The Worshipper of the Image
By
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
LONDON AND NEW YORK
1900
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
TO SILENCIEUX
THIS TRAGIC FAIRY-TALE
Contents
CHAPTER
I. SMILING SILENCE
II. THE COMING OF SILENCIEUX
III. THE NORTHERN SPHINX
IV. AT THE RISING OF THE MOON
V. SILENCIEUX SPEAKS
VI. THE THREE BLACK PONDS
VII. THE LOVERS OF SILENCIEUX
VIII. A STRANGE KISS FOR SILENCIEUX
IX. THE WONDERFUL WEEK
X. SILENCIEUX WHISPERS
XI. WONDER IN THE WOOD
XII. AUTUMN IN THE VALLEY
XIII. THE HUMAN SACRIFICE
XIV. A SONG OF THE LITTLE DEAD
XV. SILENCIEUX ALONE IN THE WOOD
XVI. THE FIRST TALK ON THE HILLS
XVII. ANTONY ALONE ON THE HILLS
XVIII. THE SECOND TALK ON THE HILLS
XIX. LAST TALK ON THE HILLS
XX. ANTONY'S JUDGMENT UPON SILENCIEUX
XXI. "RESURGAM!"
XXII. THE STRANGENESS OF ANTONY
XXIII. BEATRICE FULFILS HER DESTINY
The Worshipper of the Image
CHAPTER I
SMILING SILENCE
Evening was in the wood, still as the dreaming bracken, secretive,
moving softly among the pines as a young witch gathering simples. She
wore a hood of finely woven shadows, yet, though she drew it close,
sunbeams trooping westward flashed strange lights across her haunted
face.
The birds that lived in the wood had broken out into sudden singing as
she stole in, hungry for silence, passionate to be alone; and at the
foot of every tree she cried "Hush! Hush!" to the bedtime nests. When
all but one were still, she slipped the hood from her face and listened
to her own bird, the night-jar, toiling at his hopeless love from a
bough on which already hung a little star.
Then it was that a young man, with a face shining with sorrow, vaulted
lightly over the mossed fence and dipped down the green path, among the
shadows and the toadstools and the silence.
"Silencieux," he said over to himself--"I love you, Silencieux."
Far down the wood came and went through the trees the black and white
gable of a little châlet to which he was dreaming his way.
Suddenly a small bronze object caught his eye moving across the mossy
path. It was a beautiful beetle, very slim and graceful in shape, with
singularly long and fine antennae. Antony had loved these things since
he was a child,--dragonflies with their lamp-like eyes of luminous horn,
moths with pall-like wings that filled the world with silence as you
looked at them, sleepy as death--loved them with the passion of a
Japanese artist who delights to carve them on quaint nuggets of metal.
Perhaps it was that they were so like words--words to which he had given
all the love and worship of his life. Surely he had loved Silencieux[1]
more since he had found for her that beautiful name.
He held the beetle in his hand a long while, loving it. Then he said to
himself, with a smile in which was the delight of a success: "A
vase-shaped beetle with deer's horns."
The phrase delighted him. He set the insect down on the path, tenderly.
He had done with it. He had carved it in seven words. The little model
might now touch its delicate way among the ferns at peace.
"A vase-shaped beetle with deer's horns," he repeated as he walked on,
and then the gathering gloom of the wood suggested an addition: "And
some day I shall find in the wood that moth of which I have dreamed
since childhood--the dark moth with the face of death between his
wings."
The châlet stood on a little clearing, in a little circle of pines. From
it the ground sloped down towards the valley, and at some distance
beneath smoke curled from a house lost amid clouds of foliage, the
abounding green life of this damp and brooding hollow. A great window
looking down the woodside filled one side of the châlet, and the others
were dark with books, an occasional picture or figured jar lighting up
the shadow. A small fire flickered beneath a quaintly devised mantel,
though it was summer--for the mists crept up the hill at night and
chilled the souls of the books. A great old bureau, with a wonderful
belly of mahogany, filled a corner of the room, breathing antique
mystery and refinement. At one end of it, on a small vacant space of
wall, hung a cast, apparently the death-mask of a woman, by which the
eye was immediately attracted with something of a shock and held by a
curious fascination. The face was smiling, a smile of great peace, and
also of a strange cunning. One other characteristic it had: the woman
looked as though at any moment she would suddenly open her eyes, and if
you turned away from her and looked again, she seemed to be smiling to
herself because she had opened them that moment behind your back, and
just closed them again in time.
It was a face that never changed and yet was always changing.
She looked doubly strange in the evening light, and her smile softened
and deepened as the shadows gathered in the room.
Antony came and stood in front of her.
"Silencieux," he whispered, "I love you, Silencieux. Smiling Silence, I
love you. All day long on the moors your smile has stolen like a
moonbeam by my side--"
As he spoke, from far down the wood came the gentle sound of a woman's
voice calling "Antony," and coming nearer as it called.
With a shade of impatience, Antony bent nearer to the image and kissed
it.
"Good-bye, Silencieux," he whispered, "Good-bye, until the rising of the
moon."
Then he passed out on to the little staircase that led down into the
wood, and called back to the approaching voice: "I am coming,
Beatrice,"--'Beatrice' being the name of his wife.
As he called, a shaft of late sunlight suddenly irradiated the tall
slim form of a woman coming up the wood. She wore no hat, and the sun
made a misty glory of her pale gold hair. She seemed a fairy romantic
thing thus gliding in her yellow silk gown through the darkening pines.
And her face was the face of the image, feature for feature. There was
on it too the same light, the same smile.
"Antony," she called, as they drew nearer to each other, "where in the
wide world have you been? Dinner has been waiting for half-an-hour."
"Dinner!" he said, laughing, and kissing her kindly. "Fancy! the High
Muses have made me half-an-hour late for dinner. Beauty has made me
forget my dinner. Disgraceful!"
"I don't mind your forgetting dinner, Antony--but you might have
remembered me."
"Do you think I could remember Beauty and forget you? Yes! you _are_
beautiful to-night, Silen--Beatrice. You look like a lady one meets
walking by a haunted well in some old Arthurian tale."
"Hush!" said Beatrice, "listen to the night-jar. He is worth a hundred
nightingales."
"Yes; what a passion is that!" said Antony, "so sincere, and yet so
fascinating too."
"'Yet,' do you say, Antony? Why, sincerity is the most fascinating thing
in the world."
And as they listened, Antony's heart had stolen back to Silencieux, and
once more in fancy he pressed his lips to hers in the dusk: "It is with
such an eternal passion that I love you, Silencieux."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Of course, the writer is aware that while "Silencieux" is
feminine, her name is masculine. In such fanciful names, however, such
license has always been considered allowable.]