The Worshipper of the Image | Page 9

peer of two bright little eyes fixed on the white face of Silencieux. A tiny wedge-shaped head, with dashes of white across the brows, reared itself out of a crevice in the bank. A forked tongue came and went like black lightning through its eager little lips, and a handsomely marked adder began to glide, like molten metal, along the bank to Silencieux. The brilliant whiteness of the image had fascinated the little creature. Antony kept very still. Darting its head from side to side, venomously alert against the smallest sound, the adder reached Silencieux. Then to Antony's delight it coiled itself round the white throat, still restlessly moving its head wonderingly beneath the chin. With a grace to which all movement from the beginning of time seemed to have led up, it clasped Silencieux's neck and softly reared its lips to hers. Its black tongue darted to and fro along that strange smile.
"He has kissed her!" Antony exclaimed, and in an instant the adder was nothing more than a terrified rustle in the brushwood.
He took Silencieux into his hands. There was poison on her lips. For another moment his fancy made him self-conscious, and turned Silencieux again into a symbol,--though it was but for a moment.
"There is always poison on the lips of Art," he said to himself.
CHAPTER IX
THE WONDERFUL WEEK.
As Antony and Silencieux became more and more to each other, poor Beatrice, though she had been the first occasion of their love, and little as she now demanded, seldom as Antony spoke to her, seldom as he smiled upon her, distant as were the lonely walks she took, infrequent as was her sad footfall in the little wood,--poor Beatrice, though indeed, so far from active intrusion upon their loves, and as if only by her breathing with them the heavy air of that green unwholesome valley, was becoming an irksome presence of the imagination. They longed to be somewhere together where Beatrice had never been, where her sad face could not follow them; and one night Silencieux whispered to Antony:--
"Take me to the sea, Antony--to some lonely sea."
"To-morrow I will take you," said Antony, "where the loneliest land meets the loneliest sea."
On the morrow evening the High Muses had once more made Antony late for dinner. One hour, and two hours, went by, and then Beatrice, in alarm, took the lantern and courageously braved the blackness of the wood.
The chalet was in darkness, and the door was locked, but through the uncurtained glass of the window, she was able to irradiate the emptiness of its interior. Antony was not there.
But she noticed, with a shudder, that the space usually filled by the Image was vacant. Then she understood, and with a hopeless sigh went down the wood again.
Already Antony and Silencieux had found the place where the loneliest land meets the loneliest sea. Side by side they were sitting on a moonlit margin of the world, and Antony was singing low to the murmur of the waves:--
Hopeless of hope, past desire even of thee, There is one place I long for, A desolate place That I sing all my songs for, A desolate place for a desolate face, Where the loneliest land meets the loneliest sea.
Green waves and green grasses--and nought else is nigh, But a shadow that beckons; A desolate face, And a shadow that beckons The desolate face to the desolate place Where the loneliest sea meets the loneliest sky.
Wide sea and wide heaven, and all else afar, But a spirit is singing, A desolate soul That is joyfully winging-- A desolate soul--to that desolate goal Where the loneliest wave meets the loneliest star.
"It is not good," said Silencieux.
"I know," answered Antony.
"Throw it into the sea."
"It is not worthy of the sea."
"Burn it."
"Fire is too august."
"Throw it to the winds."
"They are too busy."
"Bury it."
"It would make barren a whole meadow."
"Forget it."
"I will--And you?"
"I will."
And Antony and Silencieux laughed softly together by the sea.
Many days Antony and Silencieux stayed together by the sea. They loved it together in all its changes, in sun and rain, in wild wind and dreamy calm; at morning when it shone like a spirit, at evening when it flickered like a ghost, at noon when it lay asleep curled up like a woman in the arms of the land. Sometimes at evening they sat in the little fishing harbour, watching the incoming boats, till the sky grew sad with rigging and old men's faces.
Then at last Silencieux said: "I am weary of the sea. Let us go to the town--to the lights and the sad cries of the human waves."
So they went to the town and found a room high up, where they sat at the window and watched the human lights, and listened to the human music.
Never had it been so