A Sound in the Night by Thomas Hardy

(WOODSFORD CASTLE: 17–)

"WHAT do I catch upon the night-wind, husband? - / What is it sounds in this house so eerily? / It seems to be a woman's voice: each little while I hear it, / And it much troubles me!"

"Tis but the eaves dripping down upon the plinth-slopes: / Letting fancies worry thee! -sure 'tis a foolish thing, / When we were on'y coupled half-an-hour before the noontide, / And now it's but evening."

"Yet seems it still a woman's voice outside the castle, husband, / And 'tis cold to-night, and rain beats, and this is a lonely place. / Didst thou fathom much of womankind in travel or adventure / Ere ever thou sawest my face?"

"It may be a tree, bride, that rubs his arms acrosswise, / If it is not the eaves-drip upon the lower slopes, / Or the river at the bend, where it whirls about the hatches / Like a creature that sighs and mopes."

"Yet it still seems to me like the crying of a woman, / And it saddens me much that so piteous a sound / On this my bridal night when I would get agone from sorrow / Should so ghost-like wander round!"

"To satisfy thee, Love, I will strike the flint-and-steel, then, / And set the rush-candle up, and undo the door, / And take the new horn-lantern that we bought upon our journey, / And throw the light over the moor."

He struck a light, and breeched and booted in the further chamber, / And lit the new horn-lantern and went from her sight, / And vanished down the turret; and she heard him pass the postern, / And go out into the night.

She listened as she lay, till she heard his step returning, / And his voice as he unclothed him: "Twas nothing, as I said, / But the nor'-west wind a-blowing from the moor ath'art the river, / And the tree that taps the gurgoyle-head."

"Nay, husband, you perplex me; for if the noise I heard here, / Awaking me from sleep so, were but as you avow, / The rain-fall, and the wind, and the tree-bough, and the river, / Why is it silent now?

"And why is thy hand and thy clasping arm so shaking, / And thy sleeve and tags of hair so muddy and so wet, / And why feel I thy heart a-thumping every time thou kissest me, / And thy breath as if hard to get?"

He lay there in silence for a while, still quickly breathing, / Then started up and walked about the room resentfully: / "O woman, witch, whom I, in sooth, against my will have wedded, / Why castedst thou thy spells on me?

"There was one I loved once: the cry you heard was her cry: / She came to me to-night, and her plight was passing sore, / As no woman. Yea, and it was e'en the cry you heard, wife, / But she will cry no more!

"And now I can't abide thee: this place, it hath a curse on't, / This farmstead once a castle: I'll get me straight away! " / He dressed this time in darkness, unspeaking, as she listened, / And went ere the dawn turned day.

They found a woman's body at a spot called Rocky Shallow, / Where the Froom stream curves amid the moorland, washed aground, / And they searched about for him, the yeoman, who had darkly known her, / But he could not be found.

And the bride left for good-and-all the farmstead once a castle, / And in a county far away lives, mourns, and sleeps alone, / And thinks in windy weather that she hears a woman crying, / And sometimes an infant's moan.