The Worshipper of the Image

Worshipper of the Image, by Richard Le Gallienne

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Title: The Worshipper of the Image
Author: Richard Le Gallienne
Release Date: January 23, 2004 [EBook #10812]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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 chalet 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 chalet 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 chalet, 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