PIPER A serenade!

Under the halter!

MICHAEL Hush.--A death-black night, Until she came.--Oh, how to tell thee, lad!

She came,--she came, not for the nightingale, But even dreaming that it would be I!

PIPER She knew you?--We are trapped, then.

MICHAEL No, not so!

She smiled on me.--Dost thou remember how She smiled on me that day? Alas, poor maid, She took me for some n.o.ble in disguise!

And all these days,--she told me,--she had dreamed That I would come to save her!

PIPER Said she this?

MICHAEL All this--all this, and more! . . .

What could lies do?--I lied to her of thee; I swore I knew not of thy vanishment, Nor the lost children. But I told her true, I was a stroller and an outcast man That hid there, like a famished castaway, For one more word, without a hope,--a hope; Helpless to save her.

PIPER And she told thee then, She goes to be a nun?

MICHAEL Youth to the grave!

And I--vile nothing--cannot go to save her, Only to look my last--

PIPER Who knows?

MICHAEL [bitterly]

Ah, thou!--

PIPER Poor Nightingale!

[Fingers Us pipe, noiselessly.]

MICHAEL [rapt with grief]

Oh, but the scorn of her!

PIPER She smiled on thee.

MICHAEL Until she heard the truth:-- A juggler,--truly,--and no wandering knight!

Oh, and she wept.

[Wildly]

Let us all hang together.

PIPER Thanks. Kindly spoken.--Not this afternoon!

MICHAEL Thou knowest they are given up for dead?

PIPER Truly.

MICHAEL Bewitched?

PIPER So are they.

MICHAEL Sold to the Devil?

PIPER [Facing softly up and down, with the restless cunning of a squirrel at watch]

Pfui! But who else? Of course. This same old Devil!

This kind old Devil takes on him all we do!

Who else is such a refuge in this world?

Who could have burned the abbey in this place, Where holy men did live? Why, 't was the Devil!

And who did guard us one secluded spot By burying a wizard at this cross-ways?-- So none dare search the haunted, evil place!

The Devil for a landlord!--So say I!

And all we poor, we strollers, for his tenants; We gypsies and we pipers in the world, And a few hermits and sword-swallowers, And all the cast-aways that Holy Church Must put in cages--cages--to the end!

[To Michael, who is overcome]

Take heart! I swear,--by all the stars that chime!

I'll not have things in Cages!

MICHAEL Barbara!

So young,--so young and beautiful!

PIPER And fit To marry with friend Michael!

MICHAEL Do not mock.

PIPER I mock not.--(Baa--Baa--Barbara!)

MICHAEL Ay, she laughed, On that first day. But still she gazed.--I saw Her, all the while! I swallowed--

PIPER Prodigies!

A thousand swallows, and no summer yet!

But now,--'t is late to ask,--why did you not Swallow her father?--That had saved us all.

MICHAEL They will be coming soon. They will cut off All her bright hair,--and wall her in forever.

PIPER Never. They shall not.

MICHAEL [dully]

Will you give them back, _Now_?

PIPER I will never give them back. Be sure.

MICHAEL And she is made an offering for the town!

I heard it of the gossips.--They have sworn Jacobus shall not keep his one ewe-lamb While all the rest go childless.

PIPER And I swear That he shall give her up,--to none but thee!

MICHAEL You cannot do it!

PIPER Have I lived like Cain, But to make good one hour of Life and Sun?

And have I got this Hamelin in my hands, To make it pay its thousand cruelties With such a fool's one-more? . . .

--You know right well, 'T was not the thousand guilders that I wanted For thee, or me, or any!--Ten would serve.

But there it ached; _there_, in the money-bag That serves the town of Hamelin for an heart!