The Poet’s Lovers

The poet reclined on the driver’s box was doing his best to look up rather than out. Up were the treetops and stars. Before were the gangly, and possibly infected, horse rears he’d been loaned. They tramped their nerves down into the road’s cold bend.
            ‘The Lovers,’ he said. ‘By Philippe P. Jacquemin: “Oh Night, oh Night, come cloak them. Veil their pale, fair faces.”’
            Since he had met them the week past, he had had a mind of composing a poem. And then, when they had shared their troubles, begging his assistance, that first line had dawned. He now had some vague notion of representing himself as the torch he was now keeping for them.

            Philippe P. could fathom no better response to such a love story as theirs. The initial fire, idyll, infidelity, separation, forgiveness, sobriety, and, if you asked Philippe P., impending reignition, demanded nothing short of poetry. Even now, knowing them to be incognito Bonapartists, the poet permitted himself no lesser romanticism on account of it.
            The royalists’ shouts and thundering horses tugged the cold night, jerking Philippe to alert posture. His heart now beating a simple, if domineering, meter, he took the reins and prepared himself.
            The lovers had asked him in a rush, clutching and kissing his hands in their rented rooms. He had stammered assent.
            But now, as they fled to his care, the poet recalled that, on the one occasion he had dined with them, the lovers had looked mainly at him or their plates and shown scarce affection for each other.
            Hooves and calls crept at his ears. He looked to the fork further down the road.
            The torch burned low now. He shielded it, ready to breathe more life into the flame. He looked back to his town.
            But yes, perhaps they had been attempting a low profile. And it had only been lunch. Of course he, an experienced romantic, should never have doubted dinner as the truly affectionate time. Ergo, with it, the evening ought to be private, so he had no real right to demand evidence of their mutual affection.
            He pictured it, though.
            He breathed deep and warm, then brightened the torch.
            The lovers’ carriage demolished the bend. Though he tried at a glimpse of them inside, perhaps in each other’s arms, perhaps pitying him, they had no lights to permit it. Their driver himself was but a buzzing shade before dousing his own torch.
            So, maintaining for them a comforting smile, the poet lashed his horses into a gallop between them and their pursuing royalists. And when they came to that fork and took right, he bid them adieu to the left. Brightly did he bear their pursuers, wind gracing his silver hair and juggling his torch’s flame.
            He beamed back at their closing gallops, and to his dark right. But when he faced the reality of the struggling horse hinds, Philippe P.’s stomach made a twisted bid at defection.
            ‘Oh Night,’ he whined. ‘Cloak me.’