The Worshipper of the Image | Page 2

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.]
CHAPTER II
THE COMING OF SILENCIEUX
The manner in which Antony had found and come to love Silencieux was a strange illustration of that law by which one love grows out of another--that law by which men love living women because of the dead, and dead women because of the living.
One day as chance had sent him, picking his way among the orange boxes, the moving farms, and the wig-makers of Covent Garden, he had come upon a sculptor's shop, oddly crowded in among Cockney carters and decaying vegetables. Faces of Greece and Rome gazed at him suddenly from a broad window, and for a few moments he forsook the motley beauty of modern London for the ordered loveliness of antiquity.
Through white corridors of faces he passed, with the cold breath of classic art upon his cheek, and in the company of the dead who live for ever he was conscious of a contagion of immortality.
Soon in an alcove of faces he grew conscious of a presence. Some one was smiling near him. He turned, and, almost with a start, found that--as he then thought--it was no living thing, but just a plaster cast among the others, that was thus shining, like a star among the dead. A face not ancient, not modern; but a face of yesterday, to-day, and for ever.
Instantly he knew he had seen the face before. Where?
Why, of course, it was the face of Beatrice, feature for feature. How strange!--and, loving Beatrice, he bought it, because of his great love for her! Who was the artist, what the time and circumstance, that had anticipated in this strange fashion the only face he had ever really loved on earth?
He sought information of the shopkeeper, who told him a strange little story of an unknown model and an unknown artist, and two tragic fates.
When Antony had brought Silencieux home