from Canto I

161

But Don Alfonso stood with downcast looks,
     And, truth to say, he made a foolish figure;
When, after searching in five hundred nooks,
     And treating a young wife with so much rigour,
He gain’d no point, except some self-rebukes,
     Added to those his lady with such vigour
Had pour’d upon him for the last half-hour,
Quick, thick, and heavy—as a thunder-shower.

162

At first he tried to hammer an excuse,
     To which the sole reply were tears, and sobs,
And indications of hysterics, whose
    Prologue is always certain throes, and throbs,
Gasps, and whatever else the owners choose:—
     Alfonso saw his wife, and thought of Job’s;
He saw too, in perspective, her relations,
And then he tried to muster all his patience.

163

He stood in act to speak, or rather stammer,
     But sage Antonia cut him short before
The anvil of his speech received the hammer,
     With “Pray sir, leave the room, and say no more,
Or madam dies.”—Alfonso mutter’d “D—n her,”
     But nothing else, the time of words was o’er;
He cast a rueful look or two, and did,
He knew not wherefore, that which he was bid.

164

With him retired his “posse comitatus,”
     The attorney last, who linger’d near the door,
Reluctantly, still tarrying there as late as
     Antonia let him—not a little sore
At this most strange and unexplain’d “hiatus“
     In Don Alfonso’s facts, which just now wore
An awkward look; as he revolved the case
The door was fasten’d and his legal face.

165

No sooner was it bolted, than—Oh shame!
     Oh sin! Oh sorrow! and Oh womankind!
How can you do such things and keep your fame,
     Unless this world, and t’other too, be blind?
Nothing so dear as an unfilch’d good name!
     But to proceed—for there is more behind:
With much heart-felt reluctance be it said,
Young Juan slipp’d, half-smother’d, from the bed.

166

He had been hid—I don’t pretend to say
     How, nor can I indeed describe the where—
Young, slender, and pack’d easily, he lay,
     No doubt, in little compass, round or square;
But pity him I neither must nor may
     His suffocation by that pretty pair;
‘Twere better, sure, to die so, than be shut
With maudlin Clarence in his Malmsey butt.

167

And, secondly, I pity not, because
     He had no business to commit a sin,
Forbid by heavenly, fined by human laws,
     At least ‘twas rather early to begin;
But at sixteen the conscience rarely gnaws
     So much as when we call our old debts in
At sixty years, and draw the accompts of evil,
And find a deuced balance with the devil.

168

Of his position I can give no notion:
     ‘Tis written in the Hebrew Chronicle,
How the physicians, leaving pill and potion,
     Prescribed, by way of blister, a young belle,
When old King David’s blood grew dull in motion,
     And that the medicine answer’d very well;
Perhaps ‘twas in a different way applied,
For David lived, but Juan nearly died.

169

What’s to be done? Alfonso will be back
     The moment he has sent his fools away.
Antonia’s skill was put upon the rack,
     But no device could be brought into play—
And how to parry the renew’d attack
     Besides, it wanted but few hours of day:
Antonia puzzled; Julia did not speak,
But press’d her bloodless lip to Juan’s cheek.

170

He turn’d his lip to hers, and with his hand
     Call’d back the tangles of her wandering hair;
Even then their love they could not all command,
     And half forgot their danger and despair:
Antonia’s patience now was at a stand—
     “Come, come, ‘tis no time now for fooling there,”
She whisper’d, in great wrath—”I must deposit
This pretty gentleman within the closet: