Benaiah

WEEKS, two weeks, of cold had dwelt about us,
And the mountain beasts were starved and savage.
All the sky was slaty-gray at sunset
Save the gory-hearted west horizon;
And before the night was well upon us,
From the sad, uncolumned vault a snowflake
Fell into the bosom of my sister.
From the windless sky the powdered feathers
Sank straight down through the unstirred night-silence,
Till the moonless darkness was illumined
With a dusty and unearthly glimmer.
And we doubted of Benaiah’s coming;
For the rock-paths of the treeless mountains
Grow impassable with icy glazing;
And we knew the leagues were surely slower
To traverse, if he should be persistent.
But my sister’s eyes had no doubt in them,
While she sat and gazed into the embers,
And her neck was curved as if she hearkened.
Slowly, log by log, the roaring fire
Crumbled into coals half hid by ashes,
And my brothers rose up to restore it.
Then her face changed, as if she had heard him,
And she loosed the bolts inside the doorpost,
Flung the door wide with a joyful outcry;
And we saw, in the uncertain darkness,
Two huge, glassy, yellow eyeballs shining,
Heard the roar that drowned her smothered screaming,
Saw the massive, tawny shape above her,
All in one half-breath ; and there was nothing
Save the blood-stained snow about the doorway, When we dashed outside with brands and lances.
But our brands died while the trail still led us,
And we slunk home weeping in the darkness
Wherein now no snowflakes more were falling.
All the night we sat awake and speechless,
With the doorway barred, and on the fire
Heaps of fagots crackling and enkindling,
While the women wailed and mourned above us.
In the gray of dawn we saw Benaiah
Striding through the pines against the sky-line,
On the frozen ravine’s farther cliff-top.
None of us dared face him, or the love-light
In his yearning eyes as he approached us;
None made any answer when he questioned,
Till a tiny girl-child, weeping, pointed
To the red trail in the frozen snow-crust.
All his face was rigid as a dead man’s,
And he strode away, his scabbard clanking,
Tramping in the claw-prints ; but he had not
Given any sign of understanding,
And his lips and eyes had made no movement.
When we plucked up heart and followed after,
We beheld him in a ruined cistern,
Full three fathoms deep, and walled with boulders.
He was sitting down, collapsed and shrunken,
By a something which I blenched to look at.
The blown snow was not so deeply drifted
But that we could see in it some fragments,
Frayed and battered, which had been a lion.