! I turned and looked into the night,
 Through the uncurtained windows, and there bright
 Saw the mute twinkle of a thousand stars.
 One night! the least in all time`s calendars,
 Yet fraught with what a meaning for this one!
 One star, the least of all that million!
 One room in that one city! Yet for him
 The universe there was of space and time.
 What were his thoughts? In that chaotic soul,
 Home of sad jests, obscene, unbeautiful,
 Mired with the earthiest of brute desires,
 And lit to sentience only with lewd fires,
 Was there no secret, undisturbed, fair place
 Watered with love and favoured with God`s grace
 To which the wounded consciousness had fled
 For its last refuge from a world of dread?
 Was his soul touched to tenderness, to awe,
 To softer recollection? All we saw
 Was the maimed body gasping forth its breath,
 A rigid setting of the silent teeth,
 And the hands trembling. Death was with us there.
 But where was he? O Heaven of pity! where?

 We watched till morning by the dying man,
 She weeping silently, I grieved and wan,
 And still he moved not. But with the first break
 Of day in the window panes we saw him make
 A sign as if of speaking. Pressing near--
 For his lips moved, Griselda deemed, in prayer--
 We heard him make profession of his faith,
 As a man of pleasure face to face with death,
 A kind of gambler`s Athanasian Creed,
 Repeated at the hour of his last need.
 ``Five sovereigns,`` said he, steadying his will,
 As in defiance of death`s power to kill,
 And with that smile of a superior mind,
 Which was his strength in dealing with mankind,
 The world of sporting jargon and gay livers.
 ``Five sovereigns is a fiver, and five fivers
 A pony, and five ponies are a hundred--
 No, four,`` he added, seeing he had blundered.
 ``Four to the hundred and five centuries
 Make up the monkey.`` From his dying eyes
 The smile of triumph faded. ``There, I`ve done it,``
 He said, ``but there was no great odds upon it,
You see with a broken back.``  He spoke no more,
 And in another hour had passed the door
 Which shuts the living from eternity.
 Where was he? God of pity, where was he?

 This was the end of Lady L.`s romance.

 When we had buried him (as they do in France,
 In a tomb inscribed ``à perpétuité,``
 Formally rented till the Judgment Day),
 She put off black, and shed no further tears;
 Her face for the first time showed all its years,
 But not a trace beyond. Without demur
 She gave adhesion to my plans for her,
 And we went home to London and Lord L.,
 Silent together, by the next night`s mail.
She had been six weeks away.  The interview
 Between them was dramatic. I, who knew
 Her whole mad secret, and had seen her soul
 Stripped of its covering, and without control,
 Bowed down by circumstance and galled with shame,
 Yielding to wounds and griefs without a name,
 Had feared for her a wild unhappy scene.
 I held Lord L. for the least stern of men,
 And yet I dared not hope even he would crave
 No explanation ere he quite forgave.

 I was with them when they met, unwilling third,
 In their mute bandying of the unspoken word.
 Lord L. essayed to speak. I saw his face
 Made up for a high act of tragic grace
 As he came forward. It was grave and mild,
 A father`s welcoming a truant child,
 Forgiving, yet intent to mark the pain
 With hope ``the thing should not occur again.``
 His lips began to move as to some speech
 Framed in this sense, as one might gently preach
 A word in season to too gadding wives
 Of duties owed, at least by those whose lives
 Moved in high places. But it died unsaid.
 There was that about Griselda that forbade
 Marital questionings. Her queenly eyes
 Met his with a mute answer of surprise,
 Marking the unseemliness of all display
 More strongly than with words, as who should say
 Noblesse oblige. She took his outstretched hand,
 And kissed his cheek, but would not understand
 A word of his reproaches. Even I,
 With my full knowledge and no more a boy,
 But versed by years in the world`s wickedness,
 And open--eyed to her, alas! no less
 Than to all womanhood, even I felt shame,
 And half absolved her in my mind from blame.
 And he, how could he less? He was but human,
 The fortunate husband of how fair a woman!
He stammered his excuses.  What she told
 When I had left them (since all coin is gold
 To those who would believe, and who the key
 Hold of their eyes, in blind faith`s alchemy)
I never learned.  I did not linger on,
 Seeing her peril past and the day won,
 But took my leave. She led me to the door
 With her old kindness of the days of yore,
 And thanked me as one thanks for little things.
 ``You have been,`` she said, ``an angel without wings,
 And I shall not forget,--nor will Lord L.;
 And yet,`` she said, with an imperceptible
 Change in her voice, ``there are things the world will say
 Which are neither just nor kind, and, if to--day
 We part awhile, remember we are friends,
 If not now later. Time will make amends,
 And we shall meet again.`` I pressed her hand
 A moment to my lips. ``I understand,``
 I said, and gazed a last time in her eyes;
 ``Say all you will. I am your sacrifice.``

 And so, in truth, it was. Henceforth there lay
 A gulf between us, widening with delay,
 And which our souls were impotent to pass,
 The gulf of a dead secret; and, alas!
 Who knows what subtle treacheries within,
 For virtue rends its witnesses of sin,
 And hearts are strangely fashioned by their fears.
 We met no more in friendship through the years,
 Although I held her secret as my own,
 And fought her battles, her best champion,
 On many a stricken field in scandal`s war,
 Till all was well forgotten. From afar
 I watched her fortunes still with tenderness,
 Yet sadly, as cast out of Paradise.
 For ever, spite her promise, from that day,
 When I met L., he looked another way;
 And she, Griselda, was reserved and chill.
 I had behaved, her women friends said, ill,
 And caused a needless scandal in her life,
 --They told not what. Enough, that as a wife
 She had been compelled to close her doors on me,
 And that her lord knew all the iniquity.

 And so I bore the burden of her sin.

 What more shall I relate? The cynic vein
 Has overwhelmed my tale, and I must stop.
 Its heroine lived to justify all hope
 Of her long--suffering lord, that out of pain
 Blessings would grow, and his house smile again
 With the fulfilled expectance of an heir.
 Griselda sat no longer in despair,
 Nor wasted her full life on dreams of folly;
 She had little time for moods of melancholy,
 Or heart to venture further in love`s ways;
 She was again the theme of all men`s praise,
 And suffered no man`s passion. Once a year,
 In the late autumn, when the leaves grew sere
 She made retreat to a lay sisterhood,
 And lived awhile there for her soul`s more good,
 In pious meditation, fasts and prayer.
 Some say she wore concealed a shirt of hair
 Under her dresses, even at court balls,
 And certain `tis that all Rome`s rituals
 Were followed daily at the private Mass
 In her new chauntry built behind Hans Place.
 Lord L. approved of all she did, even this,
 Strange as it seemed to his old--fashionedness.

 He, gentle soul, grown garrulous with years,
 Prosed of her virtues to all listeners,
 And of their son`s, the child of his old age,
 A prodigy of beauty and ways sage.
 It was a vow, he said, once made in Rome,
 Had brought them their chief treasure of their home.
 A vow! The light world laughed--for miracles
 Are not believed in now, except as Hell`s.
 And yet the ways of God are passing strange.
 And this is certain (and therein the range
 Of my long tale is reached, and I am free),
 --There is at Ostia, close beside the sea,
 A convent church, the same where years ago
 Griselda kneeled in tears and made her vow;
 And in that shrine, beneath the crucifix,
 They show a votive offering, candlesticks
 Of more than common workmanship and size,
 And underneath inscribed the votary`s
 Name in initials, and the date, all told,
 Hall--marked in England, and of massive gold.
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