“He will come no more to thine arms, my child, He is false or lost and dead, Now wherefore make ye these five years’ moan, And wherefore sit by the sea alone?” “He will keep his vow,” she said.
She climbed the brows of the cliffs at home, She gazed on the false, false sea. “It comes and it goes for ever,” she cried, “And tidings it brings to the wife and the bride, But never a word to me.”
Then, of lovers, another came wooing the maid, But she answered him nay and nay, The manfullest man and her servant true, “Give me thy hand and thou shalt not rue,” She murmured, “Alack, the day.”
Her father arose in his pride and his wrath, He was last of his race and name, “Because that a daughter will peak and will pine Must I never have child of my child to my line, But die in my childless shame?”
They bore her a bride to the kirkyard gate, It was a pitiful sight to see, Her body they decked in their jewels and gold, But the heart in her bosom sate silent and cold, And she murmured “Ah, woe is me.”
They had not been wedded a year, a year, A year but barely two, When the good wife close to the hearth-stone crept And rocked her babe while the good man slept And the wind in the chimney blew.
Loud was the sea and fierce was the night, Gloomy and wild and dour; From a flying cloud came a lightning flash, A pane of the window fell in with a crash, And something rang on the floor.
O, was it a stone from the waste sea-beach? O, was it an earthly thing? She stirred the peat and stooped to the ground, And there in the red, red light she found The half of a broken ring.
She rose upright in a terror of fright As one that hath sinned a sin, And out of the dark and the wind and rain, Through the jagged gap of the broken pane, A man’s white face looked in.
“Oh, why didst thou stay so long, Juan? Five years I waited for thee.” “I vowed by our troth, that living or dead I should come back yet to thine arms and thy bed, And my vow I have kept, my chree.”
“But I have been false to my troth, Juan; Falsely I swore me away.” “I have silks and satins and lace and gold, I have treasure as deep as my ship will hold; And my barque lies out in the bay.”
“But I have a husband that loves me dear; I promised him never to part.” “Through the salt sea’s foam and the earth’s hot breath, Through the grapplings of hell and the gates of death I have come for thee, Joney, my heart.”