SILENCIEUX WHISPERS
So Antony first knew how cruel could be Silencieux to those who loved
her. Her sudden silences he had grown to understand, even to love.
Always they had been broken again by some wonderful word, which he had
known would come sooner or later. All great natures are full of silence.
Silence is the soil of all passion. But now it was not silence that was
between them, but terrible speech. As with a knife she had stabbed their
love right in its heart. Yet Antony knew that his love could never die,
but only suffer.
During these days he half turned to Beatrice. How kind was her simple
earth-warm affection, after the star-cold transcendentalism in which he
had been living! How full of comfort was her unselfish humanity, after
the pitiless egoism of the divine!
And yet, while it momentarily soothed him, he realised, with a heart sad
for Beatrice as for himself, that it could never satisfy him again. For
days he left Silencieux alone in the wood, and Beatrice's face
brightened with their renewed companionship; but all the time he seemed
to hear Silencieux calling him, and he knew that he would have to go
back.
One night, almost happy again, as he lay by the side of Beatrice, who
was sleeping deeply, he rose stealthily, and looked out into the wood.
The moonlight fell through it mysteriously, as on that night when he had
stolen up there to meet Silencieux--"at the rising of the moon." He
could hesitate no longer. Leaving Beatrice asleep, he was soon making
his way once more through the moonlit trees.
The little châlet looked very still and solemn, like a temple of
Chaldean mysteries, and an unwonted chill of fear passed through Antony
as he stood in the circle of moonlight outside. His spirit seemed aware
of some dread menace to the future in that moment, and a voice was
crying within him to go back.
But the longing that had brought him so far was too strong for such
undefined warnings. Once more he turned the key in the lock, and looked
on Silencieux once more.
The moonlight fell over her face like a veil of silver, and on her
eyelashes was a glitter of tears.
Her face was alive again, alive too with a softness of womanhood he had
never seen before.
"Forgive me, Antony," she said. "I loved you all the time."
What else need Silencieux say!
"But it was so strange," said Antony after a while, "so strange. I
could have borne the pain, if only I could have understood."
"Shall I tell you the reason, Antony?"
"Yes."
"It was because I saw in your eyes a thought of Beatrice. For a moment
your thoughts had forsaken me and gone to pity Beatrice. I saw it in
your eyes."
"Poor Beatrice!" said Antony. "It is little indeed I give her. Could you
not spare her so little, Silencieux?"
"I can spare her nothing. You must be all mine, Antony--your every
thought and hope and dream. So long as there is another woman in the
world for you except me, I cannot be yours in the depths of my being,
nor you mine. There must always be something withheld. It will never be
perfect, until--"
"Until when?"
"Until, Antony,"--and Silencieux lowered her voice to an awful
whisper,--"until you have made for me the human sacrifice."
"The human sacrifice!"
"Yes, Antony,--all my lovers have done that for me. They were not really
mine till then. Some have brought me many such offerings. Antony, when
will you bring me the human sacrifice?"
"O Silencieux!"
Antony's heart chilled with terror at Silencieux's words. It was against
this that the voices had warned him as he came up the wood. O that he
had never seen Silencieux more, never heard her poisonous voice again!
As one fleeing before the shadow of uncommitted sin that gains upon him
at each stride, Antony fled from the place, and sought the moors. The
moon was near its setting, and soon the dawn would throw open the
eastern doors of the sky. He walked on and on, waiting, praying for,
stifling for the light; and, at last, with a freshening of the air, and
faint sounds of returning consciousness from distant farms, it came.
High over a lake of ethereal silver welling up out of space, hung the
morning star, shining as though its heart would break, bright as a tear
that must slip down the face of heaven and fall amid the grass.
As Antony looked up at it, his soul escaped from its prison of dark
thought, and such an exaltation had come with the quickening light, that
it seemed as though the body, with little more than pure aspiration to
wing it, might follow the soul's flight to that crystal sphere.
In that moment, Antony knew that the love in the soul of man is mated
only with the infinite universe. In no marriage less than that shall it
find lasting fulfilment of itself. No single face, however beautiful, no
single human soul, however vast, can absorb it. Silencieux, Beatrice,
Wonder, himself, all faded away, in a trance-like sense of a stupendous
passion, an august possession. He felt that within him which rose up
gigantic from the earth, and towered into eyries of space, from whence
that morning star seemed like a dewdrop glittering low down upon the
earth.
It was the god in him that knew itself for one brief space, a moment's
awakening in the sleep of fact.
Could a god so great, so awakened, be again the slave of one earthly
face?
Yes, the greater the god, the greater the slave; and so it was that,
falling plumb down from that skyey exaltation, human again with the
weakness that follows divine moments, Antony returned from the morning
star to Silencieux.
Her face was bathed in the delicate early sunlight and looked very pure
and gentle, and he kissed her.
Surely those terrible words had been an illusion of the dark hours.
Silencieux had never said them. He kissed her again.
"I love you, Silencieux," he said. And then she spoke.
"If you love me, Antony," she said, "if you love me--"
"O what, Silencieux?" he cried, his heart growing cold once more.
"Come nearer, Antony. Put your ear to my lips--Antony, if you love
me--the human sacrifice."
"O God," he cried, "here in the sunlight--It is true--"
And, a man with the doom of his nature heavy upon him, he once more went
out into the wood.