The Worshipper of the Image | Page 5

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.
CHAPTER IV
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more and more withdrawn.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