Read Ebook: The Worshipper of the Image by Le Gallienne Richard

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Ebook has 511 lines and 21613 words, and 11 pages

The image nestled into the cushion as though it had veritably been a living woman weary for sleep, and softly smiling that it was near at last. So comfortable she seemed, you could have sworn she breathed.

Antony lifted her head once or twice with his fingers, to delight himself with seeing her sink back luxuriously once more.

Beatrice grew more and more white.

"Antony, please stop. I cannot bear it. She looks so terribly alive."

At that moment Antony's touch had been a little too forcible, the image hung poised for a moment and then began to fall in the direction of Beatrice.

"Oh, she is falling," she almost screamed, as Antony saved the cast from the floor. "For God's sake, stop!"

"How childish of you, Beatrice. She is only plaster. I never knew you such a baby."

"I cannot help it, Antony. I know it is foolish, but I cannot help it. I think living in this place has made me morbid. She seems so alive--so evil, so cruel. I am sorry you bought her, Antony. I cannot bear to look at her. Won't you take her away? Take her up into the wood. Keep her there. Take her now. I shall not be able to sleep all night if I know she is in the house."

She was half hysterical, and Antony soothed her gently.

"Yes, yes, dear. I'm sorry. I'll take her up the wood now this minute. Wait till I light the lantern. Poor Beatrice, I never dreamed she would affect you so. I loved her, dear--because I love you; but I would rather break her in pieces than that she should make you unhappy. Though to break any image of you, dear," he added tenderly, "would seem a kind of sacrilege. You know how I love you, Beatrice, don't you?"

"Of course I do, dear; and it was sweet of you to buy her for my sake, and I'm quite silly to-night. To-morrow I shall think nothing about her. Still, dear, she does frighten me, I can't tell why. There seems something malignant about her, something that threatens our happiness. Oh, how silly I am--"

Meanwhile, Antony had lit an old brass lantern, and presently he was flashing his way up among the dark sounds of the black old wood, with that ghostly face tenderly pressed against his side.

He stopped once to turn his lantern upon her. How mysterious she looked, here in the night, under the dark pines!

He too felt a little haunted as he climbed his ch?let staircase and unlocked the door, every sound he made echoing fatefully in the silent wood; and when he had found a place for the image and hung her there, she certainly looked a ghostly companion for the midnight lamp, in the middle of a wood.

How strangely she smiled, the smile almost of one taking possession.

No wonder Beatrice had been frightened. Was there some mysterious life in the thing, after all? Why should these indefinite forebodings come over him as he looked at her!--But he was growing as childish as Beatrice. Surely midnight, a dark wood, a lantern, and a death-mask, with two owls whistling to each other across the valley, were enough to account for any number of forebodings! But Antony shivered, for all that, as he locked the door and hastened back again down the wood.

THE NORTHERN SPHINX

Antony had not written a poem to his wife since their little girl Wonder had been born, now some four years ago. Surely it was from no lack of love, this silence, but merely due to the working of what would seem to be a law of the artistic temperament: that to turn a muse into a wife, however long and faithfully loved, is to bid good-bye to the muse. But a day or two after the coming of Silencieux, Antony found himself suddenly inspired once more to sing of his wife. It was the best poem he had written for a long time, and when it was finished, he came down the wood impatient to read it to Beatrice. This was the poem, which he called "The Northern Sphinx":--

And, with no secret left to tell, A worn and withered old coquette, Dreams sadly that she draws us yet, With antiquated charm and spell:

Tell me your secret, Sphinx,--for mine!-- What means the colour of your eyes, Half innocent and all so wise, Blue as the smoke whose wavering line

Curls upward from the sacred pyre Of sacrifice or holy death, Pale twisting wreaths of opal breath, From fire mounting into fire.

What is the meaning of your hair? That little fairy palace wrought With many a grave fantastic thought; I send a kiss to wander there,

To climb from golden stair to stair, Wind in and out its cunning bowers,-- O garden gold with golden flowers, O little palace built of hair!

The meaning of your mouth, who knows? O mouth, where many meanings meet-- Death kissed it stern, Love kissed it sweet, And each has shaped its mystic rose.

Mouth of all sweets, whose sweetness sips Its tribute honey from all hives, The sweetest of the sweetest lives, Soft flowers and little children's lips;

Yet rather learnt its heavenly smile From sorrow, God's divinest art, Sorrow that breaks and breaks the heart, Yet makes a music all the while.

Ah! what is that within your eyes, Upon your lips, within your hair, The sacred art that makes you fair, The wisdom that hath made you wise?

While Antony read, Beatrice's face grew sadder and sadder. When he had finished she said:--

"It is very beautiful, Antony--but it is not written for me."

"What can you mean, Beatrice? Who else can it be written for?"

"To the Image of me that you have set up in my place."

"Beatrice, are you going mad?"

"It is quite true, all the same. Time will show. Perhaps you don't know it yourself as yet, but you will before long."

"But, Beatrice, the poem shows its own origin. Has your image blue eyes, or curiously coiled hair--"

"Oh, yes, of course, you thought of me. You filled in from me. But the inspiration, the wish to write it, came from the image--"

"It is certainly true that I love to look at it, as I love to look at a picture of you--because it is you--"

"As yet, no doubt, but you will soon love it for its own sake. You are already beginning."

"I love an image! You are too ridiculous, Beatrice."

"Does it really seem so strange, dear? I sometimes think you have never loved anything else."

Antony had laughed down Beatrice's fancies, yet all the time she had been talking he was conscious that the idea she had suggested was appealing to him with a perverse fascination.

To love, not the literal beloved, but the purified stainless image of her,--surely this would be to ascend into the region of spiritual love, a love unhampered and untainted by the earth.

As he said this to himself, his mind, ever pitilessly self-conscious, knew it was but a subterfuge, a fine euphemism for a strange desire which he had known was already growing within him; for when Beatrice had spoken of his loving an image, it was no abstract passion he had conceived, but some fanciful variation of earthly love--a love of beauty centring itself upon some form midway between life and death, inanimate and yet alive, human and yet removed from the accidents of humanity.

To love an image with one's whole heart! If only one could achieve that--and never come out of the dream.

These thoughts gave him a new desire to look again at the image. He felt that in some way she would be changed, and he hastened up the wood in a strange expectancy.

AT THE RISING OF THE MOON

But a week or two more, and Beatrice's prophecy had progressed so far towards fulfilment, that Antony was going about the woods and the moors saying over to himself the name he had found for the Image, as we saw in the first chapter; and his love for Silencieux, begun more or less as a determined self-illusion, grew more and more of a reality. Every day new life welled into Silencieux's face, as every day life ebbed from the face of Beatrice, surely foreseeing the coming on of what she had feared. For the love he gave to Silencieux Antony must take away from Beatrice, from whom as the days went by he grew more and more withdrawn.

It was true that the long lonely days which he spent in the wood bore fruit in a remarkable productiveness. Never had his imagination been so enkindled, or his pen so winged. But this very industry, the proofs of which he would each evening bring down the wood for that fine judgment of Beatrice's, which, in spite of all, still remained more to him than any other praise--this very industry was the secret confirmation for Beatrice's sad heart. No longer the inspirer, she was yet, she bitterly told herself, honoured among women as a critic. Her heart might bleed, and her eyes fill with tears, as he read; but then, as he would say, the Beauty, the Music! Is it Beautiful? Is it Music? If it be that, no matter how it has been made! Let us give thanks for creation, though it involves the sacrifice of our own most tender and sacred feelings. To set mere personal feelings against Beauty--human tears against an immortal creation! Did he spare his own feelings? Indeed he did not.

On the night when we first met him bidding good-bye to Silencieux "until the rising of the moon," he had sat through dinner eating but little, feverishly and somewhat cruelly gay. Though he was as yet too kind to admit it to himself, Beatrice was beginning to bore him, not merely by her sadness, which his absorption prevented his realising except in flashes, but by her very resemblance to the Image--of which, from having been the beloved original, she was, in his eyes, becoming an indifferent materialisation. The sweet flesh he had loved so tenderly became an offence to him, as a medium too gross for the embodiment of so beautiful a face. Such a face as Silencieux's demanded a more celestial porcelain.

Dinner at last finished, he made an excuse to Beatrice for leaving her alone once more at the end as he had during all the rest of the day, and hastened to keep his tryst with Silencieux. During dinner the conscious side of his mind had been luxuriating in the romantic sound of "until the rising of the moon,"--for he was as yet a long way from being quite simple even with Silencieux,--and the idea of his going out with serious eagerness to meet one who, if she was as he knew a living being, was an image too, delighted his sense of fantastic make-believe.

There is in all love that element of make-believe. Every woman who is loved is partly the creation of her lover's fancy. He consciously siderealises her, and with open eyes magnifies her importance to his life. Antony but made believe and magnified uncommonly--and his dream of vivifying white plaster was perhaps less desperate than the dreams of some, that would breathe the breath of life into the colder clay of some beloved woman, who seems spontaneously to live but is dead all the while.

Silencieux appeared to be dead, but beneath that eternal smile, as Beatrice had divined, as Antony was learning, she was only too terribly alive. Yes! Antony's was the easier dream.

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