The old Creole gentleman had forgotten his snuff-box--the snuff-box
he had carried constantly with him for thirty years, and which he had
purchased in Paris in days when Louisiana planters traveled through
Europe leaving a wake of gold behind them, the trail of a tropical
sunset of wealth. It was lying upon my table. Decidedly the old
gentleman's memory was failing!
There was a dream of Theocritus wrought upon the ivory lid of the
snuff-box, created by a hand so cunning that its work had withstood
unscathed all the accidents of thirty odd years of careless usage--a
slumbering dryad; an amorous faun!
The dryad was sleeping like a bacchante weary of love and wine,
half-lying upon her side; half upon her bosom, pillowing her charming
head upon one arm. Her bed was a mossy knoll; its front transformed by
artistic magic into one of those Renaissance scroll-reliefs which are
dreams of seashells; her ivory body moulded its nudity upon the curve
of the knoll with antique grace.
Above her crouched the faun--a beautiful and mischievous faun. Lightly
as a summer breeze, he lifted the robe she had flung over herself, and
gazed upon her beauty. But around her polished thigh clung a loving
snake, the guardian of her sleep; and the snake raised its jeweled head
and fixed upon the faun its glittering topaz eyes.
There the graven narrative closed its chapter of ivory: forever
provokingly motionless the lithe limbs of the dryad and the serpent
thigh-bracelet and the unhappily amorous faun holding the drapery rigid
in his outstretched hand.
I fell asleep, still haunted by the unfinished idyl. The night filled
the darkness with whispers and with dreams; and in a luminous cloud I
beheld again the faun and the sleeping nymph and the serpent with topaz
eyes coiled about her thigh.
Then the scene grew clear and large and warm; the figures moved and
lived. It was an Arcadian vale, myrtle-shadowed, and sweet with the
breath of summer winds. The brooks purled in the distance; bird voices
twittered in the rustling laurels; the sun's liquid gold filtered
through the leafy network above; the flowers swung their fragile
censers and sweetened all the place. I saw the smooth breast of the
faun rise and fall with his passionate panting; I fancied I could see
his heart beat. And the serpent stirred its jeweled head with the topaz
eyes.
Then the faun moved his lips in sound--a sound like the cooing of a
dove in the coming of summer, and an answering coo rippled out from
the myrtle trees. And softly as a flake of snow, a white-bosomed thing
with bright, gentle eyes alighted beside the faun, and cooed and cooed
again, and drew yet a little farther off and cooed once more.
Then the serpent looked upon the dove--which is sacred to
Aphrodite--and glided from its smooth resting-place, as water glides
between the fingers of a hunter who drinks from the hollow of his hand
in hours of torrid heat and weariness. And the dove, still retreating,
drew after her the guardian snake with topaz eyes.
Then with all her body kissed by the summer breeze, the nymph awoke,
and her opening eyes looked into the eager eyes of the faun; and she
started not, neither did she seem afraid. And stretching herself upon
the soft moss after the refreshment of slumber, she flung her rounded
arms back, and linked them about the neck of the faun; and they kissed
each other, and the doves cooed in the myrtles.
And from afar off came yet a sweeter sound than the caressing voices
of the doves--a long ripple of gentle melody, rising and falling like
the sighing of an amorous zephyr, melancholy yet pleasing like the
melancholy of love--Pan playing upon his pipe!--
There was a sudden knocking at the door:
"Pardon, mon jeune ami; j'oubliais ma tabatière! Ah! la voici! Je vous
remercie!"
Alas! the vision never returned! The idyl remains a fragment! I cannot
tell you what became of the dove and the serpent with topaz eyes.